Ep055: How to solve problems faster, make better decisions, and get projects finished with targeted thinking tactics from Jean Moroney

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Jean Moroney guest on TalentGrow Show with Halelly Azulay targeted thinking tactics solve problems better decisions finish projects

In this episode of the TalentGrow Show, Jean Moroney, president of Thinking Directions, shares some of her best insights on the psychology of thinking—and explains how you can apply them to your own success. She provides an in-depth answer to the question, “what’s the best way to think on your feet?”, offers advice on how to become more authentic, and shares a powerful exercise for better problem solving. Jean’s insights and techniques are easily actionable but extremely effective. I hope you give them a try and share this episode with others who could also benefit from them!

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

Listen to Stitcher
  • Who does Halelly say are the most interesting kinds of people? (4:02)
  • What’s the best way to prepare for thinking on your feet? (5:33)
  • When you see someone who seems like they’re thinking on their feet—and it’s smooth, beautiful, and brilliant—what’s really going on? (6:14)
  • What’s the biggest barrier to sounding intelligent when you’re asked a question on the fly? What can you do to overcome it? (7:04)
  • “Thinking aloud”: a tactic to help you recognize that you’re in charge of yourself and the situation (7:38)
  • What should you do if you’re asked a question and, instead of not being able to think of anything at all, you’re overloaded with a million different ideas? (9:25)
  • Halelly plays the devil’s advocate with Jean (11:41)
  • What does Jean say can be a “disaster”? (12:48)
  • Jean gives a useful tip for how to prepare at your desk (14:40)
  • What does Jean say is one of the best signals that more thinking is needed in a given area? (17:40)
  • Halelly talks about authenticity, vulnerability and how to build trust (good stuff!) (19:05)
  • Jean shares a powerful, multi-purpose exercise that helps you get to know your own mind better: “Thinking on paper” (20:33)
  • How thinking on paper can help you “vet” thoughts (25:01)
  • What does Jean say is a great way to spend ten minutes? (Halelly agrees that it’s a great investment for the rest of the day) (25:28)
  • How to stay in touch with Jean (learn how to access some of Jean’s best free resources including her “Smarter Starter Kit”) (29:46)

RESOURCES

ABOUT JEAN MORONEY

Jean Moroney, President of Thinking Directions, teaches managers and other professionals how to be use targeted thinking to solve problems faster, make better decisions, and get projects finished. They use her tactics to be smarter about achieving their goals.

Her biggest corporate clients have included BB&T, Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Canadian Bank Note Company, each of whom has brought her back to teach Thinking Tactics to 100-plus professionals at the company.

Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.

Halelly: Hey, hey, welcome back to the TalentGrow Show with episode 55, featuring my guest Jean Moroney, President of Thinking Directions. Jean and I talk about how you can become a better, clearer thinker, so that you can become a better decision maker so that you can become a better communicator. A lot of the things that we, as individuals and as leaders, sometimes struggle with – like for example when someone catches you off guard with a question and you’re not sure of the answer or you have too many ideas, she really breaks it down. This is one of the most practical and tactical episodes we’ve ever had on this show and I think you’re going to find it super useful. I can’t wait for you to listen to it, and so without further ado, here’s Jean Moroney, on the TalentGrow Show.

I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist and this week my guest is Jean Moroney, President of Thinking Directions. Jean teaches managers and other professionals how to use targeted thinking to solve problems faster, make better decisions and get projects finished. They use her tactics to be smarter about achieving their goals, which is why I thought, “Perfect! We need her on the show.” Jean has an interesting background. She’s going to tell you about that in a moment, but she actually comes from electrical engineering into this work. But, at this time, Jean and her company, Thinking Directions, offers seminars to all kinds of corporations around the country including BB&T, Microsoft, Amazon.com and Canadian Bank of Note Company. So I guess not around the country, but around the continent I should say. Jean, welcome to the show!

Jean: Thank you Halelly.

Halelly: It’s great to have you and I look forward to talking with you about your subject matter expertise, but I definitely want you to tell us the highlight version of your career journey.

Jean: Well, so I started out life as an electrical engineer. I went to MIT and got a Bachelor’s and Master’s and I worked in a very interesting field called adaptive optics, which the lay version of that is taking the twinkle out of stars. I was actually on the first project – there are these systems called Laser Guide Star, adaptive optics, that are used on telescopes to take the twinkle out of stars so that astronomers can see better and I was on the first project to get one of those things to work.

Halelly: A really silly joke comes to mind, like un-twinkle, un-twinkle little star was the song.

Jean: Right! So, it was very exciting. I was very young. Had a lot of responsibility and was totally motivated by the person who was running the project, whose name was Bob Bugate [sp?]. He was my epitome. We’re both Ayn Rand fans. He was the person in real life who is the productive dynamo like the heroes in Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead. I wanted to be like Bob. And I realized that I wasn’t that interested in solving the engineering problems. I was much more interested in how to solve problems than in these particular problems. And so to have the same kind of passion for my career that Bob did, I realized I need to change careers. So I got interested, basically went into psychology of thinking is essentially what I do, and I’ve been in this field since 1992 and making my way and it is absolutely fascinating. I am as passionate about what I do as Bob was about what he did.

Halelly: And I love talking to passionate people. Passionate people are the most interesting people. Listeners – take note. If you don’t feel passionate about what you’re doing, go do something you can feel passionate about or find the connection to feel passionate about that which you’re doing, because that’s going to make a different in everything. Jean, thank you for that. Jean and I have become friends recently because of our, we have very similar businesses and we were connected through a mutual friend and we have a lot of interests in common, so it’s been a real pleasure getting to know you, Jean, and I really look forward to sharing your wisdom with the audience listening today.

Jean: Thanks, Halelly. I’ve really been enjoying getting to know you too.

Halelly: Thank you. So in your work, I know that you organize it around three main themes – taking action, thinking on your feet and crossing the finish line. This is how you organize how you teach people about becoming better thinkers and helping, I love your tagline, it’s you help ambitious people achieve challenging goals by teaching them to think better and be more effective in their work. So, I wanted to focus – since we only have 30 minutes together total – I wanted to focus on that middle one which is thinking on your feet. Because I feel like that’s not something that’s addressed quite as much, and we all struggle with that. I really don’t think I know anyone who is just, unless you’re very naturally good at that, who actively pursues learning how to do that better. So I think people are really going to learn a lot from you today. So, what is the best way to prepare for thinking on your feet?

Jean: I’m going to have a hopefully not deflating answer. The best way to prepare to think on your feet is to think at your desk, in advance. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about thinking on your feet, because you have this thing. When you dream about, say, giving a presentation or talking to your boss, and I mean literally, daydreaming or whatever, it seems like the words just come and you’re brilliant. And it seems like it’s completely effortless. That does happen when you’re asked a question and you already know the answer. So, when you see someone who looks like they’re thinking on their feet, and it’s smooth and beautiful and brilliant, they’re actually remembering on their feet. They’ve actually, the question that was asked is something they’ve heard before and thought about enough before so that they don’t have to come up with a completely fresh, new answer. Now, you need to be able to do that too, so you need to be able to do both things because some questions you get are going to be completely unanticipated. But I think that when you see people who seem to be able to think on their feet, I think sometimes you don’t realize how much they prepared in advance. So that's one thing that I think is important.

There are a couple other things that are mental preparation that are needed. Should I go ahead and tell those too?

Halelly: Definitely.

Jean: So one thing that is, you’ll get this advice from a lot of people, the biggest barrier to being intelligent sounding when you’re asked a question on the fly is that you get nervous and you freeze up. That is a predictable problem, and it’s something that you can practice your response to, because what you really need to do at that moment is breathe and remind yourself you get to choose how you’re going to respond. So, knowing that you have options at that moment can give you a chance if you pause, remember, “Okay, do I know the answer?” If you don't know the answer, here is what I recommend you do. Start thinking aloud, in full sentences. Do you ever do thinking aloud?

Halelly: I’m sure I do all the time, but tell us more. What do you mean?

Jean: Well, instead of saying, for example, someone says, “What is the business growth going to be next quarter?” or some hard question. Instead of saying, “Well, it’s going to be such and such and such,” because you know the answer, say, “Well, that’s an interesting question, and to be able to answer that question, let’s see. I’m going to have to estimate this and this and this, and I’m going to have to put together this and this and this.” You in effect, the process that you would do if you were at your desk, the process you would go through, you in effect do it out loud as thinking aloud. What this does, it can be helpful to warn the other person that you’re going to think aloud here, because this is a more rambling answer than when you already know it. But if you know that you can have an option when you’re blank, you will be much less nervous and much more likely to be intelligible.

Halelly: I love that! That’s a really easy to do kind of solution, and some people just fall into it naturally, but it’s really nice to almost like you’re giving us permission to do it and it’s a tactic.

Jean: It’s a tactic, and it’s a tactic that it’s really a mental set of recognizing that you’re in charge and you know what you know and you know what you don’t know and you’re not worried about the fact that you don’t know something. There’s a confidence element there. If I don’t know it, I can work it out or I can ask the person another question, but I don’t have to be in a panic that I don’t know the answer right now. Answers can be figured out.

Halelly: Excellent. Love it. So let’s say somebody asks you a question and you have to think quickly on your feet, but you’re flooded with ideas. You have too many thoughts, too many things coming at you at the same time. What do you think we should do then?

Jean: This is a great example, because it’s an example of take seriously what state you’re in. So if you’re overloaded, what you’re describing there, you have a million ideas, this is first of all a good thing. So unlike the case where you’re blank, where you have no idea what to say, you have a lot of great ideas. And here again it can be very helpful to say, “Wow, I have so many ideas in response to that.” If you were alone and you had 18 gazillion ideas you couldn’t keep straight, what would you do? Sitting at your desk, with a pen and paper in hand, what is the thing you would do with those 18 gazillion ideas?

Halelly: I would just list them. I would write them down.

Jean: You’d make a list. The reason you make a list is because it reduces the overload. Until you reduce the overload, you can’t think straight. So, it’s very important to realize that thinking is something that requires some free mental space. So in that situation where you have 18 gazillion ideas, you’re talking to a person and say, “Wow, I have a million ideas here. Can we just write these down on the board or should I just zip them all off to you?” You just rattle them off one after another. Even just saying them all aloud can give the person an idea of all the ideas you have and a list is a known cognitive tool. If you warn the person you’re going to give them a list and then just go boom, boom, boom, boom, list all the things, they can also see, “Oh, wow, we’re overloaded. Let’s go figure out how we’re going to narrow this down to one thing.” You can in effect get the other person to cooperate with you to figure out how to reduce this mass of information into one thing.

Halelly: So I think that’s really great about this advice is the assumption behind it is most people that you’re talking with are not necessarily expecting you to spit out sound bites that come from some kind of a training video, where people have found the best sentence and rehearsed it and wrote it down in a script. They recognize that you’re just a person there with your brain and here is what comes to mind. And most people are fine with it, probably, and are interested in hearing you kind of ramble through until you find the right answer or whatever. But let me ask you this – kind of a devil’s advocate kind of thing, and I’m not trying to trip you up. But I can see how some people that are listening are going to be like, “Yeah, but … I know someone,” and there always is someone and thankfully they’re not the majority, but there’s always someone who seems to relish maybe putting you on the spot, or maybe it’s just someone, like a very high-status person and it’s a very high-stakes meeting and there isn’t very much time and you’re in front of the CEO and you have … like what if they put you on the spot and said, “No, I don’t have time for you to list all your ideas right now. What’s the best one?” Or something like this. Do you have any suggestions?

Jean: Yes, I do, and I think you’re absolutely right. There are situations where you would not want to think aloud in front of the other person, and you would not want to make a list in front of the other person, where it’s not, where there is some external situation where you just need to be brief. In those cases, you can sometimes ask for permission to do those things but let’s stipulate that you can’t do that. So you’re now in a situation where this person is saying, “Just tell me the right answer. I don’t want to hear all this. Just give me the right answer.” What I recommend in that situation is being honest. If you don’t know the answer, and this is a high-power conversation, pretending to know the answer is a disaster. So the thing to have in your back pocket, “This is the great question I prepared for 18 other questions. I did not see this one coming. I need to go back to my desk to figure this out I do not want to give you misinformation.” Now, if you really don’t know, that’s the thing to do.

Now, on the other hand, if you’re selling yourself short, sometimes, when you have this list of 18 things and someone says, “What’s the most important thing?” If you just pause for a second and you ask yourself, “What’s the most important thing?” One will come up and you’ll say, “Yeah, that’s the most important thing.” So, pausing and one-sentencing your answer can work. So I gave you two completely different answers. One answer is pause, just try to formulate it in one sentence. This is actually really good practice. See if you can give an answer in one sentence. But if you don’t have the one sentence, if what comes up is, “Oh my God, I really don’t know the answer here,” the important thing is not to fake it.

Halelly: I’m so glad you said that. I almost thing if we were just to reverse the two things you said, it would probably be best to do it in that order. Because if you would first give yourself a chance and maybe your intuition would just sort of pop it out for you and you would have it. Just give yourself a chance. But then if you don’t, then you can always just be honest.

Jean: Right. I’ll tell you, this is the other reason. If you are having a meeting, say, with the top manager or some hot shot or some important customer, this is one of the other reasons why it’s so important to do the thinking in advance. Preparing at your desk, one of the things I recommend you do is actually write down all the questions you think you’re going to get asked and write out not as, you don’t have to write polished prose, but actually try to write out a one-paragraph answer to each one of them, as if it were an essay question test you were taking. If you test yourself in advance, you’ll find out if you can answer those questions, if you know the answers, you can write them out – great. But if one of them really stumps you, oh my God, this is something that needs to be prepared, because if it stumps you at your desk, it’s guaranteed to stump you in person at that meeting.

Halelly: Yes. Actually, it’s funny, one of the things I sometimes teach people how to do presentations, to give presentations. So this is, when we get to the part where we talk about the Q&A and whether you should have one and how you should prepare for it, it’s totally one of my suggestions. Try to think about all the other things that people might ask you during the Q&A, because we so often, just in neglecting to think through that, we’re surprised by things that wouldn’t have been a surprise if we took a moment to think about it. So you’re actually, there still may be surprises, there may be things that stump you, but you’re reducing the number of things that will cause that. Why would you want to put yourself in that nervous state unnecessarily for things that you could have predicted?

Jean: Absolutely. I totally agree with that. I totally agree with that.

Halelly: I love it. So let’s think about another kind of situation. What if you need to think on your feet and you’re conflicted? Like on the one hand, but on the other hand you don’t know which one you’d choose? What do you say?

Jean: Right, so this is going to, I’m going to start sounding a little bit like a broken record, but here again, I think recognizing that this is a real phenomenon. I think sometimes people have this view that when thinking goes really well, it seems like you ask yourself a question, you get an answer, no work is done. And it seems like that’s the way it should be. But that is just the product of fast thinking. That’s not the way of actual development of knowledge happens, and so going through conflict is a normal process that you need to figure out what the pros and cons are of the two sides. You need to figure out what is the standard by which you’re going to decide, and so if you’re in conflict, this again, it’s very helpful to say. Suppose your boss is asking you for a recommendation for something or we’re talking mid-level managers, it could be one of your people in your group is asking you for advice. “Well, you know, I really think there are two ways to look at this. A and B. And you explain A and B. And let’s talk about which one, how we’re going to decide which one is best.” The way that you get in trouble thinking on your feet or thinking at your desk is when you try to ignore the fact that you are actually facing a cognitive problem. If you try to just wash over it and say, “Okay, I need to just pick one,” and kind of blindly go in, pick one and ignore the other, that’s when you get in trouble. When you’re willing to sit there with that ambivalence and say, “Huh. This is not obvious. There’s actually a difficulty here and I’m going to look at this difficulty and examine it,” that’s when you can really make some progress, because you’re opening yourself up to the full set of facts.

The big mistakes get made when you try to cut off a set of facts and so in fact, conflict is one of the best signals that more thinking is needed in this particular area. It’s when people shut down conflict, like for example, you hear about this all the time – you’re in a meeting and you have some reservations but you don’t speak up because you don’t want to put yourself forward or whatever, and your reservations turn out to be something that was really important and would have changed the decision in that meeting so that a big mistake wasn’t made. That happens, and so conflict is actually a signal that there are important issues that have not yet been addressed and reconciled.

Halelly: That’s a good frame, and I love the theme throughout all of your advice about just being very authentic and in some ways vulnerable. I feel like I’m preaching this, because I speak about that so much. So many people feel so much pressure to put a front on that is perfect or where they have their act together and they have no reservations and they have no conflicts and they have no insecurities and they never have a blank moment. You’re human, and we’re all human, and if we just allowed our humanity to come across, we actually would be much more likely to cause the other person to empathize with us, to help them connect with us, to build trust, because actually vulnerability is one of the things that is a key component in trust-building.

Jean: I agree with that. People can tell when you are making things up and trying to put a gloss on it and pretending as if you know more than you know. People can smell that. They can totally smell that. It just gets you into trouble.

Halelly: It has the opposite effect. It reduces trust, the people are like, they’re sensing something is off, and so it causes them to dis-trust you. It causes them to second-guess the answers you’re giving.

Jean: It doesn’t help, and I mean, just even if you think about it, this is one of the other reasons, one of the skills that I teach in my classes is something I call thinking on paper, which is what it sounds like. It’s actually writing out your thinking in full sentences on paper, and full sentences turn out to be very important which I can tell you why if you want. But the thing I was going to say is, one of the reasons I think it’s helpful to practice thinking on paper is that you can hear yourself saying things, and sometimes you try to B.S. yourself. Like, “Oh, this will be the right thing and those problems won’t happen,” and whatever. And if you do this in the privacy of your desk, thinking on paper, and you look back and you say, “That’s total B.S. That is so, that is not true.” You’d be surprised at the thoughts that come out and see plausible and you take a second look at them and they are just false. Like, “I can get this all done this morning.” Oh yeah? “I can have that done by Friday.” Well, what about the other 18 things that are being done between now and Friday? The thought gets blurted out and if you wind up in thinking on paper writing it down and then noticing, “Wow, that’s totally not true,” you get more comfortable with the idea that thoughts can occur to you that are simply not true. And if you are talking to someone, the comfort level with the fact that some thoughts that occur to you are not true, gives you more confidence to pause, just make a little check before you actually blurt out that sentence, you ask yourself, “Is that true?” Okay. And then you blurt it out. So I guess it’s not a blurt then. You say it instead of blurt it, and that half-second check before you say it makes a huge difference in your credibility, not just with the other person, but with yourself. Because you know that you’re behind the things you say and you don’t commit yourself to things that you realize in hindsight, “Wow, that was a dumb thing to commit myself to.”

Halelly: So it sounds like almost by doing the exercise of thinking in writing, which I want to ask you about a little bit more, you are training your brain to pause and reflect on your own thoughts?

Jean: Yes. You get to know your own mind more, and you get used to sort of the process of thinking and going step-by-step and challenging your own thoughts, and when that becomes very comfortable, it’s like any other thing. If you practice in slow motion, it’s much easier to do it at speed.

Halelly: How do you recommend people do this? Let’s say someone is listening right now and they’re saying, “That’s a great idea. I’d like to try to do thinking in writing.” Is this a thing –

Jean: Thinking on paper, I call it.

Halelly: Sorry I’m saying it wrong.

Jean: Totally fine!

Halelly: I forgot how you did it, it was clever. Okay, thinking on paper. So is it around a problem or is it a daily practice or like journaling? What do you say?

Jean: So I would always recommend that if you were going to try out any tactic I offer, you do it on a real problem. I don’t believe in fake problems. But the truth is, you always have one. Like for example, when you come to your desk, you need to decide what are my priorities for today? That’s not a trivial question. I mean, I think for most people, there’s actually some fresh thinking that’s needed every morning, because it depends on what happened yesterday and what emails have come in. It’s in flux. If you decide today what your priorities are tomorrow, the chances are the situation will change and you’ll need to do some fresh thinking on that. So on something like that, what are my priorities? Instead of just sitting at your desk and saying, “What are my priorities?” in your head, it’s such and such, take out a pen – you can do this on the computer typing if you prefer – write out what are my priorities? Literally write those words. What are my priorities? And then some thought is going to occur to you. I think I need to get that email out to so-and-so, and so you write, “I think I need to get that email out to so-and-so.” Now, by the time you’ve actually written that sentence, a few other thoughts will have occurred to you and don’t worry about that. The most important one will still be with you when you say, and it could be either, “Yeah, that’s the most important thing,” or it might be, “Well, what about so-and-so asked for such-and-such? Isn't that more important than this email?” I don’t know what your next thought is going to be, but I do know that if you take the three seconds to write the first sentence of, “I think I need to send that email,” you will consider that thought longer and any objections to it will have time to occur to you. So you are much more likely to vet that thought and either be able to affirm it or go on to some other issues. Sometimes when I do thinking on paper, I literally only write a sentence or two. Sometimes I only write the question and the answer is so obvious I'm done. Other times it turns out my priorities are hard. There are six things I’m supposed to do. It’s really clear I can’t do all six of them today. And I’ll wind up writing out a page, which could take 10 minutes. But my God, if you can take 10 minutes and really be clear on what your priorities are for today, that 10 minutes is really well spent.

Halelly: That’s a great investment. So you’re saying definitely don’t write bullets, right? Don’t list tasks or items or names of topics? You’re saying write out the entire sentence.

Jean: Right, so this is the difference between making a list and doing thinking on paper. So sometimes you need a list. A list is a great thinking tool. I am totally pro-lists. If you have 18 things on your mind, by all means, write a list of those 18 things. Just write them down. Now, if when you look at that list you can just write down one, two, three and you’re done and you’re morally certain you know your priorities, great. However, if there are 18 things on that list, I bet that that’s not going to be the easiest thing in the world to do. Do you agree with me?

Halelly: Yes!

Jean: It’s hard. So just put that list to the side and start saying, use the language that occurs to you. I had suggested, “What are my priorities,” but when you look at this list of 18 things the question that occurs to you might be, “Oh my God, I have 18 things. I can’t possibly do all of these. Which one do I need to do first?” And if that is the thought that occurs to you, that is a great thought to write down, because that is the literal question you have and that thought may actually, it could prompt – I don’t want to second guess what it’s going to prompt – but the next thought that it prompts, if you do this in paragraphs, as if you’re writing to yourself, you’ll actually deal with the biggest issue. Instead of being in some algorithmic way – this and this and this, like you need to just know the answer – if you know what the priorities are and you can just put numbers on them, you don’t need to think about it. But if you don’t know the priorities, you actually need to think it through and that’s something that’s done in sentences. That’s something where, in effect, you need logic. You need to see, “I can’t do all of these 18 things today. I don’t even think … I need some way to reduce it down to a fewer number because 18 is so much it’s mind-blowing to me. How am I going to reduce it down? Oh, maybe I could just do a quick sort and get the top five.” Okay. Now you go back to your list. Can you figure out the top five? Sometimes you can easily pick out the top five. Is that enough where you can now pick one, two, three? I don’t know. The point is, whenever it gets hard, whenever you find … here’s the test. If you’re thinking about something and nothing has happened, you need thinking on paper to help slow it down and make it go more effectively.

Halelly: Great sentence. I love it. Okay. I wish we could go for so much longer, but we need to start wrapping up. So before we tell listeners something really actionable they can do today and before we leave them with how to get in touch with you and learn more from you, what’s something that’s exciting and new on your horizon, Jean?

Jean: Well, I’m working on a book and it seems to be going well, we’ll see.

Halelly: That’s exciting.

Jean: It’s titled Smarter: Solve Problems Faster, Make Better Decisions and Avoid Dumb Mistakes.

Halelly: Everybody needs that book. So good, we’ll definitely have to keep in touch and we’ll tell people about it when it does come out. So, what’s one specific action that listeners can take to help them be even better and/or more efficient or more critical thinkers that they can take today, tomorrow, this week?

Jean: I’m going to suggest that that’s thinking on paper. And so I would say the next time you notice, “Wow, this is hard, or this is important. I need to think about that,” switch to thinking on paper.

Halelly: Great, and I love how specifically you explained it, so I know people are ready and will do it. Do it! So how can people learn more from you and about you Jean? How can people stay in touch?

Jean: Sure. Well, my website is ThinkingDirections.com. And if you go to that site, I have a newsletter that you can get, and I also have a freebie called the Smarter Starter Kit, and that includes a one-hour audio where I teach thinking on paper and there’s a write-up called How to Focus Your Thoughts for Action, which is a write-up on how to do thinking on paper. So there are several, those free resources, that’s something you can do. You get it if you sign up for my newsletter and that would be a great way for us to stay in touch.

Halelly: Absolutely. And I think that should be a huge value to everyone listening, because it can give you even more specific instructions, and I will link to all of that in the show notes page. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to speak with the TalentGrowers community. We appreciate you.

Jean: Thank you!

Halelly: You’re welcome, and our pleasure. Everyone listening, go take action.

Jean: Great, thanks Halelly.

Halelly: My pleasure Jean.

So what did you think? Wasn’t this extremely practical advice? I think this is something that everyone could use and for everyone of us, regardless of how much of an issue this is for us, it can take us to the next level of being better decision makers and better leaders. So I hope that you’ll take Jean’s advice and that you’ll apply it right away, and I hope that you enjoyed this episode. As you know, the TalentGrow Show is part of the C-Suite Radio Network of business podcasts that will help you improve your personal and professional life. I hope you’ll check it out on the C-Suite Radio Network, which is at C-SuiteRadio.com. And of course as you know, this show is something that I enjoy putting together for your benefit and if you found it useful, maybe some other people you know would too. So maybe just take a moment and share this episode or some other episode with one or two other people that you know, and just send them a text message or forward it to them in an email or tell them about it at your lunch break. The best way to get the word out about the show to other people, so that we can keep adding value in the world, is by listeners recommending it to other future listeners. So if you would, that would be an amazing thing to do. You would be adding value to that person, because you’re giving them something that you deem valuable, and so you’re doing something good for them. You’re strengthening your relationship with them and of course you’re doing something that helps the show get more listeners, which is something good for me. So, thank you on my behalf, and as well as on behalf of the person you’re about to help. Until the next time, I am Halelly Azulay, I am your leadership development strategist and I hope that you make today great.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.

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