Social Emotional Learning & Life Skills

Episode Transcript

SB S1 E10 – Louka Parry

Kelly: [00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Welcome to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. I am your host Kelly Bailey. Each week, I chat with inspiring visionaries about the skills that make them successful, how they develop those skills, and their innovative approaches to improving skills-based hiring and learning around the world. Come learn what skills help you live your best life.

This week I’m joined by Louka Parry. Hi Louka, thank you so much for joining us. I wanted to give a little background on Louka and man, these are some major accomplishments I’m just going to say, but I need to say it because this is well earned. So Louka works globally to enable a world of thriving learners across schools, companies, and organizations.

He speaks on innovation, leadership and change, having worked with thousands of leaders and educators from diverse contexts, all around the world. [00:01:00] He speaks five languages. I mean, that’s just like, I love it. He’s visited over 80 countries, which I’m definitely jealous about. He holds two master’s degrees, one in Instructional Leadership from the University of Melbourne and another in Applied Linguistics and has also completed Executive Studies at Harvard and a residency, is it at the D school? I am totally not familiar with the D school. What is that?

Louka: Yeah, that’s an amazing multidisciplinary Institute, which is housed within Stanford itself. And so if you’re a student Stanford, you get to cross-enroll and it’s one of the most amazingly creative spaces, I’ve been lucky to hang out in frankly, and they’re doing some remarkable work around equity.

Kelly: Amazing. That is amazing. I’m just surprised that I haven’t heard about it. He is also the CEO of Learning Future. He is committed to transforming learning [00:02:00] structures, systems and societies so that we better empower individuals to develop the key human capabilities that matter most now and into the future.

And he also sits on the executive of Karanga, the Global Alliance for social emotional learning and The Life Skills, which connects the global education community at the forefront of the future of education and social, emotional learning to empower children, educators, and communities across the globe.

That is like, Amazing.

Louka: I think you’ve rephrased that, you’ve done a great job of rephrasing that, I might take your version.

Kelly: I’ll send you the copy. No, but it’s really impressive. Honestly, based on all of the conversations that I get to have, I just really absolutely admire the work that you’re doing.

So it’s such a pleasure to have you here with us today, but I’ve given sort of this high level overview. I just want you to share with us a little bit about your [00:03:00] story more in depth. I’d love to hear about how you’ve navigated, what brought, what led you here today now?

Louka: Kelly, first thing I’d say is there’s so much alignment in skills, let’s talk about skills. So I’m incredibly excited for this conversation. I would say in summary, I’m an educator and I started my career as an educator, and I really do imagine I’ll finish it if I ever do, as an educator. There’s something about being involved in the development of human beings in the beautifully dynamic process that we see either in our roles as teachers, as leaders, as organizational leaders, as parents and caregivers, whatever the case might be.

That’s what I’ve become just really quite fascinated by. I’m also a massive nerd. And I think that you can tell that from my bio, I just love the process of learning. And for me, it’s the constant emergence of something new.

I [00:04:00] hold my passion tightly, but my ideas lightly as the saying goes. So, I am fully prepared to be changed by our conversation today. I’m sure that I walk away a different person because that’s frankly, what a good conversation, dialogue, discussion, socratic debate is about.

Kelly: That’s truly what I felt through our first conversation, by the way.

Louka: Yeah, I know. Right. Which is, so I’m glad we get a second one.

Kelly: When I left my room after that night cause that was like the last call of my night. I was like, yes!

Louka: And your kids rolled their eyes as “oh she was just having another conversation.” I mean like many, I’m fascinated by learning and how it is linked to agency and therefore empowerment because, frankly, And COVID-19 where we sit right now has really not just disrupted, but it’s revealed. I like this insight, which is crises disrupt, but they also reveal.

And so [00:05:00] it really has taken off kind of the covers of some of the parts of our societies and our structures and institutions as well. Be they democratic ones, be they educational ones, be they health carewhich has been an enormous focus. So it’s interesting that I find myself here, and I don’t necessarily want to quote a white guy, Steve Jobs, but he does have a good insight here which is we can connect the dots looking backwards, but it’s hard to connect them looking forwards.

And in some ways I look backwards on my experiences so far, the way I’ve tried to contribute to the world. And it makes sense, but that doesn’t mean I have a plan from this point moving forward, it’s constantly emergent and and I am lucky to work on a range of great projects with really wonderful friends and colleagues from around the world.

I started my career as a teacher and actually after high school, I moved to Europe for a year and a half. I moved to Ireland. That’s six months to [00:06:00] Dublin and immediately, I couldn’t understand what my wonderful kind of teammates were saying. Some of the time in North County, Dublin playing the great sport that’s Gaelic football.

It was a Rite of passage for me. I was a young man. I just finished year 12 and I moved across the world to a new country and that was really formative part of my life, because I started to ask some of the bigger questions, which is actually, what am I most interested in doing?

I spent 12 months after that, traveling across the cities and communities, different countries, different cultures. I was just totally taken by the diversity of something like Europe and the amazing history and languages and gastronomy, and of course also feeling frankly like a little ignorant.

About being an Australian and born in Australia, but both my parents, you know, migrating by boat to Australia in the 1960s. My mum from Greece, dad from Wales. [00:07:00] So hence the Greek Welsh name, Louka Parry. So in some ways it was amazing going back and exploring, okay, well who am I?

What have my ancestors done wherever they come from, what’s their story? How do I understand that so I can kind of be the author of my own? And I came back after those experiences of saying I’m an Aussie, I’m an Australian, and realizing that I hadn’t traveled and kind of done the work, the inquiry about what is the history of my own country that I can now call home? Australia.

That was an interesting insight. And also the ignorance of standing next to someone Swiss, and I always use this example, who are just code switching seamlessly between four languages. I’m there as the kind of mono-lingual going, oh, I really wish I had a bit more capacity in this department.

So that was it because really at 18, I spoke only English. I became [00:08:00] deeply curious about the world over the year and a half. And I have always been curious about the world particularly through my formal education, which in many ways did equip me particularly through art and the co-curricular activities.

I love to do drama, singing, musicals, performances, all of those. I’d love to unpack that with you. But when I came back to Australia, I changed out of commerce, which I had gotten into, into education. And the reason for that is I had become so interested in learning and I also realized that education is some ways, it’s selling, it’s actually though, it’s trying to come to create an experience where someone can grow and can evolve and can step into their power.

I might not have used those terms back then as a 21 year old or 20 year old, whatever I was. But then I experienced four years at a university in south Australia. Became super interested in languages in particular, started learning my mom’s language, modern Greek from scratch, sadly. But I [00:09:00] was doing that and then also started learning Spanish, got to live and do an exchange.

And she left six months again on that cultural interface, linguistic interface. There’s nothing quite like as an adult being thrown into those types of environments and going, I have no idea what’s happening. Your capabilities are really on show for everybody to see in that public failure and embarrassment, and I’ve got lots of funny stories.

Kelly: I bet you did.

Louka: Also, I realized that, you know, often, and we know this from language learning research is often, it’s the shame that people experience in failure, which is the greatest barrier to being a successful learner in that context. So I’m a big advocate. It is crazy. Right. But there’s something happens to us as adults in particular, where we shy away from vulnerability and yet the learning pit as we call it in education, is literally the best way that we can learn. That’s the most effective way we accelerate.

Kelly: I literally just posted something today about some research that the company that I work for, our parent company, Strada Education Network, [00:10:00] has been doing some survey research and it said the second reason why most Americans don’t go back to school or finish out education is because they don’t believe in themselves.

Louka: Wow. That’s exactly the challenge. I think that through my, through all of the work that I am trying to do powerfully and otherwise, that’s exactly it.

How do people step into their confidence? Step into a self concept where they don’t see their actions as the core of their identity. They have value regardless of what they do. That is why wellbeing right now is a massive thing. We are not our job, right? We aren’t, we are more expansive than that.

This takes on lots of spiritual dimensions. But in terms of our own empowerment and agency, the idea of feeling seen and valued is the [00:11:00] way that we create positive work cultures and positive educational cultures. How can someone step in?

And we know this with cultural safety, which is an enormous theme in the United States at the moment in particular, but all over the world. And rightly so. How do people feel? Because there’s a difference between being safe and feeling safe. And this is why the field of social emotional learning, I think is incredibly important. People say soft skills and it’s not my favorite terminology, but ultimately we’re talking about often the same constructs.

Self-regulation, how do I have an emotional regulation capability so that when I feel elevated, I can soothe myself down so that I can engage in the most powerful learning possible. Although all emotions have utility, and the point is we should be outraged about some of the things taking place.

It’s not just about resilience and people talk about resilience all the time. There’s a challenge with resilience, which is “Just [00:12:00] tough it out. Just pull up your socks, get on with it.” Well, actually, no, there should in some states be resistant, not resilience. It’s that resistance and that revolution that we’ve seen across social change, across our collective human histories, that has created powerful social movements and social change.

There’s all these tensions that I think fit in this kind of skills based world, where ultimately we should always work out what our definition of success is first. And in my view, you won’t be surprised to hear Kelly cause we’ve had this conversation already. It’s actually a sense of collective wellbeing.

Our destinies are intertwined. It’s literally the definition of a community. The individual is a completely false construct. It only makes sense when you place it alongside other human beings. So what’s the common unity towards which we are. What are we fighting for? What are we working towards?

It’s a better world. More prosperous as well, [00:13:00] because of course there is an economic piece to this, economic empowerment, but it’s not enough. How do we create a holistic thrivability or flourishing frame of reference?

Kelly: It feels like this missing piece? There’s all of this great work that’s been going on, but at the end of the day when people have low self-confidence or they can’t adjust their emotions to the necessary, and to continue. And then when they’re in an environment or in a culture, either be at work or wherever, where they’re not feeling. Again, it’s that feeling because it doesn’t matter what the perception is. It’s how they feel.

But all of this has been going on for, it feels like for me it’s been my whole life. This is a huge revelation for me now in this time, it’s happened over the last few years. There’s just a certain way that sort of like society looks at how people feel and yeah for me, that whole like tough it out, [00:14:00] that was the way.

Louka: Absolutely. In many elements it still is the way, it’s the kind of old school this is how we do things here. My personal view and there’s some pretty good research that backs this up and it’s very well synthesized communicated by Daniel Pink.

For example, when he talks about drive and motivation, and this is the thing called self-determination theory, which is the same idea, which looks at agency and mastery and these other components that are crucial. I’ve got to speak to the work of Mark Brackett, who’s a good friend and colleague of mine, from Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

He’s the foundation director there, but he’s just written a book called Permission To Feel. And so they’ve been doing work in emotional intelligence for a very long time. I’ve been really kind of at the vanguard of that. This is the idea that we need to give ourselves and each other permission to feel because we have to acknowledge that we are emotional beings that think.

Not just thinking beings that have these weird things called feelings from time to time, it is literally the integrated nature of [00:15:00] that. And the neuroscientists now are validating that in terms of the neural structures of our brain. The emotion and the cognition are intigrately connected.

So the idea of just “Get on with it, suck it up, take a spoonful of concrete,” which is a saying that sometimes means “to harden up”. And of course this implicates the field of masculinity in a really big way.

Kelly: I was hoping you were going to go here cause I was like, Ooh!

Louka: Well, all these terms, you hear them as a man and I identify as a man.

In particularly in different types of cultures, sometimes in sporting cultures and some organizations do it so much better. My view is that we just need an expanded understanding of masculinity because I think it’s actually the suppression of these emotions, which is one of the root causes for so much of the like completely horrendous outcomes that we see.

Kelly: It’s interesting because I think of this with adults, but I [00:16:00] find that it’s easier to see in children.

Louka: Yeah, they don’t hide it.

Kelly: Yeah, they can’t. So I have two girls and a boy, and it’s funny because what I noticed was, as adults what it looks like from the outside is that generally speaking, women tend to seem, right, and then society tells us that we are weaker, that we, all these things. Men are supposed to be strong, masculine, all those things. But what I noticed in my young children was that my girls are really, really strong. And at some point, they’re going to lose that because society, and I try to foster all those things.

We can talk about that later, but my son, he is like that term people call mama’s boy and I’ve heard it so often. And people would tell me before I had a boy, they just loved their mommy’s, you know, he is just very needy. I’m not saying it like, it’s a bad thing.

It’s just so [00:17:00] juxtaposed. It’s so different from what we see as adults. At some point they lose this. He’s very emotional. When he’s angry, he doesn’t know. And when he’s sad, he cries. Right. At some point they lose this.

And I’m just so curious about this concept of, at what point if they naturally come into the world, being able to express all these emotions, does that just get shut off?

Louka: Yeah. There’s a lot in that. And I wouldn’t claim myself as an expert in any sense but I do use a lot of my time to try to understand human behavior, I would say.

Teachers in particular, in some ways the experts of human behavior, because you have up to 30 human beings, some parts of the world up to 80 or a hundred human beings in a room together. And so all you’re seeing constant human dynamics, psychology played out, laid there and you, you bring up some really good points.

The [00:18:00] one thing I would say as an applied linguist, which is one of the hats I wear. So I’m very passionate about that as well. We have lots of interesting work about the way that we frame things. And so the way that we are, and often we don’t even know we’re doing this in our professional roles, in our personal roles, but the difference for example between, and you’ve you’ve talked about your daughters as being strong.

Now, the moment that a woman in particular, in my view clearly, it is not called strong, but called bossy. Automatically you start to take that behavior and you were starting to say, you’re trying to normalize that that is not the correct behavior. That’s hugely problematic.

I have a young niece and I use these words and yes, princess and fairies and all the other stuff, but also assertive and strong and creative and powerful. That’s [00:19:00] not the domain of just men. That’s the domain of human beings and we all play different roles.

And so ultimately it’s what identity are we becoming constantly? And I think that’s the key.

Kelly: To add, I think with boys too though, like not to get it wrong because I’m all about empowering women, but it seriously does have to happen with boys too.

I actually noticed this because I’m sure my husband when he was a child, it was “like stop crying. You’re a man”, all these things that happened. And I caught him saying it to my son the other day and I was like, no, no, no, it’s totally okay to cry if you’re upset. It’s fine.

So I think we also have to do the same thing with boys, just like allow them and make it be okay.

Louka: One thing I would think about is, even with something like needy, I would reframe that to expressive.

Kelly: No, that’s a good point. As I was saying that I was like –

Louka: I’m not an [00:20:00] expert.

I don’t have children yet. But again, it’s so embedded into the business that we are. I guess the link to this in any space, a corporate space that an organizational culture, it is the cultural piece. The language we use helps to reinforce cultures, and so in some cultures are safe and courageous and others are not, and you can’t.

So how do we enable people to be their whole selves and be fully self-expressed? That goes for men and for women. That’s just an interesting connected piece to whenever we’re talking about skills and particularly things like emotional regulation. I’d absolutely recommend the work of Mark Brackett and the amazing team at Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

It’s excellent. And the ruler methodology. And that’s just an acronym. And how do we recognize, understand, label, express and regulate emotions? They do some great work with schools. They are just one of a number of amazing organizations doing [00:21:00] great work in this space.

It’s why I’m such an advocate for social emotional learning, because if we can enable every young person as early as possible to understand how their emotions are information and how we can understand them and then use the right words to label them and then express them in healthy ways. And sometimes the healthy way is being enraged by some injustice and then doing something about it.

Ultimately how how’s the regulation piece? Because what we have seen in my view with COVID is, agencies shift away from teachers and in some ways shift away from CEOs and leaders in lots of different sectors because everyone’s working remotely. So the idea that, actually I have agency about where I sit and how I sit and currently I’m sitting outside, I made that decision.

In you were in an office, it would be sitting at a table and the level of agency wouldn’t be there. So self-regulation has been one of [00:22:00] the key skills of 2020, but it’s one of the key skills always, but I think it’s just been revealed ultimately. Because can we stay on task with the crazy levels of ambiguity and uncertainty and disruption that we see. That’s clearly why we should talk about skills and why we should talk about things like self-regulation being embedded into the learning and development approach of organizations.

Things like autonomy and mastery, desolving hierarchy so that they become holacracies. Looking at leads like out of Zappos and reinventing organizations, some with a little lou work, how do we create creative organizations that aren’t rigid because that age of rigidity is gone.

We need agility right now, and this is a set of skills and I think they are skills that still aren’t totally centralized. Even though we have industry now from a demand side. And also I would say much of the supply side in terms of education [00:23:00] systems starting to talk the same language about the key role of skills. And the piece beyond skills, which is the key role of character or dispositions, which I’m also super passionate about.

Kelly: I know we don’t call them skills per se, but I think they really are skills. I’m not a fan of soft skills, that word either. I tend to say like human skills. But the same concept. To me that’s all still skills.

It’s so interesting to me because when we started this conversation, it was you finding that learning was just your passion and you being so curious about learning yourself, I’m wondering at which point you realized like, “okay, so I love learning. I’m super curious. I want to now like pay that forward to other people.”

Louka: It was as a young man in Europe, in all honesty. [00:24:00] I started to realize living in places like Dublin, in a wonderful working class suburb with other young men and going out and doing what young men do going to pubs, into clubs, and playing football in the cold darkness of November in Dublin.

But it was also I became aware of something and that is how education and the enrichment activities, the expansive activities that I had been involved in, really just equipped me and how it is the key to open doors. And in some ways I became aware of my educational privilege.

Because I went to a good primary school and a good secondary school. And that isn’t the case for billions of people around the world and young people around the world. So that’s why I became passionate about it [00:25:00] because rather than selling a product I didn’t believe in as a kind of in a business sense.

I just could not see myself in that space at all. I felt like education is the key lever that we have to change. It’s the key condition. And I would actually increasingly use less of those mechanistic metaphors, like leavers and cogs and interventions and more of the organic ones.

It’s the key condition that our society has, is high quality education for all where we teach all children as whole children, as my colleague Stephanie Jones at Harvard would say. That’s where that’s the interrelation of social justice meets social emotional learning. And that ultimately is why I became so passionate about it.

I also realized that it’s the key asset that we have. It’s the greatest asset all of us have, is our capacity to learn. To unlearn, relearn, learns throughout life and lifelong, life wide, [00:26:00] life deep ways, all of that kind of stuff. But Alvin Toffler said years ago, “The illiterate of the 21st century, aren’t those that cannot read and write. It will be those that cannot unlearn, relearn, and learn.”

And I foundationally believe that. That’s not to say that literacy and numeracy aren’t foundational skills that we all need because they are. But they are the floor, not the ceiling, so to speak. So we need to go so far beyond that. And so that’s just been my own experience, my own journey as a learner. And so I try to share that passion.

Kelly: No, I love it because most people don’t find that passion at a young age. I just find that portion of it, amongst all of the things you’ve done, just that portion of it so fascinating. And I wonder if, because you help and teach people and are so curious about learning, like could you make some recommendations to young people that might be listening?

How can they go and find their passion, their special gift, whatever the thing may be [00:27:00] that may be like, is there some way to unlock that earlier?

Louka: Yeah. Great question, Kelly. I would say language always matters. It’s the way we understand the world primarily, and so I would say that we can’t find our passion.

We have to build our passion or become our passion. So this is constant. There’s interesting stuff with complexity theory, right around emergence. So recommendation number one, is think of your life as an experiment and create as many micro experiments as possible. You just do not know what you don’t know.

The old saying “to be it, you have to see it.” How do you aspire to be something you haven’t ever heard of before? That is literally the future of work. In 15 years time, the 10 biggest jobs don’t yet exist. But they will emerge through the complex dynamic systems of society and economy.

So number one, experiment as much as [00:28:00] possible. And if I could give myself advice as a 15 year old, it would be just if you’re interested in something or you’re like, I don’t know about that. Email somebody or call someone or watch a YouTube clip and learn about whatever that thing is. Also, we have to think so far beyond a job.

A recommendation too, is don’t ever ask, what do you do? It’s just not a question to ask anymore, right? Largely because first of all, our jobs are going to constantly evolve because that’s the emerging future of work. Number two is that immediately, we step into a status piece because as human beings, we’re constantly trying to manage our state this within a room, within a tribe, and then et cetera, in an organization, in a school with a classroom.

Number two, is start to ask more interesting questions. Things like, what is it that most excites you about the world? It’s a great question. My other favorite question that I’ve heard is, what is the greatest misconception people hold about you? The reason that is so good is [00:29:00] because it’s a self-awareness question, but it’s also a perspective taking question, so, okay.

Who am I? You have to come to terms with. How might people see me? How might that be wrong? It’s a very complex question. So, number one, experiment as much as possible. Literally call, get people on the phone, ask to be mentor. If you’re interested in something, test it out first. Do not do a five-year degree to become, I dunno, a lawyer, an engineer, without saying, can I spend a day in an engineering firm?

And what’s funny is when you ask people, what’s the worst that can happen? They’ll say no, or they just never get back to you because their inboxes are overflowing like all of our boxes. So those are the two big things I would say. But number three is, don’t don’t think about knowledge, think first about character.

And this has kind of, it depends how heavy you want to take this. I’ve got my eulogy pre-written now, that’s heavy for some people, but [00:30:00] actually that’s about who I want to be at the end of my life. One thing we can all agree on is we’re not going to live forever, even though Ray Kurzweil and others are trying to work on that so that we can show the futurist in our societies.

So like, what do I want to be? What do I want someone to be able to stand up and say about me and the contribution that I made as a human being? That’s that’s the most important thing. And then based on that, what skills do I need? And then what knowledge high quality content knowledge do I need?

And that is literally the way I think we should design all learning and development generally, in corporate and corporations in another, not for profit sector, in government and in educational institutions, tertiary secondary primary.

Kelly: That’d be so amazing because right now it’s kind of like, you’re just put on your path and you’re like, here, you make some choices along the way, but it’s pretty standard.

Louka: Yeah. And what do you think is the path? Like whose path? Is it our path? Where are we giving? I don’t go into this whole field, but the whole idea of [00:31:00] Bansi and machine learning algorithms. Like those paths in what we know and understand are they converged, they’re being converged by tech to take us down particular way so that we get the right type of marketing and advertising, personalized advertising.

And that’s because that’s the business model. The problem with that is that how do we stay expensive? How do we stay? Open-minded how do we have deep conversations with people with whom we disagree quite strongly? That’s really important for civic, for the way that democracy functions for example. Otherwise we’re all just yelling at each other and no one is actually listening.

That’s a whole other piece as well to that. That’s what I think, at the end of the day and this is a really great mantra, I think. Actually, I’ll say one more thing. And that’s the idea, there’s a great book called Designing Your Life. So a lot of that work came out of the D school which design thinking makes lifestyle.

So it’s lifestyle [00:32:00] design. So there’s a great piece there called Odyssey planning. So for a long time in my life, I would just set a yearly plan and then do quarterly plans, monthly then weekly. And that’s how I live my life. I have a set path. That was great for achieving, but of course the downside is then you see your value as achievement only.

That’s a whole other piece to that. Right. And that’s the case for imposter syndrome, is a manifestation of that and everything else. So engage in Odyssey planning. So as a young person or frankly, anybody right now that is recently unemployed, underemployed, unsure of where your company are, is re-imagining what they want their life to be sit down and don’t write a plan, don’t do it.

Write five plants and call them Odyssey plans. And this is coming straight out of Designing Your Life, and so an Odyssey is what’s the next five years? What is one thing if you chose, what’s one path you could not walk, but literally build as you move forward? And it might be cool. Well, I’m really interested in being a school principal or a teacher.

So [00:33:00] here’s my five-year plans to do that, but I’m must be really interesting being an author. So here’s another five-year plan. I’m really interested in being a podcast host and a television presenter. So that’s another plan. And then build all of the pieces of your life into that, your family, your relationships, health, and wellbeing alongside the way you contribute economically and sit back and go, okay of all these five plans, which one lights me up the most?

Which one am I most confident? Am I most excited by? Am I most passionate by? And what that does is lots of things. But one thing it does is it reminds us of our own agency and we have multiple examples of people that have beaten the odds, et cetera.

It’s not just about your individual empowerment. It’s about breaking down structural barriers as well and creating enablers so that we can create collective wellbeing and thriving for everyone. But at an individual level, it does enable you to choose and realize that we have choice.

Kelly: I think that’s a fantastic [00:34:00] suggestion. I hadn’t heard that before, but now I want to reframe how I think about my goals.

Louka: Well, the goals that just goals that we currently choose. And so one of the best things I’ve heard is don’t, I don’t write to do lists anymore. I write, I get to do lists. Very subtle shift. Very subtle, right?

It’s just a few words. Does it change anything? Well, maybe not, but for me it’s a constant reminder that I’m making a choice to do these things. And sometimes we just forget about the fact that we could hang up this call now, if we wanted to, it wouldn’t make sense, but literally we could do this, do crazy things whenever we wanted to, but we don’t often do that.

The mantra I want to share as well, and this one that’s helped me a lot, particularly as I try to be hyper engaged in a whole bunch of ways is, forgive yourself every night and recommit every morning. It’s a beautiful, and I first heard it from a wonderful educator called Jeff Lee, who’s doing amazing work in [00:35:00] New York in a school network there, and it’s this idea that we have to let things go after we’ve had our best crack. And then sleep, rejuvenate, and then in the morning, let’s recommit to the people we want to be, the things we want to do and the things we want to do. In that order.

Kelly: So interesting because at night I do this thing where I list just in my head, right before I go to bed, I do three to five things that I’m grateful for. Sometimes they’re significant and sometimes it was just coffee, whatever.

Louka: But coffee is significant. I disagree with you on that.

Kelly: But then I forgive myself for something, I have to list one to three things in my head. So when I wake up in the morning, what are the things that I know are gonna get me going today.

It just was something that I picked up through like personal development and that just seemed to work really well for me. And I’m like, wow, look, it’s a [00:36:00] thing.

Louka: That’s fantastic. That’s really great. Gratitude intervention is what we talk about in positive psychology. And it’s really, really powerful.

It’s actually has one of the biggest jumps in subjective wellbeing, is embedding three good things at the end of the day, a gratitude letter, writing a thank you letter to somebody as a random act, random acts of kindness. When we look at great organizations, some of the work I’m lucky to do is in this space, around the learning future. Great learning happens when you’ve got a great culture, primarily.

Not great strategy. It’s culture that eats strategy for breakfast and our key strategy should be culture, all that kind of stuff. That’s so tangible and it’s a great insight.

Kelly: You can’t really be mad about things when you’re grateful, it’s harder.

Louka: It actually helps you to notice. And it does great things like starts to re-correct our negativity bias that we [00:37:00] have embedded in our human psychology. Which helped us survive, by the way, across millennia. But it also means we pay attention to the worst things that are happening around us.

 And we do need to shine a light on what is right as the colleague Lee Waters from University of Melbourne would say, it’s true. We have to realign. We have to deliberately pay attention to the good things happening in our lives and in the world. Lest we become overwhelmed and constantly anxious about all the stuff that’s happening and so much of it being beyond our control.

Kelly: It’s such a good reminder, I would say for so many things in life. Sometimes it seems like it’s bad, but it’s just our Neanderthal brain tricking us and we just need to reframe the thoughts. But the focus on the positive things I think is amazing.

So we haven’t really jumped in yet to your work and I’d love to cover a little bit more. And I mean, this is all your work, and I [00:38:00] understand that, but I’d love for everyone to know a little bit more about the companies in particular, because it’s just such amazing work that you’re doing and the focus and if anyone of course is interested, I’d love for them to know a little bit more about it so that they can reach out.

Louka: Great. Well I definitely live a portfolio life, which is a very millennial thing to say. So I take that as a given. One of the things that I’m lucky to do is to run a consulting company called the Learning Future. And ultimately we work mainly in education, but also with not-for-profits and some companies as well, private companies.

Basically about how do we create environments and conditions, to your point, that we can enable everyone to do their best work continually. So that brings in a lot of different disciplines. So it’s not just cool with cognitive science. It’s also positive psychology, it’s social emotional learning, it’s leadership, it’s communication and linguistics, framing, all this kind of stuff.

I’m doing some really great exciting [00:39:00] projects with education systems, particularly in Australia, which is where I’m currently based. I’ve got lots of flight credits that are just sitting there of course. It’s just really interesting work and the questions that we’re trying to unpack in that is what is the emerging future of learning?

And what does that mean for places where people convene? So classrooms, schools, organizations, not-for-profits, large organizations, companies, and crucially government as well. How do we ensure that when people walk into something, they feel like they are developing? And that is because in, for every single organization, if you don’t consider yourself a learning organization already, you are already behind in that game.

It’s ultimately the capacity of teams to come together to leverage the unique creative capacity of that team, of the human beings in the team. And lots of work on that in terms of collective intelligence. How do we do that and do that [00:40:00] well? And there are some really great tactics, but ultimately those tactics only work if you can create alpha cultures that do that.

So that’s kind of the Learning Future. And ultimately, how do we create documents that look at learning for wellbeing and how those two things are interrelated within education systems and get to do some interesting work and applying some of the learning from some of the D school as well around design thinking and innovation and human centered design.

How do we think in those terms? So that’s exciting and that’s one of my day jobs. The second is working alongside wonderful colleagues at Karanga and that is the Global Alliance for social emotional learning and life skills. And this is a distributed alliance of individuals and organizations that are doing wonderful work already in different ways, often regionally, regionally based, but all see kind of the potential of centering a focus on the social and the emotional alongside the cognitive, we don’t ignore the cognitive, but re [00:41:00] correcting the imbalance that currently exists in the way that we measure, for example.

We measure success, as academic success. As opposed to well, where is the social school metric metrics in that? How do we focus on collaborative problem solving, for example? How are we focused on intercultural communication? On all of these other skills that we know are the future skills and the central skills. Big organizations are looking at this kind of work, all this and the European Commission that we’ve done some work with, the OACD that were linked in with, the United Nations UNESCO.

Everyone is kind of working on this approach.

So that’s the work that we’re doing there and ultimately we have a clear mission. The vision is a thriving world where learners, including adults, are equipped with the skills they need for learning and life, because it’s not just about school [00:42:00] and it’s not just about work. It’s about life skills as well, which is actually what soft skills and SEL is called in much of the world.

Life skills. That’s why we have social emotional learning and life skills because we’re an inclusive global Alliance. So we have representation from every continent. We have a wonderful steering committee and we effectively host different convenings. We’re trying to be an ecosystem connector, curator and driver of action.

Which are the three verbs that we want to try to do. So policymakers, practitioners, researchers basically all interested parties because if we can, and COVID has just accelerated this, if we can seize this opportunity to centralize these types of human skills in our systems, plural, which is means education systems, but it also means the systems of how companies function that is going to. We are leveraging the collective potential of human beings, which we are not doing [00:43:00] right now for so many reasons.

And many of them are historical around mass schooling, for example, or organizational rigidity and structures. The Gallup polls around employee engagement just really outline that, year after year. So how many people are actively disengaged and tearing down the organization as opposed to actively engaged and anyone else being apathetic, we need to really think differently about the way that we create structures and conditions and experiences.

Ultimately, what does it feel like to walk in? How valued and seen do you feel as an employee at any level? That is all that Karanga piece, and I’d love people to jump on and sign up. And that’s karanga.org, we’re not selling anything. What we are doing is connecting an ecosystem of committed change makers, individuals, advocates, activists.

Kelly: All the great work that’s already happening. So definitely.

Louka: We just need to connect people together. [00:44:00] See what what’s emerging as emerging best practices. Of course, ones that work in different contexts because our world is incredibly diverse and we should celebrate that.

Kelly: No, it’s so true. And you don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time.

If there’s some great pieces to pull from, you know, from various countries, I think, like you said, that’s just so helpful.

Louka: It’s a really great organization and there’s lots of, if you go onto the website, you’ll be able to see lots of different convenings that we’ve hosted.

Our YouTube channel has all of those, but we do have some of the best and most credentialed experts in the world talking about this. We also have some of the practitioners doing the work itself, and I would always say that to anybody. This conversation has been a delight but this is the easy bit.

The hardest bit is being in a human system, company, organization, team school university. It’s the dynamics that he wants. The human dynamics are in there. When I was a school principal, I always [00:45:00] used to joke that my easiest days was Saturdays because there was no humans there. Right. But it’s actually the joy that we should all get as well out of doing this work.

It’s the connection that we can create and the growth that we can see in ourselves and our colleagues. That’s that’s the bit that should inspire all of us.

Kelly: It’s interesting. I just thought about this. I’ve not even asked you how to change organizations, but in all honesty, the reason I didn’t ask that I thought of it was that it really comes down to that level of personal. The way that people are treating each other and that mental capacity, as opposed to like huge organizational change, if everyone was just kinder.

Louka: That’s exactly it. And of course, the way I would frame that, Kelly, I would say we can’t change organizations.

Organizations can only change themselves. If I’ve learned anything in this journey so far as a teacher, you can’t teach anybody. Anything. All you can do is create conditions and an [00:46:00] experience where people choose to learn. And this is why agency and co-design are just such critical pieces on this.

We can’t just send a memo and be like, that’s now the new thing. Well, we can do that. It’s just not going to be nearly as effective.

Kelly: People might not interact with that in the same way. Because we’ve talked about this, like everyone learns differently. Some people might absorb someone that’s jumping at them or a memo or something that they’re reading.

Louka: There is time and space for that. Absolutely.

Kelly: There are a lot of people that don’t and, or again, it’s not necessarily their fault. It could just be their background. And some things that led up to where they are today, that’s causing them issues with seeing something a certain way. So I agree.

Louka: Well, it’s like agency. Do you feel that you can make change? That’s an efficacy question. Do you feel like you can make change? And what I’ve seen in some of the wonderful leaders [00:47:00] I’ve worked with and educators that I’ve worked alongside, is that it’s the people that think they can change the world, the classroom, who are the ones that actually do.

That’s why I’m an action-based optimist because, optimism and pessimism, great. Glass half empty, half full, it doesn’t matter. The point is you can refill the glass and we should be taking actions as leaders, as educators, as whoever we are. Whatever role that we play. To try to make things a little bit better.

Every action that we take does make some form of change. Conversation, a nod, you’re sitting down with a child. It’s amazing. And sometimes we just don’t know how profound that one interaction can be. Yeah, we all have a story, multiple. All the moments that that other person might not even realize. I have had some wonderful moments where people have said to me, you know, ex- students have [00:48:00] come to me and said, thank you for changing my life.

As an educator, that’s why you do the work. And as a leader, ultimately, I think it’s the same question.

Kelly: That’s always wonderful. I almost want to say like what a wonderful note to end on, but I do want to ask is there anything else that you’d like to share with us as some parting words? Because everything has been so fantastic, but I feel like I just want to pull more from you.

Louka: Yeah. Always Kelly, if any of it’s useful is another question. I do think it’s the old saying that “the way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.” And I think to your point about the practices that you’ve brought into your own life. So in whatever roles and different hats that we play, and we all have multiple identities that we should be able to step into and be seen and accepted for.

What is it that you want to [00:49:00] contribute to the world? It’s a kind of contribution question. If we can ask ourselves better questions, that’s a good one way to start. And if we say, when you’re leaving that job, when you’re retiring from work, and maybe even when we’re leaving this world, what is it that you want to have contributed?

And if we can get that question and I mean, that question in all different settings, including in big corporations that we need, if the economic models that currently exist in my view for a range of sustainability reasons. My offer would be, how do we ask ourselves better questions, including what is the contribution we want to make to our world, our community, and to our selves?

Kelly: That is fabulous. Thank you. I know that we could go on and on.

Louka: We can really could, people would have to endure more.

Kelly: I’m sure we’ll get together at [00:50:00] some event or another, but I really thank you so much for taking the time out to join us today. Louka, it’s just been such a pleasure. I hope everyone’s getting as much out of this as I am, because it’s amazing.

For those of you who’d like to follow Louka, you can find him on LinkedIn and Twitter at Louka Parry, also on his website, loukaparry.com. I know he mentioned Karanga, which is at karanga.org. I’m going to post this all when I post this on social media with the links and also learningfuture.com.

Those are the places that you can find him. Definitely go and keep tabs because there’s more to come on your journey, Louka.

And I just want to thank everyone today for listening into Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. You guys, if you enjoyed this podcast, I would absolutely love if you went on and left a review, if you subscribed, absolutely would appreciate it.

And any feedback would be [00:51:00] wonderful. You can find me on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook. Kelly R. Bailey. Thank you all again and have a wonderful day.