[00:00:00] Kelly Noah: We grew up with my dad saying, “You can have anything you want, you just can’t have everything you want.” I think that was great framing as a parent, that everything is available, but there are trade-offs.

[music]

[00:00:16] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. I am so delighted to welcome back my dear friend, Kelly Noah. Kelly and I, this is our third conversation together. Each conversation has been wildly different. I’ll link the other ones in the show notes because I think you’ll find the depth of experience that Kelly brings to these conversations. This one was a suggestion born of a conversation we had a couple of months ago, and I am delighted to experience the conversation of the art of choosing wisely with Kelly. Kelly, I’m going to let you introduce yourself, and then we’ll get started in earnest.

[00:00:58] Kelly: Great. My name is Kelly Noah. I am a homeschooling mom in Minnesota. I’ve got two boys who are 14 and 12 already. It’s a really fun age. I also work full-time as a financial advisor for a small firm in the Minneapolis area. It’s a lot of fun to weave together what we learn about helping people professionally, what we learn as homeschooling parents, and what we learn from having friends like Gretchen.

[00:01:22] Gretchen: I also have to say, in all honesty, when I met Kelly, we were at the MACHE Minnesota Conference two years ago. It was a serendipitous conversation because we had a lot of things to talk about. The more I got to know Kelly, the more I found that she had to offer the homeschooling community, everything from working with gifted and talented kids to working with children who learn differently, and how to reach them the best.

I’ve been really excited about this conversation because I’ve seen some of the materials that Kelly has prepared for her financial enterprise, and I think you’ll be blessed by it. Let’s begin. Talking about you can have a lot, but you can’t have it all, how do we address that? What are your first thoughts?

[00:02:15] Kelly: That’s a big question. It’s something we’ve come to, I think, just through life experience. We grew up with my dad saying, “You can have anything you want, you just can’t have everything you want.” I think that was great framing as a parent, that everything is available, but there are trade-offs, and we have to be aware of those trade-offs. Also, when we learn economics, we learn the same thing.

One of the things we’ve come to discover as we work with people over the years, and I’m not here with my financial lens on, I’m here with my coach lens, but that sometimes we fall into seeing life in compartments, and we expect each compartment to serve a job too tightly. Sometimes we look at life as your learning years, and then your working years, and then your fun years. We try to fit too tightly into those, and it spills over into frustration into the others.

One of the things that we’ve learned to encourage for our own families is to have a layered life, where you’ve got, instead of your learning years, and your working years, and then your fun years of retirement, all three layers happen throughout your life, where we’ve got lifelong learning, we have lifelong value creation, and we have lifetime deliberate recreation. Those things will look different through different stages, and sometimes one will be bigger and one will be smaller, but we’re not trying to live in tight compartments and doing an all-or-nothing…

[00:03:49] Gretchen: When do you begin those kinds of conversations with your kids? Have you always had those kinds of conversations, or is there a magic age where you know that message rings truer?

[00:04:02] Kelly: That’s a really good question. I think that sometimes as parents, we forget that we’re teaching our kids every day by our own actions. Before we even sit down and say, “This is a dollar, this is what you do with it,” our kids are observing us making choices with how we spend our time, energy, and money. I think we’re doing that from the time that they can’t even observe and understand what they’re seeing yet. They’re watching us. Are we lifelong learners? Are we finding ways to add value to the world? Are we finding ways to enjoy life while making the world and ourselves a better place?

[00:04:35] Gretchen: I think that’s a terrific way to frame that. I remember vividly my eldest daughter, she was about three, and she had wanted to do something. I said, “That’s not in the financial plan this week. I don’t have the money to do that.” She said from the back seat of the car, “We’ll just go to the wall and get more.”

[00:04:58] Kelly: Go to the wall.

[00:04:59] Gretchen: [laughs]I was like, “No, that’s not the way it works.” [laughs] Now, that same kid bought the coffee shop she’d worked in from 14 to 18 when she was 19 years old. We did teach her some financial skills, and she applied those liberally as a young adult and graduated college without any debt. I was proud of her for that.

[00:05:30] Kelly: Girl, and you hit on that, that we are just authentically teaching our children all the time, whether we intend to or not.

[00:05:38] Gretchen: Yes, definitely. How do you discern the good from the better?

[00:05:45] Kelly: Ooh, say more.

[00:05:47] Gretchen: [chuckles] What you said is that your father taught you that you can have anything, but you can’t have everything, if I’m re-quoting what you said correctly. How do you discern from the any and the every and teach your children to make wise choices? How did your dad do that for you?

[00:06:14] Kelly: By being a great guy, by being a lucky kid. Good question. I think that part of it, of course, is going to start with your own family values. Whether you have family values statement, virtues through your church, any of those pieces, those principles will underlie all of your family’s decisions. Then we add on to recognizing that each stage is for something different. Each kid’s stage and adult stage will be different based on their own needs.

You and I were just talking earlier about how this summer, my kids need a lot of camps. Some summers, they need a lot of free time. This year, they need a lot of time away from the house with other adults, other kids, not each other and not me. We can recognize that we have this virtue and value of paying attention to what our kids need and doing things that they enjoy that are also good for them.

[00:07:08] Gretchen: When did you come to that conclusion this year? Was that January or the last three weeks? [laughs]

[00:07:17] Kelly: For this year, it was very apparent with our kids that as we went through our homeschooling year, the part that wasn’t overfilled was time with more kids. Other adults, as we were planning fall, we could see what was different from the prior year and build summer into that. The beauty of being a homeschooling family is you get those summers that are a time that you can fill any way you need it.

[00:07:41] Gretchen: Sure. Did they equally acknowledge that they needed time away from each other?

[00:07:50] Kelly: I think they acknowledge that every day-

[00:07:53] Gretchen: [laughs]

[00:07:54] Kelly: in the best possible way.

[00:07:56] Gretchen: Part of that is their boys, and the ages they are makes them naturally more competitive with each other as well.

[00:08:06] Kelly: Absolutely. I think it’s something that families who talk a lot will understand. When we key into each other, we understand, just like we know with each other throughout a week in our household, does somebody need a little extra grace? Does somebody have a little extra capacity? Is somebody chomping at the bit to get out? Is somebody trying to use any excuse to not go out? We listen and we pay attention to ourselves and our loved ones. I think that that can be done pretty authentically.

[00:08:34] Gretchen: I think that’s awesome. Yet again, I think I would have learned a great deal had you been my homeschool mom. [laughs] When we formalized a description for this conversation, we were talking about volunteering outside of formal settings and intentionally selecting recreational activity. I want to take those two aspects and talk about them separately. Talk to me a little bit about your thoughts with regard to volunteering because it seems like as the world rolls on, it becomes ever more difficult to teach kids the value of an altruistic experience.

[00:09:17] Kelly: That’s a great question. Volunteering has so many levels to it. There’s the purpose of doing it for making the world a better place, but there’s also a way of doing it that provides a lot of self-growth without being selfish. Just as you were talking about how you think you would have learned from me as a homeschooling parent, one of the reasons why I can talk about these things is because I’ve volunteered in the community helping parents. It’s only from having a lot of these conversations that I’ve had practice articulating the thoughts. That comes along. Volunteering is a really great way to serve others while also growing.

When I was a young stirrer in my early 20s, I volunteered with the local sheriff’s office, I think we’ve talked about that, doing rescue and recovery. Yes, I learned first aid, and how to cut cars up, and how to dive into the water, and all of those fun things, but what I didn’t realize I was going to learn was how to be a leader, how to communicate, how to have that first moment where I realized that everyone’s looking at me to have the answers.

I wasn’t ready for that yet as an employee, or as a parent, or as a community member, but there was a place that I got to practice having that experience. When you’re volunteering, you have a chance to learn anything. If you want to teach, you want to lead, you want to communicate, you can get into these arenas and practice those skills in a smaller setting while making the world a better place.

[00:10:57] Gretchen: Interesting. Yes. Now, have your kids had the opportunity to do some of those kinds of things? If they have, what did those conversations look like for them to choose what they wanted to do?

[00:11:14] Kelly: I think especially with the younger folks, it’s useful to start in an area that they already know well, rather than pushing them into something unfamiliar and saying, “You’re going to learn this organization, and learn this idea, and learn the skill, take what you already do well.” It happens very naturally. My boys are both in karate. At their studio, you’re a student, and then you’re a student who also teaches for free before becoming an instructor who is paid.

Having this opportunity for them to see younger instructors as they’re a younger student and then move into that progression as well, or my younger guy has gotten into speedcubing, Rubik’s Cubes. There’s actually a developed program here in the Twin Cities where the kids who compete in speedcubing, they get to go be mentors at Rubik’s cubing summer camp programs that are community centers.

[00:12:08] Gretchen: Can’t imagine what that is like. It just is outside the realm of my expertise. I’m lucky if I can get two colors to match on a cube before I’m like, “No, I’m not interested anymore.” [laughs]

[00:12:21] Kelly: I’m done. Then what these programs do then is teach kids that these organizations aren’t there just to serve them. They only happen because people are serving in those organizations, and those organizations need them. All of these pieces come together, and then they get to peek behind the curtain. They get to understand how organizations run.

All of the places I’ve volunteered and served, I’m not just learning about what the organization does, but I might be using a different communication channel. I might use Zoom. One might use Teams. I might need to lean into texting. I might need to lean into email. Whatever these things are, we learn all of these organizational operational skills that we don’t realize we’re practicing until we encounter it again later.

[00:13:06] Gretchen: Sure.

[00:13:06] Kelly: I know a lot about how government works.

[00:13:09] Gretchen: Two of my boys did volunteer capacity positions with companies where they thought they wanted to learn a trade. They started as a volunteer and they were really willing to put in– Both of them put in more than a year’s worth of time before there was any conversation about financial compensation. Then they ultimately stepped into apprenticeship programs with their organizations.

The hard conversation is to recognize you’re going to have to put in time without compensation. Somehow our kids seem to have evolved in a lot of instances that they should be compensated for everything they do and handsomely. [chuckles] How do you take that conversation and break it down to understand that there’s virtue in volunteering your time before there’s a compensatory aspect?

[00:14:11] Kelly: I think a lot of that comes down to paying attention to the own messages we’ve been telling our children, both through our own actions and for others. They watch us do the math with our time. They watch us do the math with thinking about job changes and the like. How do we help them see that that’s not the only way of doing the math and talking about the world needing their value?

[00:14:33] Gretchen: Yes. I understand the volunteer aspect of karate. We went through that same experience with taekwondo here in our household. There’s an enormous advantage to being able to put yourself in the role of teacher while you are still learning because that’s a different experience.

[00:14:53] Kelly: Experience. It is. Also, we can come a little bit out of the altruistic side and into just the general unpaid side in that it doesn’t have to be a structured outside organization where you’re stepping into their mold. I’m saying volunteering, but it can look like a lot of different things. My mother has a beautiful garden. She’s a talented gardener. She gets people knocking on her door saying, “Hey, can I come work alongside you for a summer and just learn what you know?” Putting in the work to get what you need.

There are some kids who do a great job of leading gaming clubs or informal sports clubs with their kids.

It can be a different service that’s not under a 501(c)(3) umbrella. We just say, “Hey, wait a minute. I’ve got five other kids in my neighborhood who want to play tennis, but we’re never there at the same time. Can I arrange a tennis club in my neighborhood?” I can learn communication and organizations and learn why organizations end up having policies about things you think there would never need to be a policy for.

[00:15:58] Gretchen: [laughs] Yes. It becomes an enlightening experience when you learn that not everybody thinks the way you do, which is amusing and sometimes very frustrating as well.

[00:16:12] Kelly: Then the volunteer organizations can be something that endures through the life stages too. You leave high school, you go to college, you go to work, you change jobs, you change communities that way. Having a volunteer thread can be a more stable piece along that. I was thinking about it this morning on the drive into work. I think most of my adult friends I know from volunteering, not from work. Not everybody’s the same.

[00:16:43] Gretchen: That’s really interesting. I’ve never quantified it that way, but I think you’re right because I have to say the same thing. Most of my friends post college have come through whether it was participation in a homeowners association, or participation in a community project, or a women’s organization. All of those have been volunteer-oriented in some capacity.

What are your thoughts about teaching your children to advocate for themselves as they volunteer? One of the hardest conversations I had this past weekend at a conference was talking about parents seeking an opportunity for an internship or a volunteer position for their kids and my saying they need to be engaged in that process. You calling and saying, “Hey, I want my son to volunteer with you,” does not have the same impact as your son calling. How do you feel about that? How is that reflected in your boys?

[00:17:51] Kelly: I don’t have all the answers to anything. I can just tell you what’s worked for us over the years. One thing that I did again, none of this was with intention except for good ideas, but I have long since encouraged my kids to communicate directly with adults. That didn’t have to be a high-stakes thing. Sending a fan mail letter to an author after reading a book they loved. Walking up to a counter at an establishment to make a purchase. My kids are really good at writing feedback and complaint letters to organizations.

[00:18:23] Gretchen: [laughs]

[00:18:24] Kelly: Not in the grumpy way. My 12 year old very effectively sat down this week and emailed a shop about a speed cube lubrication bottle that he ordered that came defective. He was able to navigate that. “What do I say? What do I need my mom’s permission for information to share? Do I need to copy her in?” Because at 12, he’s practiced communicating and advocating on his own behalf.

The more small opportunities we give our kids, especially for homeschooling, and they’re in some ways more engaged with the world, in some ways less, making sure that we seek those things out because they don’t have the daily experience of self-advocating with an outside teacher.

[00:19:03] Gretchen: Sure.

[00:19:04] Kelly: Helping them step up to that in smaller ways so they are comfortable teaching them when do they need to copy their parent in so the other adult knows that the parent is in the loop. Being comfortable with having those exchanges. I say start early and start small.

[00:19:21] Gretchen: One of the things that I said to parents this past weekend is you have a perfect opportunity with a cell phone to sit down and role play across a kitchen table, what questions do you want to ask? If I say this, what question would you ask in response to my saying that? To be able to teach our kids that process. Nobody learns that process by accident. It has to be intentional for us to be successful with that. I want to switch from volunteering to talking about– You said something that has affected me and I thought about for months since we first had this conversation, and that is selecting recreational activities that foster personal growth.

Knowing that I have a child who’s about to have a wild personal growth experience, 3,700 miles of it when he leaves two weeks from today, this has been an evolution that started when he was 7 years old, he’s 26, and now he’s getting to walk that out. Hiking the Continental Divide Trail is no small feat. It’s going to take all of his energies for all of the summer. Watching him plan for it has been fascinating. How do you all choose those intentional recreational activities? What does the Noah family like to do? I think we need to learn from yours.

[00:21:03] Kelly: When we think about deliberate recreation, is the term we sometimes use, and that’s enjoying life in ways that are good for you, part of that is leveraging inefficiency and efficiency, in that there are only so many hours in the day, so many hours of the week. We talk about wanting to have it all, but we can’t.

If we can take something that might have been two hours of something good for us and two hours of something that we enjoy, that can take four hours done separately, going to the gym and then going and socializing, or I can combine them into an activity that meets my needs to move my body today while spending time with a friend, for example, we can be a lot more efficient and get more into our day.

Just overall, sometimes we hate to admit it, but the things we do to relax end up leaving us more tired or less healthy, less connected with the world. If we can come into the work week, as it were, traditional Monday morning, delighted from having a fulfilling weekend that was good for us and good for our community and good for our mind, we’re ready to go, we’ll be able to produce better and learn more at work than if we come in fried from sleeping too much, having the wrong kind of fun and the like. Then amplifying that.

Again, my wise father is a fan of saying, “Find people who are more like what you want to be and join them.” “As we’re talking about our deliberate recreation, are we choosing friends and social groups that are doing things that they’re healthy and happy and excited and learning and being part of that cycle?” he said.

[00:22:50] Gretchen: Your dad sounds like a fascinating man. Now, do you have siblings?

[00:22:54] Kelly: I do. I’m the youngest of three. You’re the youngest of three. Wow.

[00:22:59] Kelly: My big sister has a birthday today, actually.

[00:23:02] Gretchen: Oh my goodness.

[00:23:03] Kelly: Happy birthday, Tina.

[00:23:03] Gretchen: Happy birthday to her.

[laughter]

[00:23:07] Gretchen: That’s amazing. I find it fascinating. In the interest of full disclosure, I also find it fascinating that you work alongside your dad. He must have been a very special man to be able to create that relationship. You’ve done this now for how many years?

[00:23:25] Kelly: I’ve been with him for 20 years. A long time.

[00:23:28] Gretchen: Wow.

[00:23:29] Kelly: As we talk a little bit, we’re talking now about career paths for young adults and such. I think one of the reasons why it worked for us is that I didn’t grow up planning to work for him and I didn’t start out working for him. We had a friendly relationship work-wise. I would help as kids do help their parents with their various jobs. I went out and got my own education, cut my teeth in the corporate world. Then only when time came where I was in my career and where he was in his business that it worked for us to put peanut butter and chocolate together, then we did it. I was able to come in as an adult with my own experience.

[00:24:10] Gretchen: I think there’s something to be said for that. We often see in the homeschool world when the first generation, the founding generation, is reaching the point of retirement, often, their children don’t want to come alongside them and pick up the reins of the business. This was a dynamic I hadn’t really thought about until I was at this conference a week ago, and how many vendors I spoke with who were like, “Yes, we’re approaching retirement and we don’t know what’s going to happen to our brand and our business because our children don’t want that.”

[00:24:49] Kelly: Big question.

[00:24:50] Gretchen: It is. It is indeed.

[00:24:53] Kelly: The beauty is that where we start in our career path doesn’t need to be where we end. I do put a lot of pressure. Again, my father says it’s not always a good idea to take career advice from an 18 year old.

[laughter]

[00:25:07] Kelly: I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was back then, but I sure knew I didn’t understand what the rest of my life was going to be like.

[00:25:15] Gretchen: You know what? I will also wager to bet that you were probably more mature at 18 than a lot of the average 18 year old women because you had the opportunity to have these conversations with your dad.

[00:25:31] Kelly: I did.

[00:25:32] Kelly: He also gave me grace in that I had finished high school, and I actually turned down a four-year private school scholarship and took a break, and entered the workplace until I had an idea of what I wanted. Fortunately, 10 years after graduating from high school, I had 10 years of work experience plus a master’s degree, which I’d worked on as I went through it. Again, he was giving me the grace, as the rest of my family did, to seek things out on what didn’t look like the perfect path. You know what? It turned out okay.

[00:26:07] Gretchen: Talk to me about that because, particularly with a scholarship opportunity, there’s a lot of pressure there then to walk that forward. How did 18-year-old Kelly have the wherewithal to know that she needed a little bit of life experience before pursuing academics?

[00:26:30] Kelly: I wish I could say that it was all with a great amount of knowledge and wisdom.

[laughter]

[00:26:36] Kelly: Looking at it then and looking back, I can only say that it looked like a bad decision, but it was also the only thing I could do at the time. I’d been top of my class through public school, but I’d gotten sick my senior year, and I was burnt out, and I was just done, and I didn’t know what I was doing all this for anyway. I ended up taking a break, and it all worked out just fine. I was also independent at the time. Had my parents said, “This is fine. You can just stay in your room and come out when you’re ready,” as it were.

I don’t know if it would have been a successful experience, but what I had chosen at the time was to go out and support myself. Then because I worked with good people who encouraged me to learn more, who encouraged me to work more, who encouraged me to learn something different, I was able to work through that path at my own pace. There was some luck involved, absolutely, but it did work.

[00:27:36] Kelly: You said something interesting that I want to revisit in a little bit more depth, and that is you didn’t know at 18 where you would be now at 28 or whatever.

[00:27:51] Kelly: [laughs]

[00:27:54] Gretchen: I think the baby boomer generation was educated that it was a gold watch experience. You were going to start working for one company and you were going to stay there forever. It was reinforced for me how much the current generation has moved away from that in a conversation I had with my 19 year old. He’s in the second year of an electrical apprenticeship.

His goal is to finish that, but he said, “I don’t foresee myself being an electrician all of my life. I foresee myself as gaining this skillset, and it gives me something to fall back on while I explore other opportunities.” I was shocked. He had never said that to me before. I thought, “Wow, yes, that’s quite a change from the way I was educated.” It was take a career path, find a good organization to work with, and stay there forever. I think we need to have those conversations with kids today to recognize that that capacity does no longer exist, per se, in society.

[00:29:05] Kelly: There are plenty of kids who have a vision, they want to be in an industry, and they go straight from high school to college to the workplace and it works beautifully. Have you read Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing?

[00:29:21] Gretchen: You made me do that.

[00:29:23] Kelly: I did. It’s a fantastic book and that it describes this fluid environment that our kids are being raised in where our baby boomer parents could see, if I’m a doctor, my life looks like this, if I’m a carpenter, my life looks like this. These younger kids today are seeing this fluidity that they can’t picture what life looks like as this, that, or the other thing. Helping them use these years to build skills and think of the world around them is very useful. If you raise a child who learns wherever they go, they will learn wherever they go.

[00:30:04] Gretchen: Right. I think homeschooling tends to foster that a little bit because we do provide the latitude of, “Oh, you don’t like how you’re learning these materials?” I still talk about the last time you and I had a conversation about you evaluating periodically the materials you had chosen for the year and deciding with your– how did you say it? The boys, they provided input to your decision, which I think is really brilliant. In other words, they didn’t drive the train, but they told you how they felt about things. You took that into consideration as you changed direction during the school year.

[00:30:48] Kelly: Made an informed decision, maybe. Sometimes as homeschooling parents especially, we can over-correct on that and only have our kids doing the things that are good for them. One of the textbooks my kids used this year was not for the purpose of learning the content. It was to just “suffer through, read the chapter, answer the questions the way they are being asked.” I know you understand this concept much broader and have lots of great thoughts about it, but can you write a one-sentence answer to this question that specifically answers the question? Teaching them that skill because they will need that in the workplace.

[00:31:29] Gretchen: Absolutely.

[00:31:29] Kelly: Sometimes you’re being paid to be creative and a great thinker, and sometimes a very specific task needs to be done. We have opportunities to learn to deliver the deliverable.

[00:31:41] Gretchen: Yes. I think also, particularly in the homeschooling community, we have embraced the idea that we all have different preferences in how we learn. I’ve never heard of an employer say, “Tell me what your learning preference is,” and then tailor that beginning work experience around that learning preference. We do have to be able to do, as you said, answer the question in the way it was asked.

[00:32:09] Kelly: Asked.

[00:32:09] Gretchen: That’s a hard skill sometimes.

[00:32:11] Kelly: It is, and learning to become the other side of that presenting of information. You and I talked earlier about the different skills that we learned academically that help us in our workplace today, and how do we use writing in everyday life. I’ve learned that as a communicator, I can’t communicate in the way that’s best for me. I need to communicate in the way that’s best for my audience.

You’re talking, but as learners, we’re often presented information in the way that’s best for us. Then as workers, teachers, parents, we need to learn how to present information in the way best for the other person. That’s a big part of growing up, is to shift that mindset from one to the other. Helping our kids see that this happens, and not expect that, for my entire life, things will be presented to me in the way I best receive them. That’s just great skill for your kids.

[00:33:08] Gretchen: It is a great skill. Sometimes that’s a hard lesson learned. It has to do a little bit with prefrontal cortex maturity, and it has to do a little bit with experiencing how to learn in different capacities. How did you say that they went through this book this year? They suffered through it? [chuckles]

[00:33:29] Kelly: That was the role of the book, and articulating with our kids what we’re looking to get out of an experience. They can’t always read their minds, and they might only hear what we’re grumbling or joyously prattling about, just like with emotional intelligence. We’ve taught our kids to watch us say, “I’m frustrated because– I’m happy because– You see this look on my face because I’m concentrating, not because I’m angry with you.” Whatever these things are, we learn to articulate these things to our kids with feelings. Doing that as well with our own motivations that they can’t see behind the curtain is very good.

[00:34:07] Gretchen: Sure, absolutely. In the financial services industry where you are, you still have to do a great deal of writing.

[00:34:18] Kelly: Absolutely.

[00:34:20] Gretchen: I think sometimes, particularly as parents, we make a misapprehension that if you’re in the financial services industry, you’re working just with money or you’re working with numbers. I want particularly high schoolers to recognize you need a complete skill set. You don’t need a singular skill set.

[00:34:44] Kelly: You’ve learned that very well. The numbers are there, but the numbers don’t matter if people either don’t understand them, or they don’t match up with people’s feelings or people’s needs. My job is to bridge the numbers to the person and the person to the numbers. The high school papers I could have written that were really long and full of really big words that were impressive and had a lot of research, that’s not useful in my job.

Short ideas that match what a person’s looking for is what matters. Somebody can come to me and say, “I have a question about this,” and I could give them a whole book of information, but it might miss the mark. I need to be a listener before I’m a communicator.

[00:35:32] Gretchen: I love that. Listening before communicating. That’s probably one of the most sophisticated skills we have to teach our children to be able to do. That is a mark of maturation, is it not?

[00:35:45] Kelly: It is. You communicate all day, every day professionally and personally. What didn’t you know back then that you know now about communicating?

[00:35:55] Gretchen: Oh, reams. Reams and reams and reams. In fact, the book that really changed my perspective about communication was a tiny little book by an author named Joyce, I think it’s Joyce Heatherley. It’s called Balcony People. Maybe 100 pages. I loved this book because it taught me that by raising others up, we raise our own attitudes and our own feelings of self-worth. It was just an enormous game changer. I made every one of my kids read it. They hated me for it in high school. Several of them have come back to me later and said, “Good job finding that book?” [laughs]

[00:36:45] Kelly: Something else to learn from it.

[00:36:47] Gretchen: Yes, absolutely. Kelly, as your children begin this path of growing separate from you, because that’s what we really want to encourage our teenagers to do, how are you encouraging them to explore the world with the mindset of lifelong learning? Are you guiding them down certain paths, or you’re just having conversations about what is possible?

[00:37:15] Kelly: I think the most primary piece is the framing, like we talked about at the beginning, that learning isn’t something you do until you’re 22. Lifelong learners. Then surrounding them with parents who are lifelong learners and grandparents who are lifelong learners. I think that’s the first part of that. The second part is just having those conversations with them that will be doing formal education earlier in your life, but you’ll always be informally learning, and you may return to formal learning as time goes by. We have no idea what their workplace is going to look like in 20 years, but whatever tech we’re using today is probably going to be irrelevant.

[00:37:55] Gretchen: I think you’re right about that. I think AI is going to make huge changes to the workplace and our capacities are going to be in our abilities to adapt and change rather than being strictly knowledge-based or skills-based.

[00:38:12] Kelly: That’s part of the fun of raising these kids to thrive in an AI environment, is the world will always need canyon jumpers. It will always need dot connectors. These people who can say, “Wow, this technology is being used over here. What if we apply it over here?” You may be in a specific industry, but what you understand about other industries will be very useful. Only an innovative thinker can connect these dots in a new way.

[00:38:43] Gretchen: I recorded a conversation last night with Duncan that we will air later this summer talking about how he used AI to plan this trip. He used it to plan everything from his physical workout to what he was going to pack. When he first told me about it, he called it potential catastrophizing. I said, “Would you explain that to me, please?”

He said there were things that happened when he was on the CDT two years ago that left him with lingering doubts about his own abilities. He tasked AI with setting up scenarios that he would then have to respond to. “Here’s how I would handle that.” Then the AI would evaluate what he missed and what he did correctly, which I thought was really fascinating. I thought was really an interesting way to plan. It would never have occurred to me. This is a guy who’s in cybersecurity, but is very leery of things that are technologically related because he’s very private. To learn that he had used this in that capacity was pretty fascinating.

[00:40:09] Kelly: Interesting. We can raise these kids to stay current with information and understanding the world around them, and having good data sets to mark against, as it were. Minnesota has a population of about six million people. If I hear a data set that talks about them having 100 million people, it needs to jump out in my head as something’s not right here, or if I hear something’s 20% off and it was $100 to start and now it’s only $30, it needs to catch her attention. Raising our kids to have a good data set to rely on and the ability to do quick checks is really useful, so as they’re putting together pieces across industries they don’t know, they can see if things pass the sniff test.

[00:40:57] Gretchen: I like that. Teaching them how things should pass the sniff test should be a goal for every parent, whether they’re homeschoolers or whether they’re any other form of educators for their kids. Kelly, I can’t believe we’re at the top of the hour. What closing words would you have for our families before we conclude today? This has been such an interesting discussion.

[00:41:21] Kelly: It has been fun. I’m so glad you’ve asked me to have another one. I would just say for our parents to trust themselves, and to see that they’re living as a role model every day, and know that their kids are learning. Lifelong learners are the way to go.

[00:41:37] Gretchen: I like that. That is one of our core values here at Demme Learning, is to raise lifelong learners. I think once you stop learning, you stop living. It’s an important thing to keep. I want to thank you so much for spending this time with me today. It has gone too quickly again. Thanks, again, Kelly, for the time spent. It was a pleasure to share this hour with you.

[00:42:04] Kelly: Thanks for having me on.

[00:42:05] Gretchen: Thank you to everyone who joined us today. I hope that you found virtue in the conversation that we have had. Thank you for trusting us to come into your living rooms. Take care, everyone. Have a wonderful afternoon. Bye-bye.

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