Amudim - Unite To Heal 5

and his wife tamar my relationship with kieva goes back 30 some odd years when he was a talmud of mine in 11th grade he embodies the expression of khazal mithamidayosamikulam from your students you learn more than anybody else in my personal life over the last 30 years when when i had challenges and within my home within my kahila i turned to kiwi for strength and for guidance kivi has together in life we've traveled and we've learned certain lessons i believe we can express it in last week's parasha the torah describes lovin's engagement with yaakov avinu loven refers to his children as bonai bonai the children are mine as if they are a possession yaakov refers to them as achen he refers to his own children as his brothers rashi explains because they were brothers in arms when times were difficult at a time of sorrow at the time of muhammad yaakov turned to his children and dealt with them as brothers validating each person's opinion and relying on them for strength and for guidance kiwi thank you for everything you've done for me for the last 30 years hey everybody we want to welcome you into our dining room as we have a discussion with one another with you about parenting about humility about what it means to remain connected in a very unknown world but we want to take this opportunity to speak about what amudha means to us i think for many of you know i'm serving on the clinical advisory board but i've also been a part of the amudin family almost since its inception it's an organization that means the world to us simply because they're saving lives on a daily basis and saving a life is saving a universe and they do that in the most beautiful of ways possible so here we are talking about life talking about process talking about parenting talking about relationships trying to find ways to infuse love into our own hearts into our own homes and we hope you enjoy i know for myself i always wonder how you feel about this but for myself speaking about many different subjects i often feel competent i feel engaged i feel secure anytime i speak about parenting there's often like this imposter syndrome that overcomes me and a feeling of like what right do i have to speak about this yes this very humbling process one that there's no real way to get it right there's no real way to get it perfect um the best way to approach it is almost one where you're engaged in it and you're thinking about it and you're conscientious about what it means and what it means to us and what it means to our children but it always humbles me and the one thing i know about this process is that different than every every other you know topic that we might discuss is that it's a topic that we're all in it together um there's no there's no one that's separated from the the crowd there's no one that stands out i think there are those you stand out by the degree of conscientiousness much more so than the product or the result and we put in our effort and then it's bestowed upon us the ability to see the beauty in our children that's the gift that hashem gives us but it's something that when we humble ourselves and get to a place where we really understand that this is about humanity and about us as a people trying to stay grounded in what's meaningful about being a parent and what it means to to love your children unconditionally for who they are and what they represent it's something that really uh really humbles me so i'm sharing this with you and with everyone else that's out there it's a conversation in our in our dining room about what it's like to be a parent the ups and downs the struggle and ultimately being in it together it's interesting we're both therapists and i think there's a lot that people say about being therapists and raising kids and what that means for them i myself am a child of a therapist and as you see many of my family members are also therapists as well but there's certainly an expectation you walk into a room there's there's almost an expectation like you have it figured out differently than anybody else and the truth is the the sheer act of attempting to parent attempting to guide and to nurture is one that humbles anybody who's who's engaged in it i remember we had an experience which always stands out um we were at a uh i think it was a challenge if i remember correctly they had like some event here in queens where uh they had all these like bouncy houses and things of that sort um like a trip and uh we were there together one of our kids started freaking out there was like an event that happened and we didn't really know what was going on at the time and there we were trying to like settle it and everyone is running around at different places one of our kids was in excruciating amounts of pain and we didn't understand what that was about he was eating uh cotton candy at the time we found out a minute later that uh there was a bee on the cotton candy this really happened and he ate he ate the b the b didn't exactly like it so much well he didn't eat the bee the bee stung his tongue yeah he still has a mark he still has a mark from it and apparently getting stung by a bee on your tongue is extremely painful right and there there we were trying to parent as best as we could in the unknown in this environment with all this chaos and being watched and being watched and that was a moment i remember there was a a therapist someone that we know well yeah we were in a peer supervision group together yeah and she made the comment as as she sees us like trying to create some sense of normalcy and what it's like in that moment yeah and she said um she goes oh look at the two therapists trying to raise their kids and i still remember that moment it was it was it was a nice it was like a hug yeah yeah that's what it felt like yeah it's like a reminder yeah we're in this together and that's ultimately i hope what this conversation is like one where we speak about some of the things that matter to us the things that are important and hopefully we could learn from it just a bit there are three ideas that we would like to cover we'll take turns with it one is about attachment and connection in childhood and and the importance of it all um and also another idea which is quite controversial especially at this particular juncture in time is unconditional love versus expectations which is certainly a challenging one and different styles and parenting where i think we'd like to speak about a concept that you know we're so often raised with the idea that parents need to be unified and exactly the same and i think if there's one thing that's going to become clear throughout this discussion is that however much we we love and care for one another which we which we do we're very different human beings and being different human beings is going to produce different parenting styles and how does that play out you know with our children and that's where we want to start so i want to start with uh with an idea i was learning we're actually learning this a little a couple weeks ago um last week we were talking about it which was nice that we're we're in the process of of the torah we're talking about avraham avinu and the tasks that abram ravino the test that aubameyang went through and there are a few that really stand out and like the lord jonathan sachs kind of like spends a lot of time focusing on these dynamics what does it mean to leave a house to lachlan what does it mean to be to be tasked with slaughtering your son what does it mean to be tasked with letting your son go ishmael go on his own and what could we ultimately learn from these particular elements they're all about self all about parenting all about relationships and how do we understand it so with all the questions that are asked there's certainly a lot to learn about self and parents and lord jonathan sachs here's one critical idea where he says all of these stories all of these tests that admirabinu had they all represent breaking free breaking away avram leaving his household breaking free from his son and also letting his son go they all represent a certain concept and even though it was challenging for him uh to go through all these experiences it was really hard for him to engage in in this journey of letting go ultimately that becomes like the fabric of the test the success was his ability to separate um and there's a lot that's been discussed about helicopter parents and what it means to be very involved in your kids needs and desires and and sort of like superimposing yourself on their being and one of the lessons that we could we could take out from these stories is that in order to connect in order to really connect with self you need to go through a process of disconnection you need to see yourself and see your children as an entity that's separate from you they're connected with us they're part of us but on the other hand they're also their own autonomous characters their own beings they're people that need to be valued and nurtured and cherished simply because they are unique and they're then and and they may have elements of us inside of them but what we celebrate is the fact that there's that separation there's that difference i think it's one of the most humbling parts of being a parent we just had our oldest go interesting for the first time i miss him yeah and like just the like the the pain the pain of sending a child away yes but then met by the experience of knowing that this is the best for him this is where he needs to be where he could discover himself and he could grow and find himself yeah without our presence just by himself and that was really like the process what you call like and also you know with with with the al-qaeda and sending away his son learning to to value and love another human being with that separation seeing them as their own individual and it's it's an idea that really stays with us that that our children are a part of us but they're also separate from us and it's our task to see them as separate characters that we're we're supposed to nurture them and build them up so they could become their own beings their own people they could develop their own families and their own lives for themselves and i think so often what gets complicated in parenting is that it's so close it touches the fiber of all of our beings yes that it's so hard to see them as separate we just want to protect and we want to make sure they're okay and never fall in any particular manner to just be in a space of like sheer fusion and what we learned from all these stories is that fusion is largely not helpful in helping a person develop to become their own being it's helpful possibly in the beginning the early early stages of life but as they begin to to age it's it's so much more about seeing them as separate characters and how could we nurture them so they could become the best version of themselves i know that um i want to make our way into the world of attachment um and i always love hearing your ideas on that subject yeah but i'm like thinking about as you're speaking um about separation and i'm thinking like i think that's in some ways one of the hardest things for me as a parent and you know as as the kids get older and like this the tension between protection and and letting go and i think that we experienced this from the beginning of of you know as a woman as a mother the idea of separation like birth being the first it being you know notoriously a painful experience physically and i think that as as you know children develop and and grow up um the separation continues to hurt but on a on a less and less physical level and it just turns into more emotional and then and and psychological and ends up actually being um an internal process i think for the parent also as a therapist when a client is in like a deep experience and i know that she's touching something new and there's like a new tenderness that's happening and i need to become extremely in tune so i have to actually kind of quiet all of myself you know from like my my mind to my senses to just quiet all the noise inside me including all the stuff i know about her because i need to create space for something new and just to create an immense amount of room for her you know it's this idea that i've been learning recently of team two of like making yourself like so small to give room to the other and and hashem does tim soup for us so that we can grow so that we have space for ourselves and this is what you're talking about like as parents you know um acting on on on tim tsum within our own selves to create space for them so that's speaking to that idea so i need to i need to do that on the other hand if i do that but then she has nobody to come back to and she has no one to to kind of fall back into routine with and a rhythm with and if if i'm not there so she can find herself that's good but if i'm not there once she's found herself and i was never there before then she has nothing to rely on and it's the same thing with parenting i find it's like you were saying as they get older we need to do the separation but if we never had the connection then it's not separation it's just lack of connection and separation isn't a lack of connection it's being connected and then giving space to them to grow so what so that connection at the beginning that attachment that that early childhood you know home stuff like all the stuff we know about all the stuff that you know happens on this dining room table and on the other dining room tables that have been broken and painted on which you hate i hate paint yeah i just feel like it doesn't belong it's part of attachment you think so we're putting tape in the category okay it's necessary i think so if you notice this table does not have any paint on it and that's part that's my attachment to you i very much appreciate that um but this this is a pretty pretty relatively new table so it's also speaking to that but um i think that being that self that that that that connection you know is um that needs to be built throughout and continue to be nurtured throughout so it's this tension between giving space and then and then saying i'm here and i think that part of that is being able to be a separate person on our own you know i think our children want to know that obviously we care about them in every fiber of our being and they impact us but if they think that our entire self is based on them that's extremely frightening to them they need to know that we exist even outside of them and that we exist no matter with what happens with them and that is for them it's like you are there and i can lean into you so that separation needs to be built on that connection and that separation also fortifies us which ultimately gives them a safer base and this by the way is you know like i can't not talk about marriage stuff because that's like just interesting we're here in our diet you know it's true we might as well we might as well like this is like a date but it's not really cheers um that when uh when a child learns this process of connection and separation and he learns during the separation he needs to be alone right so when you let go and you say like letting go that means you're saying like you could be on your own then the child turns into an adult that knows how to be alone and an adult that knows how to be alone is also an adult that learns how to be connected so it's the cycle that feeds itself if you don't know how to be alone then you'll end up being lonely because you won't be able to be there for another you won't be able to modulate yourself you'll you'll drain the other so to speak that's like sort of the codependent relationship right an often very misunderstood term but it's what the ability to be alone is what builds the ability to be connected versus codependent you know so sometimes when it's hard for me and like you know thinking of this idea of like whatever that letting go is for me whatever the new stage of letting go then i think like i am i i tap into like i'm giving to my child the ability to be alone and that grounds me for a few moments until it doesn't until you start missing again yes exactly i've always loved like the the valvey like sort of metaphor that he uses i know winnicott also uses the similar messages of the uh good enough mother no yeah the good enough mother but like the idea that we infuse something in our children yes like they're different ways of looking at a child and you could look at a child and see them as a reflection of yourself and that is like a fusion that is a connection it's one and the same and the message that you implicitly send to that child is that you are me you're an extension of me and when they make their way out into the world with that belief they're they can't really stand up on their own two feet right there isn't a sense of like i have an identity i have a being right because their identity is wrapped up in the identity of their parents right it's a new beginning but it's a good beginning but it's not a good process yeah like yeah when a cut winner cut says that the child learns about himself through the parent like you know the mirroring you know he coined that concept that he used that word when it comes to you know that when you smile at a baby the baby doesn't smile just smile back and then because he sees you smiling the baby learns about his own smile because you're smiling so he's saying that the baby learns about himself through the attachment these are you know a lot of the attachment theories but you're saying like if all you see in your adult baby it's very easy to smile at a baby you know because it doesn't really you don't have any conflict about it it's just cute you know but what about a grown child what about like you know a right and all their different and all they're different suddenly one of the delicious stuff yeah and then we want to control their smile and we want to impact it and we want to see on their face what makes us feel good as parents like a lot of times it's like stop being what makes me insecure so then we want to contort the face as opposed to what you're saying like see the face yeah that's the the flip side of that is that you either look and there's a mirror and you see yourself and this is just an extension or you look and you see their soul you look at their eyes and you're not you're not seeing your own reflection but rather you're seeing them you're seeing something new it's like the creation of something that's most beautiful and mysterious and then you ask like questions like who are you teach me who you are and tell me about yourself and tell me about your nuances and your sense of individuality and that message somehow gets like imprinted on their own being and they when they make their way out into the world there's a sense of like i i have a self yeah myself was given to me it was gifted to me and i don't have to fight for that identity i could be different because i was seen as an individual i was felt as an individual and i think it's like it's amazing to look at the research of of even like the first year of childhood and the implications that it has later on in life it's all free verbal there's nothing there's there's no discussion of of self at that time all it is is do i see this child as its own entity or do i see this child as a reflection of myself and its own entity it enters it brings it introduces us to the world of mystery i don't know who you are but i know that you're beautiful i know that you're perfect and you'll teach me about who you are and i think a lot of times as you're talking about this miracle like i'm thinking what parents end up seeing and this is something this is this has been you know um my own personal journey with it also is that but but i'm i'm almost perfect as a parent but i'm saying in that almost right almost right exactly exactly um is is the piece with when they see something in their child when we see something in our child that we don't like then it's hard to see past the regrets the guilt the insecurities their own stuff our own mistakes their own questions our own mysteries and parts of us that we don't like right so we end up you know being blinded by our own selves and that way also i find that this is something that i work a lot with women when it comes to their own when i see like a stuck in a mother very often what's behind us stuck is is guilt and regret and then as soon as we somehow like touch that and quiet it a bit or at least put it to sleep for now then like what emerges is this like uncontrollable compassion almost like this deep like ah you know but he's so something and she's so and his compassion is right underneath it well there's like this parallel process that like if we learn to accept our own humanity and what i mean by humanity i mean our own flaws we could accept the fact that we're very imperfect as as an individual and as a people we're simply imperfect if we could accept that in ourselves it becomes so much simpler to accept that in another yeah certainly in our own children and it's like if we can't accept ourselves and our own flaws we certainly can't accept our children's faith yes and if we can accept our own then we can really lean into the fact that we're all trying to figure it out yes they're trying to figure it out we could respect that process yeah and when we resist that process we end up resenting the fact that our kids are making us do that process and we end up blaming them for the process that we have to we have to do i sometimes say in like my lectures that if you're not especially with adolescents like if you're not like changing in some way like if you're not if if everything is the same as 10 years ago then like something's wrong you know i'm not gonna tell you you should go this way that way or let go of this or put on more boundaries than this just things need to be moving internally with you and if it's not moving like you talk about that's often like st if you're not in the tension that means that you've you've let go of yourself and given up yeah tension represents like i'm engaged yeah i'm i'm i'm a part of the journey um and that goes into our next topic of expectations yeah and unconditional condition i love speaking of the tension yeah for sure it's um it's i feel like one of the hotter topics today yeah you've seen it written about in in the magazines you know yeah all these dot this dialogue between you know what does unconditional love really mean yeah and how far do you go with it right could we have expectations could we not have expectations and i think it's very easy to get caught up in the narrative it's very easy to get caught up in like which side which camp are we on are we on the we believe that unconditional love is a necessity or are we on the other side where it's all about expectations and i often find that that narrative certainly removes us from ourselves it takes us away from ourselves it doesn't bring us closer to our own internal tension with these real fundamental questions which is like how do we love children when they're different from us how do we love children when they act in ways that we may not fully agree with or we may not fully believe in what exactly does that mean what do they need from us as parents in that space do they just need you know like endless love you know unconditional meaning it doesn't matter yeah you just love or is that idea of boundaries expectations goals whatever you want to call it that the other side right you know like that other side that is has now become almost like the evil side or like it's almost like you know don't speak about expectations it's like bad you know i always find like like debates like this they they i find that they're often detrimental because they like we lose nuance we lose like the fact that polarize yeah like you have to you have to make a choice am i here or am i there and what's my fundamental belief as opposed to where do i stand and how am i personally responding to this question because and i want to speak about that for a second but i want to i just want to share a story of one of the uh the dear people i i have like the the honor to work beside um a client of mine and he it's a story of conditional love um and that's it's like as basic as it gets you know when you you're raised in a home where there are very clear expectations about this is how you need to be and i could fill in the blanks with many people that i've worked with who sort of had this story in their background where it was very clear to them that we need you to be a certain way and you're going to secure love by being that way and when you think about what that does to the self the development of self that i can't pay attention to my own inner heart i can't pay attention to my own inner flow rather i need to externalize my being and focus on my behavior as opposed to who i am as a person it's a real relinquishing of self and so this particular man um he was raised in a i would it's it's possible to refer to his father as a bit of a tyrant a controlling man and he certainly had his own history as to how he became that person but it manifested in his family where there was a great deal of control he needed his kids to learn x amount of time in the right type of way in certain conditions and a child needs to make a choice in that moment do i abide by this to secure the love which is the most important factor a child needs it's just a feeling of my parents embrace me they adore me they believe in me do i forsake myself in order to acquire this love for my parents or do i lean into myself and become that um and and again he's to this day he's still trying to identify his own self here he is an adult years later with a family of his own and it's hard for him to to pause and listen to his own internal heartbeat because he's primarily focused on what exists on the outside as opposed to what he actually is on the inside and when you think about like what conditional love does to a person i've seen people spend 60 70 years of their lifetime sort of lost in this like matrix of who am i really and they they have a very hard time sort of landing and if there's anything we could say that the gift of looking at a child and saying i love you for who you are as opposed to i need you to be something for me is probably one of the most selfless gifts we could give to a child and it's a gift that keeps on giving it gives to them it gives to their children god willing it gives to future generations as well but i think we could very much get in this like theoretical dialogue with this question where do you stand and i to me i always prefer to personalize things like let's ask ourselves a question of why do we conditionally love people in a certain way why do we need our kids to be a certain way what is it ultimately doing for us and how could we pause for a moment and try to engage in a very different type of manner and it reminds me of a story and i really see that a lot of the condition the conditions that we place upon our children are largely because of our own deficiencies our own unresolved emotional conflicts and and i like to share some of my deficiencies if that's okay i know you love when i do this but it's just who i am we had an experience um you know as a therapist uh well i think people know this already about therapists you know um but but as a therapist there are certain like things you look out for certain opportunities that sort of represent a degree of success and like you made it somewhere and i think when you open up one of the magazines and they have like a pesach program or a circus program and you see like a therapist there that's true i think most people kind of like look right past it i don't think they're paying too much attention every therapist i know stops and like why that guy uh what about me why wasn't i called and i remember we had that that at that moment where we were called and said like why don't you come and and speak at a program right yeah it was wonderful and it was a great opportunity and and and i also got lost i'm just going to speak about myself because i think i had a very different process than you i think you were much more grounded i think it meant meant something different to me and maybe a lot more to me based on who i am as a person and where i come from in this world what that i never saw myself as a person who would be capable or worthy enough of being someone who could impart these ideas to others enough that they would really want to listen to it that's my own internal wounds my own insecurities that i carry um and i think that's why as a therapist i choose to travel alongside my clients as opposed to like place myself up on a perch and say i sort of figured it out because internally i don't i don't relate to myself as someone who sort of figured it out that's that's a part of my own story and i'm and i'm working on it well it has you're saying it has given you the humility to to be assigned yeah i think it has it has it has its it certainly has its pros it has its struggles as well and i want to speak for a moment about the struggle i remember so we were going to this program this beautiful pesach program i think as a child like the idea of going to a pesach program was a big deal and um and i noticed as we were preparing like this inner tension just building in me like you know we're we're again the therapist in this place and we're gonna need to be a certain way um and we're speaking about different topics so we're gonna be looked at like are we doing it the same way and i kept having these like fears like what if you know we're going into shul and my kids have like these you know grape juice stains on their shirt or we're leaving uh because our kids don't spill grape just on themselves yes they never do that we train them properly that they're just they're like there's tickets on the table yeah they don't see the floor the paintings but we uh there it is from one painting you actually mean that there is there was a paint it was a single paint night and there's still paint on the floor and i noticed it every time but that's my own work and then we're doing okay with it but so there was this like feeling that i had as we were approaching pesach like it wasn't filled with peace it wasn't filled with serenity or joy it was filled with fear that what if i need to what if i feel uncomfortable and when i notice real quickly my children this is the beauty of children that they know us at times better than we even know ourselves yes and my two oldest the two you know two boys like they picked up on my insecurity and they kept they kept like kind of like rubbing it in my face a little and they were young yeah they were yeah they were young yeah and they kept like like yeah i remember one of them got dressed and like he did his buttons wrong and he's like abba what do you think of this and i of course i just want to enjoy it and have a good time but i found like my need for them to be a certain way was which is what we would call conditional love that's what we would call it in that moment it was an experience of conditional love i needed them to be a certain way to quiet my own insecurities and i placed attention upon them that they didn't deserve they didn't need and i think that we ultimately but it was coming from my myself my own feelings of you know am i am i really good enough am i valuable enough will people see me in regard that i'd like to be seen or will they see me as as a human being with flaws and in that moment for whatever reason i didn't want to be perceived as a person with flaws i wanted to be seen as sort of put together and and i i was forsaking myself and worst of all i was forsaking my children and i think one of the beautiful parts of this story is that there was attention and we were able to speak about it and we ultimately made that decision to say until well it's mostly me like until i kind of work it out we shouldn't place our children in such a position where they're uncomfortable with it and obviously we've gone to other programs since and we've gotten to i've gotten to a better place with it but it's just amazing to kind of look at this story of conditional or unconditional love not from the vantage point of our own cognition what do we believe in what's correct but rather look at that question with a mirror before us and say what is going on with me why do i need my kids to be a certain way why do i why do i impose certain beliefs on them and i think the more we ask ourselves that question the more we're going to realize that it's it's our own work and if we if we do that well enough and we're aware enough of who we are as people then we're going to have much less of a need to place to impose these sanctions upon other people that give them that sense of of ultimate loss in who they are it was a just i want to finish with one little story with this element there was a i was speaking to a boy recently this this beautiful a live series boy who was struggling with different yeshivas one after the next it just really wasn't working out for him and when you speak to most kids about their experience especially 16 17 years old they start they have a lot of rage and a lot of anger towards the system and and speaking with him i didn't catch any of that and at some point i asked him i'm like you seem to be so okay with the fact that at times you're mistreated and at times you're spoken to in a very derogatory way in the systems that you're in and how are you okay with that and he looked at me with like this blank like this face of knowledge and understanding like a serenity and he said like i'm always supported in my home and my parents have my back they believe in me and because of that even though i'm in this environment where sometimes i feel like i'm being beaten up and he is beaten up there at times um but at the same time he carried with them this sense of we got your back and it makes life so much more enjoyable simpler more effective with a sense of self a sense of being and it's just a a beautiful story so it's we almost need a new definition when we talk about this clearly we have a belief system we have a torah that guides us we can't ignore that we can't forsake that it gives us form as to what's right and what's wrong and when we talk about unconditional love it comes into the face of some of these other ideals that we also carry and how do we how do we imbue that within our family and i think that to switch the word a little bit instead of unconditional love to unconditional belief which is a term that i sort of lean into we need to unconditionally and i don't have any conflict with this at all we need to unconditionally believe in our children believe in their capacity and that that's about them it's not about us because we're filled with insecurities we're filled with flaws but when it comes to raising children they're not there yet they're just in a state of pure innocence and pure goodness so it's not so much about that love because sometimes we're incapable of giving love because we're caught in our own narrative but unconditional belief extends beyond who we are as people and and it places the responsibility on on our ability to love our children as opposed to confronting our own sense of self or our lack of sense of self yeah and i think that that last point that you made about them versus us i think that's the main differentiation between is it when it comes to you know teaching our children because a parent a parent needs to also be a teacher we need to guide them they need our guidance like you're saying they need to be taught what to do otherwise they're also lost they need us to they need us for the rights and the wrongs and but i think like the key in what you're saying is is it for me so that for my own insecurities that i don't have to face myself or is it because i want you to be taught i want this for you because this is good for you and i think that learning the difference between those two is a constant it's like a sharpening tool and and to and it has to get more and more nuanced and then the challenge and figuring that out sometimes becomes more and more core we have to question even more core ideas inside you like what is mine here and what is yours like what and also it makes you kind of have to fine tune your own ideals like what is the main message i want to hold on to and what is what is peripheral what is external what is the the less something is defined by what it's not the more it is going to be defined by what it is so the more then it makes us need to fine tune our own what are the messages we want to teach them and what is it and most importantly is this what is it about them and what is it about us where do we end and they begin yes because part of like you said like belief part of belief is in the child being seen in his highest self and you know one of my i've had many teachers and one of my biggest teachers was this girl that um i remember she came in in the first session with her father and there was and and she was she was struggling and she was mistreating herself in the world and she was using many means of doing that and the thing that bothered her father the most for some reason it was interesting he probably has his own story with it right i don't i never learned his story but she did um was smoking like for some reason the fact that she was a smoker despite other dangerous things she was doing bothered him the most and we ended up speaking a lot in the first session about her smoking and eventually you know he he let go of that and he kind of leaned into just giving her space and and quieting the tension in the home and quieting the fights and and she and that gave her space to grow it gave her space to listen to that heartbeat that you talk about and to listen and lean into herself and to um and it you know she no longer was fighting all the time with her parents so she could start to fight with her own self and and to start to win some battles and and eventually it also externalized and some of her behavior started to be kinder to herself she felt enough love to herself that she tried she started to treat herself with with more with more respect and one of the first things that she gave up was smoking and i remember that moment when she told me you know doc guess what last night was my last cigarette or whatever whatever the context was i don't remember and i at some point i asked her have you told your father and this was one of the saddest moments that i've ever encountered she said my father he has long given up on me somehow that lack of expectation didn't translate into love it translated into into looseness apathy into apathy into nothing matters like we don't expect much from you we just want you to stop fighting and that that lack of that lack of expectation translated for her as in like i don't matter that they don't see much in me they've given up on me they don't see the non-smoker in me anymore they no longer think that i i could be that and um they they gave up on the best self that she could ultimately be as i say i think that this is the tension in parenting is to be able to be okay in the child's worst self while at the same time never losing sight of their best self and respecting them in their journeys and their struggles and also respecting them in the best self they could be is part of love is part of love that's a way to love another when a two-year-old comes home with a uh you know when a five-year-old writes one sentence i love you mommy and the mommy says like wow that's it's amazing it's your first sentence and it spells wrong but like the mom celebrates that with her child the child believes it and the child internalizes it and says like wow i just did something great and my mom sees it but let's see a 10 year old writes a messy paragraph that that could be done better and the and the child knows it like you said like they know it but the mother celebrates it anyway externally in a non-genuine way the child doesn't feel celebrated the child feels placated the child feels quieted almost disrespected exactly almost disrespected and what the child wants is the sense of oh they see that let's see how much greatness i have in me that how they see the bigness in me that i am bigger than now that i'm then my biggest is greater than my challenge and that also you know we talk about self-confidence i i think that this is one of one of the concepts that i still remember from grad school that was meaningful to learn that self-confidence is really self-efficacy it's the idea that i can do hard things and the way that you learn that you can do hard things is by doing things that are hard for you and things that are hard for you means that they're not comfortable for you so something needs to push you to do that and something needs to propel you to do that not so that you can gain your parents love it's it's not it's not conditional in that sense but it's part of it so that you can build your own self-respect so you can gain your own love in a way and that you can teach yourself like if i can do this i can do anything i know how to do hard things so i think that that differentiation between is this for me or is this for my child and then kind of keeping tabs on this like you know containment and goals and expectations and teaching at the same time being in the tension of that i think is is like a key space to remain in we can't we can't abandon that you know yeah yeah like tolerating the imperfection but not losing sight of the best self that could exist within a person yes yeah it's a lot of tension to hold on to yeah that's what it is parenting well is parenting intention yeah not abandoning the fight i remember there was a program we were talking about technology in the school i was yes and work with yes yes and this is i love it when you talk about this idea yeah we just the whole the catchphrase of the program was staying in detention yes meaning we're not resolving this issue but we don't want to get too comfortable with it we want to remain tense because in that tension we're going to battle have an honest battle with ourselves and most of us we forsake that we simply give up because it's too intolerable for us but staying as you're saying is really the key i just want to move a little bit to uh and i always i always appreciate that a little bit of this next idea that i want to share is that and i'll start with a story we had a moment i uh i find this like a little you know these moments like these kisses from hashem like these little beautiful gifts that you get that you didn't ask for they just came your way and i remember i forget the circumstance but it was in the living room right next to this room and our children they wanted something i don't know they wanted to go somewhere they wanted an experience and they yeah whatever it might have been and i just happened to have walked into the room as they were having like a child conference amongst themselves sibling meeting a sibling meeting they got together i don't think it was like officially called for right but they were talking and i walked into the room when they were speaking about and they were sharing with each other which which child should go to which parent and what should they say to get to get their means met you know to get the trip or to get the whatever it is that they wanted at the time and i remember walking into the room and i had the biggest smile on my face because they were so bright we're so transparent we were so transparent to them they knew exactly what to say which child to send how they should say it um and they were spot on and i remember just giving them a kiss saying like you're not getting this because you're busted but um i love this moment i love what it represents and to me what it represented is like you know we talk about like a unified front and sort of being the same um and however much we tried it being consistent that's like the big word right but i think as parents like being consistent with the kids yeah like together we're in it we're in it and we have the same belief we have the same approach we have the same set of expectations of our kids and i think you read so much about this idea that parents need to hold this unified front always like always agree about all the details around it right and here we are having this moment you know this little snippet of an experience with with our children and there they are sort of like flipping that whole theory you know upside down on its face saying we see right through that we know exactly how you feel we know what you believe in we know what matters to you we know the type of way we should say what we should say in order to speak to your sense of individuality um and i think it's clear i hope that it's clear even in this conversation that you and i we i think we should we think very similarly in many respects but we're very different human beings we come from different places and if anything we're we're trying our best to celebrate that and to not and to not pretend that it's anything but difference that we could believe in the same objectives and the same goals but as human beings we're going to approach it differently our pathways to our own development of self our own emotional health they were different we come from different countries different universes um yeah many couples do even if when they don't yeah yeah even if they come from the same block they're sort of different countries and i just it was that that that teaching that our children gave us that lean into your individuality lean into the fact that there are differences and the fact that different ways to approach things and by doing so they already know but by doing so we're we're actually honoring ourselves as opposed to like trying to you know force ourselves into this posture that is not really genuine to who we are and i think learning to develop a relationship that could tolerate those differences and celebrate them respect them yeah that we don't we don't need to be the same yes we can believe in the same things but we don't need to approach it the same exact way right and because our children i think our children gave us permission to be this that they they taught us that even if you attempted to um we're going to see right through it yeah but i think we also worked on that love yeah like yeah i think so i mean our children taught us but i think i know that you know like we both bring different things to this table and um and i think a lot of times when we get when our message is apparent or our power as a parent our impact as a parent feel gets threatened that by the other parent then the instinct is to is to quiet the other parent's voice to to make it weaker and in doing so you know you're just defensive and weakening and then you just end up having two weak parents right and i think that you know this is something that i i've like i know that like you're talking about how parenting has been humbling from the kids but it has also been humbling for me as co-parenting with you that whenever and i now this is much more intrinsic but i because i've learned it now it's it's it's become more natural but even in a place where i i just didn't agree with your point of view whenever with the spaces where i've just paused and like really leaned in and listen like what's the sense in what you're saying like what is the new point that i'm having a hard time integrating that i'm too threatened by that i'm that's threatening my sense that's threatening my approach that's even my vision or even like my even feels like even even our child even the belief about what's right and wrong yeah that's that if i just pause and really lean into that and and try to hear it from a place of curiosity from a place of honor and respect then there is always something that i learned that i respect and in that way you've taught me to be a better parent in many ways and like a thousand percent um because you've told me all the things that i needed to learn and also in my quieting myself i've heard more i've been able to you know hear my own authenticity better where like i was saying before like well i had to sharpen and and kind of get rid of and shed the parts that were not that were not necessary and were in the way and i think that when you also do that for me where you listen into like what's the what's the nuance here yeah well what's the teaching you can give to me like then we then we end up offering to our kids to nuanced and different parents and they need us both right they need us both to be authentically ourselves yeah and communicate together so we could find a way to discover what the other right is asking or could teach us about our role yeah and i loved like how you changed the words to belief with the unconditional i would say here like maybe to change it from parents needing to be consistent to parents needing to be really respectful and i think the word respect has the piece of like seeing you as another for me you know kind of weaving it back to the beginning of our discussion here um you know seeing you as separate from me in this journey and also honoring you as a father and and and hearing and learning from you as a parent and and in having enough humility to to quiet and and re-listen to my own voices and and question my own voices while at the same time like you're saying um finding even a more authentic self so when you do that you not only empower each other to be a better parent you also end up being like you're saying more authentically and more powerfully you create room to lean into our authenticity yes so instead of then having two disempowered parents you have two more powerful parents that are more uniquely them yeah it's so nice speaking about the journey yes i think if anything this conversation represents is like a lot a lot of our journey together and trying to do what's best and right and and stumbling along the way many times many many stumbling blocks but at least we're at least we're trying to remain present yes um and together in this journey and uh i just wanted just to end um do you have any final thoughts the piece that just came to me that like i that i feel like i don't i can't not share almost in in the piece that in my most humble spaces where there is that complete newness and complete aloneness with your own self as as a parent that the only place that grounds me is really is that i have a relationship with god i feel like i i it would be really hard to parent without that right any a relationship you know in in in whatever level of nurturing that comes to you yeah that's a place that i go to and like and sometimes i say like god you love my child even more than i love him which is like hard to grasp and that like and you love me and you love me as a parent like you love me you you chose me as the parent of this child that's me and you accept me and you expect of me and all of that and to lean it when i lean into that that's i often find newer spaces there and comfort there and and movement and movement there i feel very grateful that that i have that i i would be really really lost even more lost without it yeah yeah well thank you in this moment and thank you amudim for this opportunity guys please give generously this is a program that is saving lives on a daily basis and this is our moment sharing with you part of our journey but we're all in this together everyone i imagine has similar conversations similar dialogue about what's best and we hope and pray that us all we find peace and comfort and love in our homes and continue to think about the journey and the process and with hashem's help we'll bring more love and peace into our own hearts and into the hearts of our children and all our people yes and i and i just want to join you and you know as when you mention like you know do you want to do this with a mood and like i don't even pause like if there's anything we can do for a mood in it feels like such an opportunity how can we how can we not do it because it's done for the right reasons with the right approach and there is so much thought and professionalism and love and genuine care that goes into it and i don't even know you know hundreds of it um and to to to invest anything that we can in a mood in i know will yield you know generational results you know when you invest in a human being you you invest in forever and uh i do believe investing in amudha means that yes thank you very much cheers [Music] welcome all to the unite to heal event we are here tonight discussing what is missing a conversation about social emotional learning i am here tonight with the darhainu team of amudim with mrs shira berkowitz rabbi avi landa and rabbi israel grossberg and we will be having a conversation about what exactly is missing and why we need to be paying attention to the way that we develop and grow our children and communities i'm so excited to begin our conversation and i wanted to begin with a very basic question anytime you have a new initiative whether it is educational what is something that is involved with our children my first instinct is always to ask what's missing why on earth is this necessary so before we even jump in to any description of a program or an initiative i want to know what is the problem that your initiative and your team is coming to address let's begin with mrs shira berkowitz sure thank you so much what's missing we teach math in school we teach science we teach hamish we teach navi we teach everything that our children need to know from an academic standpoint who is teaching them to recognize what they're feeling to express their emotions in a healthy way to know how to deal with their stress when they get stressed who's teaching them to be okay being mindful being present and not having to be with friends or on their phones every second who's teaching them how to have healthy boundaries so they have healthy relationships so they say no when something feels uncomfortable what we're missing is what we need to teach our students to teach our children our tommy dose or tommy dim how to become healthy people healthy human beings healthy teenagers healthy adults and of healthy marriages and be healthy parents i'm so happy that you brought that up because let me add in another layer you know you talk about this emotional growth emotional development boundaries aren't we already teaching this we have halacha curriculums we learn torah we have role models from our rabbian from our local revenue community so why exactly is what we were already doing not enough to address this these issues meaning these are all very important issues but aren't we already addressing this with our limu de kodesh with our rabbanim with role models with our connection to torah why isn't that enough perhaps rabbi grossberg you can address that sure so i think that you know we live in a time where the struggles are are a little different than when at least definitely when i was growing up technology um busier appearance you know it's not only the fact that you know nowadays there's a parlor meeting every night there's the yeshiva dinner the hasanas but parents are strapped you know two-income families are really necessary within the yeshiva system and parents are less available for their kids than they've ever been um and they're additionally we very often were brought up to kind of take our feelings and stuff them down not you know not to not to feel not to get upset about things not to allow ourselves just to kind of soldier on it's both an advantage and a disadvantage mostly an advantage that students are really feeling and parents are listening to their kids but now what do they do with these feelings where do they go with them some of the um you know to quote um the great rabbi is that you know we can't keep coming to the same nuclear war with the old bow and arrow we can't keep coming you know it's a new age and we have to have new tools to deal for dealing with that so rabbi lando maybe you could help me understand better because i'm not i'm not totally buying it maybe you need a curriculum and a program that addresses the parents meaning if rabbi grossberg just mentioned the parents are at parlor meetings maybe you need a curriculum for the parents how exactly can you teach these very basic human skills from a curriculum don't you have to go to the proverbial school of hard knocks that's a great question and you're right the parents are strapped as rabbi grossberg mentioned they struggle tremendously trying to be able to maintain the home at a functioning healthy standpoint in terms of educating their children it can be strained and in many cases parents themselves will admit sometimes they won't admit that the school really is there nowadays more than ever to supplement some of that parenting to be able to supplement some of that education how can we only supplement some of the academic processes of children learning math and science as well as of course torah and mishnah and gemara and navi how can we only supplement those but not supplement what's arguably just as important if not more basic and fundamental to allow learning in all the other subjects and that is that social and emotional learning piece many times in the past as rabbi grossberg mentioned there would be this encouragement this thought process maybe a philosophy that emotions are more of an obstacle than actually a part of life to be embraced the gemaran soccer tells us that in this world we make a tovah native on good things that happen and a diana amazon bad things that happen the gemara says in the next world when mashiach comes we're only going to make atova maite and that's says that means that in the next world we're going to make atova made up on everything we made a diana amazon in this world so i once asked my rebbe ribs v berkowitz so if we know we're going to make a tova made them on everything bad that happened in this world anyway it's just we're missing the information at this point why don't we make a tova mate about it right now we should we should rejoice over even the hard times because we know ultimately we'll figure out it'll be just revealed to us how it was really good the whole time and in our discussion the idea that came out was that emotions are something that hashem the rabona shalom wants us to feel and experience for real and with sincerity both the good the happy the joyful but also the difficult the sorrow the pain and hashem wants us to be able to understand those emotions be aware of them and have the skills to be able to process them in a healthy way to live in this world experiencing for real the sorrow at times as well as the joy in appropriate fashion and the social emotional learning curriculum is the vehicle to be able to teach our students and our children the next generation those skills that knowledge base and that understanding that is right grossberg mentioned in many ways we're missing from the parents being able to fully fully give that over to their children if i could i'm sorry if i could just say yes um just because you said a word that resonated the school of hard knocks um we can sit and debate as to the whys but i don't know if that's within the purview of this uh situation but the school of hard knocks is really knocking them down and not everyone is getting up we as you know being on the front lines we see that and being at a mood and event at somewhat apropos we're losing students we're losing students at a an alarming rate and i don't mean to sound like you know um a total alarm is that things are out of control but whereas in the past somehow there was a certain resiliency that people picked themselves up and whatever struggles they dealt with they kept moving on often people are opting out and if we can teach them the skills give them literally the toolbox to face that challenge and not just throw it all away then we've done a tremendous amount both for their emotional health but as well as their religious well their religious health as well so i want to get a little bit practical to understand this better you know in my own life and in my own home i'm not only a graduate of yeshiva day school i learned in yeshiva i'm also a parent and in our home i think the issue that i struggle with the most is my emotional regulation i can get so frustrated dare i say i can get i can lose my temper not doing anything that i think is outlandish or wild but me and my son are working together my son is five and we both talk together about controlling and and dealing with our temper explain to me a little bit about what a school could do and provide to help somebody with their emotional regulation what are you doing you have a mara makomo shoot oh i didn't if i would have known the mission in pirkei evo says it's bad to lose your temper i would have i would have gained control oh i didn't know that there were uh psychologists who said that it's important to be in control you know there's no sore sheet there's no textbook that makes this easier so what on earth are you doing in a classroom that makes this any better shira can you help me understand this sure i want to start by answering with a quick story i had a client i'm a therapist on the side i had a client come in in high school and she was describing some of the symptoms that she's having in her life and it sounded pretty much like panic attacks and i said to her do you have anxiety and she looks at me and she says what is anxiety i wanted to cry cry or scream and go back to the school she went to and say why like why didn't you tell her when she was in second grade in third grade in sixth grade what an anxious feeling is and what to do so she's not at the point where she's in high school and now she's having a panic attacks our curriculum is a complete comprehensive curriculum every single step for the teachers what are feelings how to identify them activities videos step by step for the students and every single skill that we teach we have the children act them out we call them behavior rehearsals we have them act out every single skill because research shows when you practice it in class you can leave class and then you're able to do it so in your example with anger ideally we start in fifth grade they're doing the feelings unit feelings 101 what is the feeling what are comfortable feelings what are uncomfortable feelings and notice we say comfortable and uncomfortable we don't say good or bad because you know what it's not always bad to be angry if somebody is being inappropriate with you or somebody really hurts you you should be angry so it's not good or bad we stay away from good or bad it's about healthy unhealthy comfortable uncomfortable we identify what we're feeling we talk about what are healthy ways of handling feelings what are our reactions what are the consequences of our reactions and that's fifth grade and then we build from there and other grades taking from that and building on that in each grade level how to handle your feelings rabbi landa maybe you could talk a little bit about because i know pieces of this curriculum you know i'm listening to this now and i am a believer of that the foundations of your development of your sense of self is used to be what we learned in kindergarten but for some reason it's not sinking in you have units on this that deal with matters of kedusha of holiness which i don't know if you're comfortable i don't want to use the euphemism though you do use euphemisms these are matters about sexual boundaries and how to be appropriate can you tell me a little bit when do you think this these conversations should begin and why would we be introducing this in a holy setting like a school or yeshiva to talk about such areas of like filth great question so first i would question one of the earlier premises in your in your question in terms of the natural absorption that used to take place in kindergarten i would argue that while it might be true in previous generations maybe even centuries ago that there seemed to have been less of these problems although it's always a question to ask whether we were less aware or there really was less of a prevalence but either way even if there was less of a prevalence it very likely is more attributable to the fact that there was less of in your face type of society knocking at your door and when you don't have some of the nucionos the tests the challenges under every under every stone you turn over there's another nissan there's another test lurking in terms of a fight for for your soul and a fight for your value system how you conceptualize the world and your morality like we have nowadays the the game needs to change as rabbi grossberg mentioned we need to come to the battle with a little bit more of a thorough approach to help our children moving on to the second part of your the main part of your question the kedusha curriculum is just that it's it's kedusha interestingly and it should be kind of striking to those watching the way that you describe this question in the same paragraph you could use the word kedusha holiness and filth at the same time and that's really where i think it strikes to the foundation of what the misconception is when it comes to these matters these matters may be very private matters but first of all they're certainly not filthy and dirty when approached and respected for the holiness that they actually contain and they're also not secret matters in other words they're not meant to be kept to yourselves they're meant to be shared albeit in private fashion in a more private and sensitive form so the kadusha piece of this curriculum which is one piece in a very large curriculum addressing all sorts of social and emotional learning topics is a part that has some potential group discussion touching on areas of self-control general self-control building of self-control which is important but also much more private one-on-one conversations where a basic level of education can be given to our students as they are approaching the years of becoming an adult the years of puberty why should any child go through the fundamental changes in their body and be confused why should they not be aware that what's happening to them is perfectly normal i've given many parent presentations on this about the conversations that i was then going to have with their children ahead of time and countless fathers have come over to me and told me if only 20 and 30 years ago someone would have told me about this and i wouldn't have had to have to suffer in silence with the confusion of is this okay things haven't happened yet things are happening is there something wrong with me and there's no address to turn to and that's the beauty of having a darren or an rpath scl teacher in the classroom because now that's a person r path s-e-l-t i've never heard so many letters right next to each other what exactly does that mean so our path is just the translation of our path oh our path yeah our our path um and scl social emotional learning okay you said that so quickly i'm sorry intelligent life form so and our path sel our path seo so we have this ability to have the teacher in the classroom that that is could be a rebbe it could be a mashikiyak it could be a guidance counselor but now the children are exposed to them in in a whole new way already broaching a lot of these topics and there's an address for them to go to with any additional questions they might have which is a supplementary huge benefit to having such a curriculum in a school i think i let all three of you off the hook and particularly rabbi grossberg in trying to understand and conceptualize what the real issue and what changed is rabbi grossberg when you were describing it you mentioned the term you said and technology it became like the excuse for everything like supply chain issues so i showed up 20 minutes late to the meeting and to me it feels sometimes like this dismissive hand wave like we got to do things differently technology and if you mean pornography say pornography what exactly has technology done that makes our emotional development any different i i generally want to understand better meaning is it because what technology gives you access towards so so is that what it is then say what that's what it is or is there something more fundamental in the way that it shapes the way our children and adults frankly develop right so i think it's an important question um pornography pornography is really just one small piece of the picture when we say technology we mean that the situations the issues that are facing i'll give an example and i remember linda mentioned the idea of having the teacher becomes a safe person right so i'm a teenager i have my smartphone my parents are clueless i'm now addicted to my smartphone all night long and that's that's rampant i'm on not necessarily doing anything wrong per se i'm not going places that are inappropriate but i don't know who to speak to about that i'm not going to my rebbe about that because he's going to maybe be upset i have a smartphone i might not go to my principal he'll give me a hard time i'll get punished or whatever the you know the appropriate consequence would be but this is a problem that i can't go to my parents with either so you know we mentioned technology the idea also that when we're busier with our phones than we've ever been then the social emotional growth that we used to have playing ball play just hanging out with friends that is much less common than it used to be has now become something that is not just a given it's not something that we get through our social social interactions with friends so technology itself is not necessarily the um we're not talking necessarily about the parts of technology that are inappropriate or user but just the fact that it's changed the world that we live in whether we like it or not we can say that we're just going to check directions because we're busier when we're on our phone we are not socially interacting when we're on our when we're on our computer even if we're playing one of the you know uh various different games that have now become an issue um i'm playing technically you know as a kid will say i'm interacting with friends you know if you look at that list of people that are playing world of warcraft or whatever with me there's quite a few friends that i have you know that i'm interacting with but that's not interaction that's not the social healthy social growth um that people have and i can tell you working in a summer camp when kids are away from the technology some of them have no clue that they're not they're just not used to all this time and all this the need to be with friends for so long it's just too much for them they don't know i mean it's you know if someone is listening to this and thinking that this is an exaggeration they either don't have teenagers or they don't know what their teenagers are doing i actually want to check my twitter account right now i'll be real with you uh shira can you can you do you have something yeah yeah i want to i would just want to add to that this whole piece of technology that neither one of them covered because it is so huge it is affecting our self-esteems and our relationships in a huge way and leave the two issues they spoke they both spoke about aside i had a teacher in seventh grade and they were talking about body image none of their none of her students would ever think about forwarding a picture before editing it seventh grade she came to me and told me that again i was so sad that they can't send a picture without editing it they're looking up at what everyone is posting everything has to be perfect and i see the same thing in my generation with with the mary's everyone only shows you know the perfect pictures of their families they and their husband always get along their kids always look perfect they post their their beautiful gourmet dinners marriages are falling apart because of this the the pressures people are having and then the other piece that i mentioned earlier to you is is the privacy factor there's no privacy there's nothing i don't today engagements even the most achievish world it just it boggles my mind it's a whole setup and people are waiting to video waiting to take pictures like i don't know back in the day 20 years ago when i got engaged it was like this was a moment between the two of us and that's how they're starting their relationship they're starting their marriage there's no privacy anymore there's no just us everything is like for the public so i i wanna i wanna add in some of the equation if you wanna add to this uh you can after but allow me to add in a really important piece of the equation you know i'm still i'm a genuine skeptic of curricular efforts because you build this beautiful edifice and you go home and you'll never compete against the culture of the home you'll never compete against it and you even mentioned that you know you don't want to necessarily go and speak to your parents about this i don't know i think the parents should be the first line of defense so my question is how do you build a curriculum and help a child develop emotionally that begins as a school effort but brings in the parents as partners unless you're telling me that the parents are being painted as enemies i mean they are definitely contributing to the problem i contribute to my kids problems i'm sure all of your problems were contributed by your parents and it goes on forever so how do you contain actual growth in a classroom and compete so to speak against or figure out a way to integrate with whatever culture is going on in the home so yeah i think it's important to point out that when we talk about you know the issues of the home we're not saying that the home is against social emotional learning they're just not necessarily giving it so it works together with the home the home is willing i see skepticism but you didn't call yourself a skeptic but um meaning that many parents are just like i said they're busy they're they're powerful they're not either they're clueless they really don't know what's going on well i see you know students all the time so clap on the bema and stop having so many parlor meetings so instead of an initiative for schools tell parents enough enough one wedding a week that's it and you have to be home meaning if you were to ask me where should we be focusing our time and attention should it be again obviously in a perfect world we could do both and get both but i want to understand better it sounds like you're just saying okay look the p they're busy what are you going to do who has time to parent their children face so we'll do it instead i think there's an important word here and curriculum the idea is we're it's not just a contest it's not just you know a nice um you know for a parsha sheet about this media it's really taught and that happens in school we we're we're taking a given that this is not something that we can just tell a nice story about a goddess and there's a whole beautiful thing don't get me wrong the but it it's it's really taught and you know i wish we had the curriculum in front of us you'd see that it's taught in a way that really it's school you know we encourage the teachers that we work with give them give a mark on the report card um give homework do things make it real now i know in your mind that might be so also they probably hate it but if it's taught right they would have been there i read your face but if it's taught right if it's stored by the right person and told correctly and this is you know the proof is in the pudding we're seeing this they look forward to this part of the day they look forward to you know and granted every teacher decides homework may or may not be appropriate depending but this is for some of these kids it's a breath of fresh air they're being given a green light to feel the things that they've been feeling and not really knowing how to identify them that it's okay to be feeling this way and what to do where to take those feelings once you have them avi do you have something you want to add yeah i'd like to i'd like to comment on the whole curriculum piece that rabbi grossberg was mentioning i think there's a lot to say on that but to more directly address your question let's be real we owe all the good parts of ourselves to our parents just like we owe the bad parts of ourselves and we owe all the good and bad parts of ourselves to ourselves also so it's not all on the parents and we certainly can't just blame all the bad stuff on parents we have to attribute the good stuff too to parents in generally healthy situations we work with the parents the parents are an integral component to this curriculum working i am involved in ta in baltimore of actually being a darcheinu teacher of implementing this curriculum and a key component in what we do it's not the 40-minute class that we're giving to the students but a key component is that we send a letter out to the parents letting them know here is the new curriculum that we are launching now parents are excited multiple parents reached out to me saying can you tell me what are some of the topics that you're going to be covering i'd like to try to help reinforce some of those at home speak the same language i said you read my mind we are in fact going to be doing that we will be sending out updates every few weeks with some of the key terminologies some of the key concepts some of the activities we did i recently did a poem that's out there with the boys it also speaks to some of the stigma where you can't do certain types of classes and topics with boys but if you come in there with confidence and you do it the right way you can do it really well and the boys really appreciate it and participate in it especially if you start them out young in fifth and sixth grade and you continue it throughout their grades so there's this poem where for when read many of you might have seen it when read from top to bottom it describes everything extremely pessimistic but the same lines when read from bottom to top it describes everything very optimistic just the opposite and it's a cute way of showing that we can have we can shift our perspective the same set of words can give us two wildly different messages i got a text later that night the day of the class from a father who said my son came home and excitedly showed me this poem that you gave out and did with them in class and as a family we sat around the table and took looked at it read it together and we liked it it was cute it was interesting there's a certain funny part to it but it was just eye-opening to us as a family and we talked about it as a family that is a 100 success rate in terms of uh implementation of this curriculum we do not see it as 100 it's better than nothing for sure but we do not see it as 100 or the preferred method to exclude the parents not at all we would prefer the right way to do it is to have the parents involved included informed and thankfully a lot of parents are really excited about it for those that aren't and that are so absent you can do all the clops on the bema you want they're going to continue to be absent with whatever else is going to be going on and hashem thank god those children are still going to get something from the curriculum that we're providing to them and i would argue they're going to get a lot from it and they they potentially can then be the vehicle of change even in their own homes as they get older a mood and receives many different calls almost all the cases are due to some sort of trauma be it sexual trauma be it childhood trauma physical abuse we will get a lot of cases just calling for a therapy referral we will get a lot of cases calling for what we call psychoeducation they want to understand their loved one or their difficulties and they don't even know how to help them so they're starting just with tell me more about their mental health and then um we get calls from people in crisis they just found out their child their sibling was abused either recently years back and they're just they're at a loss sometimes they're sobbing sometimes they are whispering they can barely speak someone who is thinking about reaching out to mutin when they get assigned to their case manager they should expect warmth no judgment i like to think um every person who calls i think like if this were my family member what would i be saying what would i be recommending i think that on every call because that's the only way to do this job [Music] so you've developed these two curriculums one is called our path one is called one obviously being the translation of the other and this isn't obviously the wild wild west this is under the auspices of rebellion rodney and this is in conjunction and partnership with torah missouri so i understand this in the wild wild west and i underst and i hope that you receive my questions with the love respected curiosity with which they are stated my question now is almost to get a little bit more personal to get to highlight some examples of what exactly we're teaching here and i would ask each of you and we'll start with shira and go all the way across tell me something from this schedule of learning from this curriculum that you wish you were able to have when you were growing up tell me the grade tell me what you were struggling with and why this piece of this curriculum would have benefited you i'm very much a relationship person so i definitely choose something in that realm i'm thinking about ninth grade i came from a small school and joined a high school that had girls from other schools in a much bigger class and i just kind of remember floundering i became you know those the best friends really quickly was somebody that totally fell apart after a few months didn't know how to handle it until i found my place i think specifically and i think i mentioned before boundaries but i'm i'm known to be a little bit obsessed with healthy boundaries i really feel like that's the foundation of how to be a healthy person i work in a camp and i'm known as the boundaries police in the camp that's like my thing i feel like understanding where i end and where you begin what my role is in different relationships um how to handle situations how to solve a conflict use i statements all these things relating to relationships i feel like i would have gained so much had someone taught that to me i just want to follow up because you said that so quickly you said using i statements what exactly do you mean by that okay it's one of the things i love teaching we teach at first in sixth grade and i tell them this is the secret i say guys i'm now going to teach you the secret to having healthy relationships if you can get this formula down pat you can have a healthy relationship with your friends your parents your teachers your boss one day your husband one day your kids this is the key to conflict resolution so i statements are basically that instead of a you statement when you're upset with somebody typically you would go on attack you call them names you start with you you did this you are this and instinctively when somebody attacks us and they start off with you we either get defensive put our shield ups nah no it didn't or we attack back and we say well you did it to me last week and the conversation is a non-starter immediately it escalates and there's no conversation so we teach them this formula starting with i feel and i tell them you don't have to sound nerdy when you say it you don't even have to use the word feel but focus on i i was upset i was hurt you can't say to me no no no i'm hurt you can't tell me i'm not hurt wait a second why are you hurt all of a sudden she's listening to me she's not attacking she's not going to defend her she's listening because she cares about me and i'm hurt that's a nice statement and we teach them it's i feel because and i want that's the formula we teach it in sixth grade and then in seventh grade in the friendship unit we teach it in twelfth grade and dating a marriage unit and a few times in between i absolutely love that rab avi tell me something that you struggled with when you were you know in this fifth through twelfth grade where the curriculum really addresses development that you wish you could have had when you were growing up in school okay i think my elementary school that i went to through eighth grade did a really good job of using the available resources to them but there was no until very recently with the advancement of this project dedicated curriculum comprehensive curriculum towards these important social emotional topics and i think when it comes to something that you mentioned before basic emotional regulation the ability to have techniques and skills to be able to properly vent process emotions as opposed to being the guy who emotions don't really bother them at all and they can simply rub and shrug things off and move on and obviously i did that to an extent but i think i would have benefited greatly from having a more full curriculum i just want to digress for a second on the previous point from urban grossberg in terms of it being a curriculum to me sel the most important word in that acronym social emotional learning is not in the acronym it's that last word curriculum much to your dismay and your criticism or cynicism of curricula i would argue that when it comes to math if we would want to every once in a while have a project from the math foundation that would come in and do some cool math exercises and that would be like one month of school or one week or maybe one day we would not have children educated in math it would be something that they're kind of aware of so the same thing when it comes to bullying or when it comes to conflict resolution or when it comes to basic social emotional regulation when it comes to being able to properly vent your emotions if you don't have a weekly class or a bi-weekly class where there's a regularity to it and then not only within that grade is their irregularity but it then builds the next grade on a foundation that you established in the earlier grade much like we teach the secular subjects and much lahavdo like we teach to all the mu de kodesh we don't jump into the intricacies of a kid senenosivis when we are first teaching the children the building blocks of reading a piece of gemara of learning gemara of understanding how the torah works so so too here making it into a curriculum gives it not only a certain khashevas in the eyes of the children and the teachers and the parents but it also appropriately builds from the foundation up those skills so while my elementary school might have done a pretty good job utilizing certain projects and opportunities rebaim and moras all the time utilize opportunities that come up in parsha and come up in mishna to teach a lesson to teach a skill but it's much more project based as it comes up as opposed to it being a full thorough repetitive building block curriculum and i think that's something that i could have benefited from greatly and it would have enormously helped me moving into high school where it was difficult as i became in that mindset of between child and adult what we sometimes call teenager or young adult and there's that transition happening it was challenging for me to both be able to handle the emotions that i experienced when there were adults in my lives the way i perceived it as still treating me like a child and i would have wanted a certain level of autonomy or independence afforded to me being able to handle some of those emotions in a healthier way would have done me great benefit personally and i think i read this recently much of what we want to accomplish in our youth is actually going to happen in the middle school years and then taking them through the high school years but if you just start in high school you've started too late you can argue you've got to start in elementary school already in kindergarten but once they get to those middle school years if they're not already developing some of these skills it's going to be they're going to be way behind in their development once they just enter into high school and they're thrown into that environment without these skills rabbi grossberg tell me a skill that you wish you could have learned when you were in this developmental stage okay going with the theme of confessions with codolum stories first i was far from the perfect high school bar and being what you know our curriculum was basically a we we learned best case scenarios constantly in other words don't be you should be doing this you shouldn't be thinking about that you shouldn't have any thoughts concerns et cetera about the movies television all these other things and all of a sudden they say well well i'm really not living up to who they want me to be does that make me a bad person you take that and it just it segues right into a lack of self-confidence so all of these things that are again it's all in the curriculum i think that everybody who's in high school facing the challenges and we're not talking about crazy challenges we're not talking about you know things that are off the wall but just simple growing up in 2021 having just an understanding that you're you're not evil you're not made and yes of course you're obeying or shooting high because that's what rebellion do that's you know they want the best for us and maybe in a you know best case scenario a rebbe will understand it won't but the bottom line is understanding that there's a place for growth without guilt growth in a healthy way that i think myself as a teenager would have been would have taken away a lot of angst and a lot of you know uh feelings of inadequacy that um i'm so sorry what specifically in the if you have to pick one aspect of the unit that would have helped your younger self what would that have been dealing with guilt dealing with guilt in a healthy positive way fantastic i wanted to transition with maybe a few rapid fire questions to understand a little bit of your own development you can weave in some of the topics and ideas that you've been speaking about but i wanted to try to begin to move a little bit quicker i'm curious from each of you and i know i have my own answer what was your favorite grade in your development through k through 12 and why for me it as i said i had a more difficult time going through high school i imagined that i could have in a more positive environment for myself i could have had a lot of amazing experiences there and i did have some but for me eighth grade was an amazing year for me i was captain of the basketball team which which did which was amazing for me um david and i grew up a little bit in nary srell but i'm not sure if we ever played against each other on the court so we did not so so what's interesting to me looking back on that is that one of the highlights of my educational career is an element of the school that's not part of education it was part of call it the outlets or the extracurriculars the sports in this case and what i see in the students is that many of them get a feel for these classes because the rules are a little bit more relaxed obviously as a good teacher you have to have basic classroom management skills you can't be devoid of that but with the basic classroom management skills if you're able to give over these top these skills and these activities in a fun more interactive way the kids actually relate to it more like what you might call an outlet as opposed to just your typical class shira favorite grade k through 12 and why 12th grade i feel like i was settled i was confident i had my group of friends i had good grades i got into the seminary i was choir head like i had my place wow that's more than captain basketball i don't know it's prestigious rabbi grossberg favorite grade k through 12. feeling a little inadequate over here um no never choir head definitely not on the basketball team but um i would say fifth grade but it's interesting it wasn't so much the grade as it was the rebbe and that it had a profound i would say to this day profound influence on who i am and even you know the profession that i chose so you know that just showed me just what the right positive influence in life can do for you my favorite grade was 11th grade it felt like i was seeing the destination of my own personal development and there was something very beautiful about that i'm curious to hear just from your perspective as an educator growing up what was your most difficult grade where did you feel like you struggled the most what grade let's start from randby grossberg so it's funny just quite the opposite 12th grade i was very unsettled you know it was that question college yeshiva cola track um business track you know where i was going and it was kind of like this tremendous pressure i felt that somehow at 17 years old i needed to decide the rest of my life and probably it would have been great maybe to have a darkening curriculum telling me that i didn't have to worry about that but um it was just the whole entire time i went and i i was a um you know a roller coaster up and down i you know go from short haircuts and very white shirts and everything to the next day said no that's not for me it was a very unsettling year for me avi i would say 9th and 10th grade are kind of blurred together for me that transition like i mentioned before being what i felt was unprepared in contrast to the wonderful preparation we're offering through this curriculum i felt less left me less equipped to be able to healthily transition into that particular high school shira i said before ninth grade i just want to say like just quick thing about darachenu like the units that get address all these things that you all just said and what you said about 11th grade like knowing where you were going um eighth grade transitioned to high school a whole unit about it dealing with change ninth grade transitioning into high school what are your expectations have your expectations been met how do you handle your expectations not being met 11th grade self-knowledge unit we talk about goal setting i have the girls do like a vision board or like a whole like values collage of what they see for their future 12th grade life after high school we go through and talk about the skills you need after high school just if you think all the things we're saying we literally address each of these topics for me it was without a doubt 10th grade 10th grade to me was gam begat salmavus it was the shadow of death because you're really rootless you're not just starting something you're nowhere close to finishing it and i felt unmoored from any sort of sense of self of where i was and that's really where i began to struggle the most you had already mentioned shira a part of the curriculum you spoke about i statements that really resonated most with you and it resonated a great deal with me i want to go through each and maybe you could have another shot at it what is one thing from the curriculum of you had previously mentioned that poem that could be read both top to bottom and bottom to top one thing from the curriculum that has resonated with you personally in your own home i can pick it exactly it's in 10th grade in the life pressures unit we have them write out all the different roles they have so i'll start for them and i'll say i'm a female i'm a from woman i'm a mother i'm a sister i'm a we talk about all the different roles we have and then we flesh out all the different responsibilities that come with those roles and then we talk about prioritizing compartmentalizing for me this goes back to boundaries again like if i try they know i see like i don't answer my phone between four and eight like that's my time to be with my children i do work at night i work almost every night after my my little ones are in bed if we're trying to do eight things at one time we're not doing anything properly you know everyone says oh i multitask i multitask okay so you do three things ineffectively my role right now is i need to be a student you know for the kids in high school i do the best i can right now i need to be a babysitter that's my job i'm on the basketball team if we can compartmentalize and focus on each role and prioritize see what's most important i feel like we can be so much more effective so much more productive so much less overwhelmed and hands on all life pressures because for boys and for girls in the firm world there's just there's a lot of pressure there's a lot of pressure so if i could break it down help you break it down and figure out how you're going to handle all of it i just feel like we're giving them such a gift and i use that sorry you asked how i use it i use it in my life every minute when i'm working i'm working when i'm a mother i'm a mother avi i would say in sixth grade we have this great exercise where we we draw a black dot on the board or we give out a document with a black dot in the center and we ask in my case i'm teaching the boys we ask the boys what do you see and they focus on the black dot and i challenge them as a way of making a little tricky is it a black dot or a black circle what do you guys say and they'll fight with each other and get all philosophical about it and then ultimately i'll explain to them that you're all missing all the white all the white that's around that black dot and it's human nature for us to focus in on those things that stand out to us pain sorrow difficulty challenge those stand out to us the fact that our heart continues to beat and our eyes can see and we can breathe and we have people with decent good relationships that we can share life with the fact that we have yiddish kite that we have judaism all of these things can easily fall by the wayside in terms of our attention so we use that activity in order to show that it's so easy to miss all the white which is much more in terms of how much space it's taking up than just that little black dot in the center we institute gratitude journals with the boys talking about such great people like victor miller who was the master at every little tiny thing that you couldn't see and feel and look at and pay attention to is another area of hakara satov of gratitude to hashem for life for the fact that we exist etc i actually have an interesting situation this year where my son is in sixth grade in ta where i'm teaching the curriculum and i get to kind of listen in on some of the conversations at home and once i heard him telling one of my daughters i don't know necessarily i would argue that that's the smartest way that one sibling should tell the other sibling it's great for the parents to be to hear about these messages and then transmit it but he was telling one of his sisters that's so pessimistic you're looking at the black dot you're not looking at the white space and a little nachos point there maybe he knew out of the corner of his eye that i was watching but that's really a powerful idea that i think everyone should know and i love that the kids bring it home to their parents as i mentioned before also so i i know that takreno is used sufficiently at home because it officially gets the eye roll when i say well in the darkened curriculum and you know right away because here he goes again but uh i i think that in the relationships the unit on relationships there's a lot of talk of being able to put yourself in the other person's shoes to understand where they're coming from before we right away jump to they didn't invite me because they're you know they're obnoxious they hate me they said but really putting yourself in such an important thing in all relationships like he's a little bit older we have some some married some single and you know there's a lot of different dynamics and you know this one didn't call this but if we can train ourselves through for all of our relationships to always have that ability to see things globally to see things that you know not just uh you know from our angle but from the other person's angle um we're really arming them with the you know the ability to have positive relationships despite some bumps along the way now if i could just add to whatever was saying we we utilized sources in torah as well to be able to bring those points out so like grosser is mentioning empathy the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes will bring various uh experiences and incidents from tanach from khazal to be able to make those points so that there's this very seamless connection between those very special judaic holy sources connecting to these very important human talents and skills that we want to teach our kids short of going through the entire darkreinu curriculum as we mentioned so many times before this is a dialogue of our children's emotional development between our school system and the parents the parent comes to you and says i want direction it'sa in order to help my children grow emotionally what is a piece of advice or a book or an article that you would recommend to a parent to help get them on the right path shira my favorite parenting book is how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk totally change the way i see everything validation i think validation i i think is huge again it's just a really quick story but i had a client in therapy and i just she had a lot she really had a lot and a lot of symptoms and a lot of a lot of suffering and she was described through some of her symptoms and i said to her wow you must have been in so much pain she froze she froze and she she started crying and she says to me no one has ever said that to me i didn't use any fancy you know i'm training emdr i act i didn't use any fancy skills there all i did was validate her if her parents had validated her when she was two and three and four would she be here would she be in therapy now avi that's a good question one of the pieces of advice or a little tip that i offer parents all the time it comes from my clinical work and counseling but it also comes from the curriculum is the idea of looking at time as an ally time is not your enemy it's your ally and what i mean by that is we never we almost never unless there's some type of imminent physical threat to someone's safety outside of those much more rare circumstances we almost never need to react to anything immediately it's it's almost always appropriate to react within the next few minutes and even with the next few hours or days if you simply say to a child who might have crossed the line this is something that needs to be addressed but i want to cool down i want to relax i want to think about this and then we're going to have a conversation about it i love you no matter what i know you love me and this was a mistake but give me some time to think about what the right next step is going to be those types of messaging to children i think can be extremely powerful and time is not your enemy you can utilize time in a way in which it is extraordinarily helpful and when we view time in the opposite as an enemy and we need to jump in and quickly fill in the blank it almost always results in failure and destruction so that's one of the main main ideas rabbi grossberg i don't know if i can call myself a tomato atomizer but i did learn and heard many schmoozing from him so this field building and planting translating into english to me is the bible it's really the premise is that parenting takes two different roles there's the building which is the direct meaning the parent is directly involved in building up the child and the zeria which is the planting is where you cultivate you do what makes sure that it's watered properly but then leave it to grow as it needs to grow and it's that balance and that ability to balance if someone would read it and not know who was written by they would think it's you know a forward-thinking modern-day psychologist it's um there's so much in it and i i suggest it for every parent you addressed very early the ills of technology i'd like to hear from each of you what are the internet and technology policies in your own home shira sure my brother-in-law's director of tag and passaic so i really get a lot from him i ask him for guidance all the time i think they have a thing like prevent protect like there's like whole thing try to push it off as long as you can what age did your kids get cell phones so i think a lot of things also depends on the school they go to like for for us a priority was a school that doesn't allow smartphones um and i really i spoke to the principal and i said you know at what age i want i want to push off as long as i can i said at what age do they need to them cell phones she said by 11th grade they all have cell phones so that's what we did um but in their school they only have done phones they're not allowed to have smartphones so that took you know that took the battle away from ibrahim we have filters i go with the tag rules so the kids can use the computers the kids computer that's heavily filtered in a very public space only while we're home avi technology is a magnifier it's nothing more than a magnifying glass if you want to do something good technology explodes it potentially into doing tremendous amount of good if you want to do something bad it can explode how much bad you can do this curriculum teaches that we are supposed to helpfully integrate technology into our lives it's not something that we just try to shelter ourselves from therefore the way that i think it makes sense and the way that we do it in our home is we absolutely do have elements of technology in our home our children use these devices they do not my children are still pretty young my oldest is only 13 or 14 so we do not we have not gone into the later years of teenage hood yet and we'll cross that bridge when we get there but at this point they do not own their own phones or smartphones or dumb phones there's no need from our perspective that they should need to own any of that but certainly in our home there is usage of technology in smart ways in safe ways we filter the router so that every device that's automatically connected through the wi-fi and the internet in the house is going to be automatically filtered and we look at it as this is our opportunity to train our children the the essence of is to train children to be able to when you're not around to tell them what to do and what not to do to make those right decisions and if they're first in encountering things that they most likely will encounter and you're not around and that's when it's happening they may be in trouble i always use the muscle technology is like a power tool it definitely is necessary it has its place you just have to know how to use it properly and that's a discussion we have we talk very openly about it um basically my kids uh my boys do not have smartphones my girls at a certain age 11th 12th grade will get a smartphone that's heavily filtered and you know but technology we we're a family that uses technology i guess you as a whole but carefully you know some of them haven't found a way to find a filter that takes out amazon and um some of the other shopping sites but for now mrs berkowitz rabbi avi lando rabbi swell grossberg thank you so much for the conversation today really helping address and illuminate what indeed is missing this conversation about social emotional learning can really help individuals children families and communities help build healthier lives and futures thank you so much to united to heal for organizing this incredible event and thank you so much for the darchano team and amudim for bringing this conversation to the forum an important conversation that helps us reflect not only in what our children are struggling with but how parents communities families are all partners in helping build a healthier jewish community and a healthier future for ourselves and the next generation thank you so much for joining us tonight [Music] yes hello everyone welcome to ammodium united to heal uh my name is hayem haas i've been working as a public relations professional in the innovation economy for nearly 25 years throughout my career i've worked with some of the it startups and biggest brands in the industry like foursquare skype and microsoft and some of the most visible executives in the sector people with visions of a future radically different from the one we're living in at that time today i lead innovation communication for bloomberg where i have the privilege of telling stories about how the company's engineers solve incredibly challenging technical problems thereby enabling finance professionals around the globe to trade billions of financial instruments each and every day so i'm in a unique position to host today's virtual panel about innovation and its impact on consumers as part of the united to heal fundraiser and i'm thrilled to bring together some amazing people who are looking at the role of innovation and its impact across a number of sectors that you our viewers touch every single day retail and the supply chain consumer technology and mobile devices and what the future of work looks like to get us started let me introduce our panelists and ask each of them to define what innovation is through their perspective let's start with deborah weinswig founder and ceo of coresight research for the last 15 years or so debra has been analyzing disruptions at the intersection of retail and technology that foster conversation and spark innovation for retailers and brands so debra how do you define innovation within the retail sector you know i think that first of all it's a great question and you know i think sometimes we can very much over complicate innovation you know the kind of taking a very tried and true cpg product and uh you know changing the color from black to pink could be defined as innovation right because that drives sales productivity efficiencies there's you know kind of the the other side of that where it's very kind of you know and that actually could be technology driven or data driven right as consumers are searching for something and we're then giving them kind of what they want even maybe in some cases before they know that they want it on the other side right where it's very kind of tech heavy and ai and you know driven ai ml nlp i mean it's it's truly unbelievable in terms of understanding if we want to use the terms around metaverse or whatnot right this this idea that the consumer is sparking data everything that he or she does or they do along their journey and as we can understand and analyze that data right from a research analyst perspective we can then deliver i mean ultimately for me i care very much about sustainability efficiency productivity and really giving consumers products that they cherish because that ultimately will will really start to change the ecosystem so i look at it from a kind of you know if you will bottoms up and like top-down approach as changing the way consumers live their lives whether it's through products or technology-driven products and the journey with which you know kind of we on the other side help develop that for them and everything in between so i i really look at it as kind of almost ethereal in terms of what's done and from a holistic perspective but ultimately it's data driven so data data-driven change that impacts consumers lives and we'll get back to the metaverse a little bit later our next guest is avi greengart president of tech exponential a firm that helps technology companies mobile carriers and retailers sell more effectively by understanding tech adoption patterns managing the competitive environment and improving product launches avi is one of the most sought after consumer technology analysts having led market research teams at global data current analysis and jupiter research he's regularly quoted by the media a noted speaker and moderator and a featured columnist avi tell us how you define innovation within the consumer electronics sector hi first thank you so much for roping me into this discussion for such a good cause on to your question i break down consumer tech innovation into three categories new to the world incremental innovation and process innovation we tend to think of only the first category new to the world and that's things like robots and virtual reality headsets and things like multi-touch user interfaces that apple introduced on the iphone in 2007 that redefined what a smartphone was but incremental improvements can be quite innovative and even spark entire new industries for example the steadily improving camera modules that we see on our smartphones that not just make your vacation memories better they also led to things like instagram and video doorbells and finally process innovation is often overlooked but changing how things work or how they ship or how we buy them is an incredibly powerful form of innovation so i mean where would we be without apple's app store that's a process innovation just the 30 percent cut you know everyone's arguing about it now but it was wildly innovative at the time when everything had to go through carriers and that wasn't pretty oh i remember it very very well being in the middle of that fight uh for for for skype um our final participant in today's conversation is danielle farage danielle is a workplace futurist and it couldn't be a better time for us to tackle this topic future of work spending is predicted to reach 656 billion dollars this year that's up 17 compared to last year so danielle how do you define innovation as it relates to the future of work thank you for that big question uh talking about skype i uh i i was around for that so that was the beginning of my video chatting sort of days uh so i you know the ability to really reimagine um how we work in this new hybrid reality is how i would define innovation and i think it's actually two-sided so when you think about the future of work there are you know there's a worker economy and then there is the employers right and and that's a two-sided sort of approach so in terms of employers i think innovation really is the ability to question everything about what we were doing in uh to say for example why weren't we involving entry-level folks in these discussions about transforming culture and how can we move forward to run these meetings differently and and do they have to be synchronous and is how we gather really important which i think it is and so on the other hand you know it is the employees and the talent um there is this need to innovate on their side as well which is how do i want to be a hybrid professional how do i want to deal with this new hybrid reality and i think that is just kind of you know that is going to explode in the in the next um you know five to ten years just how do you navigate this new hybrid reality is is going to be a huge point of innovation um especially in like the personal you know professional side um and i really do view innovative leaders and people as those who can handle the speed of change because they're at the forefront of it right whether you're a job seeker you're on the phone with your friends about you know what kind of culture does this company provide like what kind of lifestyle um is is you know the new hot one i'm always being able to know what's happening and then i think the innovative leaders at organizations it really requires being on the phone with leaders of other organizations and in different industries across the world having conversations with people at all levels of their own organization to understand what people want um and really teaching others how to how to adapt to today act on tomorrow and plan for next week so it's clear we've got a lot of ground to cover uh to discuss innovation in each of these very big sectors of the consumer economy so avi let's start with you uh i know the consumer electronics show is coming up in las vegas in early [Music] this is the place where pretty much every tech brand shows off the latest in their lines of everything from tvs and refrigerators to new laptops virtual reality headsets give our listeners a sense of how big this industry is and how the new tech is impacting consumers every single day all right well i mean i could quote you numbers on the size but it's easier to put things in perspective just using comparisons and and then just a sort of an anecdote that gives you an idea of how tech has sort of infiltrated our lives just the video game industry alone you know games for games consoles pcs and now mobile that is bigger than the entire movie industry like four times over um really um we everyone has a smartphone but literally everybody has a smartphone the smartphone is without question the most successful consumer product of all time there are over 6.3 billion smartphones in use and 80 percent of the population of planet earth has a phone of some kind or other um very so i mean it's huge um i'll let deborah talk about the impact of remote work and learning on on the growth of pcs or the regrowth of pcs but here's a much more mundane story for how tech has woven into our lives but here's version one um the way we tend to think of it the other day i took a bus into manhattan here's the version two what's actually going on the other day i took my connected super computer out of my pocket i opened a free app i downloaded from the app store and the app used my 5g connection to connect with computers in the cloud to see when the next bus would arrive it knew that because both my phone and the bus have gps systems that ping satellites determine our exact locations the app then sold me a virtual bus ticket using a tiny camera biometric identification and encryption to charge my credit card account again using a fifth generation cellular connection when i got on the bus i used the phone wireless headphones with advanced noise cancellation 5g and a spotify app to listen to an album that i had not directly purchased and i'd just been released that's a lot of tech but i just took the bus [Laughter] that that really puts it into context and that's not just you know that's not like some wild oh only tech analysts do that everybody does everybody does that that's right that's right that that that really is just shows how everything we do every single day you're touching the this whole ecosystem of technology and innovation it's in everybody's lives and they don't even think about it it's just big and it's pervasive yep so deborah let's come to you um you know there's something we're hearing in the news every single day um we're we're we're we're we're in the middle of the holiday shopping season and you know the prices they pay the retail goods gasoline holiday gifts they're all going up what's going on with the supply chain and why does that matter to today's consumers well i think it starts especially for this audience around the chip shortage and that has had unbelievable impacts uh there are literally you know different areas of supply chain where you know kind of the product should complete your kind of if you will getting it from like the cotton field to the consumer is is missing a chip there's also chassis shortage out of the ports which seems like very basic technology but when you don't have enough of them it is uh really driving uh the capability of kind of getting product off of a ship and into a trailer uh at a at a very um dire level almost and so the you know going back to obvious comment right i mean if you think about even some some basic items right so i think in 2020 we ended up seeing like an 11 to 12 percent increase in pc sales almost a million units the assumption was as you know kind of children returned to school and you know kind of we were working in a hybrid environment then we see probably north actually 15 growth uh yeah that was you know people were waiting for like the windows 11 upgrade and whatnot but with the chip shortage right there is just a lack of units and it was fascinating in 2020 coresight was asked to kind of re you know rethink holiday right what could what could we do to to think differently about the pace that we ended up creating a shopping festival and kind of trying to pull as much as we could into october as we fast forward to 21 and you know we were like okay it was june del's variant you know we probably should try and do things remotely so we made the entire festival this year remote and was on october 10th again which was a sunday and what we saw was already at that time out of stock levels for many of the companies we had 35 who participated because of challenges in the supply chain so it's real uh we are seeing inflation as you mentioned i think that you know there right now that price is ahead of inflation so retailers will and i'll leave you with this phenomenally positive thought will have their most positive margin quarter on record in the fourth quarter of this year and so from a retail perspective and then as we think about technology right next year retail media nft is the ability to monetize their own data it's not like your your mother's retail right this is a whole new sector totally totally totally true and and we're seeing it you know just just the online shopping alone but but you you referenced something there the the the lack of chassis the the truck drivers who either stopped working are no longer employed unfortunately passed away during the the pandemic um that's impacting this delivery of product from the ports to the retail warehouses to the consumer but on the flip side of it there's this thing called the great resignation where millions of people are quitting their jobs as they seek new jobs that offer them more flexibility danielle what's going on here and where is innovation playing a role in the great resignation definitely so i actually entered the hr tech world right before the pandemic and throughout it i really was able to be a community manager and lead conversations with you know head of town acquisition at ey and deloitte and have uh you know produce a podcast actually with uh with them as people uh and and really understand sort of what they were thinking um throughout the entire pandemic and going through it um and throughout the pandemic really caused two massive shifts in hiring so one is that geography was no longer really a factor you could hire people and people could work from anywhere which really does change the landscape from a local based right approach to a global one um and the second one is that the the skills gap that we've seen really rising uh in in the last 20 years has finally caught up with us and that means that organizations are desperate for talent it also means that this new sort of uh i like to call it the post-pandemic enlightened generation of talent um to sort of have options and and there has been a shift of power completely um and so whether you're a senior leader or you started your job in 2019 every single person went through the pandemic um and it did you know it did unite people uh you know and communities saw a huge surge in in activity a lot of communities were born whether it be on facebook or slack or and circle what not um but it also highlighted you know the foundational issues and underlying resentments within an organization itself and that's part of why people went outside of the organization to find that belonging and inclusion um and really some sort of guidance and so you know as as people sort of reflected and they said you know i'm not happy or i'm not i'm not happy with how an organization may be handled um you know the the response to certain situations like diversity politics communications how are they talking about the pandemic how frequently were they really updating people on their plans did they have plans um i think a lot of people were disappointed with how their organizations dealt with these problems um and they sort of maybe tried to dodge questions and and uh maybe made commitments and over commitments that they didn't really follow up on and now what we're seeing from all of these sort of things happening and powers at play is this renaissance i like to call it and instead of calling it the great resignation i actually call it the great reshuffling or the great rehire because these people are leaving but they're going off to do other things and to join other companies right um and so i like to think of it as a renaissance the talent are are in demand and badly needed but they also have this opportunity to push for more and really demand their worth and and i saw this earlier this year in january i started uh writing a book about values based job searching right you have a 90 000 hours of your life to work uh you deserve to give yourself the time necessary to really decide what it is that you want to do with that and i think this relates back to my sort of answer to your question about what is innovation i think innovation is two-sided it's you know the the companies like spotify who have opened worker hubs based on where people actually live um to give their their workers you know different uh dynamic spaces to work from where collaboration and creativity are at the heart right they're designed for that purpose or bumble who you know they gave their workers a a week off for burnout because they realized that oh mental health is really important and and we do value it so it really was up to them to step up to the plate and not just talk about values right in a corporate communications um but to really show up how how they uh in an authentic way to that culture and then on the flip side i would say for for talent um i think there's an opportunity to you know in part of my personal mission is to really teach people how to conduct a more values based approach to job seeking and always be that sort of culture investigator which i like to call myself um as to which are the organizations that are really showing up the way that they claim to be and and how are they showing up and if you want diversity well come to the interview with the right questions uh to to really get to the bottom of is this diversity the right type of diversity right are there opportunities for mentorship um are there opportunities for reverse mentorship right and really start to pay attention and tune in to what an innovative organization is really doing today and and tomorrow so it's really changing the way employers are interfacing with their employees and vice versa which i think is really important um deborah let's come back to you we talked about we just talked about the white collar workplace side of this we've talked a little bit about the blue collar side of this but but let's also talk about the availability of staff to work in restaurants which i think impacts a lot of our listeners right there they're restaurants that aren't opening in as early as they might have in the past they're not staying open as late because they just don't have the staff and there are lots of different reasons for it some of it has to do with salaries some of it has to do with just talent availability people have moved to other markets where they might have worked uh previously in in one city how are innovations like mobile ordering delivery apps helping in this in this sector and there's even been a lot of talk about either drones or robots being used to pick up the slack in the last mile to get the products into the hands of consumers where do you see that going uh great great timing on the uh the question you know we just did a report around the instant needs market and it's this idea i mean you know if you live in manhattan if you've been on 14th street you know i'm sure you've seen the the dark stores whether it's go puff get tier 15 20 fridge no more gorilla right you know i'm sure i've left a few out because there's new ones every day but the idea is that you have this workforce and they are really kind of your last mile and hyper local i think that that's also like once i said again i i look at everything to this lenses sustainability it's just always you know i've always looked at well maybe more is frugality but ultimately it's this idea of utilizing it's like what all of our parents taught us let's be honest like utilizing what you have to the best extent and it's it's wild there's i you know kind of where i live in the city and where one of my um teammates lives we got on our phones we were looking at go puff and our stores had completely different merchandise and we're like two miles apart in the city that's how local it is but what's really been very inspirational to me as you mentioned this kind of lack of you know kind of available you know kind of talent to either be in in the restaurant or even to do last mile that gopal is now specifically they are powering local eateries and delivery kind of mech yeah this whole mechanism to really be their kind of you know this this kind of partner if you will to get the product to the consumer you know hot and delicious and to you know and they also i think it's very important they're very consumer you know kind of minded in terms of making sure you have a great experience and so i think that to me so if i if i take a step back so for many of you you know i spent you know the the bulk of the last decade before the pandemic in um greater china and you know we were seeing that with like meitwan and elema and you know kind of ways to get product to the consumer in a surprise and delight kind of way and there's you know gamification and whatnot and so if we look at how consumers consume right there's stores which number one we're seeing an unbelievable change in terms of in-store technology number two e-commerce which obviously especially in kind of grocery i went from like two percent penetration to 12 during the the height of the pandemic number three an area where we're spending a lot of our time is live streaming live selling so this idea and what we see there's a 50 reduction in returns when someone buys something in a live stream why because i'm talking to you right and i'm asking you you know i'm like i'm uh short-waisted i'm this i'm that like can you have a model who's my size you can try this on and so you buy with much more knowledge i've always been very surprised right when you go to any one of a number of websites right there's one photo maybe two there's no embedded video i mean you know things that you know in china five years ago when we were helping western brands go to china right in the middle you had 16 photos pdps and an embedded video so you knew what you're you're buying so the return rate in china was one quarter what it is in the us because the consumer just had more information and the reason i bring all this up is that i think now right you've got stores ecom and live streaming i actually think the fourth kind of if you will vertical now is the instant needs and this is a whole new way to consume to deliver right retail media and everything else and so i i will tell you what's amazing to me is we've literally seen during the pandemic two entirely new channels of distribution for retail and i think that that will i mean it's permanent it's exponential growth and i think that you know so many of us when i think about innovation that's where we're seeing a ton of new innovation and what i love about it is it really powers the smbs you know talking with you know danielle about this whole idea around like diversity right you're able to have everyone participate whether you know you're a pwd a person with a disability or whatnot you can participate in this ecosystem in a way you never could before and that i find incredibly something i it's very important to to me to coresight and i think to you know consumers in general that's awesome and i always thought the the the thing that blew my mind coming out of asia were the vending machines that i could walk up to with my cell phone and you know pay with alipay and have the product drop drop down i remember seeing a demo of that a number of years ago at south by southwest where oreo had vending machines that you could just walk up to an order from um but it sounds like it's far more advanced and far more built out and and hopefully we're learning from that uh and bringing those uh best practices into our supply chain uh here in the us now avi the we talked about a little bit about this this semiconductor availability issue um i've seen stories about car companies device manufacturers like apple even the military who are reporting that this is impacting their manufacturing plans so how do you see this resolving itself obviously you know samsung just announced that they're going to be building a semiconductor plant in texas uh but that's not going to come online until 2024. right yeah now the answer is not easily and not anytime soon some of the shipping mess uh you know with all the carts stuck on boats um off of long beach that'll probably work itself out in the next six to nine months um and in the case of apple specifically they lock down their supply chain so well that you can usually get what you want um just not when you want it or in the exact configuration that you'd like um and they they claim that they lost six billion dollars in sales last quarter but they sold like 70 billion so yeah yeah so supply issues yeah the the core supply issues require investments in fabs that take two to three years to build and most of that investment is going into the latest and greatest next generation process nodes the kind of plants that build pricey profitable processors for phones and computers and 5g radios but every one of those phones in every car and well every everything has a bunch of smaller less expensive simpler parts that require older fabrication processes that aren't getting the same investment so it's a mess you can design your way out of some of that by using the more expensive processors um tesla does that um but you know on a lot of products that have multi-year uh product planning cycles um you can't do that and even then like my car is dying and i'm trying to buy a new one but subaru has a three-month wait to get my car be probably not because it's missing a central processor but because it's probably missing some actuator for the turn signals or or a controller for the backup camera or it's sitting at a long beach avi that's the issue right is you like literally because there's no chassis we can't get it off the right i mean and and part of that though also gets solved by people moving away from the toyota system of just in time and more towards the i'm going to have a few parts extra just in case and in the in the short term that ripples throughout the supply chain everybody instead of ordering 10 of something because they're going to need 10 in a month orders 100 because they're going to need 100 in case they can't get them month to month but eventually you'll be able to have a little bit more of a cushion uh for the supply chain but for things that require you know 20 nanometer processes instead of today's five seven four um yeah you know people are taking trying to find old lithographic machines that are mothballed and spinning them up again it's a long ugly complicated process and and and not a cheap one no and not a cheap one well the oh i i hope you get that car soon you may not have heated seats because i've heard some of the auto manufacturers just can't get the chips for the heated seats right which is a problem up here in the northeast but uh you know three months you'll be you'll be through the winter by then or maybe um so so let's go back we talked about a term before um the metaverse um what is it what role is it going to play danielle let's start with you what role does the metaverse play in the future of work well i'm honored i get to answer this question uh it's a big one so at its most basic uh the the metaverse is a virtual reality that allows people from all over the world to interact uh both with each other and with the metaverse right the virtual reality itself um so oftentimes you know people will play video games and that can be a metaverse right it's a it's a virtual reality um where they can really interact whether it be you know with with guns uh sadly um or you know in in other ways which are more helpful um so users are are often allowed to like obtain items so um that kind of brings up the the term nft and that remain theirs between different worlds uh and metaverses um and there are a lot of ways to interpret that that concept and it definitely has evolved um throughout the years from you know just simply gaming to oh wow this is actually a an entire world um but essentially the metaverse takes this a little bit further to to put the user in the middle of the action so it opens the door to a stronger and more realistic experience that simply then then really browsing the internet does or watching a video um so essentially as it relates to the future of work right i don't know if you guys saw this but facebook um is now meta did you know did you know yeah it's uh it's pretty crazy so reports on it [Laughter] um so it really does you know put this idea of the metaverse in the spotlight um but a couple months prior to that um they were actually they released a sort of article and and i guess maybe they released the tool but um essentially it's like the future of working right it's this virtual workspace where you can join your co-workers in a virtual world and you can work side by side or at the same desk um and essentially this this sort of relates back to um remote work right so the idea that you can log on to a virtual world and be with your co-workers in that virtual world uh opens the conversation to like remote working and in my understanding i think remote working is actually a diversity issue um not just for you know the women and and mothers who we've we saw uh step away from the workforce during the pandemic in a drastic way but also for diverse uh people of diverse backgrounds right so i spoke to a number of people this year about being black at work and what the experience is like just you know how many microaggressions they encounter on the way to work in a subway right for example um so i think it sort of raises this problem of well or really a solution of well if we have vr it's a it's a matter of inclusion it's a way to create safe spaces at work without being at work right and and i think um the definition of of culture and of the workplace itself has now expanded to to really fit this idea that it's no longer work life balance it's no longer work and life it's work life integration um and how we choose to really move forward with that is it is reflective of our individual cultures and organizations the other thing is you know it this vr and metaverses bring up the the concept of hybrid experience so how does the physical world and the virtual world how do they interact and how how do we integrate them and so essentially we just did a feature of work convention with the future work community on upstream on this platform called newbie and it was a fully virtual reality and conference where you literally entered a virtual space on your computer and you could go and talk to people and zoom with people at different booths that's fully remote right but essentially this hybrid experience is how do we empower um the the personal hybrid experience to be one that is super tailored to the person and their needs um how do we let managers you know uh empower other people to participate in the culture as it works for them right are we empowering them to to stay at home or work in a physical space and how are we doing that um so i think you know the the vr question and and the the metaverse question really is something that organizations should be thinking about um because it will be a huge part of of sort of moving forward and and being more inclusive at at work and wherever work is for you one of the things that truly sets amudhim apart in the mental health field is that amudim has never charged any client money for any services that we provide comprehensive case management costs a lot of money having the proper staff clinical directors supervisors it gets costly from day one we did not want anyone to ever be nervous that they shouldn't pick up the phone to call because they can't afford it and that is why it is so important our money comes from the public it is the people that are supporting us yes we get some grants but it's nowhere near what our budget is i mean our budget this year is estimated to go a little bit over 8 million dollars and you know that's that's a very significant amount of money and it's something that we need partners in the community to help us to be able to raise that money i urge each and every one of you to please do whatever you can to help support amudhum and know that by supporting amudha you're saving lives because that's what we do and it is directly going for the programming that we provide so so i think we all encountered this idea of work life integration when our work desks ended up in our living rooms uh over the last 18 months um so i think that was sort of a rude uh introduction to the concept but i definitely see where that where where you're going with this um but but avi i'm gonna come to you because for the metaverse to come to life it sounds like we're all gonna need either augmented reality devices virtual reality headsets uh some something in between not quite sure yet um talk about the market for ar and vr i know you've been playing with different devices in this space for a very long time yes i play with toys for a living i i know i'm jealous at times um are we first of all are we finally at a time when this idea of a metaverse can't go mainstream from a technology perspective um yes no maybe let's let's do some quick definitions um i i basically agree with danielle's definition of a metaverse uh think of but just so that um if if you're not technical think of it as like the internet um and a series of web pages and if you go to one website well that could be part of the meta if it was a virtual world instead of taking over more of your senses and not just a web browser that that's a decent definition of the metaverse so therefore you could almost say we're at we have a metaverse today or metaverse equivalent um ar augmented reality means that i'm seeing what's in front of me plus some sort of computer overlay and virtual reality means i all my senses have been occluded in some way and i'm being transported somewhere else some are real some are not whatever so vr headsets are now have the processing and imaging capabilities to do genuinely useful things and the price points have come way down for one reason and that the reason is facebook um or meta facebook has been investing billions of dollars subsidizing vr hardware um and it's not for any nefarious reason there are plenty of things they're doing for nefarious reasons but um facebook is tired of apple controlling how much ad data it can gather so and they want their own platform that they can control um so a vr or a metaverse that's certainly a potential next generation platform facebook bought a company called oculus and invested heavily so the oculus quest 2 the most recent standalone vr headset probably should cost seven or seven hundred dollars eight hundred nine hundred dollars based on the technology that's in it instead you can pick one up starting at three hundred dollars and using it you can play games you can exercise or god help you you could attend virtual meetings um the next big thing is ar glasses um so that's augmented reality where you're seeing the real world plus uh microsoft has bulky ar headsets uh called hololens for business already and they're they're kind of amazing um but they're for somewhat specialized use cases um and then there are you know high-end boutique companies like vario um that make vr headsets uh they make ar headsets they make vr and ar headsets um for product designers and aircraft simulators you can actually get a pilot's license using an uh nar headset from them in europe um but everyone is watching apple to see what's next for consumers because apple has a lot of ip in this space they've been putting it into their phones and their tablets and once the imaging capabilities are good enough that it can be miniaturized enough and pleasant enough to do something useful on a regular person's head we sort of expect apple will certainly be one of the companies uh that figures out how to how to do that and they have a developer following so again once you have a new platform you need apps to take advantage of it so vr is here today um you really can just go to best buy and and buy a vr headset that will do genuinely useful and fun things ar not here yet um but within the horizon of the next few years you can see that that's coming so so ar is going to be way more than me just sitting at home and you know checking out my next tv and where it's going to sit in my room even though the tv is not there but it i can display it might be there you go um time to replace my tv that's right um deborah for you what does this mean to the retailers and brands that sell physical goods um danielle hinted at it this idea of selling digital goods to be used inside the metaverse and how do those retailers take advantage of this shift to this virtual environment so it's interesting i mean i i would say for the retailers it's all through nfts and for those of you know um a non-functional token it's a kind of a unit of data if you will stored on digital ledger so you know ethereum tazos you know kind of blockchain um and you know they can be associated with a photo a video audio or any other type of kind of digital files and just this idea that there's like kind of public proof of like who's the original owner and so i had originally thought that we would see a lot more of this as it related to you know kind of um design patterns and that at least to date has just not been the direction things have gone instead right we've seen well first of all many of the retailers have a lot of picture inventory right that they they own right celebrities and whatnot number two because of their stores they have artwork but what's been the most interesting and we started to see more of this kind of come to play on singles day is that they are starting to have uh nft opportunities around product right so whether it is something you might wear in a game or uh so for example burberry and lawn jeans um they actually sold out of all their nfts on double 11. we've since seen uh american eagle and macy's is doing it with the like macy's day parade and the balloons and and where i believe at least today that we will see the greatest growth is in we've seen the most success today in the luxury sector and so our prediction is that by the year 2025 that ten percent of revenues in the luxury sector will be driven by nfts and what we saw last month that like dolce gabbana had i think it was nine nfts it sold for almost six million dollars so it's real this isn't kind of you know hypothetical anymore and you know we're talking about easily you know kind of uh a very kind of significant market and you know it goes back to as i said right retail has this opportunity to to earn more and whether that's around retail media the data that they have or whether it is kind of nfts we are seeing this in my opinion as a really a new revenue model and i think you you have to think about right what is it that you want your brand to represent and this could go right kind of into infinity right and and i think that you know understanding your customer base that you have and the customer base you could have and where is the intersection between the two and so i i do think that we're still very early but we've seen it's actually been amazing to me to see in the use cases that we've seen really in the kind of 2h of 21 and the kind of plan that many of the retailers have for 22 and also in some ways i do find a lot of this can number one you know who who the organization owns it just the what needs to take place because retail unfortunately is still very siloed and as we have more kind of ways to make money right i think in some ways it becomes more solid but this actually goes across the organization and what we find is it's been i mean if anything i've seen in my let's say over a decade of retail experience it's the easiest way that i've seen retailers think about a new revenue stream that actually brings the whole organization together as opposed to kind of disbursing them into silos and and that i think is powerful in a way that we probably don't even understand just yet well there's definitely lots to look at next year at nrf the national retail federation and how they tackle nfts i think that that's that's an exciting space now danielle you and i have spent a lot of time talking about nfts how does this concept relate to the future of work yeah so uh i really like i like to think about sort of the the time that we're in and i think deborah did a really good job of setting this up and helping us understand you know that technology is really at the cusp of enabling us to keep track of every person's economic contribution at a granular level right so nfts give credit and monetarily um i might add to the original owner or creator of that specific nft or um thing right uh and essentially what that means is you know in the context of work i think people are often overpaid or underpaid for their contribution to the the overall product right a junior level employee who does 80 hours of work per week um gets compensated much less than the senior leader who works probably may or may be less in a specific organization um i know that's true for some industries and and organizations that's different for others but essentially the quantity of of code or you know let's say a developer you know the quantity of code someone contributes doesn't mean that the code was was necessarily critical or or valuable right so now we're getting to the actual quality of the work and over time it becomes clear which lines of code or code libraries right are used in multiple projects and survive revisions so things like github also allow programmers to sort of give credit or kudos to contributors um that they admire who have done the the previous work so i think you know ultimately it's pop it's possible to quantify every person's contribution um and with smart contracts and stored on blockchain and nfts it's now possible to integrate all of that with you know the proper compensation mechanism um and i will cite you know drawer pole egg has a really really really great article on this um specifically and how the you know nfts really impact the future of work um but in you know in my opinion i think that creators and um people who who come up with these innovative ideas deserve to reap the benefits uh especially if these things are being used in the in the long run and i actually think that you know a lot of the um you know it then creates sort of this we all have a stake in something um because you know if i contribute now my fullest then i might be compensated even more in the future and i think that's a huge motivator for people individually and at a larger level i think it actually um is able to bring people together like like deborah said whether it be um you know between organizations or within them um because if you're all working towards sort of the same the same goal which is what a lot of nft projects are based off of it's this one central mission and everyone buys into it and then you know people can have a say in how uh you know