James Dean Talks Career Advice, Dyslexia, and Leadership (Transcript)
Victoria
James, welcome to the show.
James
Really happy to be here. It's so exciting to just talk about it as opposed to teach about it and coach about it, which is what we both do on such a regular basis.
Victoria
Amazing. I'm really, really looking forward to our chat and I would love for us to start with a little bit around your early life and career path. So what has been your experience with Dyslexia and how has it impacted your early life and your time at school in particular?
James
Well, when I was at school, the teachers were really focused on 10% of your mark is spelling and grammar. Because you can't spell, just expect that you've not got that. And this is where they were like, so you don't want to be working in an office, you don't want a career in this. They were trying to push me to go into the army and stuff like that, because I was good at rugby and my career couldn't be further from the army as it is. But when you're in school and you're in that environment, it's almost used as, I know it's changed a lot now, but it was used as a "do you really want to go hard at this? Because you're not capable." You've got this inability to spell correctly and stuff like that. You're already 10% behind, so why not instead of going for A's... because there was two groups of assessments, there was a C to E and there was an A to D, I think, and then there was an F. So they're like well, why don't you just go into the C to D? So I just did C to D.
James
The C to U of everything didn't go for any of the A stuff, despite the fact things like maths and stuff I'm very good at. Yeah, I came out just with C's because it was the path of least resistance and it made the teachers feel more comfortable. So despite the fact I end up with an MBA, Director of Organisations in the education space, I was pushed into a devalued mechanism, probably for their grades and their school and their overall, because they didn't want to risk anything and it's just because I couldn't spell, which is weird.
Victoria
And you mentioned the MBA and I'd love to dig into that shortly, but just staying on the topic of school, what advice did the careers advisors give you, then?
James
You'll be better to do something physical, you'd be better to do something as far away from an office as possible. So why don't you join the army?
Victoria
You said that that links to your love of rugby. What is the link? How does that work?
James
Because they had sports teams, like our school was a rugby school, so they played a lot of rugby and stuff like that and I was in York, so York's got, obviously, the army base and they've got a rugby team there, so they were trying to make this connection based on something that I was naturally quite good at. But I think it's one of those scenarios where you're good at something, you get praised for it, so therefore people push you in that direction as opposed to something where you struggle with instead of getting support to actually build you up, they'll push you towards a path of least resistance. It's like an electrical current, I often find, and they didn't want me to go any further in academia, they suggested that I just do it and enlist, which is a really weird thing because you don't see that much anymore.
Victoria
No. And interestingly, even when you're talking about it, your energy is super low, you can tell it just does not interest you at all. So what did you end up doing straight after?
James
So complicated family stuff which we won't go into. But I had to get a job as soon as I left school. So I did work experience at Comet or Currys or one of the things and I was working in the warehouse, moving stuff around and they gave me a job straight away because I was good during work experience.
Victoria
I'm laughing. Is Comet still going? I don't know.
James
I think it's PC World combo now.
Victoria
Is it like the Woolworths of the nineties?
James
If anyone doesn't know basically they sold fridges and ovens and dishwashers and stuff like, if you're not familiar with it.
Victoria
I did work experience at Miss Selfridge. You probably aren't as familiar with that, being a guy and everything, but yeah, my careers advisor pushed me into retail.
James
So I did that. And then there was a company that opened in York and I was selling stuff in Currys and going to the front, helping people, and there's this company that is found out to be illegal now, but they were selling credit card insurance. So when you activate your card, you rang this number, you get through to an advisor and they'd be like, oh, well, do you want to protect your cards against fraud and loss and all these things? What happens if you're in a foreign country and you lose everything? The insurance sale, so to speak. They were offering five pound fifty an hour, which was a great salary for a 16-year-old. I went and worked for them because they were recruiting heavily in York and stuff like that. So I ended up in sales just because I could talk and it was just clicking a button next, next, to generate the calls, like next call, automated dialling. You were timed within an inch of your life. It was like, hang up, next one through, bosh, bosh, and if you made 1000 pounds selling these things that were 29 pounds each, you were finished for the day.
James
So that was always a motivator. And so, yeah, I ended up in sales for the better part of my early career and I think it worked because obviously I've got the written side that's developing because there was no attention given to it. But my verbal side, my ability to communicate and sell was always really high. So I think organisations saw this balance between there's this guy that can do really well from a sales perspective and can communicate really well and can win us big business. He's just got this weakness over here and businesses start to value you in different ways to probably at school. So if they go well, we can make a load of money, we just got to give them a bit of support here. Well, we'll do that. So my early career went from just selling credit card insurance into selling gas and electricity, which was horrible.
Victoria
What makes you say that?
James
You're ringing up people going, do you want to change your electric provider? Like confused.com is everything it is now, but you're just ringing up going, yeah, it's going to cost you more money. And they're like, well, no, then. And then I ended up in recruitment, then education. So I was doing accountancy recruitment and then an accountancy training company was like, do you want to sell accountancy training? And then I ended up in the training game and I've been in it for 17 years since. That's how I got into part time education and that's how I started working in part time education. So it went from sales to recruitment to accountancy recruitment to training.
Victoria
Oh wow. And where does the MBA fit in with all of that?
James
So probably in 2019 I was a director of two training companies and all I had was GCSEs to my name. So I was probably the most senior education specialist with no qualifications in the UK, and the Board at the time were like, well, you need to get something, because it's kind of this false equivalence to say, this is the benefits of education. Oh, what have you got? Nothing. So they pushed me to do an MBA and I submitted an application to a couple of universities and we agreed to split the fee. And, yeah, the companies were like, yeah, you definitely got the experience, you know what you're talking about. And stuff like that, and straight away put me on online MBA programmes and I was on one and I did it with Aberdeen and it's a good programme or anything, but, yeah, I kind of was pushed into it because I was an education specialist without an education, and they thought I needed an education to be able to do it.
Victoria
What did you think?
James
I struggle with it because I don't see the benefit in what I've learned, because I knew what they were teaching me, because there's all this coaching and mentoring and all the stuff that goes within and I understand how qualifications work. And this is about I said to you before we went live, probably got a weird opinion on this. So I can see through what they're trying to do and look at the marking guide and know what a pass is. And this is where most people struggle when it comes to learning and education. If you don't know what a pass is, you feel like you've got to know everything about everything, but once you know how the mechanism works to get a pass, you can go, If I do this, this, it's a pass. And then work in their infinite wisdom, said, oh, we've got this part of the group that's failing. So there was a group of us, three directors, we need you three directors to take on this business as well. So my time went from maybe 10 hours a week to put on it, to maybe half an hour to an hour a week to be able to put into this MBA.
James
And I came six in the morning to do it, because I function best in the morning, I'm a weird morning person like that. And it was just one of those chaotic situations where you're asked to do something, they don't care about...the business, don't care about you doing it, because they've paid and stuff like that, they gave you even more responsibility. And I implemented something which I refer to as the Blaggers technique, which it's unfair, really, to call it that, it's just I knew how it works, so I used my time in the most efficient way possible to just pass everything. Didn't delve into anything, didn't... picked the easiest example I could possibly find, as opposed to, if you're looking at marketing strategies and stuff like that, and all the different connections. I'm interested in how social selling works, but because I've got this 1 hour, I know exactly how PPC works. So I will write about that and I will not investigate into the thing that interests me. So what I found when I was studying my MBA was I was picking everything I already knew to get the pass, not delving into what I was interested in because I was learning, because I wanted to learn.
James
And there's a big difference, I think, with that, which is, see, some people just collect qualifications because they learn how it works and they're not trying to learn anything. And I found myself in a situation, not trying to learn anything. And it was really disappointing from my perspective, when I work with thousands of learners a year, really wanting to better themselves, and I'm taking what felt like a cheat code to get something that I didn't even value as much as it's not what I wanted to do, it's what my company wanted me to do. So it was a really weird situation and I learned a lot from it, just from the whole how qualifications work, but also why people learn. Because it didn't appeal to me. It was just a tick box. As you know, I do HR qualifications now and I get people in both situations. If you want to get this job as a HR manager, you've got to have this qualification and it's written as essential, but some of you don't want to study it. And there's this real connection where there's some people that really want to understand it, really want to get under the skin and pick really challenging things for themselves.
James
And it's really obvious to see. Now I can see one assessment and know someone that's really into it and know someone that's just trying to pass.
Victoria
It's super interesting as well because you left school with your GCSEs, you've got all of this like years and years of relevant experience and then you're kind of pushed into doing this almost like a tick box exercise. Would that be fair? In order to prove your knowledge and your worth, which you already have. And then just to compare and contrast, I left school at 16 with just my GCSEs as well. I didn't pursue a university education. And my dad, he doesn't remember this conversation, but he was so disappointed in me that he told me I would never be a success of myself if I didn't go to university. And I had that in the back of my head my entire adult life. So you said about people who do qualification after qualification, that became me in terms of training courses and content and information consumption because I felt like I could never be satisfied because when would I be good enough, when would I know enough? And you mentioned about having that really limited time and going quite strategic with your time, your focus and your output in terms of the MBA. Whereas I'm the type of person, I get really overwhelmed by lots of choice and, like, a breadth of a subject because I feel like I have to know everything about everything because I've still got this little voice in the back of my head telling me I'm not good enough.
Victoria
And I'd love to know how has that experience shaped like the business that you've created today? And what have you learned through that experience that has enabled you to create more neuroinclusivity at work?
James
So one of the things that really stands out to me now is understanding that there's people that want to know everything about everything. There's people that want to know the path of least resistance. And what you have to build is something that allows people to dig, but not into a hole, because it's so easy to go into a rabbit hole of something that has no benefit. And what I've learned is what you have to do, regardless of how much someone wants to dig into a subject, is keep them on track. And to a degree, it's a really helpful structure for people with ADHD, and it's really helpful for people generally who can get sucked into an interest spike because you get, oh, that's really interesting, and then you dig into it and then you miss the question. So what I learned when building this is you have to reinforce the question constantly and you have to learn the question so that you're constantly checking what you're learning against it. And that's what constant reflections are designed for and that's what we built into it. So constantly quizzes, reflection, learning rotations, which is a big thing because you can lose an entire evening to learning if you're not focused.
Victoria
What do you mean by learning rotations? Sorry.
James
Yeah. So the best way to learn is and this is for memory retention, for medium-term memory. This is to study for 45 minutes, take a 15 minutes break for the next 15 minutes, reflect on everything that you've just learned, test yourself, do things, stuff like that, and then study for 30 minutes. 15 minutes break, 15 minutes reflection, study. And that's a learning rotation got you. And it's something that was created by a gentleman called Tony Buzan, who's a memory master. And this is how you connect things from your short to medium-term memory. Because if we were in a classroom and we sat together for 8 hours and I was teaching you for 8 hours, you would have forgotten 90% of it within two days. So by doing activities and constant reflections and learning cycles and constantly checking what you've learned and testing your understanding, what you're able to do is put things into your medium term memory, which may get you through an exam or an assignment or an assessment. If you carry on that practice, you can get things into your long term memory and your retention will actually go up by around about 25%.
Victoria
Interesting. Okay. What other kind of neuroinclusive approaches do you have within the business for your learners, or even within the teams?
James
One of the big areas I'm seeing at the moment and this is for Dyslexic people I'll start with is AI, because people will not feel confident in their own writing and they will take their entire work and they will put it through AI because they've got this thinking like we got when we were at school. Which is 10% of your mark is related to your grammar and spelling. CIPD. No, nothing to do with spelling and grammar is in your marking guidance. So that's number one, which is your writing is your writing. We want to know how you think. If we're reading AI, then it's a fail and potentially you could lose everything. So we give them the tools like Grammarly, which is suggestions, and then they can work through it because that's better. And that doesn't flag AI because it talks about commas and spelling. And what we're especially seeing at the moment is American spelling versus UK spelling. So we've got that from an ADHD perspective and from an autism perspective, we break everything into ACs. So trying to think about the best way to summarise it, if you think about an assignment for CIPD is three and a half thousand words?
James
It is actually broken into ten to 15 questions of 350 words.
Victoria
Yeah.
James
So let's say you've got ADHD and you've got an hour and you've got that motivation to study. We break it so you can work on one question and you just work on that one question and you might get that one question done and then you forget and you move away.
Victoria
Yeah, I love that, because it's breaking down a huge goal, three and a half thousand words into more manageable chunks, isn't it? So you can still tick it off your list, get that dopamine hit and then move on to the next thing, whatever that may be.
James
Clean out the spice cupboard or whatever takes your fancy next. And the main one that I try to teach people at the start of the programme is something called answer planning, which you take the question and you break it into its components. So you take the verb, because most people get the verb wrong, they'll explain as opposed to assess, they'll evaluate as opposed to diagnose on all these different variances, and they'll break the question. If it's advantages and disadvantages, well, that's two plurals. So you need to give multiple advantages and build out your answer. So just sketch a little diagram advantages and you put your links in and you build it all out and then suddenly something gets your interest. It might be TikTok, it might be your phone, it might be something like that. And you're not in that situation because this is what normally happens to and this happens to everyone, but mainly with neurodiverse learners is they come back, they knew they had it, but they can't remember it. And then the spiral happens because you're like, I knew what the answer is. Why can't I remember? And then everything else is just it's a complete panic mode and it's really hard to put yourself back on track because you have all these negative and a lot of people have all these negative emotions connected to studying because they've not done it for so long.
Victoria
Yeah.
James
And they all come flooding up at once, like, you're not good enough. My work is going to fire me because I can't do this and no one's going to take me seriously. All these pushed down emotions that you've built up to yourself to push yourself forward all come spilling out because you've completely forgotten one answer. Which sounds crazy when you say it, but it's just how people feel. So by getting people into the habit of taking the answer, the first thing you do is you break it into its components. Then you start studying that one question and only that one question. You answer that one question, then you move on to the next question. Relieves the whole pressure of, I have this big three and a half thousand words over here. I have all this content to learn, I have all this time to do. You've just got a little bit of a process that's just a little bit and often and it works quite.
Victoria
Oh, I love that. It's a little bit like or it sounds like it's a little bit like when you're writing and you just get stuff out of your head. It doesn't need to be formatted, it doesn't even need to be in a sentence, but it's an ugly first draft and then you can come back to it another day to refine and reflect. So here's a question for you. What tips or advice can you bring to just stay productive, stay focused or maintain balance as a business owner?
James
My main thing, the most important thing that I do every day is I get up and I take the dog out because I refer to this place because of when I was working previously and stuff like that as my cell. And it's about the size of a cell, and I could be stuck in here for 12 hours in the day. But to actually get out and do something and to switch your brain off from it and to physically walk, the dopamine the ability for your brain to wander, the thought about what's going to happen today, what you've got on this week. Thinking about what we're going to talk about today and some of the other sessions that I've got lined, that I'm doing today because I'm crazy and I'm doing too many in a day because that seems to work for me for some reason is really important. So if you're a business owner, have your escape. Doesn't have to be a long escape, just has to be a small window. But be consistent with it because you scroll on social media for two minutes and everyone will tell you never give up, you're always working.
James
I'm always on. I work 70 hours a week and when I'm not working the 70 hours for my job, I'm doing 30 hours on my side hustle and I'm... utter crap.
Victoria
You only work 70 hours a week? Mate, I work 70 hours a day.
James
Well have you seen the video? I break my day into three separate days. I've manipulated time. It's utterly ridiculous but that's what these people do. They create this crazy content that makes people feel inadequate. That's what social media is. It's designed the most extreme opinions to get fire behind them and not for common sense. So to do things like this where we can actually talk about common sense, have an escape, always have an escape. And it doesn't matter if you do it in the middle of the day, the end of the day, whatever it is, just have something that's yours and that isn't ours. It's not mine and my wife's walk with it, it's mine. It's my chance to set my brain up for everything like that. So have something that is purely yours and have it so it's repeatable so that you can get away from stress, situation and pressure and stuff like that. It seems to work quite well for me.
Victoria
Yeah. Awesome. And before we hit record, you mentioned about getting up early in the day because your energy levels are really good first thing in the morning. You day-to-day mentioned just and I know you laughed about it, but your day to day is literally stacked until I think you said nine o'clock tonight or something with back to back meetings. So how do both of those things help you run your business and support your energy levels and support your brain as well?
James
I work on a really weird momentum way. If I start my day off slowly, I never get up to speed again and I know that I never get up to speed again so I have to start well and then it just rolls and I can have a really productive day and today will be a really productive day. Tomorrow may be terrible, but I know that once I start to build momentum, I continue to move at that pace for the entire day because I'm a morning person and the pace I set seems to be the pace that I constantly work at. So it comes down to that really. I know if I start my day off with a load of things it will just maintain, maintain, maintain and I'll get loads done. If I start the day slowly, like I've not thought about what I'm doing, I don't have a things to do list and I'm creating it and stuff like that. It just doesn't work. But I don't linger on it. This is the other thing I'm constantly saying to my wife, she's like I've not done enough today and I was like well, so what?
James
Tomorrow is another day but she seems to linger on it a little bit more probably because she's not a morning person. Like she can get energy at 2:00 a.m. In the morning then suddenly work for like 5 hours.
Victoria
My other half is a little bit like that except at 2:00 in the morning he'll decide to go on the Xbox, do some gaming until silly o'clock but he's on school holidays at the minute anyway so he doesn't need a routine or structure so that's his time. I was going to ask as well what one tool or piece of software or gadget could you not live without in business?
James
Grammarly for me.
Victoria
Grammarly? Yeah. How does that help you?
James
So you get feedback every week, it sends you feedback about what you're doing right and what are you doing wrong and stuff like that and I've experienced it so many times. Anyone that's Dyslexic will experience so many times of passive aggressive responses to things. You can send out a tweet and you'll get someone back going it's this, not this. I've sent out a mailer for a recruitment job before and someone's come back and gone seven out of ten for spelling and grammar. That was their response. It can be really scary to put yourself out there on a consistent basis unless you've got some tools that make you feel safe. Now, Grammarly is my tool that makes me feel safe. If I've made a spelling mistake, I've run it through Grammarly. If it's a bit disjointed because I've not put it through properly and it's changed the meaning of stuff, I'm more comfortable with that because I know that I'm using tools to make myself avoid those negative situations. Still happens, still happens all the time but it feels better knowing that there's something that I trust and that sends me a report every week to tell me what I'm doing right, what I'm doing wrong, how I can improve and stuff like that so that I can be consciously aware of it.
James
So for me that helps me no end because you don't even realise how many texts you send. I've got it on my keypad how many emails you send. People live chatting responses on LinkedIn, like you must send maybe 100 different pieces of communication a day and living when you live with Dyslexia and stuff like that, having one of those potentially come back and go oh well, seven out of ten. Six out of ten for spelling and grammar is not a comfortable place to be and I spent a lot of time sort of in that uncomfortable place rereading stuff 7, 8, 9, 10 times and still not being able to see it. Yeah, so that's probably the biggest game changer. Spell check on word is terrible. That's why I prefer Grammarly because it actually helps. So yeah, that's probably the biggest change and whilst not really helpful, well, helps me in a business because obviously I write website content and all this stuff isn't really a unique business insight, it's just really helpful generally.
Victoria
Yeah. No, I agree. Absolutely. And I think I don't know if you've found this as well, but people are so quick to slam you when you've made a spelling mistake. And I just think even grammar is so subjective now. Whether it's formal, informal, casual, assertive or whatever, there are so many different tones that you can have. So I like that there's a little bit more flexibility and hopefully people can be a little bit more just accepting. If you can get the gist of it.
James
I mean, it's taken me 'til what, mid to late thirties to realise that the reason people make those comments is because to push you down makes them feel like they've pushed themselves up.
Victoria
Yeah.
James
And that's a really sad existence to live in, to feel like to raise yourself up, you feel like you need to push somebody else down and I get that's the whole premise of capitalism and stuff like that, but it's no fun, is it? Waiting for that little opportunity to make yourself giving yourself a little dopamine hit because oh look, I'm special, I can spell great. There are a million things I can do that you probably can't, but I'm not going to put them in your face, I'm not going to do anything like that because you've got value regardless. The fact that you can spell is great, you have value because you can do it. Now let's use what you're good at to raise people up as opposed to pushing other people down to raise yourself up. And it took me a long time to just go, well, they're just not happy about that because they're not happy about something else and it has nothing to do with you and what you've wrote.
Victoria
Yeah. In your own show. Let's Talk HR, you have a segment on unpopular opinions. What unpopular opinions have you heard about Dyslexia and what would you like listeners to know instead?
James
So people with Dyslexia should never work in an office is one that I heard the other day and it's just chaos because we've got so many tools to help people nowadays. I think one of the other ones, because I was reading some of them, which is people with ADHD should be constantly you should constantly be attempting to put them into hyper focus mode so that they actually get their jobs done. Which is just a really horrible way of saying we should try and burn out people as quickly as we possibly can so we get the most money out of them.
Victoria
I was just thinking that sounds like a recipe for burnout.
James
But I mean this is how some businesses think, isn't it's? Like, oh, we need to push people to the limit. That's the way that we get most value. And the other thing that I've heard on Dyslexia is that it can be cured with the right mix of herbs, like autism can be cured. And it is the most ignorant and ridiculous thing I've ever seen. Like, oh, if you take apple cider vinegar every day, not only will you lose weight, but you'll cure your Dyslexia. No, you won't. You might lose weight because you've been sick every day, but it's not going to cure Dyslexia. Your brain is what is valuable and the fact that it mixes up letters is absolutely fine because it's programmed and its got its uniqueness in its unique way that actually has value. So, yeah, it's the ridiculous curing of everything now.
Victoria
It is about just finding things that work with your brain, whatever that may be. And just because you've met one person with Dyslexia, you've met one person with Dyslexia, right? In terms of tools, strategies and approaches and everything. So other quick fire question. HR most influential 2023. Hello. What's that award about?
James
I know, I still, to this day, don't even know who put me forward, which enrages me. So, because of what we do with Let's Talk HR, which is about taking real world examples and applying them to a syllabus and a qualification and how it all works. I received a couple of nominations for this award from other HR professionals and they put me at number 17 on the most Influential Thinkers list because of how we're changing the way online learning works, which is weird. Amazing, but weird. So, yeah, I've been like a director of the business for a long time and it's never been my award, it's always been, we've done this, it's my loss, it's our win. So to get something that is your win is really weird. And I'm still a bit off balance with it, but, yeah, really proud and really thankful to whoever it was that did it.
Victoria
What massive congratulations. Are they going to give you something physical that you can have in your backdrop? Oh, do you have something? Oh he's bringing something into camera. Oh, we've got a framed certificate. Oh, amazing. That's brill.
James
I've got my windows shut because of the sun, so that's why you can't see it, but yeah, so they give you that. And then they took us to an event in London, all paid for free drinks, free food. They announced the list, showed people where they were. I agreed to go because my wife told me I had to because you don't know who's there. So I was like, I might not know anybody. I'm just stood there all day going, hi, I don't want to speak to anyone, but thankfully, there was a few people there that I knew and people like Ian Pettigrew, David D'Souza from CIPD, Perry Timms, who got an award for being on the list multiple times and stuff like that. So thankfully, there's a few people that I knew and I made some great new connections of people that are HR's most influential, which is a very strange thing to say that I'm on.
Victoria
Oh, it's fantastic. I'm so, so pleased for you. And it's super well deserved. So, yeah, congratulations. So I'd love to know what are your goals and aspirations for the future in terms of business and the impact that you're having on education.
James
So my goal is to build a platform that can see people through the entry into HR and learning and development through to strategic level, so that we can teach people different approaches to education. And the reason why I'm focused just on HR, so it's called HR Courses Online because only do HR courses and I do them online. It's a really inventive name.
Victoria
I like it. Does what it says on the tin.
James
But I've always said if I can train HR people on what great online education is, they will create great online education. So not only do we improve HR people's career aspirations, prospects and ability for learning, they will create content that helps other people because there's too much at the moment of take an onboarding process. You watch the health and safety video of a guy telling you how to lift a box, and I always use that example because it's the most boring video I can think of. And then you read all these terms and conditions and there's 54 interactions within an onboarding process, none of which are exciting. Yet the onboarding is the most important introduction you've got to a business. If we can teach HRO to make really interesting, really engaging and really good content that actually people remember, so that they can actually implement all this onboarding activity that they've done, people will be happier, organisations will be happier, everything will work. So my focus is creating the absolute best online versions of courses for HR and L&D people from level three. So when you start your career through to being a strategic leader, so that you got more ideas than you have answers, so that you can try and you can fail and you can make things, and I've got AI videos at the moment, I'm trying that because if I try it, you can see it works.
James
You can go, I hate that because of this, or I really love that because of this. And yeah, it's about creating something that gives good back and online learning. So all this is about online learning for me, which is how the majority of us are going to learn. So this podcast is online learning for a lot of people, and it's all about how we do that in the best way possible, so that people get the most value they possibly can.
Victoria
And I love the fact that impact comes through really strongly with that. It's not just having an impact on the people who are doing the training, it's how the training that they go on to create, then supports the employees or the people who are completing the training as well. Last question. If you could go back in time and give your 16-year-old self one piece of advice, what would that be?
James
Apart from buy Bitcoin?
Victoria
Invent Facebook?
James
Yeah, I probably, if I'm really honest, wouldn't give myself any advice. I have made my mistakes, my challenges, my issues, the things that I've done, decisions I've made, I wouldn't want to derail any of them with that whole butterfly effect of changing stuff. So I would probably just say, go with your gut, because that's where everything I've done has come from. And try not to change anything because this business will either be a roaring success or it will collapse into nothingness because it's not right for people. I'm confident I can do the first one and not the second one, but I don't want to change the journey that it's going to be, because the learning that comes from is going to be equally as important. So I would try and avoid my 16-year-old self, apart from maybe suggesting buying a couple of Bitcoin, because that would be helpful, and then to tell him, sell them in, I think it was 2020 when they were at the peak, so sell them in 2020 and that’ll do.
Victoria
Amazing. James, thank you so much for making the time today. I'm happy that we are your first podcast of many today. And, yeah, huge congratulations on HR Most Influential 2023 and we look forward to seeing where you go from here.
James
Thank you very much.