Protect Yourself-Part 1 of the Double Episode

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Transcript

Courtney 0:01

All right. Welcome back to Scratching the Surface of Workforce Development with Courtney Taylor, and I am Courtney Taylor. And I sit here today in August and genuinely can't believe I'm still talking to myself. It's a lot of fun, and I feel like I can't believe people are still listening to this, so I don't know what's wrong with you. I think I know what's wrong with me. But I'm glad you're here. I'll say this first before I start. One thing I get a, I get a kick out of when people are like, "Oh my gosh, I don't know how you find the time to do the, the podcast." And like, well, it actually only takes me the time to sit down and record it, because I keep running notes in many different apps and places of,, when I have an idea or a thought that I'm like, "Oh man, I like that. I need to, I need to talk about that at some point," right? And so then, you know, I'll have a moment and I'll look at something or feel something or see something, and I just come back to it. And then, like, I sit down and record this literally whenever it just is about to bubble up for whatever reason, And it could be something I thought about months ago, days ago, weeks ago, or the day. And I will say this next topic is something that I have thought about and thought differently, frankly, over the past, you know, decade or so of my life, which has been in dog years. I jokingly, you know, just turned 43 this week. Or I guess last... and, and like I'm actually was like 42 going on 103 because I feel like I've, I've lived the last decade of my life in dog years, and I feel like I have learned so much every year and had so many opportunities to apply learning that, clearly that would have normally taken seven years. And, and that it is exhausting. That is inspiring it is all the things. So if you are living your life in dog years join me on this journey through whatever it is we're about to walk down. And I think this is going to be potentially an interesting episode or an episode that finally forces my board to tell me to get out. I'm just kidding about that board. Please don't kick me out because I'm having a really good time, so anyway, so for those of you who are, who are thinking like a podcast is like this big whole production, it can be. It probably should be, but I use a couple of very simple apps and a few minutes, and I give it back to y'all. Could it be better if I added music and purposeful editing and put like... That's a lot of popping of the Ps here, but put like real money into it? Sure. But that's not why I created this thing. And so I think, like, if this is something that's on your mind or however you wanna communicate with the world, like writing is actually my chosen method. But unfortunately I got into the habit of I sit down and write at my computer, then I go like answer emails and stuff. So it just talking and have my cell phone here with my notes and, and that's all, so. But anyway, I think if like, if it's something that gets on your heart for longer than a little bit and you wanna do it, just like grab the bull and go do it, whatever it is. I will say that you know, for, for any of you who follow me or know me, you know that, the last five years have been really hard. I would say the last decade professionally has been really hard and, and simultaneously very rewarding. And I think when you're a young career person, if you have, like, a lot of just like, "I just wanna get stuff done," and you don't get the right mentors, you will probably flame out. And so I've talked about mentors a couple of times, and I think it's really critical to keep talking about... I don't hear anything about mentorship in workforce development, and that drives me bananas because, we have to do this, and there's no time for it. I remember when, when my office first staffed up and people were coming in like, "Hey, can you help me understand this?" And I'm like, "I cannot." 'Cause I was in survival mode, not just professionally, but personally with all the things going on in my life between, people dying and COVID and horses dying and long COVID and, and it just wasn't the right... I was not in the right space to help. And, i love humans. I don't necessarily wanna be around them all the time. And so that's funny because people will disagree with me about myself, and they're like, "That's not true, Courtney. Look at you. You are talking to everybody." I'm like, "That doesn't mean I'm not an introvert." It just means I have to recover from these moments. Before I get into this, I'll say I went up to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho this week, and I've been up there a few times back when Lightcast was Emsi, and it is just an, a spectacular place. I had never been there when I started going there in maybe, like, 2012. I had never been there. I think I had only... I don't even know if I had been, to the Pacific Northwest at that point in my life and so I hadn't really experienced the people, the culture, the beautiful scenery. And so when, when I, you know, got invited to go out there, I'm like yeah, I'll be there," on top of being with one of my absolute favorite corporate partners, I guess I should say at this point. Yeah, I'll go. And so it's funny because, like, I'm with all these people all day, and they're amazing humans doing, like, really cool work. And so learning from them and listening to them and entertaining them apparently, which wasn't my goal, but it's apparently what I can do sometimes when I'm being particularly spicy. But then I had the opportunity to spend, I went on a paddleboard for two hours in the middle of the lake by myself the, the day I got there 'cause it's, it takes an entire day to get there. It's worth it. So I went you know, on a three-hour walk, a hike, quote, unquote. I mean, look, when you're from the South and it says summit, and your dumb self is like, "I'm just gonna walk up to the summit," and then your heart is like, "Yo, sis, you probably shouldn't have 'cause you walk on flat surfaces," and 10 minutes on the stair climber is not walking up to the, quote, summit, okay? And this was a mountain if you're from the South, but if you're from up there, it was probably just, like, a little, a little hill, so then I went up the next day, which was my birthday, and just for a couple of hours, I'm like, what a better way to bring in a new year of your life. And then I had this existential crisis in the middle of this where I'm like... 'Cause I was like, I'm turning 43, and just like, I- I... But I've lived 43 years on Earth at this point, so I'm entering my 44th year, not my 43rd year, so then I'm actually 44. And age does not bother me, which is why I talk about it. I love how old I am. I've never been this old before, but I never know and you don't know when, like, your last day on Earth is, so, like, I'm just living it up, and I'm literally living my professional dream, and I know it will not last forever I know it will not last forever and We always hear people say, like, "I wish we knew it was the good old days while it was happening," and I feel like I do so when I say I am trying to soak it up as much as possible, I am. And I don't take any of it for granted. I have, like, pretty sincere boundaries around me with humans because that I don't... I'm not in, in my creative space when I'm battling personalities and nonsense, and so I just don't. And so when you bring all the nonsense, unless it's, like, super fun nonsense, I just can't. And and, and that's worked for me in my life. It's not perfect, but, but while I, while I have the opportunity that I have today, while I am so blessed to get to do the work that I get to do genuinely, it is literally the, the most fun I think I've ever had. Even on the bad days or the really stupid days when you have to fight the most ridiculous of things, you're still at the end of it, you're like, "Well, you know, you gotta, you gotta have some of that stuff because otherwise you don't get this stuff, and you probably don't appreciate this stuff if you don't get that stuff." So anyway, I'm sitting there and I thought, 'cause I did not want to get out of bed that morning 'cause it's, like, 4:00 in the morning. I'm on Pacific Coast time, which it's 6:00, you know, where I'm from, which is, you know, whatever. And then I'm like, wait a minute. When else am I gonna get to turn 43 to a beautiful sunrise in the Pacific Northwest? And so in a sweatshirt in August, okay? I hate the summer. So I was like, "Okay, I'll get up and I'll go." And so I sat there on a rock and by the way, like, I used ChatGPT to help me, like, navigate this and make the most out of a very limited amount of time. And so it's funny 'cause people are like, "Oh, you were on vacation." I was like, "I was not on vacation." I got to the hotel at, like, I don't know, 2:30 or something. I got on a paddleboard, immediately and then went paddleboarding. And then I came back and I went for a nighttime hike to watch the sunset. I just was really busy, and so you can too. So anyway, but as I was sitting there, I was thinking about, my career and, and that's where the... I'm telling you all this 'cause that's where this idea that I've had before, but I just had never cared enough to write it down, and so I did. I did this week, and I titled it, because you probably think you know where this is going, but you don't And so here we go. There's actually two topics that I'm gonna talk about, one of them a little bit less 'cause I'll probably dedicate an entire episode to it at some point. One of the things that, that I've gone through my career and at different stages for different reasons, like I just never felt like I was being heard with my ideas and my thoughts. And part of why I started this podcast was, like I genuinely enjoy debating, disagreeing. I don't think I have all the answers. I have the answers that I have come up with. I have the solutions or the challenges or the whatever, but we have lost the ability to argue respectfully, and that's a damn shame because disagreeing respectfully is probably like the highest sign of respect you can give someone, and it's my highest sign of respect. If I respect you enough to sit and have a conversation with you about why I disagree, that means I genuinely respect you. And when I listen to you disagreeing with me, it means I genuinely respect you. And the strongest relationships I have in my life are the people who will do that with me and to me, and I love it. It's not that I like confrontation. A lot of people think disagreement means confrontation. Simultaneously, they will bottle it all up and then just explode on everybody like it's not confrontation. It's like, or we could just emotionally regulate ourselves, and we could just be adults and have this conversation. And so for me I appreciate whenever I get to have the conversation. I was actually conditioned from an early age to just put my ideas out there because they weren't gonna be heard., I did not come in my space from a place where anybody should listen to me, especially when I was younger and had nothing behind my name. Nobody knew who I was, and I'm like, "No, I think this is a thing." And they're like, "No, you're wrong, little girl." I remember one time I had a professor disagree with me on some data that I had gotten actually from Emsi, which is now Lightcast, and we were trying to do a project on, identifying maybe where our students were going to work or something like that. And he was just hell-bent on getting the data downloaded directly from maybe like iPads or somewhere. And I was like, "Okay, I'm just gonna go pull it with Emsi." And of course, then I went to my little buddies at Emsi, and I like typed in the little chat box like, "Hey, I need to produce this data. How do I do that?" And of course, they told me because that's what they did. And so then I produced the data in literally like 45 minutes, and it took him three weeks to come back with the data set, and it said exactly the same thing. And so I was, I don't know, I was maybe in my mid to late... I was probably in my late 20s, and I just remember being like just so full of it because this professor with a PhD had, shown me the light, and I was like, "Nope, I got it." Now, I'll also say there's a man, Steve Cherkowski, I think I've talked about him before. He was at the Dothan Chamber when I worked at the university, and he, he made me, when I started using Lightcast, he made me learn how to download the data sets, the raw data sets, and how to manipulate them in Excel form because he said, "If you're gonna have a tool like that, you need to understand where the data originate and what they mean." And I was like, "Okay." And it is still the greatest professional gift I've ever gotten because I don't lean into the data the same way I used to. I mean, I lean into data, but just not the way I used to, like the functionality of how I got the data and the methodology and all that. But I still know it. So it's always super fun when people who are either older than me or have some feeling or whatever try to like one-up me on data, and it's like, "You wanna nerd? We'll nerd, dude," because I'm old school with this and, and I was raised old school by my mentors. And so that was the whole point of this is like I have had some of the most incredible mentors that one person should not ever be able to you just soak up from the world. I shouldn't... I mean, it's, it's like a superpower to have these humans who have just been so spectacular, and God knew it, and He's like, "You're getting a little bit. I need to give you this person, 'cause this person needs to calm that down, okay?" Because I feel like I'm going in a lot of different directions at one time, and mentally, and my brain is just really, really active, and constantly. And so I can either channel it for good or I can be messy, and I know that. So I just spend my time giving it good stuff. And so,, figure that out about yourself. And in the process of all of this is I am young and just full of myself, and I really wasn't. Like, I, I did not have this, like, ridiculous self-esteem or self-confidence. But I just thought about things, and I read about things, and I, I contemplated them. If you go back to, like, the 10,000 hour, like, if you're gonna get good, good at something, you have to spend 10,000 hours on it. I am, I am at hundreds of thousands of hours at this point., It's just where my mind goes, and I can't control that, and I'm not gonna control that because I like it. So I'm, riding horses or exercising. I'm, I'm sometimes now watching television, but it's very rare. But my brain is just popping. And so it has always done that. I just haven't always known what to do with it, okay? And so I th- I think if you're in that boat, I would say, like, find a medium, and that's what the PhD process taught me was I found a medium, and that was where I learned I actually love to write. I'm not good at it, though. It takes me a long time. And they giggle at me, and it's like, no, y'all don't, y'all need to understand. And I want, if you're younger or just in a tough place, like I am a slow learner I speed it up by obsessing over it at some level. Not in the way that, obsessing normally means, but when someone tells me something that I don't understand, I go look into it. I Google it. Now that I have, ChatGPT, I will put it into ChatGPT and like, help me understand this in relation to this, you know, whatever. But writing my PhD, writing my dissertation, like taught me before AI, by the way, that is a total flex. I wish we had had AI back then. But we didn't 'cause we're from the olden days. But anyway I like to write and so I write a lot of stuff down, and it actually has served me well in my life 'cause there's ideas or random thoughts I had 10 years ago that I can search through my Evernote app today, for something and when it's like, I'm thinking about this. Let me go in there, and then I'll find it. I was like, "Oh, well that was dumb." But this other part of it was good, so Anyway quick side note here. To talk about mentoring, the thing I would say is, like, lean into what you're good at, but know what you're not good at. Don't necessarily spend time... I think it's some of the best advice I ever got was, why am I gonna spend time, on things that, I'm not good at, and I don't want to be good at, right? Like not, not worrying about that, and I don't waste time on it. And it just infuriates people that they can't distract me and say, "Oh, you suck at this." I'm like, "Okay, and? I don't care. I don't care if I'm bad at it." I'm not a good barrel racer. I'm not a bad barrel racer, I'm not a good barrel racer. I do it for fun. I'm not doing it to impress people. I'm not doing it to go win the world. I, I don't get anything out of that. I just wanna do it, and I have a good horse that lets me do it, you know? So okay, great. And the same thing professionally. There are things I know I am not good at, and there's probably things I don't know that I'm not good at. For a long time, I was fairly good at public speaking, and then I went through this lull where I didn't do it very much, and I was very bad at it. I still don't think I'm good at it, but I have gotten more intentional about, what point am I trying to make with this conversation? 'Cause I would just get up and talk like this, right? I can do this in this scenario. I can't do it in the other scenario. So it took me a little while to, get my thoughts around me and like, "Okay, here's the three things." And it was actually a, a friend of mine who was like, "You just need to... what three points are you gonna make?" And I'm like, "Well, there's 107." He's like, "No, three points. That's all people are gonna remember." When I started doing that and being intentional about writing my notes and, and I got better at it, the delivery felt more comfortable. I felt better about it. So whether or not it looks better on the outside, it was not important to me. It felt better, all of this to say, like, throughout my career and my personal life, I have had mentors and, and people who care about me who have, called me on my crap, and I hope you have that. If you don't have that, go find it. But, I walk through a world where I feel like so many people just need more mentorship. And that's not me passing a judgment. I know how it felt for me, and I wish other people have the same opportunity. Even today I'll have people, my mentors, my very trusted people, which I don't even expose who they are will tell me, "Hey, that's right on," or, like, "I think you're missing that." In fact, I tried to quit workforce development twice, and both times I tried to quit it, I had a mentor say, "You know what? Go home Take the night, you're not quitting." I'm like, "Yes, I am." And then I go home for the night, probably ate something, and then I didn't quit, so here we are. So I think you need that. And so the other thing I think that, that as I've, I've navigated my career, especially as a young woman, okay? And I can only live life through the perspective of a six-foot blonde female, because that's what I am. Okay? I was an athlete in high school. I started college as an athlete. I very quickly decided that was way too much like work I didn't wanna do, and I just wanted to be an academic. I just wanted to be good at school. I didn't really benefit from being good at sports, so I walked away from sports. I would say from a, like, formal sports. I still did, all the things and still do. I enjoy those things. But That's, that's my perspective and how I have lived my life, so not everybody has this perspective, but that's fine. But I think the way that, the way that I'm, I'm going to say this is, like, I think the reality in any occupation is that at some level you have to protect yourself, and your ideas, and your mission, and, and, and, right? You have to keep all of those things front and center. Who you are, what you are doing, and why you are doing it. And I think if you protect those things, you feel a lot better about your life. And for me, in my career, I have been really fortunate that whenever I felt like one of those things was out of balance, I just moved on to something different, and I was never looking for anything different. And so lots of people chatter when I would leave a job, and it's like, "Oh, Courtney, da, da, da, da," it's like, no, actually, that just flew all over who I am, and I'm not gonna stay here. It doesn't mean there's actually anything wrong with them or the entity or whatever, but but it's just like I, I gotta go, and so I did. And I think the world would have you believe, and there's plenty on social media about, protecting yourself. You've only got you, right? You've gotta protect yourself, and the world is against you, and whatever. These are things that... Don't get me wrong, I've been really frustrated through my career when things would happen. I'll talk about it in a minute. But, what are we doing? You know? Humanity, which is, really inhumane, wants to attempt to manipulate you into thinking that, you're you can't be successful unless you do it on your own. I'm a boss girl, unless you own every win, right? Unless you're like "I'm only winning," and you don't ever talk about your losses. Unless you point out, like, everybody else's flaws. It kinda treats you as, like, this is, this is better for you the culture you're in may tell you that in order for you to be successful, in order for you to succeed that you pretty much have to step on the person next to you, and maybe that's true in certain industries. I hope it isn't. But I don't think you should listen to that version of the world, because it will tell you, "Don't give your ideas away. Hold them, because they'll make you successful." And, I just really disagree with that n- now, there was a point in my career where I was so frustrated that I would have completely disagreed with this statement. So I get it if you disagree with it. Love to talk about why. What I have found is my professional life is immeasurably better when I give the ideas away. Here's the thing I'm thinking about to whomever. Sometimes they are spectacularly horrible ideas, so it's ignored. Those are the times that I'm like, "Thank you." Sometimes I, have been to points in my career where I had to give my ideas to... What I would have said 10 years ago is I had to give my ideas to a man for them to be heard. But what I actually was doing was giving them to a more senior employee who then could run with them and pr- position them in the right way, because I was too young and inexperienced in certain ways of the world to be able to navigate, how do you make this idea a thing, and so, I've learned, I've been, mentored and no one's ever told me to give ideas away. No one's ever, mentored me on that But what I got to learn was if you have ideas and you think they're good and you share them with the world, the world will tell you whether or not they're good, and the world will embrace them. And look, I'm also saying this as a reality that I have had whole organizations take my ideas, including the, like, action plan, bill it as an own- as their own, and not even invite me to the conversation after they took my ideas. It was absolutely infuriating at the time. And then, and you look at it and you're like, "Well, at least that got to go see the light of day," you know? Now, it didn't have the same it didn't have the same positioning that I would've had, so maybe it had a different type of success. Maybe it was more successful. Maybe it was less successful. I don't know. But what I do know is, when people are threatened, what I see, and I'm seeing it right now, is, like, they insulate themselves, and education is doing it nationally. And I'm not saying that I would be operating any differently. I think I would but I don't think insulating yourself is actually going to solve the issue until I talk a lot personally, you know, about, like, just rapid acceptance. Like, "Oh, okay, this is where it's going. How do I accomplish what I want to accomplish while helping them accomplish what they're trying to accomplish?" Whoever it is. And sometimes the answer is, "I can't," and sometimes the answer is, "Oh, okay, I can, but I need to do it this way." Can I don't think you protect yourself by just fully insulating yourself from the real world, but I do think you protect yourself if you're engaging with it enough to understand it. It's kind of like you go out into the wild, and if you understand nature, and I'll go back. I'm a Millennial, an, an elder Millennial, mind you, but, Steve Irwin. And so Steve Irwin comes in, and he knows how to interact with the animals. He knows the danger. He knows all of that stuff. And so until the, the fatal incident, right, he was safe by not insulating himself because he was educated and he learned how to operate within the system. So he had rapid acceptance of, this is the animal I am choosing to deal with, and so in order to deal with this animal appropriately this is what I need to do and to protect myself. And so that's kind of how I would encourage professionals in the space that, that I am in at least to think about this, is instead of Insulating yourself and hiding away and, protecting yourself with your data and your numbers and how perfect you are. Just stop and acknowledge, maybe it's not perfect. I have a lot of fun working in a government entity by just simply saying,, "Yep, these are things we're not good at right now, and we're gonna get better. Or I'm never gonna be good at certain things, and so I'm not, I'm not even trying, and I'm not lying to you about that. It's like, what are you gonna do? You can't be good at everything. And so you just pick the things that you can be good at, and you let other people worry about it. And they can argue with it. They can, they can despise. I don't care.. We can't do everything well, and you can't either as an individual. As I have, grown and matured and watched the world around me, I have, gotten more bold about just sharing my thoughts and probably aggressively so to the world when it's not used to that because, something that... my current chairman actually did this to me, and I think I've talked about this before, where I was sitting in a r- room one day and I had just gotten to k- to know him. I was still working for a different organization. I was like, "Man, I'm sitting on my hands right now." He's like, "Why are you sitting on your hands? Speak up." And I remember it just being so freeing because I had kind of... You know, I don't think it was ever, as,, vivid as I'm thinking it was, but, like, I think people were just like, "No, you can't say that, Courtney. You need to be less. You need to be quiet. You need to... You know, like, what do you know? Who are you?" And that may have been just my self-talk. And so to have a person say, like, "No, you need to speak up," now, now I've got a feeling like half the world I interact with is probably like, "Dude, can you not tell her to speak up?" But I also, remember, it was so freeing because then also when I got the opportunity to start speaking up, it also comes with great responsibility and this is where I think we miss the mark when we're protecting ourselves and we're not telling our ideas, and then when we do tell our ideas, I don't... I don't know how to say this, but, like, my goal is never to protect myself at this point in my life because I am just so sold out on the things that I believe about our system, which isn't actually a system, as a nation, about where we are, about what we're doing. I do believe I see it differently than the masses, and I do try to put myself in rooms with people who are questioning things. Maybe not the same things, but at least questioning things. Not just going along with it because, oh, this is what they want us to do. Because they, the, the quote "they," don't know. They need the subject matter experts to tell them, and there are plenty of things I am not an expert in. And so the way I see this is if I believe this and I tell you I believe this, this is what I think, and you don't use it as an opportunity to correct me or educate me genuinely, you don't care enough, therefore, I don't care about your opinion. As toxic as that may be, I don't care. If you only care about checking boxes, I don't care. So these are the ideas that I am that I am sharing with the world. But I think, I'm doing a horrible job of getting to the point, right? But, like, I think if you have an idea that you think the world needs to hear, share it. Just, just talk about it in whatever medium or capacity. Maybe the world is your household or your community. Speak up and say something. The worst thing that can happen is someone can ignore you. Maybe in your world the worst thing they can do is say something negative to you. But if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks, you'll never get anything done. Tell the world, listen to its feedback, contemplate it, and move forward, I just need more of that in my industry. I need more people genuinely thinking about what we are doing and what we are not doing, and I have had moments over the last few weeks where l- life has been fairly insane across the board. And I haven't been as intentional at looking into certain things as I need to be. Part of it is we're waiting on data or, whatever, and so it's like, okay, Courtney, you gotta get more intentional about these things. Like, have those conversations with yourself before you, tell the world. I don't think you're helping anybody by keeping your ideas to yourself, especially in the workforce space, okay? I also think, like, giving it away to people who will love it differently than you do, I'll tell you this, like with horses. I keep horses that match me in the phase of my life that I am in, okay? So, like, Hershey matches me. I love Hershey. Whenever Emily comes to ride, he takes care of her. Like, it's all perfect. He takes care of me. I enjoy it. I sold another horse that I had all my hopes and dreams in, and I sold him, and he would've been a really good horse for me But he never would have reached his potential with me because his potential was greater than my potential and where I wanted to go with that, so I sold him. And that's usually what I do, is I sell the horse that I'm like, "Ah, that one's gonna be... that one needs a job." Like, if they need a job, they gotta go 'cause they're not gonna have a job at my house. Hershey is happy being a freeloader, okay? He loves his little alfalfa buffet and hay and whatever. So he and I match right now because he's just, whenever I wanna go ride, he's like, "All right. We'll go. We'll do this." And so I give, I, you know, give that horse away to a person that's going to take better care of it, and that's kind of how I feel like ideas. Because this brain is, zinging things, and again, they're not all good ideas. Like, I'm not sitting here trying to say I have all these good ideas. But every once in a while, I have an idea that I think is good, and every single time that has happened and I have given it away to somebody who will take better care of it than I will, it's turned out to be something really precious. And some of those things are happening right now in my life, and so it's just really, really fun to watch. And, and I think about, like, man, if I had taken a negative approach to this whole idea thing, if I had gotten in my head, not been mentored appropriately, And, it's even simple things like when you get bogged down, you get frustrated about something and you're like, "Man, they didn't give us any credit for that." And then to have my boss say, "Yeah, but who cares about the credit?" And it's like, "Nobody does?" You know, said with, like, an eye roll and sass, right? And I don't genuinely care about the credit. It does sting when somebody takes your stuff and doesn't credit it back that it came from you at all. Like, that stings. I'm human. I don't need it, but it would be nice as a human if you recognize that, hey, this idea was originated over here, or this thing came from so and so. We don't give enough credit in workforce. Everyone is so desperate to get credit for their thing at some imaginary piece of paper, and that they're like, "I've checked the box. Look how good I'm doing." It's like, well, are you? Or are you just good at checking boxes? And so I have to question myself on that. Am I good at something? Am I good at checking boxes? I don't know. But I think when you learn, like when you give ideas away to people and they don't take care of it, then you have to file that away and you have to learn that. Or when you are working with someone or some, some group and you have an idea and they take it away from you and then don't come back and give you credit again, never gonna get credit, don't need it. Also not doing that again. The thing I've like woven into in my brain is like it's not even about the fact that they took the idea and did something with it, it's that they didn't take care of it the way that if you had purposefully and chosen to give it away, that they would've taken care of it. I don't know if any of that makes sense, But it's like if this is a good idea, it's got good bones, it's got good whatever, or it's such a bad idea that it encourages a good idea in you, take care of it. And I know, I, I know like the world listening to this you're like, "This lady is nuts," and I know I am. But as humans, w- we have the ability to think critically. We should. And I pride myself on that. I pride myself on trying to think critically about things, and I don't always have enough information, and sometimes you just gotta do it. So anyway, I, I think I think this is probably true for any industry, but- What, what I wanna say is like don't protect yourself right into this little insulated cocoon that nothing good can get into, Have enough self-preservation. Don't follow my lead 'cause I have no self-preservation. Have enough self-preservation that, you are being protected against bullets and whatever yourself, but not so much that the light can't get in, I guess is what I'm gonna say, say. I'm not trying to speak, you know, for any entire profession but what I have found is that I don't hear people talking about workforce developers and workforce development as a profession. It's always l- about a system, and so I'm switching gears on y'all right now. I am moving From, whatever to like here's aggressive aggressive. It's not a system, okay?, And I have just found myself getting angry about this, and that's what usually motivates me into doing something about it, So today I'm just whining about it, but this is the place where I'm coming to, say it out loud, to hear it out loud back to myself, and then it's like, all right, what are you gonna do about it, right? What am I gonna do about people taking ideas from me and me giving ideas away? I'm going to keep doing it. That's, that's my chosen answer. I'm going to keep doing it at, as fast a pace as I possibly can, okay? I, I encourage you to do the same thing too. I encourage you to get yourself into groups and situations where you can give ideas away to somebody, and then they come back to you, and you get to see that idea as a grown-up, mature thing And there's one thing that's, that's happening this week that, like, if I make it through the conference that we have this week without ending up in, like, a puddle on the floor, because I had this, crazy idea. I gave it to a teammate and some consultants, and they took this little nugget and made it just such an impressive thing. And the world, when they look on the end of the work, they're not gonna understand why it's such a big deal to me. And maybe it just ends up being a big deal to me, but I don't think so. But I can't wait to,, as, like, a proud grandmother in the audience, like, I'm not even engaged with it, just get to watch these humans who have, like, taken this little tiny, like, thought and nurtured it and grew it up and made it something really special. So anyway, you just have those kind of things. But as a profession, I don't hear us called a profession a lot. It- rarely ever, and, I'm not giving it up. Like, I'll probably be in my 60s and one day and still be talking about why workforce development is a profession that nobody wants to call a profession. We're a profession. I am a professional some days. I'm a workforce development professional every day. But we talk about workforce development as an agency. Suddenly the Department of Labor is workforce development. No, it is not. No, it is not. It has a function of workforce development, but it is labor. Labor does not always equal workforce, right? So, separate the two. C- can they do workforce? Yes. So can the Department of War. So can the Department of Rehabilitation Services or Medicaid or whomever. Anybody can do workforce. So just identifying us by a funding stream is just getting really annoying to me as a professional, so I'm not here for that. I dedicate a significant amount of mental space and time and energy to my profession, I care about how the system interacts and how it doesn't interact. And as a professional, remember, go way back to the beginning of these podcasts, it includes education and workforce and higher education and private industry and economic development and government. It includes everything. You can be a workforce developer and be in any industry, kinda like engineering or accounting or even nursing or IT. So why don't we call ourselves a freaking profession, when I talk about, opening up with protect yourself I also think as an industry, we need to learn how to do more than protecting ourselves around whether or not we checked some box. We're more than that. We are humans, because at the end of the day, AI, machine- a machine can come along and, put, apportion all this stuff and do all the things humans are doing in this space right now if we don't step up, okay? So at the end of the day, what I have learned is, like, at some level I'm going to do workforce development, and I have to always be thinking about, and so do you, about like, is this the version that I wanna do? I'm not a, I'm not a, an agency head or an entity head. I'm not a dean or a vice president. I'm a workforce developer, and I'm in that role, okay? And I'll say,, one of the fears of taking the executive director's job where I am was like what if I, I'm not able to do workforce anymore? Well, what I have found is even a g- and probably why I'm having so much fun, even on the really, really bad days, is like now I get to see a system and have a perspective that I never had before. Genuinely, I couldn't see above my programs. I didn't understand why the system didn't care about the struggles I was having, and, and so I've gone through all of those things, and now I'm like, ooh, I get to do all this other cool stuff, and then also get to hire people who get to do the things that set them on fire. How much fun is that? Being a workforce developer, a practitioner, is not about like who you work for or how many or what degrees you have. It's about like the work you do. And so I hope it gives you joy. I hope you're enjoying it. And if you're thinking about getting into it, I think what I would encourage is like, where do you wanna be in this space? How do you wanna grow? And it could change. I never imagined... It was not on my bingo card to work in the government forever. I came in education, and I was going to get out of education and go into private industry, and then every time I tried, something cooler came along and I was like, "Dang it, I gotta stay here." Then it came along. And like every single time I've been like motivated internally to move, I, I think God has moved something in my path that's like, "Nope, not yet. You gotta go do this thing." And I do, and it turns out to be really amazing. I think you've gotta know in workforce if you're really going to like protect yourself and protect your future and your career is like do you wanna manage growth or do you want to do development? These sometimes can go hand in hand, but they're very different things, So one of the things when I left when I moved states to Mississippi, was because I had realized I was really just managing growth. And there is a personality and a type of person that that would set them on fire. It's not me. When I started looking at like what my opportunities would be in Mississippi, I was like, "Oh, I can do like develop- like actual development work there," not just building a class, selling a class, doing it over and over again. I get to come up with like new ways of doing. It's basically a little lab. And I saw it as that. And so h- here we are because it's not... I mean, and it's, I'm not trying to sell it as like this, I don't know what I'm trying to say right now. It's not like this weird thing. It's just like different parts of the economy diff- need different things at different times, okay? So I think there's a growth, there's a leveling off, and then you gotta develop some stuff so that you can grow again. And that's what I saw where Mississippi was in this like it's about to grow. It's going to need a lot of development for that growth to get the biggest impact it could get. So here we are And I think whatever your brain is and whatever you do, that's what you need to lean into. That will also keep you from the toxic thoughts of "I need to just protect myself. I've only got myself. I've gotta insulate myself." No you don't. No, you don't. And if you're in an organization or in a situation where you feel like all you can do is protect yourself, get out. Whether it's about the organization or you, it doesn't matter. Go. Life is too freaking short to spend your time, just huddled up in a corner because you're worried about all of these other things and maybe it's the organization's fault. Maybe it's your boss's fault. Maybe it's your fault. It doesn't really matter. Just go. And so anyway, as I, like, scratch the surface of all of this, I come back to these archetypes or whatever, these personal types, people who lean into different things in their space. And I think your space and your corner of the workforce world will feel a lot better when you first acknowledge that, "Okay, where is my default personally? Where is the, where is the default I have to go to because of the position I am in?" Because you may not be in the right position, and that's okay. Just go get in a different position. And I say a lot, you cannot use my job against me, ever, 'cause you can take my job from me. Fine. Ever. Doesn't matter. I don't care I say that a lot for somebody who has very expensive horse habits and literally needs her job. But the reason why I say that is because I identify as a workforce development professional, and am increasingly moving into the world of, it's really m- more about, how does all of this make people economically competitive? How do the systems interact? And my brain goes more towards a system than a super detailed local level type thing, right? And so there's a different place for everybody. I can respect that. I don't think at this stage in my career I would be really good at the things that other people are really, really good at, and, and they may not be good at the things that I think I'm good at, right? So, I accept that. And so I hope that you find that for you. And it will feel sometimes, at least it has in my past, that "Oh, it's the organization's fault," or, "It's my boss's fault," or, "It's a human that is... I'm associating with." It's somebody's fault, but probably not mine. Then as I've grown and matured, it's like, "Oh, I was, just genuinely in the wrong space. I was in the wrong place, maybe at the right time, maybe at the wrong time." And when you get away from it, you learn that it wasn't everybody else, it was probably just you. And that's okay. But, but whatever it takes to get you to move into your next phase is probably going to be the best thing. Why are you stuck? Why are you fighting this if it's not what you wanna do? And I, and I can say that from the perspective of someone who felt that way several times over the last decade or so I mean, it's probably, probably most of my career, frankly. And then as I've, I've grown and matured and found myself in a situation where I have amazing opportunities to do the work that I want to do. I work with really talented people who, across the country, okay, this is not just my team, I think my team is incredibly talented. Are we perfect? Nope. We don't strive for perfection, and that's the difference 'cause we got a lot on our plate. We don't have time to be perfect. We're gonna do the best we can, and we're gonna move on to the next thing. And if you want it to be better, then make it better and come to the table. But if not, we're still gonna move on. And nationally, I'm getting in conversations and system-type conversations with the world. Humans th- with other, other beliefs and experiences and perspectives, and it is so much freaking fun. Tie it back into a couple things., I came back from Idaho totally, like even in the room,, I felt like the most annoying person in the world at this event because I just wouldn't shut up. But they said, "Come. We wanna have a conversation." And I was like, "Well, I'll talk." And then a couple of the other people were talking, too, and I'm like, "You're my people. We're gonna talk after this." And b- but it w- also, and the reason why, I just couldn't sit on my hands, and I had been told years ago not to, so I wasn't going to. I'm in this opportunity with these incredible people who have these thoughts and these experiences that I don't have, and so I wanna talk about 'em. I wanna tell them what we're doing, and I want them to tell me, maybe at some other point what's good about that, what's bad about that, what am I not seeing., And I got that. Because they said, "Do you wanna come?" And I said, "You're darn right I do." And then I got to work on some stuff with some folks and now I've got some follow-ups with, different folks and, and it's exciting. And it lights me up and it's important stuff that had I just sat on my hands and protected myself from feeling like an idiot or looking like an idiot, 'cause maybe I did. Part of me in this moment is like, "Oh, God, I really look like an idiot because I just wouldn't shut up. And it's like a running joke with everybody that like, "Courtney, here's Courtney." And it's like, oh, well, you're not talking, and maybe you are talking, but I got things to say. But anyway, but I didn't sit on my hands, and I, I used the opportunity because what will inevitably happen is people will correct me where they think I'm wrong. They will engage me where they think I'm right, or they will engage me where they're curious, and vice versa. But if they don't get to know me and I don't get to know them, those things never happen. So if I had just elicited the protecting myself... I'm an introvert. I could have gone in that room and sat in that room all day potentially and not said anything. But because I am also an introvert lit up by the work that she gets to do, I couldn't shut up, so here we are. And well, it's funny 'cause I'm sitting here thinking to myself, I actually couldn't have, I couldn't have not talked because if you've never read the Lightcast study on fault lines, it's called Fault Lines. You can download it from their website. If you're a workforce developer, you need to go look at that. You need to go look at the demographic drought., They are putting out, Ron Hedrick and team, there's others, like they are putting out some really incredible research that if you listen to it, read it carefully, and think about it in your world, like can have massive impacts on how you see these things. I appreciate economists when they're not political, especially even though I know they have politics, Because it's like this is just what's happening. This is what we think needs to happen. And, and I appreciate that 'cause I feel like I kinda walk in the same space of like, I think this is the right thing to do regardless of the politics. Now, I also understand that, you can't always do the thing that you want to do just because you think it's right because that's just not real life. And that's actually part of, the world I'm in right now is working with different nonprofit groups and people who are studying things and thinking about things because,, I wanna bring additional resources and things to my state. And so I get these opportunities because I didn't insulate myself, okay? Figure it out. That is my one wish for you. If you have listened to me this far, is that my one hope and wish for you is that you figure out how to... whatever protection you think you need, you have that protection, that's, that's important. But also that you don't protect yourself into a cocoon of nothing. So find that balance, and find it quickly because I think when you get yourself into the right place, and I believe I am in that place, and I won't be here forever, because eventually the winds will shift and they will push me out, or something will happen. Like, I just... That's just life. And, and too many people make too big a deal about that. Like, you know what? I don't know what's gonna happen in one year or five year or 10 years from now, but I know what's gonna happen tomorrow. And what's gonna happen tomorrow is I'm gonna be the best workforce developer I can be for the state that has given me so much, and I'm going to say the things that I think the system needs to hear. And one of those things right now that has come to my, brain, and the way I have said it is we don't actually have a workforce system. We have workforce funding. Okay? Now, clutch your pearls or do whatever you're gonna do, but I... There's 100 years of history in this, quote, "system," and if you go back and really look at it, it is simply about getting us to an unemployment rate of 3%, which is full employment, which by the way, we're pretty much at. It is simply about providing funding to solve needs. That's not a system If we had a system, and I'm gonna give you an example, and I gave this example on stage this week I gave this example on stage this week. When we were, quote, "recruiting AWS," we went into a meeting, and my office is maybe two years old at this point. We go into a meeting with them, and w- this is before anybody knew anything about data centers. And so we, we had... Th- there's not a lot of information you can find on the internet. We're doing the best we can, and we show up with like, "Here's w- here's what we're going to do to increase the supply of electrical engineers, software engineers, and all of these, engineering-type high-level positions." And Amazon said, "That's great, but that's not what we need." And I was like, "Excuse me?" We were ready for this, And they're like, "That's not what we need. Like, we need construction trades. We need skilled trades. We need craft people. We need pipe fitters and plumbers and electricians, and we need a lot of electricians." And then as we're going through these conversations, they're like, "Oh, this one state that we're working in has a shortage of 6,000 electricians." It's obviously a large state. I'm in a small state. 6,000 electricians, and I'm like, "Holy crap." And these companies are data centers and don't come at me about data centers because I will eviscerate you, okay? Like whatever it is, it's happening, right? They are building these things, and they are putting a lot of people to work right now doing it, a lot of people that maybe wouldn't have had an opportunity. And so I have a perspective from my rural South, farm-loving perspective, which is that my friends in many communities have really good jobs today that they would not have had but for this infrastructure investment, the weakness, though, is that the system doesn't exist, What should have happened if we had a true system- Actually, I think I'm gonna come back to that and make this a separate episode. I'm gonna make this a separate episode, so I'm gonna cut out all that. Anyway as we're talking about protecting ourselves, I think it's really critical that that we get ourselves in positions where we can do the work that we need to do, that we want to do, whatever. And so I'm gonna leave this episode and I'm gonna do a double episode, and so I'm gonna go over into this other episode about the system because I don't wanna make a two-hour episode. I think just know where you fit, figure it out, it's not gonna come easy. Like, n- being, getting to the point where I feel this way did not come easy. I had to completely uproot my life twice, three times really, to get here. I had that luxury. If you don't have that luxury, figure out how to do it where you're at. But anyway, so I will leave y'all with this concept that don't protect yourself so much that you're in a, in an informidable, you know, just cocoon. You're in this cocoon that no one can enter, that the light can't get into. Like, get yourself in a position where you can let the world in and and, and let yourself out to the world. I encourage you to do that. So that has been scratching the surface of workforce development. I am Courtney Taylor, and I will see you on the next episode, which is going to be a double episode. So join me over there in a minute.