Meta Skills: Translating Parenthood Behaviors to Workplace Strengths

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kelly:    Welcome back to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby, the podcast where we discover what skills can help you live your best life. I am your host Kelly Ryan Bailey, and each week I chat with inspiring visionaries about the skills that make them successful. You’ll get a firsthand account of how they develop those skills, as well as their innovative approaches to improving skills-based hiring and learning around the world. Now let’s talk about skills, baby. Today is a special episode in celebration of the second Mothers Monday. Mother’s Monday founded by my good friend and season one episode six guest, Gaietry Agnew, is a day to recognize the pressure placed on mothers and caregivers, and to cultivate a community of leaders working to reinvent motherhood [00:01:00] and work. For anyone who is interested in learning more head over to mothersmonday.com.

I’d like to welcome our guests today, Ricarda Zezza. She is the absolutely perfect guest to be here with us today to celebrate Mother’s Monday. Ricarda is the founder and CEO of Lifeed, the only learning platform in the world that transforms life transitions and care activities such as parenting, caring for an elderly person, going through a crisis, into opportunities to train soft skills, or as we like to call here life skills. Today, the Lifeed platform is used by 20,000 people in 80 companies worldwide.

She is also co-author of the book MAAM, Maternity As A Master. Ricarda is a fellow of Ashoka, the NGO that selects the best social innovators in the world. And is part of the European network of Weizmann Institute. In 2018, she was awarded [00:02:00] by Fortune Italia as most influent and innovative woman. Ricarda, thank you so much for joining us today.

Riccarda: Thank you for inviting me, Kelly. It’s a pleasure.

Kelly:  The pleasure is all mine. I am so excited for everyone to learn more about your book and your journey. Because when we first spoke, it was so meaningful to me. And I know as a working mother and those listening in today, it will be very meaningful for our audience as well.

And I want to point out just because we’re talking a little bit more about mothers today, actually the conversation has a lot to do with parenthood. I don’t want to have anyone only assume that this is a mother’s only conversation.

Riccarda: It’s a matter of practice is for those who practice Parenthood. It can be fathers too.

Kelly: It’s so true. So true. Well, why don’t we start off, I’d love to learn a little bit more about what skills really spoke to you throughout your journey.

Riccarda: Yes. I have been a manager for many years, for 15 years. When I became a mother, I realized that my workplace was [00:03:00] seeing my motherhood as a challenge.

It’s a problem in a way. So as a role that was conflicting with my being a manager and I was puzzled because that was my second maternity. And I had to realize that being a mother was training some very important soft skills that I had been using at work. First of all, I was feeling stronger and then I was better at some relational skills, that communication, that listening. A lot of change in my life. I wasn’t really surprised by the fact that becoming a mother was seen as a problem in my work. And that’s why 10 years ago, I left my work as a manager. And I decided to investigate, why does this happen? Why is being a mother perceived as a problem for the workplace? And I thought when you become a mother, you also have a maternity leave, which lasts five months.

That is considered as a problem because you are a way it’s a leave, you know, but then what happens is that you go back to work and you have more skills, more energies. And so, I thought, why can’t we consider [00:04:00] becoming a mother as a training course in soft skills. And that’s how everything started with a very long research that actually I found a lot of scientific evidence of the fact that becoming a mother improves soft skills.

It improves leadership. But of course, it’s like that because you’re doing something that is very important for the nature, you are taking care of life and so of course you become stronger. But we’re lacking the connection between this event in life and these skills and work because, know, Kelly, the work place is looking more and more exactly for those skills.

How come that they don’t see them where they actually develop? And that’s how the adventure of my company started. We created this learning methodology that we call life-based learning. And we have been working since then with thousands of mothers as a starting point. Now we are working also with fathers, with caregivers, because every event in life and every caregiving activity, develops soft skills.

[00:05:00] Kelly: It is so true.

Riccarda: And I think what parents should know, and in particular mothers should know is that this is not just about them.

It’s not just about us. It’s not just about being fair to us because we deserve to be treated. And this is already important. But the point is that there is a big wage to going on. So, the workplace is wasting our resources and the workplace and the society cannot afford to waste our resources anymore.

We are needed. What we can do the kind of caregiving attitudes we have, the capacity we have of communicating, of understanding the instance we have, the empathy we can bring to the workplace, but also to the world they are needed. And we can see that now. I mean, it’s pretty clear that the world needs more care.

 I think what’s very interesting about being a mother and also being a father, because this is coming out very strongly for men too, is that you actually connect power to responsibility. So, you feel this very strong responsibility [00:06:00] and that’s the right time for understanding that that responsibility carries a power with it.

And so, we have a power in this and we can express it and it’s our responsibility to do it, to bring all this to the workplace and to the society.

Kelly: We’ve talked about soft skills like empathy, but I wonder what are the top skills you’re seeing parents gain through that period?

Riccarda: I would say, there is a whole set of very practical skills, so skills that really make the difference in your daily life because they make you more effective.

And they’re about how you are able to relate to other people, understand and communicate, listen, motivate and so on. And that’s pretty clear to mothers, I think, but also about how you organize time, how you’re capable of setting priorities, how you’re able of deciding what to do now and what’s never, you know, setting priorities is about that and its organizational skills.

And that, of course there is a lot still on the practical side about creativity, innovation. Think about [00:07:00] lateral thinking. Think about mental agility. I mean, while our children grow, our mind keeps on growing with them. They change every day and they challenge us to understand every day a new reality.

And that’s an incredible exercise of mental agility. And then there is a whole set of skills, we call them meta skills. There are skills that allow you to learn all the other skills. So, they’re not just life skills, but they are really skills that if you have them, you will, live better in complexity.

It will be easier for you to keep on learning as you are asked to do nowadays. One is emotional literacy. That’s interesting because basically when you have a child or someone you take care of, you really challenged it to be closer to his, her or your emotions.

You have many more emotions to handle. And you can become more familiar with your emotions, which means, you can really get closer to good and bad emotions.  So emotional literacy is very important because life is more and more complex.

And in all our relations, we need that. [00:08:00] And then there is a reflective capacity that overall makes a difference because we don’t learn from the things we hear, but we learn, from how we reflect on what happens to us. When we started this, some people are asking me, so you’re telling me that just becoming a mother makes you a leader.

It doesn’t work like that. You have to reflect, you have to have the capacity to reflect on it and really, really take the best out of it. So, understand what’s going on. And then every day it’s about reflecting every day on what you do, and then you will find the resources. So, the reflective capacity, I think it’s a very important matter skill.

Kelly: It’s so true. And you know, there’s so much that you’ve just said there, that I want to come back to. The original skills that you were talking about, there were so many moments that came up in my mind as a parent and there’s moments every day and different moments as they grow.

But I can recall when the children were young, I have three children, three different personalities as all parents know. And to get three children out of the house with all of their [00:09:00] clothes on, at a certain time every morning, that in and of itself is skills that you’re gaining throughout that time period, because sometimes you’re managing all of the different emotions that are happening.

There are some kids that have a very particular type of clothes that they want to wear, and then someone has to go to the bathroom at the last minute. And so, all of the ways and keeping everybody happy and trying to get them out the door, I mean, just the number of skills I can think through that time period to try to get that moving.

I think of course, always about the way we have to calendar once you have kids. You talked about organizational skills and I just laughed because everyone has their own system, but usually there’s a lot of color coding and everyone has their place. And surprisingly, I don’t think anyone would ever recognize that they had to spend that much time on calendaring until they’re a parent. And then you kind of go into the changes as they get older. But at what I really lean on too, is when you hear me say these things, most people might think, well, you know, they don’t automatically recognize or reflect [00:10:00] on all of those skills they’re learning on a daily basis, but remember skills are not things that we learn once in our life, it’s something that we practice. It’s almost like a habit. And that’s the difference that we talk about when we refer to skills that are gained in life experiences versus skills that we gained in let’s say a one-time educational experience, because there’s a difference between reading something in a book versus practicing something every day.

Riccarda: Absolutely. Absolutely. And the practical part is there’s most challenging. Whenever I was in trainings in corporate trainings and the most challenging part for them was to make me practice. They were teaching me skills and then they were wondering, how do I have this person practice this? Because that’s the only way to acquire them.

And then I went home and I had my little child there and it was okay, this is my practice. I don’t need to practice in the classroom. And the point you said is really true, like skills at the end of the day, express with behaviors. You see the behavior behind the skill, then you know what the skill [00:11:00] is about otherwise it’s all theory and doesn’t translate. And the example you were making about children getting out of the house, that’s a typical example I use also with corporates because they, then they say, this is different. Now at home is one thing and the office is another thing. Think about when you have to engage your team.

You always are in a hurry. You want to get them out of the house as quick as possible, and you just say, get out. Okay. And they might do it, but they’re not following you really. And this is like in your team. They don’t follow you if you just say, get out. You have to get close to them, get their own level of communication, you have to engage them. You have to play with them and then they will follow you out of the house. It looks like it takes longer. But in fact, because they’re with you at the end, it’s more effective.

Kelly: I love exactly everything you said there, because I think of that all the time. If you walk into a meeting and you just try to talk to people, you don’t yet understand them, and this could be team and or anyone that you interact [00:12:00] with in the workplace.

There is something to be said at that initial time period that you spend with that person or that team or those people to understand their thoughts about the world, right? Because that’s the way you think every child in your family, if you have multiple children in your family, has that different personality.

Every person you interact with has a different personality. You have to sort of get into their head and understand how they see the world. And then the way you talk with them, like using that example of getting out of the house, but in the case of a team at work, maybe you’re trying to convince everybody that this next idea is the way to move.

And you sort of have to figure out how will this be valuable to that person. And again, then when you’re thinking of all the different people on your team and the way you need to navigate that, I say all the time that I would never be as great that I am with a team at work if I did not have, and three children for me was the one that it was very challenging for me when the third came [00:13:00] along.

But I will say that it taught me the most. And I think that that experience, because two, you sort of have the ability to play off of each other, but once the third gets in the mix, there’s always something that’s going to fall to the wayside and trying to figure out how to navigate that was so powerful.

And it changed the way that I was able to see things at work as well.

 Riccarda: Yeah. And what is interesting is also that you can transfer skills from work to home. In Italy, we become mothers more than 30 years old. So we have quite a lot of experience professionally and a lot of women are scared that they don’t have the skills to be mothers.

 But in fact, we have a lot of soft skills already from the workplace and we can take them home. There are skills, like for example, delegation. And women and some mothers in Italy, they say that they’re not good at delegating at home, but they’re good at delegating at work. And I challenged them to understand why.  Why this skill is better in one place than in the other one. What is the difference? And try to transfer the behaviors also [00:14:00] from work to home  

Kelly:  I was actually chatting; my brother is a new father. His daughter is less than a year old, and it was interesting because he had said being also an older father for the first time, he said a lot of what he was bringing into his family life were things that he learned at work.

Riccarda: And this is particularly true for men. I had one father once was like, I just had a new baby.

I am not sure I’m going to be able to manage everything too. It’s going to be too complicated. And I asked him, what’s your job? And he said, I manage a farm with 100 people. I’m like, I think you have the skills for managing your baby.

Sari: Hey everyone, this is Sari from the Skills Baby team and I’m here to tell you about the upcoming events that Skill’s Baby is hosting in the coming weeks. We’re going to be diving deeper into the future of work and the future of education, which in other words is the future of skills. If you want to be a part of the conversation, head to skillsbaby.com/events to [00:15:00] register. We would love to have you. 

Kelly: The world talks a lot about skill gaps right now. And I think there’s actually two types of skills gaps and there’s the actual skills gaps when there’s something an employer needs that people don’t have or vice versa, but then there’s this communication skills gap. Because sometimes it’s the, employer’s not communicating to employees or potential employees. But I think a lot of times it’s that we don’t recognize in ourselves and can’t tell the story of the skills that we’ve gained through various experiences.

I love that LinkedIn added the option to put in, parenting as a role because a huge step, right? Because it’s not only helping companies see that this is important, but it’s also helping us as individuals.  It took me a long time to recognize, and I work in this field that me being a parent was worthwhile.

And that I could tell that story and showcase how I was learning some of these various skills. Now, some people that [00:16:00] may not know what the skills are to talk about and how do they learn Riccarda, to describe, I mean, you’ve done it so eloquently. How can someone else learn how to describe that in themselves?

Riccarda: It’s exactly, as you said, it’s about self-awareness because if you become self-aware, then you will have the tools to look at yourself and find your own skills and find your own efficacy, and how we do it is we provide some content that frames the situation.

So we provide content that gives the context, the learning. You understand that actually, what is it empathy about? Like, let’s make an example. What is empathy about, or to some information, some knowledge about empathy and then prompts.

Do you recognize this skill and do you happen to use it recently and then the next question is what behaviors do you use when you think you’re empathetic? And what behaviors work better?  And then you identify that there are some things that you do that work better than others.

It’s about you, it’s about your own strengths. [00:17:00] Then we challenge you to transfer those behaviors somewhere else and see what happens. This kind of habit, it’s a change so you need a good reason for changing the way you do things. They have to really see an immediate feedback on the next situation in which they adopted these behaviors and they see if this is effective and this gives them the reason to try again and again  

Kelly: What you’re describing now, because of course I’ve been able to play around with the software that you provide. You’re describing a lot about these courses that you have in there. I know this is available directly to companies and of course, employees of those companies would have access so that they can start to become more self-aware and understand how things apply in both ways. Can individuals’ access this also on their own?

Riccarda: We absolutely have to work on this. Like we couldn’t at the beginning because of the business model, but we have to go there. We want to go there. We are looking for a good model to do it because it’s effective also for individuals. And I think, as I said, it’s not [00:18:00] just about leveraging the potential of parents and caregivers, which is already very important, but it’s also about delivering skills that are needed to the world.

We need to create a critical mass of these people, of this kind of change makers, that can bring this kind of caring skills, because all those skills I think they are more effective than any kind of cold skills you can apply because they embed this caring part. That’s for some reason has been left out from the workplace.

Kelly: You know, interesting because most people you know, I obviously have a background in working with labor market data related to what companies are looking for.

And I can say that the most transferable skills are what we would refer to as soft skills or life skills. A lot of the skills that we’ve talked about today are the ones that across any industry across any job are the most sought after are the most applicable. Companies know that when they talk about skill gaps, this is the most difficult.

They [00:19:00] believe that when they hire someone that has a bachelor’s degree or above, they automatically come with those skills and that’s not necessarily the case. And so not only is it extremely important for companies but when we talk about the future of work, in all reality, you know, we talk a lot about what I refer to as the future of skills, which is sort of this combination of work, formal education and life experience to create you as a unique person.

And you as a unique person is truly what employers are looking for as they navigate towards what their future looks like. You know, the fascinating thing about this is in this moment in time, when we’ve seen so many women step out of the workforce, a lot of times we don’t trace this back, but we’re already having a shortage of talent.

And now when women step out of the workforce and this could be different in every country, but here in the US. the problem is we don’t have a good infrastructure for caregiving. The expense of health insurance is so high [00:20:00] that when women step out of the workforce, they typically have less children because they can’t afford it.

And when that happens, I know we don’t talk about this, right? But like if companies actually thought about this, they’re building the next generation of workers.

Riccarda: And consumers.

Kelly: Very, very good point. And this really is, I mean, this is so much part of the future that the fact that we’re not taking this as seriously as we should is such a shame.

I think the positive is that COVID that silver lining sort of way has really made, if you weren’t aware of this as a company or as an individual, it’s pretty much smacked you right in the face.

 Riccarda: Yeah, no, I think nobody can ignore it anymore. What can happen is that the system might try to go back. And we have to resist that. We have to make a conscious effort because we can’t afford that. And I think that at the end of the day, it sounds like it’s still a matter of time. Time is a very little factor nowadays, because time is taken [00:21:00] care of by machines. Machines have changed the idea of time. Humans are about capacity, humans are about attention intuition, it’s about creativity. It’s about how we manage change or those skills that we only have and machines can have them.

Leave the challenge of time to machines, and let’s think about how we can put everything together and have all those rules, not conflicting with each other and competing for time, but generating more attention skills and capacity to improve the world. Because that’s our responsibility as human beings, I think.

So we really have to change our mentality about work because as long as we see work as a container, that you can only feel then it’s not going to change and we cannot keep on adding stuff into that container forever.

 Kelly: It’s a really valid point. There’s so much talk about automation now and I was reading an article the other day about the latest systems on chess teams as an example, or even doing debate.

[00:22:00] And the interesting thing is that most often they beat humans on their ability to be able to bring up facts very, very quickly because they are able to tap into things like LexisNexis and Google automatically but they don’t beat humans on strategy.

So when we think about, if anyone out there is wondering, oh my gosh, you know, is my job going to be automated? Well, I’ll tell you what, the one thing that will never be automated are the skills that we’re talking about right now.

Riccarda: And are needed for us to keep on being human, like to avoid that the technology becomes more relevant than us.

Technology is meant to serve us, not the other way around. We have to make sure that humanity keeps being at the core.

Kelly: Oh, it’s so true. Going back to your book, did the book come before Lifeed came along?

Riccarda: Yes. The book was the result of the first research I did. And the first experiences in the traditional classrooms, it came out in 2014. And then my company is now five years old. So it’s [00:23:00] quite young, but we’re already 40 people. I’ve also learned to be an entrepreneur and using a lot of my maternal skills being an entrepreneur and the other way around those. The book is still selling and I’m eager to take it to the US as well, if possible, because I think that the good side of the book, I think is I’m just telling how it happened to me, and that I was really surprised that nobody had told me this perspective. Why is nobody telling this story? I mean, we know it. We should tell it more.

Kelly: I used to say to my mother, why didn’t you tell me? And she would say, well, if I told you, you may not have had children. I wonder if that’s part of it, but the great thing is to be aware and if we don’t talk about it, then how will that elicit change in any way?

And, and honestly, I think your book would be fantastic in the US and I think the time is so right, especially with everything that’s going on and this conversation around what’s going on with work, but also with all of these [00:24:00] women, mothers especially as stepping out of the workforce throughout this time period, to help them understand.

And there’s so many organizations that are focused in this way right now, they have been and that this moment is making them sort of double down. I think it would be perfect timing and women would really appreciate it. I think they also need encouragement throughout this time period, anything that helps them build that self-awareness. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this Riccarda, because there is nothing bad, if in your time period as a parent that you have to step out of a professional environment. There are plenty of reasons why that could happen. And it sounds like you’ve done that as well. And I’d love to hear with your experience, you’ve mentioned how valuable it is. How can we help encourage other women that are in this place right now?

Riccarda: The point is the life cycle of work that we imagine is not updated and stepping out, having transitions is so normal and people step out for various reasons. They step out to have a trip [00:25:00] around the world on a sales boat, they step out to have a training, to have a masters.

They step out to become a parent. They step out for whatever reason. Normally transitions are moments in your life in which you learn so much, you understand so much, you always go back to whatever, being much stronger, knowing much better, who you are. And this is not my opinion is it’s proven by science.

There is a very interesting book about transitions, which is called 100 Year Life, by Linda Grafton, and it really tells you that those are moments in life in which you really renew your skills and your relationships, your networks, and make the world progress together with you. And the point is, I think it’s time for us to also imagine a new model of maternity motherhood.

We can be mothers, you know, the way, which is not the way our mothers were, but not the way the culture designing us. We don’t have to follow that idea. We can think of something completely new. This is the right time to do it. We are empowered enough to do it. We just have to [00:26:00] join strengths because we are so many. We can change the culture.

Kelly: It’s so true. If you were to redefine motherhood, how would you define it?

Riccarda: It’s a generative power.  It’s called generativists by psychology and generativist is about planting seeds of things that will survive you.

And this makes you so strong. You think about your growing children and people that you want to leave after you. Even the way you look at time changes because time doesn’t end with you, it goes beyond and yeah, that’s the generativists now. So, we have different view on the world on, on time, on everything life.

This is our power, and I know women don’t like the word power normally, because it’s shaped very differently, but this kind of power is a power that has roots, historical roots also. This is really strong and needed.

I think motherhood, this is a way of being very powerful [00:27:00] and caring is a super power.

Kelly: Completely. When we look back in history, a lot of times women and especially mothers, because they could recreate life were cherished. It was really something that was looked at as amazing, it wasn’t something that was looked at as taking away.

Riccarda: But for this to happen, I think that’s very important because in Italy we have this problem.

When you become a mother, the society tends to look at you as only a mother. The point is to be able to have this different way of being a mother. We have to make sure that we know that we’re not only mothers, but being a mother is an identity dimension that adds up to others.

We are still a woman, a partner, a friend, many, many things, and all those things get together creating an area of responsibility and power that is much wider than just being a mother. This is a problem that we might have and we have to overcome it

Kelly: That’s so true. And, you know, I think almost the reverse happens for a father.

And so, although we’ve talked a little bit about, you know, [00:28:00] re-imagining how to define motherhood, I think that’s the same thing for fatherhood and maybe just parenthood in general, because there really is no one right way. I think there is almost a uniqueness to this, depending on the person. But you don’t have to go along with what the world says you have to be for sure.

Riccarda: All frameworks don’t work anymore we can see it from the results we have to change them. And we can do that. Technology is a good enabler for doing that because we can have a very high impact with a low cost and you can really work on culture.

Kelly: I agree. In your system, the one thing that I really loved is just that you had options to walk through as a father, a mother, someone generally just in caregiving or life transition. I thought it was fantastic to have the different viewpoints because of course depending on where we are, you know, it’s sort of like meeting that person where their mindset is, because if we don’t, if we try to mold them and create this view that doesn’t necessarily fit with their life, the [00:29:00] learning is a lot more difficult because there’s that barrier. Whereas you meet them where they are in that journey and kind of take them along, which I think was just fantastic.

I even went through not only the mother, but I went through the father because I was just curious to see. It was really powerful, and I loved that it wasn’t that outdated version of fatherhood, that journey you were bringing them through. It was like let’s reinvent this together.

Let’s reimagine it together.

Riccarda: Yeah.  I think that care is a common territory, that in a way or another can unite everybody.  Because we recognize it. We recognize that we need caring, caretaking. We all need it. And we all provide it in a way or another and so we can really create a new territory for everybody to find the common language and get together.

Kelly: It’s so true. We’re coming up close to the end of our time here, Riccarda, I’d love to inspire our listeners to take action in some way. I’m feeling like through our conversation, there were two pieces that really struck me. One, directly [00:30:00] for people trying to navigate their life, obviously it could be parents or people going through life transition, how to re-imagine. And the other struck me is that, you know, we’ve had this discussion maybe on the lines of a company and how they may think through a different way on hiring.  Leaning back on looking at someone’s skills and not only skills they gained in the formal sense.

If we can put in your parting thoughts, maybe those two lenses, what can people do to take action and what can companies do to take action?

Riccarda: For people, I think it’s about self-awareness. In a way, for some reason, we grow up thinking that someone else is going to provide the solution for something when it’s not true, like we can provide solutions.

We can be the ones who changed the world. Each one of us. I realizing myself, I mean, I was in the middle of a struggle and I realized there was something I had to do there, and this changed my whole life and, in a way, it’s changing the lives other people. I hope so. I’m [00:31:00] not a superwoman and I think we all can change the world around us. It’s about how we see ourselves. There is one thing about what happens with children and that really can teach you a lot about how you relate with other people, is that your children always know if you see them and if you see them, they will listen to you.

And this is true about everybody. This is also true about ourselves. If we get to know ourselves better than we will be stronger, and we can really realize that we can make an impact. Each one of us, and for companies, companies have been so important for me because they have been the places where things could happen.

They have been the right business model for starting because they are ecosystems. They have their own cultures. They can make things happen inside them. I think companies have to realize that they cannot afford to waste all those resources. I’m not sure how much they have realized it, but they’re getting there. Because again, it’s about seeing. It’s about how much do you [00:32:00] see about your people?

And if, until last year or five years ago, seeing too much about your people seem to be too complex. I think now they know that this complexity is going to come anyway. They have to decide that whether it’s going to be a point of strength or a point of weakness for them. The sooner they updated the map, the more they will be competitive and they will be capable of managing the growing complexity they are facing. People can be allies in this, but they have to update the map. They have to see the complexity as a richness and they have to allow it. There is, I think that is a lot we can do. And it’s a good time. I mean, crisis is always good times for changing things.

Crisis it comes from the word choice.

 Kelly: Really? I didn’t know that.

Riccarda: Crisis means choice. Yeah.

Kelly: That’s really fascinating and I love your thoughts and suggestions. Those, all three, spoke to me so deeply, and I think the audience will appreciate it as well.  This will go to an audience of men and women who [00:33:00] are also trying to make change and I think collectively we could really do something, which would be amazing.

Riccarda: I agree. And thank you Kelly, because the thing is that we need allies.

We need to be together. Nobody can do this alone. The lucky part is when you start change more people who do the same will come to you or you will find each other.

Kelly: So true. Well for anyone that does want to find out more information about Riccarda and the work at Lifeed, please head over to lifeed.io and they are also available on all of the social channels.

Really great posts by the way. I absolutely love following them. You should go and check them out. And then of course Riccarda is available on LinkedIn, probably most active there if you want to come and continue any of the discussion. I’m also happy to continue any discussions around skills, topics, and or the skills that you gained during life experiences, such as Parenthood. It is all to me, part [00:34:00] of future of work, future of education which really truly is future of skills. I appreciate you joining today, Riccarda and I so appreciate the work that you’re doing and I do see the change that’s happening and it has affected me in such a positive way.

I know it will for everyone else as well.

 Riccarda: Thank you, Kelly. Thank you so much.

 Kelly: You’ve been listening to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby, a Growth Network Podcast production. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and share it with your community. Ratings, reviews and suggestions are great sources of feedback and always appreciated. Please reach out and connect with me on social at Kelly Ryan Bailey.

I’d love to meet you and continue the conversation. We’ll be back next week with a new episode so until then keep growing your skills and have a great day.