I have an opportunity, I don't know, maybe they won't be great, but maybe they'll be really, really great. And this is an opportunity. And I can't control what's gonna happen, but let's go in with that possibility.  What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. I know for myself, when I get the most anxious, those what ifs become very daunting and a strategy that I've tried to use that has been effective is follow out to completion, the worst case scenario. So we'll often be like, oh, this is gonna be terrible, but what truly is terrible? So oftentimes our worries, the things that are triggering these anxieties, if you actually think them through, follow them out to the absolute worst case, they're not nearly as bad as we often label them. And that strategy has been really impactful for me. Another one that we talk about a lot with our clients is diffusing yourself from the emotion. So oftentimes, when we feel an emotion, we fuse ourselves to that emotion and we become that emotion. We don't realize that actually just creating a little bit of space, understanding that that's an emotion that I'm feeling, I've also felt a number of other emotions throughout today and this will pass like those other emotions. Can you speak a little bit about the impact that diffusion in our emotions has on our anxiety? Yeah, absolutely. That's such an important point. I also wanted to say that, that shift of mindset from, oh my God, this is gonna be terrible for our business to actually we can do it. That mindset shift is, I'll start with that and then I'll go to the next thing next, is so, so important, particularly for those of us that have anxiety, because it is something that can diffuse anxiety from, this is the end of the world, to, this is actually just fine and I love it because another gift that comes from anxiety is the gift of creativity. That mindset shift is asking you to use your creativity to, in this case, to look at the situation from a more distant perspective, sometimes to shift a task that was thrown at you into a challenge, like can you approach it like something that is a challenge for you? And those small shifts work your creativity in a great way and can be used in so many parts of your life, but it could also be used in emotions. So where are you kind of focusing that emotional real estate in where you are feeling? And while I am a big proponent of saying that all the emotions, the more uncomfortable ones as well as the joyful ones are equally important, I certainly don't want people dwelling only in anger or only in, you know, hatred for a long time, but it's always useful to feel them because they're, again, they're telling you something. You can't, I don't recommend acting from that emotion of hatred, but feel it. Say, okay, yeah, that is what's happening and then try and step back to ask, what is that hatred? Well, wow, that was a big bout of hatred. Where's that coming from? And sometimes it comes from something specific, sometimes it comes from just a general situation. I'm just feeling hateful today because so many bad things happened. And it also gives you a new perspective on how to move forward. So feel the feelings. We're never gonna get rid of hatred, anger, anxiety, all these uncomfortable emotions, but then address them from a point of curiosity, from a point of creativity, and from a point of asking what they can tell us about our values. I know many of us, when we feel anxiety, there's a physical sensation often tied to it. We'll feel hot or flush in our face. We'll feel pain or tightness in our muscles and our body is reacting. And sometimes just scanning your body and thinking about all the different feelings and sensations that are going on, again, can reroute that focus away from the actual anxiety into a more meaningful pathway for you to move forward. And we talk about this in a social setting. So many of our clients come to us feeling some social anxiety exactly as you were saying. And I think it's really important.  Like the end goal is to never feel that way again. And that's not practical. You're feeling that anxiety because you care because you actually want relationships. You wanna be viewed positively. And that's a good thing. We don't wanna become robots and we don't wanna lose that anxiety but understand that anxiety is a meaningful signal that, hey, I'm about to meet some really awesome people. And guess what? They're probably feeling it too. And I think that's really important that we normalize these feelings instead of labeling social anxiety as bad and feeling like we're broken or we're different or we're incomplete. Everyone right now is feeling it. Were there things that you would do in preparation or social events that would help you counteract that social anxiety that you knew you would be feeling? You know, it's going back to earlier part of the conversation and just reminding myself that this is a great opportunity. I love meeting great people and I have an opportunity. I don't know, maybe they won't be great but maybe they'll be really, really great.   They're gonna think I'm not interesting enough. All these things that have also gone through my mind before I go into a social situation. Well, that reframing is incredibly important. And I don't think you're going to be able to reframe properly if you don't have a working relationship with that anxiety and yourself when you are experiencing it. Another thing that I was laughing about with AJ earlier is I also last night went through it was worst possible scenario but also how long we've been doing this 15 years and I also went through the problems that I was worried about in the past what had happened when we experienced them. And so I went through all those and I was like, oh, we've been through more scary things that have happened doing our live programs over the last 15 years and we've done them in different cities and different countries without half the resources that we have when we're at a home base and they were amazing. But again, without working through that without understanding what state I was in and having that conversation it would only allow that to continue to percolate. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Yeah, yeah, I talk about that in the book as our natural human negativity bias. So if lots of things happen, some bad, some good what do we do? It's like, oh, remember that? That one comment that that person gave about my talk. Oh my God, that was terrible. When there's 3000 other positive comments, right?  It also works, I think people will relate to this in a social situation where in my academic world we're always evaluating candidates, evaluating things. And you have to be very, very careful about what you say about these different applications. Even a small negative thing can tank this application because the negative comments have so much more power than the positive comments. And so that's really important to keep in mind for what you hear on the outside. Remind yourself, are you only focusing on that one negative comment and ignoring all the beautiful comments that other people, I found myself doing that the other day for myself and a friend tapped me on the head and said, God, stop focusing on that. I said, oh God, I'm doing it again. We all, and we have to get comfortable with that idea that no matter how well you even understand all of this it's you're still programmed to view it in one way and that you have to override that programming. Yeah. And it's learning. I mean, that is the reason why that the underlying theme of the whole book, Good Anxiety is brain plasticity. The brain's ability to learn, to respond to the environment and there's positive brain plasticity that includes all the learning that we do and all of the situations that we can help promote positive brain plasticity like movement, working out, meditation, sleep, so important, but then negative brain plasticity. The brain also responds negatively to prolonged negative stimuli like stress, like bad anxiety as we've been talking about. And with that negativity bias, many of us are hypercritical of ourselves, some of them in the audience are even perfectionists and not only are we primed to hold on to the negative but we often stop our self-analysis on the negative and we teach all of our clients, it's okay to critique yourself but we have to weigh the scale and tip it to an equilibrium and give yourself an opportunity to be positive about whatever you could take away from that experience. So even if you bombed your talk, even if you went to that event and you didn't meet anyone cool or fun, well, what were the positives? What went your direction? Well, you showed up on stage, you actually had an audience in front of you, you got out of the house and got an opportunity to meet some new people even if they weren't for you and it's so important that we realize we're primed to think in the negative, we're primed to hold on to the negative so to counteract that, we also have to spend some time focusing on the positive. And for me, sometimes that's relying on a friend like Johnny saying, hey, I'm in this loop, I'm in this situation or my fiance Amy can help me snap out of that. So one of the things that we're seeing now is not only are we feeling anxiety but the people that we love, the people that we care about are also feeling anxiety and I know many in our audience are parents and they really wanna help their children deal with it in an effective way and we now know that we begin out of the rug telling them not to feel it to avoid it is not helpful. So what advice do you have for the parents who are listening who are concerned about the anxiety their children are facing? Yeah, so anxiety for kids just like anxiety for ourselves. I think the first thing is to learn how to turn it down, learn how to get out of that really negative spiral of anxiety and we've already talked about the power of the breath. I'd love that one because if you practice it when your kids don't have anxiety they can use it while they're standing in line at school whether in class if anxiety comes up you can model and practice that together. You could even do it if they get anxious during a conversation. So have them do it while the other person is talking and they don't even know the other person doesn't even know you're doing it because you could kind of do it in a stealth manner. But the other tool that I like to give again for both parents and kids is movement.  It improves your mood that's why you go out for a walk and you feel better. It's those neurochemicals that you're stimulating. That's also a wonderful thing if you know that your kid or yourself is going to be anxious because of a particular situation get that walk in before you go. Get there after having a good power walk and get yourself to that level. But then even with kids you could also start practicing how do you feel? It's okay to feel afraid. It's okay to feel worried. Let's talk a little bit about why you might be worried and then bring in all the things that you guys talked about so beautifully. Is this the best thing? Do you think we could survive this situation with your friend that's causing you problems? Yes, of course we can. And talk it through and be that wonderful coach for your kid but let them know that it's okay to feel those emotions but give them the tools to turn down the worst parts of the emotion of anxiety.


One of the concepts that's made a lot of difference in my life and in my business is this idea of Kaizen, I don't know if you've heard of it, but it came out of Japan It made its way into US corporations and made a lot of difference there Kaizen is basically continuous incremental improvement and with that you can pretty much achieve any goal that you want And but not only is it was a big incorporations is a big right now still But it's also been really important in a lot of people's lives whether it's for fitness or You know health or for you know relationships or for work Or for you know personal development anyway, I'm really excited today to be interviewing someone who is an expert on Kaizen Her name is Dr. Susan Peck She is actually one of the members in my master heart group coaching program and let me read her bio to you And then I'm gonna bring her on and she's has some wonderful insights to share with us that will help us to Not be as afraid of our goals and to really take steps toward our dreams So let me share with her bio with you all Susan is a Kaizen based life coach who specializes in helping people who feel stuck in some area of their life To get unstuck using a process based on small incremental steps or improvements changes so small That they slip under the brain's fear radar and so we're gonna talk about that today Typical clients are individuals going through a life transition such as burnout or divorce And it's calling them to reinvent themselves and their life or People who've been putting off a big dream they've been putting on the back burner because deep down they don't really believe they they are capable of Achieving that big dream and maybe some of you might might relate to that too Susan helps her clients to believe in themselves and in their vision and to get into action Starting with simple easy steps that allow them to quickly experience success Cultivate confidence and build momentum Susan welcome to this interview. Thanks for being here Thank you, George I am honored to be here and thrilled to share the concept of Kaizen with your viewers. Yeah, absolutely then this is You know as I said in the beginning it really has made a big difference in my Life and in my work. I feel like it's I I learned about Kaizen Probably 20 years ago or more and ever since then I think it's really woven itself into The core of my my character so much so that I don't Even talk about it anymore because it become it's become so obvious to me But then I realized that wow a lot of people haven't either haven't been exposed to concept or they don't really understand it It sounds so simple that People don't use it often enough and so that's why I'm so glad that you're gonna be giving us a focus on it So maybe the first thing we can start with and I know you have you know, we could talk on this topic for hours but There's a couple of key insights And I know you want to share and one of them is about how our brains are wired So talk about that. I'm sure that with us Yes, and it's so funny that you say That you said you forget about it because it's so simple and I find when I'm sharing these ideas with people It's like the light bulb goes off and it's like, oh, that's so obvious But yet there's still this little bit of resistance to try it because it sounds so ridiculously easy and simple that there's no possible way that it can work and yet it is Transformational for the people who do give it a go so Getting back to how the brain works Okay, so the way the brain is set up There's a core at the brace that the brain stem. That's the reptilian brain This takes care of our heartbeat our breathing our basic functions right above that is the mammalian brain and The mammalian brain is kind of the instinctual Reactive part of our brain within this part of our brain There's a little area called the amygdala and this is where the fight flight or freeze response lives and Our brain this part of our brain does not like change Change is threatening this part of our brain goes back to the cave people days where any type of change was a threat to survival and so This part of the brain wants to keep everything the same so that we can survive Now above the mammalian brain. We have the cortex. This is the rational thinking part of our brain where we Where we come up with logical plans will come up with a vision goals You know figure out how to get from point A to point B and we and where we accumulate knowledge Well, the problem is When it comes to a fight between the cortex and the amygdala the amygdala wins Because it's more basic and integral to survival. So let's say you have a goal maybe you want to lose weight or get fit or Start a business something like this and your cortex comes up with all the plans It knows exactly what you should eat what healthy eating looks like How many times you should go to the gym? It knows you should exercise but those things are changes from your comfort zone and As soon as you start getting outside that comfort zone as soon as there's a big change That amygdala kicks in And the fear response takes over and it actually floods your brain with Neurotransmitters and other chemicals the kind of short circuit the thinking part of the brain and let the amygdala take over and This shows up as resistance to change And that's why a lot of these big success achievement gurus who are talking about massive action You've got to go out there and kill it 150% people get all revved up listening to them and Maybe they go out for a day a week maybe even a month. We're just sheer willpower pushes them through But eventually that amygdala is going to resist that change Now you might be saying I'm not afraid to lose weight. I'm not afraid to get in shape I'm not afraid to write that book. I just I don't have time I don't I It's genetic. I can't lose weight All of these excuses. Yeah, and another one if I may jump in is This this concept of limiting beliefs Yeah, now I know some people watching this Believe a lot in limiting beliefs I have some issue with that. I Not I mean you can believe what anything you want But I do see limiting beliefs holding a lot of people back and sometimes I question Living beliefs as a as a as its very own limiting belief But tell tell say say more about how does how does that relate to the fear? Yes, okay. Well, thank you for that beautiful segue because Exactly we don't realize that we are afraid or Resistant to something as simple as a change What happens is we get that response in our amygdala. It doesn't like this change that's coming on and it starts Putting on these disguises and It kind of involves the cortex because some of these disguises get very creative limiting beliefs is one of them It finds the brain finds a way to rationalize this response. So it's not I'm Panicky I'm afraid it's a limiting belief. I'm too old to go back to school I don't have the resources to start a business. I'm not whatever enough to Go higher in my career. I don't like Exercise, I'm not athletic all of these things that as you said they're limiting beliefs and I Would say limiting beliefs are very real and They do hold us back But what they really are is a smokescreen for this fear response in the amygdala Other ways that the amygdala reacts And puts up this resistance. Let's say you start going to the gym or You start on a new diet plan or something, you know, you start down this path to whatever your goal is and all of a sudden You know a trip comes up or a bunch of trips your boss asks you to work late or You have these parties to go to and suddenly it's impossible to stick to your plan So it comes up with all of these Rationalizations for why you can't do what you said you were going to do or it'll come up with Distractions I'm gonna spend an hour tonight working on Writing the great American novel. I'm not afraid of that. I want to I have these ideas in my head And you sit down at the computer and let me just check my email first or let me just you know cruise Facebook for five minutes Just to get in the zone and get used to sitting in the chair. All of a sudden an hour later your time It's gone and you look up and it's like, oh my gosh now I don't have any more time to work on this all of these things the limiting beliefs the rationalizations the Distractions they're just your brain's devious way of Covering up this fear response and keeping you in your comfort zone because whatever you were doing was uncomfortable this is great and I You know, I see I see a couple of things happening that I'm wondering if it's related to this I see this happening in you know people's lives as they try to build a business because that's who I usually talk with One is family and friends You know a lot of like a lot of oh, but I need to take care of them you know things come up and You know as you're talking about it's like that actually is a comfort zone, right? Because they are they've been maybe for many years accustomed comfortable with taking care of family and friends or Responding to their needs and wants and that's very comfortable Even though sometimes it seems like a you know a problem or crisis that they have to deal with but then once you know They're comfortable dealing with that instead of facing their own project their own dream Which is which is the most fearful thing and the second thing and this may be taking it too far I don't know you can let me know I wonder if it might be related to some people's illness now again You know illness has a lot of factors. There's genetic There's environmental there's you know other lifestyle factors or you know infection or whatever of course But I wonder if some some discomfort physical discomfort or illness might have some cause from the amygdala and the fear response like It's almost like I'm I'm more comfortable being ill Than I am working on my project my dream I Know that you can speak to any of those you'd like well, I think on the family and friends definitely that You know compared to working on the business which there might not be positive feedback and Reinforcement right away. It takes a while to build the business and start getting some momentum there So you've got this huge swath of time where you're not getting any Positive hits you're not getting that serotonin The positive neurotransmitters in the brain now. Let's switch to taking care of friends and family Even if it's an obligation or it's not fun. Yes There's there's a comfort in that and there's also positive reinforcement Even if it's taking care of the need of a relative and you resent that need you still get a positive hit of I'm doing something good. I'm being helpful. I'm being Ultra-wisting and so that makes your brain feel good Whereas working on the business that's out of the comfort zone. It's scary. It may not be working There's a risk of failure There's just a lot of monotony to the things that you need to do to build it So of course we're going to gravitate towards the things that make us feel good now on the side of illness you know again, I think it depends certainly there are Illnesses that that just come on us that we have no control over But I think you know, there is a category of psychosomatic illness there is a category of You know aches and pains and just not feeling our best not and I think some of that is You know some of that could be triggered by the brain Feeling uncomfortable. In fact, some of the illness Symptoms, you know that like a headache or just feeling tired And I can vouch for this myself, you know some fatigue syndrome not not to take anything away from Medical chronic fatigue syndromes But I know when I start pushing myself Outside the comfort zone all of a sudden I get ridiculously tired and I need to map more than I did before And it's an escape. So Yeah, I think and and we never intentionally do this but think, you know, our brain has ways of Tricking us and and keeping us away from what we say that we really want. Yeah, I I Have I've said before and I still believe I think the smarter we are The the more brilliant our excuses are That's what I I tend to see but So funny thing is I don't consider myself a very smart person. So my excuses aren't not aren't that aren't that very good, you know Anyway, um, there's so much we can talk about and I can keep you on here for hours so I'd love to skip to Talking about how do we what do we do now because we've spent, you know About 10 to 15 minutes talking about what what are the causes of this and of course they are books and books written about this And you've read them, but what about okay? So now now that we know that this this is such a such a an opponent or such a massive You know, you know sort of thing that's resistance, right? It's it's like we're getting our in our own way How can we what do we do? Or just to give us some ideas here Well, that's where Kaizen comes in and just like a one-minute blurb about where Kaizen came from It kind of started out in the manufacturing sector It actually started in the United States in the lead-up to World War two a group of statisticians led by man Named W. Edwards Deming They led this effort. We didn't have time to build new factories We had to get our product of productivity up there as quickly as possible because we were getting dragged into the war And so these statisticians came up with this way of making small Incremental changes lots of them, but they were all small and easy to implement and they resulted in dramatic increases in productivity And that led to that was part of what helped us win the war And then after World War two was over We kind of our manufacturing sector put that aside and forgot those lessons But we exported these statisticians and Dr. Deming over to Japan and Japan didn't have the resources To build new factories from scratch, you know, they were devastated after in a World War two And so they had to work with this system of small incremental changes to get their productivity and their Manufacturing and factories back online and they did and they made it their own And if you think back to the 70s 80s 90s how Japan was trouncing the rest of the world in Automotive and electronic manufacturing. This was all because of Kaizen and there's a book out there called the Toyota way And you know, they coined the name Kaizen, which is simply a Japanese word the characters mean good change And it was kind of adopted to mean small incremental changes small incremental improvements, so Anyway, and then, you know, we learned from Japan. We brought it back over here You have things like Six Sigma into her total quality improvement, but we don't really care about business We care about our own personal lives and let's of course some of your viewers are business people and this works beautifully in small businesses, too Okay, so the man who really pioneered Bringing the concept of Kaizen to personal development is Dr. Robert Moorer and he is a professor out at UCLA a psychologist and he started using this concept of Kaizen with his patients and Seeing these dramatic radical transformations So he's now like the leading expert in the world and I highly recommend his book It's called one small step can change your life the Kaizen way and that's the book I read many years ago that had such a profound impact on me. Yeah, yes, yes, and In the setting of personal Transformation Kaizen is all about finding steps or Changes that are so tiny that they slip under the brain's fear radar They don't set off the amygdala and that's why they work.  I was tired. It wasn't comfortable I found some reason not to go So after reading this book I was I got the idea and he talks about this woman who had no time to exercise But she needed to for health reasons and she was going to resist any any Suggestion that she exercised and go to a gym and work out for an hour and take classes Or even walk for half an hour and he told her just can you know, your prescription?  It's like is there any reason I can't stand in place and walk for one minute? Yeah No, of course, I can do that And so she did and she wound up over a couple of months, you know Getting into a fitness routine upping the amount of walking and then joining a gym and loving it and getting healthy Well, I kind of did the same thing I had a stair stepper in my living room So I was like, I'll get on that for one commercial one 30-second commercial every night And I started doing that and then it was so easy it's like well that I can go a minute and then maybe I can go two minutes and Then I started walking, you know And this took place over a couple of weeks to months and then a running class came along and like oh let me try that and Just starting with that 30 seconds a day on a stair stepper I gradually through just little incremental increases Wound up a few years later running half marathons And joining a gym and now I do weightlifting and things like that. So And that gets a little into how kaizen works. So it's all about these tiny steps Finding things that are so small Your brain cannot put up any resistance because they're easy But the reason that this works is number one it becomes fun Remember we were talking before about meeting that positive feedback Meeting some sort of positive reinforcement. Well when you do your one minute of Walking in place and you finish it you get a pat on the back you get that serotonin hit I hit my goal I feel good.  Let me challenge myself It starts having fun Then there's also the magic Geranium effect and this goes back to a children's story from I think the 1950s But there was this old woman and she lived in the lapidated run-down house and she wasn't doing anything to improve it It was just overwhelming And one of her friends comes over one day with the tyrannium and says this is a magic tyrannium. It's my gift to you and So the woman takes the magic tyrannium into the house puts it on the kitchen table The tyrannium is beautiful and she notices how ratty and ugly the tablecloth is So she goes to the store and she gets a new tablecloth to match the tyrannium puts the tablecloth on and it looks beautiful the table is lovely But now she notices the paint is peeling off the chairs and you know other things in the kitchen are all shabby So she starts changing these things to match her table and her tyrannium Well, then the kitchen is remodeled and this goes on throughout the house You may have to do the dining room and you know the living room because it has to match these other areas Finally, you know, she has a beautiful outdoor garden the inside is all renovated her friend comes back over and it's like Oh my gosh what what happened and she's like it's all that magic tyrannium it made all these things happen and That's part of the magic of kaizen too a lot of times We you know one of the ways that our amygdala Stops us is this feeling of overwhelm. I don't even know where to start There are so many things that I have to do with the magic or with kaizen and the magic tyrannium It doesn't really matter. I'll work with my clients and it's like Let's just find one small thing. Let's say you're starting a business You know, what let's make a list of all the things that you're going to need for your business just that let's just make a list Let's spend five minutes a day Working on that list That's not threatening anybody. You know most of us love sitting down and making lists And then you start there and then your list is made then it's okay. Well, let's spend five minutes a day Let's pick one thing the smallest thing on that list Let's just start working on that five minutes a day and all of a sudden You know, you're you're getting into this habit of putting in five minutes a day You feel good because you're meeting that goal and over, you know a couple of weeks you start seeing progress I've seen people do this. I've done it with decluttering I have another client who started decluttering and she had, you know stacks and stacks of old documents going back decades and We set a goal with her of five minutes a day of shredding old documents Well first maybe two to three weeks. She's like, I don't know if these piles are getting any smaller There's still so many of them, but I could see progress. She's like, you know, moving from the 90s to the 2010 one day she writes me, you know in her little update and she's like, I'm running our things to shred like all of a sudden this massive pile of Work where she didn't even know where to get started was was cleared up So that's kind of how it works. I also mentioned, you know, five minutes a day I find this tends to be a sweet spot. We can pretty much put up with anything for five minutes We can get ourself to do that. Sometimes it needs to go down to one minute, but Usually five minutes is a good spot and people underestimate that. They're like, I can't accomplish anything in five minutes Well, if you put in five minutes a day, that's 35 minutes a week That translates to a little more than 30 hours over the course of a year We're working on some small, you know, some project like decluttering your closets or You know, I Don't know something along those lines creating a new offering Yeah, we're writing writing content writing content. Yes 30 hours if you had 30 hours, what could you accomplish? Most people are like, wow 30 hours That's that's huge but if you tried to sit yourself down and work on content for 30 hours straight or even, you know Four days, eight hours a day, your brain would shut that right off, but five minutes, that's easy And then finally it builds momentum So we've been talking about sticking with, you know, one minute of walking or five minutes of decluttering or writing or whatever it is The thing is your brain, it's this whole process starts to rewire your brain To where whatever this activity is that was outside your comfort zone that your amygdala was resisting All of a sudden it starts to think this is fun I can do this your confidence grows and all of a sudden you find yourself wanting to do more I tried this last year I was trying to do things out of my comfort zone to get used to that and I started out with tiny little steps Just going to new places, driving a different route to wherever I was going, trying out a new app And then pretty soon I was up on this high ropes adventure course when I have a fear of heights And I was driving around LA in a rental car things that would have terrified me before But because I had kind of stepped up my tolerance to being outside my comfort zone All of a sudden I was like, I want a bigger challenge. I want to do this So it builds momentum If you're doing this with writing, I suggest to people, you know Let's say you've been putting that novel on the back burner How about spending five minutes on the outline or even just write one sentence a day?  Yeah, so that's that's the magic This is this is and Yeah, it's just incredible. I mean and and if people aren't doing this if I mean some of us have heard of these concepts before but if you're not doing it working with a coach on this is Translational because they provide the accountability the encouragement the guidance and Susan this is what you do with your clients, right? I mean you work with them to calm down the overwhelm and focus down on the actual improvements that are so small they could definitely do it and it really makes them and I've I've heard from folks who have worked with you and They they find it magical they find it to be a magical process. So tell those who are watching if we're interested How do we how do we work with someone like you? How do we work with you on something like this? Yes, well, um, first, let me reaffirm what you said the accountability principle That's where coaching comes in. So when I work with my clients one on one, I help them Um, you know first we we clarify what their goal what they're trying to achieve is Sometimes that's the small step of just getting clarity there But then we figure out something, you know, we start breaking that down and we come up with A small step that is very specific to them because the small steps are different What might be a small step for me might be a huge step for somebody else And might be too tiny for somebody, you know, another person So it's all about finding the individual sweet spot and then the accountability with all of my clients I have them text me or email me every day To report in that they have completed whatever their little step is and I find that is really key because I can tell people about kai zen and They're like, yeah, that sounds great Um, I could do that.  It has to be massive action. You have to transform overnight You have to get instant results. It's a little bit different Um, so, you know the amygdala even on even on the concept of kai zen rears its little ugly head um But what I find so when I tell people about it and they're like, oh, yeah, I'll try that and then they really don't You know, they might try it one day and then because they're not seeing an instant Transformation or an instant result and it takes a couple of weeks to rewire the brain and really get it going I have my clients report in every day And that's how we see the change. Usually I see with them this miraculous brain change and transformation And they start seeing tangible results around about three weeks in which is Where a lot of people say habit formation or whether that's a whole other topic But you know to kind of get something Beginning to be etched into the brain that takes about three to four weeks Yeah, so if anyone watching this is like, you know, I really would love to make a change in this particular area of my life Or got to get going on my business You know, susan is a great coach to work with on this. So susan your website is www.call2excellence.com Call c-a-l-l-t-o excellence just like it's spelled excellence with a ce at the end call to excellence.com and Yeah, I think people can find all the information there. Is there anything else you want to say about How people can contact you or work with you? Yes, so on my website There's a page Under services that goes into all of my different one-on-one coaching options I have single sessions and then I also which you know, those are great if you just want to come up with your kaizen plan and then I also have like Three sessions succession and nine session packages With discounts and then I also have a blog and I have written Several articles with a lot more to come on the concept of kaizen and how and why it works and How we can use it to affect specific areas of our life like fitness or career or relationships Or things like that. So You can check out the blog you can sign up for my new newsletter to get regular updates to get basically the blog delivered to your inbox And I also have a facebook page under call to excellence and on there I also share a lot of inspirational information And we'll be having kaizen challenge questions and things like that. So Following on, you know, either my newsletter or my facebook page or any of those Cool. Thank you so much susan for your work and for sharing this inspirational information with us Um, I hope those who are watching this will take one small step Today on On the dream that you have so Thank you susan Well, thank you for having me george. It's been a pleasure


This series is tied 3-3, which means we have a game seven coming up on Saturday alongside Sarah Kousteck, our main man Frank Isola, I'm Michael Grady. Welcome in to the Fandall Sportsbook Nets post game Kouste. We'll start right away with you, your initial thoughts on this game six. Well it was a struggle for the Nets in many cases from the start to the finish of so many of these quarters. They started a game slow in the first quarter and the second quarter as well closed out the half in a manner that allowed the Bucks to get out on a run and same thing happened from the start of the third quarter and then bridging the gap between the third and fourth it was a 9-0 run for Milwaukee and despite the fact that the Nets cut it to five on two separate occasions just couldn't get over that hump and a big part of it was two F words, fast break points and free throws that's where Milwaukee really held the edge and held on to this one. Alright Frankie, I shoot thoughts on this one. Well why do our victory for the Milwaukee Bucks? They took care of business at home. I thought Chris Middleton was outstanding 19 points in both the first half and the second half and Sarah talked about those runs. Remember the Nets did close to 8277 under nine minutes to go and that's when Chris Middleton drew yet another foul while he was shooting a three. The Nets actually thought about challenging the call. They decided not to. I thought they made a mistake because if the foul was called on the floor then you know Milwaukee just has to run their offense instead Middleton went to the line knocked down all three free throws and that started the decisive 14-0 run which ended with that dunk that you showed from Yonah Santana. So I thought that was kind of a crucial stretch right there cut it to five then starting with that Chris Middleton the three free throws that was your ball game right there in the fourth quarter. Yeah I'm curious whether or not Steve Nash was asked about that in the post game because it seemed like Hardin was advocating for the challenge and then at some point Nash was talked out of it. We talked about the runs several runs in this game cut it to five multiple times and then Milwaukee would go on a spurt themselves when you're coming off of a game where Kevin Durant played 48 minutes James Hardin played 46 minutes you know exerting a lot of energy to get back into the game and then having enough to get over the hump it seemed like Milwaukee had a little bit more in the tank and just executed better every time Brooklyn made it close in particular Milwaukee did a really nice job with their movement they're cutting actions and you know overall for Milwaukee and getting their offense to go we focus so much on Yanis but Chris Middleton my goodness was he special in so many areas and ways and hitting some big time shots when needed and it really was even though Drew Holiday had a rough night for the Bucks in particular one attend from the three point line there was moments when he understood how to get downhill and how to attack and that's where Milwaukee was able to pick apart this Ned's defense in getting to the basket working the paint so much of it too was that early offense in those transition points that allowed them to get going and that's where it seemed like Brooklyn was just a step behind whether it was some turnovers early on that allowed for the the Bucks to find their way and fluidity in the run or even just in instances on the defensive end just not being quite as sharp quite a step ahead and that translated to the offensive side of things it felt like for Brooklyn because even though it was another big night for Kevin Durant he didn't get a lot of help otherwise yeah you're absolutely right you look at Jeff Green two for nine Joe Harris four for nine going into a game seven they're gonna need more I thought the one positive to come out of it for the Brooklyn Nets James Harden moved a little bit better now there are a couple of times where he had steals and instead of just sprinting up court to try to get a fast break layup everyone else passed him and he kind of set up the offense so you can tell the hamstring is bothering him but he did knock down a couple of more shots so I thought that was a positive but speaking of Chris Middleton let's think about this guys there were four times tonight he had two four point plays and two other times he was fouled while shooting a three so that's four possessions 14 points for Chris Middleton I really thought he was the difference holiday was very good and let's not forget about Yanis 30 points 17 rebounds knocked down some free throws he was a bit of a menace in the paint I know the Nets were complaining they felt a couple of times he should have been called for a charge I thought Yanis Middleton and drew holiday when they needed it guys in elimination game those guys came through yeah Middleton was huge with what he was able to produce tonight Yanis you almost expect those numbers 30 point 17 rebounds for a De Decumbo Kevin Durant coming off that 49 point performance in game 5 has 32 points shooting 50% from the floor 11 boards in this one


Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Spark Summit 2017, brought to you by Databricks. The Cube is live once again from Spark Summit 2017. I'm David Goh, your host here with George Gilbert, and we are interviewing many of the speakers that we saw on stage this morning at the keynote. Happy to introduce our next guest on the show. His name is Matt Fryer. Matt, how you doing? Very well. You are the Chief Data Science Officer. I don't see many CDSOs out there. Is that a common time? I think it's a newer title, and it's coming, I think, where companies that feel the use of data, data science, and algorithms are fundamental to their features. They're creating both the mix of commercial, technical, and sort of algorithmic skillsets as one team to execute together. And that's where the title came from. There's more coming. There's a number of Facebook have a few, as one, for example, but it's a newer title. I think it's going to become larger and larger. The time goes on. So it's CDSO for hotels.com. Correct. Something else we learned about you that you may not want me to reveal, but I heard you were the inspiration for Captain Obvious. Is that true? That's not true. I think Captain Obvious is our inspiration of our brand. So there's an awesome brand team at our office out of Dallas. Yeah, I was kidding. You have to. I think the captain, we all love the captain. He has a good humorous moments and he keeps us all kind of happy. Oh yeah, he states the obvious. We're going to talk about some of the obvious and maybe some of the not so obvious here in this interview. So let's talk a little bit about company culture because you talked a lot on the stage this morning about customer first kind of approach rather than oh, look what I can do with the technology. Talk a little bit more about the culture at hotels.com. And that's important. And I think we're a very data-driven culture. I think most tech companies and travel and technology companies have that kind of ethos. But fundamentally, the focus and the reason we exist is for the customer. So we want to bring and actually an even better way than that I think is the people. So whether it's the focus on the customer, if we do the right thing by the customer, we fundamentally want you to use our platform time and time again. Whatever need you have booking, lodging and travel, please use our platform. That's the crucial win. So to do that, we have to always make delight you in every experience you have with us. And equally about people, it's about the team. So we have an internal concept course being supportive. So the whole part of our team culture is that everybody helps everybody else out. We don't single things out. We're all part of all the same team and we all win if all of us pull together. And that makes it a great place, fun place to work. We're going to play with some new technologies. Tech is important to us, but actually the people is even more important to us. I'm sure you love the Spark Summit then, same kind of spirit here. It's great. And I think it's my third Spark Summit, my second time over in San Francisco. And the size of it is very impressive now. And I just love meeting other people, learning about some of the things that are up to how we can apply those parts of our business. And hopefully sharing a little bit what we're up to. Well, let's dive into how you're playing it to your business. You talked about this evolution tour becoming an algorithm business. What does that mean and what part does Spark play in that? I think a lot of it is about how do you, if you think about a bit of the journey, historically a lot of the opportunity came in building new features, constantly building that there's like almost like a semi-arms race about how to build more and more features. The crucial thing I think going forward and particularly with mobile devices now, you know, over half our traffic comes from people using smartphones and both the app and mobile web. That bringing together means that being more targeted in understanding your journey and people are less tolerant to time. Speed is much more important. People are expect things to be right there when they need it. Relevance is much more important to people. So we need to bring all those things together to offer a much more targeted experience and a much more real-time experience. People expect you to have understood what they did milliseconds ago and respond to that. The only way you can do that is using data science and algorithms. You balance that on the business operations side, which is how do you scale? You know, the analogy I use with say anomaly detection, which is the crucial future for enterprises, is you used to have a lot of large business intelligence, lots of reports, pages of paper. Now people have things like Tableau, Power BI. Those are great and you need those to start with. Really as a business leader, you want to know, tell me what's broken. Tell me what's changed, because if it's changed, something caused the change. Tell me why it's slowly moving. And most importantly, tell me where the opportunity is. And that transforms the conversation when algorithms can really surface that to users. And it's about organic intelligence. It's not about artificial intelligence. It's about how would you bring together the people and the events and technology to really do a great job for customers. You mentioned AI. You made a big bold claim about AI. I'm going to ask George to weigh in on this in just a moment. You said AI was going to be the next big thing in the travel industry. Can you explain it? One of the next big things I think. Yeah, I think it's already happening. In fact, our chairman, Mr. Dilla, made that statement very recently, and also backed up by both the CEO and the brand president, where it's, if you think about 20 years ago, one of the things both Expedia and hotels.com, and the wider travels to online space did, was democratize price information and made it transparent to users. So previously, the power was with the travel agents. That power moved to the user. They had the information. And that's evolved over time. And what we feel with artificial intelligence, particularly organic intelligence, and you enable as like mobile messaging and having conversations and machine learning make this happen. You can turn the screen around and actually empower users almost with the second revolution. They actually, they can have the advice and the benefits you had a number of years ago from travel agents. A, they have the price transparency. They have the other part now, which is the content, the advice, and what's the most relevant to help them. And you can listen to what they're saying to you, send it as a customer, and actually we can now replay the perfect information back to them, or increasingly perfect since time goes on. Okay, that's unpacking a little bit, George. This is a journey to go on. Let's look into the hood a little bit. That is fascinating, because in the way you sort of broke that out with, it wasn't actually only travel, but over the last couple of decades, sort of price transparency became an issue for many industries. But what you're saying now is by giving the content to surprise and delight the customer, as long as you're collecting the data breadcrumbs that help you do that, you're not giving up control. You're actually creating stickiness. Yeah, we're empowering as a language I use. Yeah. And if you empower the user, they're more likely to come back to use your service in the future. And that's really what we want. We want happy customers. Tell us a little bit at the risk of dropping a little in the weeds. Tell us a little bit about how you empower. In other words, how do you know what type of content to serve up, and how do you measure how they engage with it? It's a great question. And I think it's quite an embryonic part of the world right now. I don't think anybody's, I think we made some great developments. I still think it was a long journey we have. But it's a lot about how do you, and this is true across data science and machine learning. Great data science is fundamental to having great feedback loops. So there's lots of different techniques and tactics around how you might discover those feedback loops. And customers demand that you use their data to help them. So we need to get faster in streaming as one way that's becoming feasible. And then the advances in streaming and it's great data bricks are working on that. But the advances in streaming allows us to feed that loop. They take those real-time signals as well as previous signals to really help figure out what you're trying to do today. What content, interesting thing is that Netflix and Amazon were some pioneers in this space where if you use Netflix service, often you go, how did they know this video was going to be right for me? And some of the comments. And you can say, well, what they're actually doing is they're looking at micro segments. So previously everyone talked about customer segments as these very large groups, and they have their place, but increasing the machine learning allows you to build micro segments. But what I can start to do is actually discover from the behavior of others things you might be very relevant things you're going to be very interested in and actually help inspire you and discover things you didn't even know existed. And by filling that gap and using those micro segments as well as truly personalization, I can bring that together to offer you a much more enhanced service. And so help make that concrete in terms of what would I as a potential, I want to plan a vacation for the summer. I have my five and a half inch or five, seven iPhone and that's my primary device. And in banking it's moved from tying everything to the checking counter, tying every interaction to your mobile device. So what would you show me on my mobile device that would get me really engaged about going to some location? So I think a lot of it is about where you are in that journey. So you think there's so many different routes and routes customers can take through that buying decision and depends on the trip type, whether it's a leisure trip, seeing family and friends, how much knowledge you may have about that money, have you been there before? We look for all those signals to try and help inspire you. So a great example might be if you've stayed in a hotel on our site before and you like that hotel and you come back and do a search again, we try and make it easy to continue by pinning that hotel at the top. Try and make it easy to task complete. We have a trip planner capability you'll see on the home screen which allows you to record and play backs from your previous searches. So you can quickly see and compare where you've been and what's interesting for you. But on top of that, we can then use the signals and increasingly we have a very advanced sort of filter list and that's a key and we're looking at sort of how we do conversations and chatbots as a sort of future to how to have that conversation to say, hey, here's a list of hotels which we used in a mix of your, the types of preferences that we understood about you and the wider thing, where you are in the world, what's going on, what time of day. We take hundreds of different signals to try and figure out what the right list is for you. And from that list, the great thing is most people interact with that list and give us more signals exactly what you wanted. We can hone and hone and hone and repeat. Because instead of the start, for example, the majority of customers will do multiple searches. They want to understand what the market is. They may not be interested in one particular place. They may have a sweeter place as they're interested in. And even now we've moved and further the funnel investing behind how can you figure out what destination you're interested in. So you may not even know what destination you're interested in or there might be other destinations that you didn't know were very relevant for your use case, particularly if you're going on vacation. We can help inspire you to find that hidden gem at that hidden great price. You may not even know it existed. We know a much better job. We can show you how busy the market is. So how fast you should be looking to book there. If it's a very compressed and busy market, you need to get in there quick to lock your price in and we now provide that information to help you make a better decision. We can mine all that data to empower you to make smart decisions and smart data. I want to clarify something quick. I saw in your demonstration this morning you were talking about detecting the differences between photos and user-generated content. So do you have users actually posting their own photos of the hotel right next to the Photoshop pictures at the hotel? We do. We post and what are some of the ramifications of that? So it's an interesting advance that we've made. So we've, in the last sort of year we now offer an asking users to submit their photos to help other users. I think one of the crucial things is about how to be authentic. Over the years we've had tens of millions of testimonial reviews, textual reviews. And we can see there's a really crucially important to users in their buying decisions. It scares the hotel owners of death though, doesn't it? Well, I think it does. But I think it's the testimony of the customer. One of the key things we call them is we have verified reviews. So to leave a review on our site you've had to have stayed in that hotel. And we think that's a crucial step in really helping to say these are your customers. I'm very recent and in recent times we've taken that product further that now when you actually arrive at the hotel within a few hours, we'll ask you what your first impressions were. And we'll ask if you want to share that with the hotel owner. To give the hotel owner a chance to actually rectify any early challenges so you can have a great stay. And one of the crucial things we have is that what's really, really important is that users and customers have a great stay. That reflects on our Net Promoter Score and their view of us. And we need to fill that cycle and make sure we have happy users. So that real-time review is super crucial in basically helping hotels, they want happy users and customers as well. It helps them to quite a course correct if there's an issue. And we can step in as well as help the user if it's a really deep issue. And then with the photos, the key I think is how to navigate and understand what the photo is. So the user helps us by tagging that, which is great. But how we- Possibly mistagging it. Possibly mistagging it. Occasionally, we're building some scale as you heard on how to tackle that. But the crucial thing is how to bring these together. If you're using a mobile device, you've got to scan through each photo and places around the world have limited bandwidth, and limited time to go through them. So what we're now working on is how to assess the quality of those photos to try and make sure we authentically, and what we want to do is get the customer the most likely experience they will have. You know, we are, as I said before, we're on the customer's kind of focus. We want to make sure they get the best photos that are the most realistic of what's going to happen. And they're the most diverse. You want to see three photos exactly the same. And we're working on them. You can swipe left and swipe right. We'll work on how that display evolves over time. But it's exciting. Very exciting, fascinating stuff. I'm sorry that we're up against a hard break coming here just in a moment, but I wanted to give you just 30 seconds to kind of sum up maybe the next big technical challenge you're looking at that involves Spark and we'll close with that. Cool, it's a great question. I think I talked a little bit about that in the keynote. In turn, we call it the kind of the outs challenge. You know, how to scale the mountain, which is there's been great advance on how to stream data into platforms. Spark is a core part of that. And the platforms that we've been building and both internally and partnering with Databricks and using their platform has really given us a large boost going forwards. But how you turn those algorithms and that competitive algorithmic advantage into a live production environments, whether it's marketplaces, ad tech marketplaces, or websites, or in court centres, or on social media, wherever the platform that it needs to go, that's a hard problem right now. Or I think it's a too hard problem right now. And I love to see, and we're going to invest behind that, a transformation that hopefully this time next year that is no longer a problem. It's actually an asset. Yeah, well, I hope I'm not captain obvious to say. I know you're up to the challenge. Awesome. Yeah, thank you so much, Matt Fryer. We appreciate you being on the show. Thank you for sharing what's going on hotels.com. We have time for the chance to talk about it. And thank you all for watching theCUBE. We're going to be back in just a few moments for the next guest here at Spark Summit 2017.


My name is Megan Turner, we're at Digital Akidna. You can follow me there at M-Turner on Twitter. I have shared my slides on Google Slides today, so if you'd like to follow on your laptop or phone, you can follow that link there. And just a little bit of background on the company I work for, you know, over there. Digital Akidna is a triple shop located in London, Ontario. We do different things from sales support to content marketing and management. We love using Drupal and are proud to use it. We are a team of 60 plus Akidna's proudly and still growing strong. So before getting into the design tools today, I wanted to go over just a little bit of background of the overall process before getting into that. So before going into the design process, we need to be able to get the information from the client so you have something to work off of. So following process is going to help create a clean transition in between each step. So if we go and get the information from the client, define our roles, target audience, tone and content, what's important to the users coming to the site, the business and the client, we can really target the design after that. And other things coming into role like the site map, we'll kind of say are we starting from scratch? Do we need to do a rebrand of the colors and logos of the site? Do they have a brand that we can use for the site? So all these kind of come into play before we can get into this process. So and then getting into that core design phase, once that is established, then you can get into the development and then eventually having your finished products for your client. So jumping deeper into the design process before touching on those design tools so we know what they're actually being used for. So a design process is an approach for breaking down a larger project into manageable chunks. Architects, engineers, scientists and other thinkers use this process as well to solve a variety of problems. We define the steps needed to tackle each project and we hold all those ideas throughout the whole process using this. So specifically today I'm talking about a web design process. So quick overview is we got our wireframes, style tile, which is like a new board there, comp and then your prototype. So let's just break down these steps a little bit more so you know what they entail exactly. So jumping into wireframe. Not so much design at this point. You're more so getting those views and content types for Drupal specifically. So different types that we can go into and a few different ways. So wireframe is very back to white. Like I said, we're not introducing any colors or images yet. We don't have the client to see that kind of thing. It's more so the layout of the pages that we're working on. So boxes representing images, lines representing where the text is going to go, and working out that functionality for each of the pages. And so we can do that in like a sketchbook if you don't have a lot of time and you just really want to like sketch it out quickly before going into a design process because it gives you a better idea. Or going in the method of using a white board, which is really great. We use this at a cabinet because it's really good for collaboration in the team setting. You can get the designers, developers and managers in the room and you can really work together working out how the pages are going to be before moving into the design. As well as there's a lot of online tools we can be using as well where you can still collaborate with your team members. They can comment on those wireframes as well. And the online process is good too because it kind of gives the chance for people to kind of comment at their own time. Like if everyone can't get into a meeting one day, it kind of gives them that flexibility. So once we have a solid wireframe, we can also work on the style tile, which is like a mood board. So the feeling and mood of the set. And it's important to know which direction you want to go in when you're making these style tiles because it's going to contain over various design elements of what your UI could look like. For example, I'm going in deeper with the style tile. So typically it's going to be an online program doing this, such as like a program like Sketch. And it's helping portray the feeling of the site. As we can see the colors, there's some action words there, fonts, icons, imagery, like input fields and those kind of things there. And then here's just another example to help you get the idea of what kind of things you could expect on a mood board or style tile. Once we got that style down and we have the wireframe, we can really go into working on what everything is going to look like when it comes together. So moving into the comp phase, there's a lot of resources out there to create this. So this is why I think the typical idea of how a comp is made since technology is advanced, we can use online programs. So we can choose to make a full comp page or you can do a comic design method where you're designing in sections. So forms and headers and footers or we can do the full page method which I'm going to show you here. So this is just an example of a comp for a client that if you want to do a responsive design. And this helps bring together all the stuff that we did in the style tile. So the forms, text, color, fonts, images and how it's all really slowing together there. It helps bring all the ideas together to form a page. And I guess depending on the budget for the client, the more you can do or the more flexibility you will have. So here is just the responsive, but you might want to do a secondary page as well. So having home secondary and then that could show a little bit of functionality so they know what it's going to look like on the page. Once our comps are down, sometimes you can go into a prototyping phase where you're showing how it's going to flow a little bit. So there's a lot of online software programs I'm going to talk about that you can use for this. And it's more like an interactive comp as you think about it. And the client is going to be able to see how it functions. So here is just an example of Marvell, which is a prototyping tool. And we'll be able to upload our designs, export them for a program such as Scature, Photoshop and you'll be able to customize it. So making clickable boxes like on top of your comps. So say you have a login field, you'll be able to drag over a box and you'll be able to set a destination after the user is clicking that. So they click the login let's say and then it's going to go right to the home page. So it kind of gives a feeling of how everything is going to flow there with your comps. And then I'm just going to show a little bit of example here. So here's an example on revision. So here we just have it's a static page obviously, but if I click around here, you can see it kind of flows and you're seeing what kind of functionality or steps that are going to happen here. We don't see it. Oh, sorry about that. So this is InVision and you can kind of see me when I click buttons here, which are just links to the different comps. It kind of shows that and you can even like go up here, click on your profile. So that's pretty cool. So once all those are done, then obviously you're going to have to go into development stage, develop all this and have your finished product. So now I'm going to go more so into the process that we use at Akidna. Some of the challenges we face in the past with tools and views and diving into a bit deeper of what's coming to the future for us. So design tools definitely have advanced over the years, but before there wasn't a one-fit-all tool for comps and wireframes for us, we were using two different programs and there were quite a few cons using this method. So in the past we were using Illustrator for our wireframing and Photoshop to produce high-fidelity comps. And Illustrator worked fine for what we needed it for, but it was difficult and took a lot of time, mostly because there are certain things you can't do like you can do in the program sketch where it makes the process a lot faster, like changing an icon. For example, in Illustrator you would have to go click the icon on one page and change it on each page, whereas Sketch has things called symbols and styles where you can set those and if you change one it changes all across. And then Photoshop is similar in that manner, but it's also a raster-based program in order to give those high-res comps to give to the client the file size and it being really huge and sometimes ending up Photoshop crashing. So our present solution is using Sketch and it's miles ahead of Illustrator in terms of wireframing comps or concern. Photoshop still has its uses and we still use Photoshop in Illustrator, but more so image editing and logo icon, big vector design-based stuff. So it's about 80% Sketch doing the comps and whatnot. So just going into this Sketch if you've never known or heard about it. Sketch is a great tool. It was founded in 2008 in the Netherlands. It's a vector-based workflow and it makes really beautiful high-quality artwork from start to finish. Top companies are using it today, Google, Apple, Facebook and much more. This is a much better solution for us because it's one program, has a large supportive community, there's a lot of third-party tools out there that you can use and it's a much cleaner UI than what we were using before. So it's very clean and has what we needed right there and not any extra things. Another benefit as well is there's smaller file sizes with the high fidelity comps that we're producing. Now going into the future, now obviously I'm not a fortune teller or anything I can't predict what's coming. But as we grow and technology is advancing, we are trying new things and trying to incorporate a better and more efficient process for us that's going to benefit the company, benefit our clients. But anyways, moving on, design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Does anyone know who said this? This is Steve Jobs. So we can have the best design website but if it doesn't work in efficient ways for our users, this could result in a bad website for the user experience when they're going on. And this is kind of introducing me and talking to you about pattern. Pattern allows a great HTML prototyping tool. It's an atomic design based prototyping tool which if you know it's familiar with atomic design, it includes atoms, molecules, organisms, templates and pages kind of in mind when you're designing. So atoms for example being form labels, a button or a font. Molecules for example being the groups of elements such as having your search input field with the form label and the button together. And then the organisms being groups of organisms, the groups of molecules and the atoms. So standalone reusable components. And then moving into templates, these provide context relative to molecules and organisms. Helpful for designers and the client because it's grouping all those together to produce the final there. And finally the pages. So it's the instant of the template swapping of that placeholder and putting in the content there which is giving a more accurate representation of what the user will see. And different languages it's available in. You can use this for Drupal, there's Mustache, there's just a twig version and there's also a thin version which is very customizable. There's a lot of benefits of using this program. So it has a focus on Drupals which is great for outside of kindness and stuff that we're using. There's a lot of plugins available. The code is very visible. So once you're done designing the pattern lab you can take that template code and apply it to your projects because it's already there. So you're only making the template once. So that's a great process. And you can see everything coming fast together. It's better than just a static comp. And the competition. Sorry. I was going to show you what it looks like. It's a little bit complex idea to get a hold of. I did a fresh install on my local of the pattern lab for Drupal. And this is what it looks like when you first get it. So there's a menu up here which shows you that you can look at the different elements. So the atoms I was talking about the molecules and organisms templates the pages. So as we scroll down we can see all the different elements here. And even going into the sub things there where you can see all the different things that they can do. So this is an example of a homepage bringing all the elements before together and what that would look like. Now moving into some of the competition tools and other tools are out there because obviously we can't use every single tool that has to be, we have a process of what ones we're using. So there's a lot out there and once you find works best for you you can implement that in your process. With making sure it provides awesome results and experience for your client and mine. So some other tools that are out there are such as sketches we've done before that people are using. Adobe XD, Zeppelin and Envision. Some prototyping tools such as Marvell and Envision. So some of these tools so Envision has a lot of great aspects to it actually. You can do mood boards in there from prototypes and you can even create your wireframes in that tool. Marvell is similar in the sense that it's just a prototyping tool though. And then you have the Zeppelin which uses style guides. So developers and designers are in the focus of that sense. So you would import your sketch files in this and you have access to the CSS borders with colors and more. So I would import a page and then I could click on an element and all my column on the right there will come up all the CSS for that element. So say it was a box, it would say the border with the color, the dimensions and that makes it very useful. So in terms of other tools while you are creating comps and going through the design process I'm going to talk about here. So some stock image resources you can go to or design assets. So one of the best sites I love to go on is Unsplash. They have really high quality images on there which is great because you want the high quality when you're creating those comps if you just need the placeholder for the moment. And then in terms of design assets we have the Google Fonts, Font Awesome, Noun Project and so Noun Project has all your icons on there you can search. And Google Fonts obviously is Fonts it's great because it gives pairing suggestions and you can download them you can download from thin to bold you can kind of customize it that way and Font Awesome works with your CSS so you implement it there and that's for icons as well. And just to recap, recap, sorry and conclude I'm going to quickly answer to what the right solution is in long term there's always new technologies that are constantly being presented and updated but by understanding what your needs are the client's needs and the pros and cons of the tools that are out there you can make the right decision to improve the user experience and productivity Any questions? Yes? I use a couple of years ago I cannot remember the name of it but it was a total prototype that you can design apps so build a little app as a prototype Wait, sorry what was that? It's a software that I use a couple of years ago and I cannot remember the name and you by chance would know like you make it a whole app just like the designs in there too and all the functionality of the app you can have like the code and the design I'm not sure Any other questions? Alright, thank you for coming


Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning, hi Bob. On behalf of the commanding general, Marine Corps installations east, Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune Brigadier General Robert F. Costelvi, welcome to this morning's groundbreaking ceremony for the Department of the Navy, Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune and Duke Energy. We are pleased that you have joined us for this special occasion. You are also requested to remain seated throughout the ceremony, except for those occasions when you will be requested to rise. You are also asked to turn off your cell phones and remain seated until the conclusion of the ceremony. The invocation for today's ceremony is being given by Lieutenant Commander Danny B. Purvis. Let us pray, Almighty God, I thank you for the opportunity to gather here this morning for this occasion and I thank you for loving us more than we could ever understand and bestow more grace upon us than we could ever imagine. I thank you Lord for the precious gift of liberty that you have bestowed upon us and for entrusting us with the sacred task of defending that liberty here and around the globe. And even as we celebrate here this morning, we have comrades in harm's way, Lord. Watch over them, protect them and bring them home safely and soon. And Lord for our comrades who tragically lost their lives yesterday may you be with their friends and their families and may they feel your grace and your peace as they go through this difficult time and remind them Lord they do not go through it alone. Lord you have given us this beautiful planet and placed us as stewards of your creation. As we gather here this morning, may we be reminded of the integral part you have given us as caretakers of the earth. May we use the technology that you have given us to make this a better world and to do our small part to help take care of the planet with which you have blessed us. Lord I ask you to bless the work of our hands, this great Navy Marine Corps team and God continue to bless the United States of America. For it is in your name that I pray, Amen. Ladies and gentlemen please rise for the invocation and remain standing for the march on of the colors followed by the playing of our national anthem.


Kintsugi, the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken vessels, broken pottery and ceramics with a mixture of lacquer and gold, became so popular in 16th century Japan that people deliberately broke their pottery in order to have a kintsugi treatment done to it. They just wanted those golden veins in their broken vessels to enhance their beauty. Kintsugi translated literally means golden joinery and the Japanese didn't think their vessels were beautiful despite their breakings and their repairs. They believed they were beautiful because of them and I think what's true of ceramics is true of people. I want you to welcome any golden joinery going on in your life today because those golden veins in your life, in the broken places in our lives enhance our beauty and enhance I believe our voice and impact into other people's lives. What really helps you guys today, your brokenness makes you more beautiful. Love you, stay strong, take care.