Episode #35 – From Chaos To Culture Episode 3: Engaging Students - Teacher Zone

Episode #35 – From Chaos To Culture Episode 3: Engaging Students

In this episode of the TeacherZone with Chris and Tyler, they discuss the third part from their five-part series “From Chaos to Culture”.

This episode covers the most important element of our lesson & learning businesses, “Engagement”. Engagement with your community you can transform your culture and increase retention and facilitate wonderful growth.

If you own. or run a lesson based business, you will not want to miss this series or any content from The TeacherZone with Chris and Tyler!

(Access the pdf to the ebook at: http://www.teacherzone.com/chaos​)

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0:00:10.0 Tyler: Welcome to The Teacher Zone  with Chris and Tyler. I’m Tyler Marolf, your co-host and I’m with Chris Bates today. How are you, sir?

0:00:17.2 Chris: Tyler, I’m excellent. I’m really excited for today’s episode actually, 

0:00:44.0 Tyler: So am I, because we already went into stage one, which is chaos… If you’re just catching up, you need our e-book, by the way, which is at http://www.teacherzone.com/chaos, catch up, back up a couple of episodes, and we’re gonna review those stages that we’ve gone through really quick, so the five stages you must grow through.

0:00:44.0 Tyler: We’ve done episode one? Run chaos or not, that’s up to you to decide. And we went into some detail on that. Number two, okay, how do we get out of chaos, let’s get organized, let’s find out what systems can work. What do we not need to even have our hands on anymore, let alone systems covering them?  So that was a wonderful one… I love that one, Chris. And now that leads us to today’s episode, and that is engaging students.

0:01:14.8 Chris: Engaging students is… You know what’s funny is, out of the five, we’ve got it in the middle on purpose, because it’s sort of the thing that props up our entire learning business, it’s literally the crux of what we all do!

0:01:40.0 Tyler: The why is right smack in the middle of it. Why we even started to teach people things, we knew… We started doing that because we like it and we thought there’d be a benefit in it, and here we are.  For number four, which will come after this episode is fueling your growth, so we’re gonna talk about creating a growth engine and feeling growth right. And then the last one, which is near and dear to our hearts is building culture and… 

0:02:12.3 Chris: Right, yeah, it’s like the holy grail that we’re all always chasing is trying to build a better culture and really hinges upon today’s episode engaging your students.

0:02:23.6 Tyler: Before we go, please everybody who’s listening right now, and this is not paper thin, this is not skin deep, if this feels like it’s over-killed to you, that’s okay. Maybe we’re not for you, but if you’re growth-minded and you feel like that it is a possibility to change people’s lives through ideas and systems based on things you know and grow… This is the place for you. Details are here and these episodes are rock and we’ve already had a blast, so keep that in mind as we start to unfold or peel the onion, the layers of the young back, because if you think you’ve arrived… You might not be in the right place with this podcast, so… 

0:03:01.9 Chris: Yeah, yeah. There’s no… We would have to call you out from the standpoint of there’s arriving where you’re at a comfortable level of your needs being met, but the reality is life is not static, and so you’re either growing or you’re going the other way. So it’s an important part to build into your way of doing business and engaging your students today’s episode, you know, Tyler you and I were just talking about this idea that it’s easy to get stuck in stage to the getting organized stage.

The chaos is sometimes really exciting, and so I’m just gonna be a marriage counselor right now, it’s why most divorce has happened, I believe. I believe the reason divorces happen is simply, or you could call break-ups with relationships. I think the reason it happens break-ups happen is because people simply crave that chaos that happened at the beginning of the relationship again, so they’re like… They think somehow that’s sustainable, and that is not sustainable, there’s a deeper level that a relationship takes on when you stick it out, and so I’m not trying to be a marriage counselor, but honestly, I’ve seen it with many of my friends and family that are like, we got it. If you create the excitement all the time, then it’s almost like you’re manufacturing challenges versus coming up with deeper and better solutions, so engaging is our product. You and I just had mentioned that to each other earlier.

Tyler and I have locked arms globally with you all with regard to all of us that help people learn some type of talent skill or something, learning-based businesses.  Whatever it is you teach is not your product, your product is student attention or engagement, because what you’re basically, if you don’t have engagement, you don’t have learning, and if you didn’t have learning, you’ll eventually not have a student… 

0:06:46.0 Tyler: I’m sorry, you could be the coolest dog comforter in town, and if nobody’s learning anything… It’s not gonna last. Yeah, and you all know what we mean with some of your instructors, some of you have some instructors that you should have got rid of a long time ago, because their people skills are terrible. Their engagement is terrible. 

0:07:09.7 Chris: I had a quick anecdote and then Tyler, I wanna talk about our first lesson into engagement with you and the listening concept, I’d love to get into… So one of the things that I really like to think about with engagement is, are you just playing office? So have you gotten yourself so sort of busy, busy in the day-to-day that you’re forgetting about the core component, which is the fact that the students actually engaging and learning something is the most important…

We had an episode a long time ago with Roger Chow, who is our friend that is in curriculum in public schools, and he said 80% of the time teachers should spend their time asking questions.   80% of the time. Not just spewing information.

Engagement is about listening. Asking questions, connection. And so, a quick story that I want Tyler to tell is when we first started our school, Tyler was making a great impact with the students, in fact, my own kids were taking from him initially before we grew into multiple teachers, music school. As a dad, I’m like, ’cause Tyler and I were best friends, and I was watching his engagement and I was like, wait…I think you’re a better dad and that I am?

0:07:49.5 Tyler: That was, by the way, the funny part, I had no kids yet when I started Los Rios Rock School..  We were kinda like, Should we have kids or not? We’re kind of busy that whole thing, and here’s Chris with his hilariously awesome kids Hudson and Dax, and they were… Gosh, how old were they?  Hudson was six and Dax was eight.

0:08:12.4 Chris: Tyler sometimes it’s made me very emotional when I tell other people about it in our school, because I think it’s a very heavy concept. Tell me what you told me when I said, Why are you so much better with my kids that I am?

0:08:35.3 Tyler: Well, one thing I discovered in the very beginning when I was teaching those few different instruments, and I’ll straight up, let you know, I’d only done it for fun to help people a couple of times, I was not trained to teach these things. The reason we became so successful, and this is one of those deep moments in this podcast, especially the engagement episode we’re on right now, is what Chris just mentioned, what Roger had success with, and that’s the listening and the asking questions. So I can’t listen if I’m talking all the time.

I can’t listen if I’m like, Hey, kids, stick with me for a while and you might get somewhere, maybe you can play professionally what… You know.

0:09:25.9 Tyler: When I was younger, I felt what it felt like to not be listened to, I was talked at, and I had no core relationship with anyone, so therefore, I made some decisions as a young adolescent to find some people that would listen to me, and those people guess what? Birds of a feather flock together. Those young adolescents didn’t have anyone listening to them either, so we would meet in these interesting areas outside of the parking lot of the school, and not the best things were happening in my life or theirs at the time, because none of us had a deep connection with our families. So we found a connection within each other, and things didn’t go very well.  Fast forward, life changed, I wrote an album had some fun making music and decided I wanna keep doing this, and how about if I just teach kids only what I know.  What happened was when I started to talk to each child, I noticed how important it was to see who they were, who are you?

0:10:51.9 Tyler: My intrinsic thought was like, Who is this person and it… Literally, you guys, I don’t know if you can do this, I do this naturally. I have this interesting empathy, back in time, a meter device in me, flux capacitor, whatever you can… If there’s an eight-year-old in front of me, I can remember the good and the bad when I was at eight.  All of it the whole year who my teacher was, the whole thing, it just downloads really quick and then I just feel like I know them even if they’re not going through the same stuff I was, doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.

0:11:33.2 Tyler: And then, yeah, what hits me so hard to her about that story is how important it is for us to feel loved or listen to or connected, and that is what in the lesson business we don’t realize, but what we’re imparting to our customers often is… I get it, I’m listening. And…

If this is too deep for you and you just wanna make the buck and sell the piano lessons or whatever, we’re not against you being you, but if you think there’s an opportunity for life-changing impact, like let’s just… For example, my seventh grade social studies teacher, Drew Story, who is still a big supporter of everything Chris and I do, and I love you, Drew. He made a difference in so many kids lives in that social studies class, he would bring music of the times in.

0:12:37.4 Tyler: Politically driven music.  His lessons were based on experiences, questions and provoking thought, and being an independent thinker. And not to think like him either, never once did he ask me to think like he does, but you know what’s funny? He attracted me to wanna think like him.

0:13:13.2 Chris: Infectious. It’s infectious, that’s an important part of that I think Roger is trying to convey to instructors all over is that when you’re trying to get someone to actually digest, you want them to feel like they came to their own conclusion.  What Drew did so successfully is by you guys feeling heard, you were willing to go to your own conclusions, which often is what he was trying to impart in the first place, he just wasn’t doing it overtly… We have to convey this concept to the Teachers better.  We talk a lot about flip classrooms and utilizing technology to engage your students more deeply and coaching versus teaching.

0:13:57.3 Tyler: In another episode we’ve done in the past, you can find because just talking at someone, as you said earlier, is basically not letting them truly digest it, you’re literally spoon-feeding.  You’re not letting them sit there and smell and look at it and come to their own conclusions, the more we come to our own conclusions, the deeper the experience… 

0:15:22.8 Chris: Tyler, so you and I, we were kinda talking about what would an example be of a business that doesn’t have any really engagement, and then what would be one that does? The simple analogy, we mentioned is the post office. So how many of you… Have you walked in a post office recently? We have next to our business, so we get to go in there often, and I can tell you is, first of all, it’s really dreary, it’s sort of this grey, like the stark grey color, so there’s no life when you walk in temperature-wise isn’t it always cold in there was… 

0:15:22.8 Tyler: It’s the Feds man, there’s probably literally a rule in the area, every aspect of dehumanizing is in that building, right? It’s cold, it’s dark that you could tell the staffers just wanna get to the next person in line and they don’t wanna… help, you’re just a number. When you walk in and there’s six people in line, you’re number six, that’s it, right? You… No person, you have no last name… Now, don’t get me wrong, you can have some nice people at some post offices, but the majority of the entity is in a culture based on that, that they have the basic social communication training probably to make sure that no opinions are given and nothing’s escalated and everything stays very vanilla. They are stuck in level two, they’re just playing office.

0:16:02.8 Chris: Right. Then you look at, okay, so what are some like businesses that engage… And you look at the beautiful FedEx and UPS offices. I think FedEx is now Kinko’s, they merged, but…

0:16:17.3 Tyler: That sort of experience where people are really sweet and there’s all these new things you can get done, and then you take the other example that you and I were thinking about earlier, was Amazon…They’re taking it to a different level.

0:16:30.4 Chris:: Yeah, and they’re in it, they’re making the delivery part that the post office is hung its hat on, like second nature, they’re even making it cooler because now we get a text of the package sitting on my doorstep, but we’ve also tied it into all the products and things that we love, Amazon’s kicked it up a whole another level as far as feeling like they get me, because everything is specific, everything we even use. I don’t know if you guys… For those of you that have Alexa out there, we’re now using it for a grocery shopping and everything, so Amazon’s creating this connection that is…amazing. So the engagement is now way past just buying a package, and love or hate… That’s a whole another topic. They’re an example of a obviously largest company on earth, very large company that is going deep on the consumer engagement side, whereas a similar business because they’re both in the delivery business, the post office didn’t… And you can just see that stark reality, so that’s what we’re trying to do is paint the picture of by going deeper, you start doing really cool things, everything from… You can think about Amazon trying to in part have drones and all these different ways that they’re trying to get us our stuff faster, more personalized, more connected or that kind of thing, so kind of an interesting analogy, a way to think about it.

0:17:57.8 Tyler: With regard to engagement and how someone can analyze their current engagement with their learning business, what are some of the ways that someone can kinda know what are some of the ways and data operation of a learning business that they engage with their people that just kind of run through them a little bit… Well, if you got the post office route, you’re not… So if you have a new idea and you don’t have some sort of system in place to where someone sends out this communication that is very clear messaging on, Hey, we’re having a barbecue customer appreciation day, whatever, if you’re not doing that, then you’re… The post office, if you are getting communications out to them… And that’s just an extent. Communication is a big one.

0:18:47.7 Chris: Right? So if you’re leveling your students at… Let’s go back, if you’re leveling the students up and they’re showing up better by the next lesson than they were previous, okay, then a by-product of that is your lead in your daily business growth life in this engagement setting with more communication thought at all times. And intentionality, so everything now you look at… Because you’ve seen the kids showing up better the next week, you’ve seen the kids, maybe you’ve started to implement more of a tribe building area where they get to meet each other, or maybe you’ve got yoga classes and they all get to meet each other, but until you did this one interaction activity, they weren’t really talking to each other, they only talk to their pairs they would show up with, and no one knew each other’s name even, and then one day you had a barbecue, everybody had name tags and everything changed. Those are the engagement level ups, those… We never leave. But the intentionality, Chris, once you start even one of those, if you try something new and succeed and have social proof that something worked, you can’t stop thinking like that, you won’t go to sleep at night if you feel like some message didn’t get sent to your people don’t you agree? Yeah.

0:20:14.4 Tyler: I think that… What I was gonna say is Everyone get your pens out and start making a list of all the ways that you engage, there’s your day-to-day lessons, so basically, are they coming in person or virtual, and how is that experience… There’s the other six days, or if you’re doing privates or if you’re doing a group the other days that they’re not with you, how are you engaging them? Social media, email, learning curriculum, things that they can engage with offline, how are you actually… So I’d sit down and make a list of all the ways that you’re currently engaging and then some of the ways that you’ve always wanted to get to, but you haven’t, ’cause you’re stuck in level to trying to keep everything organized and playing office. Start to add to that list. And things that, you know, you’re like, Gosh, I’ve always wanted to do that. I’ve always wanted to do so, for instance, as an example of social media, we weren’t as consistent on engagement standpoint is we want it to be… We want our students to think about us all the time, so Instagram is a great medium current way for our teenage level students, and so we have a younger staffer that is good at that, and so that person is now in charge of poles or whatever out of 45 and a 49-year-old guy.

0:21:41.3 Tyler: No wonder we stopped posting, we’re smart. We were the posters that we’ve already talked about, the chaos, I wear every hat, and the system’s cool, I built resistance, but I’m still wearing the hat, that wasn’t the point, but we were still wearing that hat and it’s funny, our output besides videos of the kid succeeding, there was an engagement on social media before, and I think we hadn’t figured out that with our Tommy Bahama shirts on, like Maybe we shouldn’t be creating the content anymore, it’s been 10 years.

0:24:01.7 Chris: Well, and it takes a village. That’s the big one at a day and age, it can feel very, very overwhelming for all of us, I mean, I wake up sometimes and cold sweat thinking about all the ways that we… Tyler and I could be better at this. So this is an ongoing project, but it’s important to realize that engagement is your responsibility as a business owner seven days a week, this isn’t something that’s your responsibility only when they’re taking a class with you… Right, it’s your responsibility. Seven days a week 24 hours a day.  Does that mean you do it?… No. Responsibility simply means you’re raising your hand, you’re saying, I’m owning the fact that this is real. Now, how can this get done? It doesn’t mean you have to be the one to do it. Right, well, that’s what the getting organized section is about. Once you think of it, guess what, you’ve got to earn it anyways, Are we repeating it? Constantly, daily, weekly, monthly. Then go back to getting organized, build a system around the fantastic new and courageous idea you just came up with, and it will fall into place and the only time you’re thinking about it is once a week, maybe a

0:25:11.2 Tyler: Let’s talk about some of the systems you can put it into engagement number one, with regard to social media and email, do you guys… For those of you that maybe aren’t doing a lot with that stuff, do you know that you can schedule all of it?… It doesn’t have to be manual. You could schedule a year out, you go 30 pieces, or let’s just say you can make 52 pieces on a weekend of relevant. Cool Stuff. Did you know this about our company, did you know this, did you know that 30 seconds, 10 seconds, a lot of the marketing teams like things under 10 seconds for certain ads, for landing pages, and then you give it to them or your guy, and it’s literally weekly on Tuesday, for 52 weeks. And you’re done… Imagine if you did that with two types of topics, Tuesday is this, Thursday is this, 52 more, you’re done. It’s unreal. The potential is unreal. And then there’s social media, I don’t know if you guys know, but now there are services, but also built into all the social media platforms is scheduled engagement, you can actually schedule posts and polls and surveys and all the stuff to constantly go. 

0:26:42.5 Chris: So scheduling is an important part about it, the other thing that we talk about a lot is the other time that his students not with you, so if you’re doing private, it’s the other six days, or if you’re doing classes the other day, is that they’re not with you in class, how are you… engaging them? 

0:27:27.4 Tyler: Like at Ju Jitsu there’s a rotation of curriculum, and there’s different levels, so you’ve got your white belts and your beginners, you got your blue belt-ers to purple belts, and they have different hours every day, and you can pay for the unlimited class. Right, and a big shout out to optimist, Juju and Livonia. And so Coach Grant, Professor grants going over something on Tuesday, but you couldn’t make it, and that it doesn’t happen again on Wednesday. Wednesday is a different technique. Well, imagine if Coach Grant had something built so people who missed can review and see and maybe even try at home what they missed, or if it’s yoga. Well, yoga is all about that consistency, breathing, health, being one and understanding how you become one with who you are, and if you miss a night of yoga because of circumstances, imagine if that piece was there and it was you, not just some random person on YouTube. 

0:28:43.8 Chris: So in a learning management system like teacher’s own or there’s others, what we’ve done is you’ve got a full multi-media, you can create evergreen courses and lessons, and you can have those literally create once and set him, forget it. So if you keep teaching the same thing over and over again, that is just like we talked about last episode, that is the thing to start getting curriculum around. 

0:29:04.7 Tyler: Chris, do you know what people are doing now with Teacher Zone, they might not even be… Some of these schools that I’ve talked to are not even teen off in the actual course curriculum, but they’re building a course with the Welcome to learning with me, one of the 20 teachers. And so it’s like a welcome video, hey, and before that student even arrives for their first lesson ever, they have a practice assigned TeacherZone… Lets everybody know you have a practice assigned to log in and check it out. And it’s the teacher going, Hey, I’m Tyler. We’re gonna be going over guitar. This is what you’re gonna need. I’m so excited to meet you. Yada, yada, yada. You get the idea, every teacher has one, they assign it with a click of a button, and all of a sudden that students engaged, before they’re even engaged. 

0:29:04.7 Chris : Love it. And they are setting up expectations for the future, which is always a good thing. Here’s the other thing that crossed my mind when you were talking about you and all that. So you know how today we’re getting very popular with all the devices, like there’s the new workout mirror, there’s the Peloton, there’s all these things, right. Well, if you were in the learning or lesson business and you are not embracing some of this technology and realizing why some of these multi-billion dollar companies are… Hello, it’s in your face now, you can actually… You are a better instructor or have a better operation than some of these big companies. So why don’t you just take the time, take one day, put some evergreen content and like you said, and now it becomes the gift that keeps on giving where your customers are able to engage with your content. So content can be a really powerful way, to increase engagement, both on the learning side, and then also on the social connection side and the communication side, 

0:30:18.4 Tyler: Chris the communication side segues right into that. So, okay, cool, you’ve got three Yoga… Its three different levels, maybe 50 people per level that come in and out…Well, not only can they get the content when they’re gone, but they can also teach you… TeacherZone allows you to put them into group for group chats and file sharing.So the community can actually do school could be in one group too, maybe as people get to talk to the beginners and say, Hey, don’t give up as you remember to breathe. And we were all there. I didn’t do this six-hour hand stand over night, you know what I mean? And all of a sudden, people feel back to the listening part of all this, like they’re part of something, and that there are at…

0:30:53.9 Chris: Because we have, at our learning program, Tyler and I have about typically about 13 group classes, and then we also have sub-groups, if you will, of different projects and things going on, so on top of the private messaging that’s going on, which is a great engagement tool, we also have a ton, at least 20 group messaging that’s going on where people feel like they’re a part of something, they’re sharing memes are sharing… Thanks for sharing. So that’s a huge engagement strategy, is getting your intranet or your intra-communication where all your classes feel like they know each other a little better.

0:31:34.3 Tyler: And by the way, a good point on the private. We want that open door policy, we wanna level up our students to the point they trust us. Well, that means they’ve gotta be able to go to someone or… Right now it’s email. Hey, send me an email. Well, the director of the whole school or in their instructor, they can also send a private chat of concern and say, Hey, I don’t feel like this is going very well, or whatnot, it’s just as easy to do private chases group chats. That is the full circle. So now people can get as involved as they want, they can talk privately to their instructors only, and now your company is full service in regards to no stone unturned that with email communications and whatnot, you’ve got it all covered.

0:32:18.0 Chris:…That goes into all the auto… Everything that we’ve talked about the last time about getting organized, everything from auto-billing to all the auto communications like SMS and email notifications, teachers on has 62 and growing different auto notifications that go out, and those are just important ways that you can customize. In fact, Tyler customized ours… And some were hilarious. It’s like jack pot. Whenever you want to sign a new assignment, so there’s really fun ways you can engage.  

0:33:23.3 Tyler: The first thing you do is you go in and you change the word teacher zone to your company name, so it’s white labeled, we don’t… You’re the hero, not us, so you go in there, you change it to optimist Juju, and every text and every email, whether it’s a reminder or a practice assignment or Hey, a group chats active, comes from optimist jujitsu, and so is that… Is if they’re paying you and they’re part of the drive that’s important to them, so I… You’re not doing it.

0:33:23.3 Chris: So with our program, this week we taught… Let’s just say between lists in classes, like 300-some odd instances, all those notifications, all the different reminders and everything that went out, were you waking up at like 3-00 AM and sending those out or…

0:33:39.9 Tyler: No, no, no, no. Yeah, so at Loreto, all of those are going out automatically and we set which ones we want, you don’t have to use also.

0:33:48.2 Chris: The beauty of it is that you’re not… If you’re still not automating on some of the stuff, then that is a great way that you can increase your engagement overnight, it start to get automated on some of your notifications, automated on some of that stuff. You know, Tyler, I was shout out to John Kozicki with the Michigan Rock School. He and I were having a conversation and it brought to my mind this engagement concept with Disney, because we all know Disney’s like, they’re amazing. And so there’s lots of different anecdotes that you can come up with over the years, but for myself, I had a really, really interesting engagement experience when we were on a Disney Cruise, so we got off on… One of the days we went off early, how you go… If you’re on a cruise, you do excursions in the morning usually, and so we were getting off to do an excursion, and my wife wanted is strawberry smoothie, and so she’s allergic to wheat and blah, blah, blah, so she likes do smoothies. So anyway, is this Disney… So we run over the breakfast place and they don’t have smoothies, and they’re like, smooth guy doesn’t open up for another hour or whatever…Okay, fine, so we go off an excursion, here’s how good they are at engagement, that evening, 10 hours later, we sit down at dinner, and the waiter walks up and says to my wife, Madam, I understand that you had a smoothie this morning that you were unable to receive… She’s like… And we all look at each other and just like. Excuse me. How do you possibly know that we were in a giant dining room asking for smoothies, and they’re like, Sorry sir, we don’t have them do… And we just left it. We didn’t ask someone to follow up with us. Okay, so then he goes, I’d like to make it right. What would you like to drink? And Mary’s like, I like martinis. He’s done. So he brings her a martini, okay, so we think we’re over, it’s over. Next thing we know, about 20 minutes later, the “Ratatouille” Chef. This giant French Chef a huge chef hat and… He ooked like a cartoon character. He comes out of the kitchen, walks over to our table and says, Who’s Marcy? And she’s like right here, and he’s like, I understand you didn’t get your movie this morning, and we can look to each other and she goes, It’s okay that… Wait, or already took care of us. He goes, No, no, no, it’s not okay. And he holds up a phone, he goes, Do you know what this is? And we’re all like, What? He goes, This is a magic phone, and we had our little kids with us and the kids are like, Ohhhh, and he’s like, I can do anything magical with this phone, he’s like, in fact, I can even have it make smoothies! What time do you need your smoothie tomorrow? And she goes, 6:30am, but you guys don’t do them yet, and he goes, I told you this is magic, watch this… He gets on the phone and he says, Hey, I’m gonna make it up, John, he goes, aren’t you setting up that area in that kitchen? On Deck 9 at 6:00am. I thought you were… Yeah, could you do me a favor? Can you deliver a strawberry smoothie to what… And what room you guys in a (Marci tells him). He tells his guy, great, thank you, sir. 6:30am. Correct. Thanks, hangs up.  See I told you it was a Magic phone. You’ll have your smoothie delivered at 6:30am tomorrow.Awesome, how incredible is that. That we didn’t tell anybody. We didn’t report it, we simply asked someone noted a way that customer wasn’t served.

They put it into their engagement system, however, Disney does it, however their magical world does it, right. So a fairy probably delivered our message on an elephant, right, but

However it was done is arbitrary, I still can’t forget that experience… That was seven years ago. And for the rest of my life, I will see Disney in a different light because of that. That’s engagement, that is engagement, because they showed that they were listening and that they cared, and they went over the top to do so, so how can we go over the top if there’s someone that has their systems in place much more than all of us, yet they’re still obsessed with culture and engagement, then we have to ask ourselves how can we continue to be throughout if Disney is still totally obsessed… 

0:37:49.3 Tyler …And I’m gonna reiterate that. And they are Disney. It sounds like they broke through at some point, blessed Walts heart, and when you break through that first ceiling, then you can’t stop thinking that way, but until you do, the growth won’t happen that beyond culture, growth won’t start happening. So the key here is to try new things, find out what works, and that takes courage because guess what? Find out, finding out what works. What happens? You have to find out what doesn’t work. Right, that’s okay. If you’re listening to this, you’ve already done that, I don’t care how safe you’ve made your little business or big business, you’ve already failed.  So dust off the failure hat, put the gloves on and go in again.

And this engagement series leads us right into stage four Chris, which is fueling growth. So we have an exciting episode coming next episode, so we’ve gone over chaos, we’ve gone over getting organized, we just went over the ins and outs and the intrinsic value of engaging students and how it’s not… the product is not piano or jujitsu, the product is the engagement, the families are looking for that the adults that take lessons or doing that, they’re looking for the experience of growth, and people who don’t even know it yet, realize that one of the biggest attraction principles on earth is that success breeds success. So if you go to a yoga class and no one’s succeeding in the turn, you don’t know anybody every time, it’s not special, but if you show up and they say, You know what, those three ladies are always there, that guy is always there, he doesn’t talk to many people, but he sweats more than anyone, he never misses a class, there’s something there, and then if you can go beyond the in three weeks later, now they know their name, they feel heard. Yes, they’re part of this thing, just like a young Tyler yearned to be listened to and felt her wages what I got when we created the school, because I listened to them, they

0:40:47.1 Chris: Listened to me all the time too, so… Yeah, so you’ve got what you yearned for… Its so funny, there’s a book called tribe that I just finished that talks about during World War II, the British then the blood screen. And by the way, I told this to one of our music students recently and he told me recently that Blitzkrieg is not even a German word, Germans are even like, what are they calling it?So we made our own word.  But the point being is that they were getting bombed to no end, so the Germans thought that it would actually break their resolve, but what it did is… Is it actually strengthened it. And so the point with this is this is when the war ended, first of all, almost all psychological issues went away during the War, the reason being as people felt so connected, that felt so engaged, they all had a commonality.  You see all the class systems, all the money all that was gone. We’re not just English, we’ve lived together, bombed together, and they had to help each other. 

0:42:35.8 Tyler: Like when you get out of yourself for half a second, I realized that the solar system revolves around the sun and not you, or not me. I learned that in my late 20s, it took me a little while, all of a sudden hang-ups and yearning for more grasses, green, or all of those things that are by-products of that self-self part, and I don’t mean the healthy self part, where you fill your cup up and you have more to give. That’s not what I mean, it’s just the selfishness that core…

0:43:09.7 Chris:  Those people when they were getting bombed, all they could do for the most part, was commune together and help… Who needs food? Who needs help? Where do they go? And a lot of people felt so guilty after the war that they yearned for it again, but what they were really yearning for a time there is those times of connection, those times of engagement, those times of humans yearn for deep connection, so much so that we’re gonna yearn for a war or to get bombed just to get that connection.

0:43:09.7 Tyler: Yeah, let’s not do the war part, this is real.  All you have to do to avoid war and have fun, happiness is keep listening to this podcast series on the five stages you must grow through.  No World Wars will have to happen, and yet you can still get the results of what Chris was just talking about with your families, friends, clients…so on.   Amazing example, Chris, that’s actually heavy. Very, very heavy. So guys, we’re gonna close this episode out and telling you, We’re gonna leave you with this. Fueling Growth is next, we’re gonna be there in a second. For now, make your list, and if you haven’t made one in a while because there was a pandemic for a year or whatever the circumstances is, make now, write it down, find out, and there’s probably… By the way, you’re not… You’re a superhero, you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve had ideas you haven’t implemented yet, they’ve been tabled, and there’s a couple out of those ideas, you know were a sure thing, but it would take time, courage, effort and a system built around it.

It’s go time!Make the list and circle the ones that are kind of the givens, the ones that would totally work. Do that today. We’re challenging you, we’ll do it to prison, I’ll do it when we’re offline here and have some courage to start to implement those, and then next week, we’ll key you in and we’ll do our fueling growth episode. How about that, Chris? 

0:44:33.8 Chris: I think it’s great, and you make a great point that I have to say for anyone that went through the pandemic with your learning business or your lesson business, you no longer… Number one, those that already had amazing engagement, so less attrition, and number two, you no longer have an excuse to not want to create a more solid community, because for a lot of us, we saw how important our community was for keeping people together.  


0:45:34.8 Tyler: Absence makes the heart grow fonder. I know many of you are already doing it, have reassessed, move some things around, we’ve done it too, and then created a better version of what you were through diversity.  Hats off to you if you did that, and if you’re listening for the first time…Remember, get our e-book, catch up with us, TeacherZone.com/chaos… free e-book, back up to the chaos episode, catch up, and then everyone else will see you on the next episode with The TeacherZone with Chris and Tyler, we’ll see you next time, Chris. Thanks!

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