The Magic of Doodling: Unleashing Learning and Retention with Ashton Rodenhiser

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Playful Humans podcast. This is another cool episode with Ashton Rodenheiser. She is a professional Googler and sketch-noting, so we're going to talk about how to draw for a living, how you can draw out your conversations and learn more and think better, and all kinds of cool stuff. So you can find Ashton at Minds Eye Creative Consulting or sketch-noteschoolcom, where you can get a beginner's guide to sketch-noting. If you want to learn how to draw your own notes, if you want to learn how to rediscover the power of play, you can go to PlayfulHumanscom and go for this podcast for your listening. All right, ashton, welcome to the podcast. We like to start with the joke of the week. The joke of the week this week is brought to you by the word plethora. I would like to thank Dictionarycom for teaching me the word plethora. It means a lot. Okay, the official joke of the week is what's the difference between a cranky two-year-old and a duckling, a baby duckling? One is a whiny toddler and the other is a tiny waddler.

Speaker 2: 1:39

Cute, very cute.

Speaker 1: 1:41

There we go. Do you have a joke you'd like to share with us?

Speaker 2: 1:44

Yes, my favorite one is what is Beethoven's favorite fruit?

Speaker 1: 1:50

I have no idea.

Speaker 2: 1:52

Ba-na-na-na.

Speaker 1: 1:57

Yes, I like it. Okay, that'll get us started in the right mood. I guess the best question for you right off the bat is what's the power of doodling and drawing? How have you found this beneficial for yourself or others?

Speaker 2: 2:15

Yeah, so doodling has gotten a bit of a bad rap, so I feel like part of my personal mission at this point is trying to bring back the power of the doodle people. My favorite stat I'm not much of a stat person, so I'm just going to throw it out there and get it over with is about doodling and it is the fact that you can retain up to 29% more information just by doodling, just by putting a little swirly, swirl or whatever it is on your paper when you're making notes. A lot of folks have gotten in trouble for doodling, you know, in the past in their notes, but it actually was helping you stay focused. So trying to, yeah, rewrite the fact that it can actually be a very powerful tool to help you think and learn. The way that I see what I do is just taking that doodle, just making it work for you a little bit more, make it a little bit more purposeful.

Speaker 1: 3:13

Yeah, I love that because I think it's so like so many things we talk about on this podcast. It's one of those things that we do. Naturally we love to do it. We love to doodle and draw, and you can give a crayon to a two-year-old and they will scribble all over the paper and enjoy making art. And then it's one of those things that kind of gets beaten out of us and not encouraged and for some reason, they pick some people and they say you're good at drawing and they tell other people they're not and they give up on it. You know, like dancing and singing and a lot of art forms are that way writing, even public speaking and stuff that I do, you know, somebody encouraged me along the way and so I lean into that and I think it's something that we can all do. And as an adult, there's no rules, right, like sure, there was teachers or somebody, like you know, parents checking your notes or something as a kid, but there's no rules. Now, If you want to draw on your sheet of paper during a Zoom meeting, nobody's ever going to see it. Do what makes you happy or what makes you the most productive and stuff. So I love that.

Speaker 1: 4:18

Anything else you would say about drawing in and I'm sure you have a ton of techniques because you got a whole book and a school about teaching people to do this. But is there any other common myths or misconceptions about doodling that it does it need to have a point? Do you need to draw shapes and make notes? Or I always put stars by. You know things that I want to remember and find later when I have a page full of notes from a conference or something. Do you have any quick tips or ideas on that?

Speaker 2: 4:47

Yeah Well, if you want to start doing sketchnoting, I think one of the biggest things is like trying to like let go of capturing everything. I find when we get into meetings and presentations we aren't trying to digest and learn in the moment, we're just writing everything down frantically. So sketchnoting is sort of flips that on its head a little bit and makes you think while you're listening, which is a muscle to build and sort of train over time with lots of practice. But at the end of the day you don't need to actually really know how to draw anything Like. I can teach you the sketchnoting skills in like 15 minutes or less. Like it's not rocket science.

Speaker 2: 5:30

The still the core of my graphics that I create for myself or for clients. Still most of them was essential drawing elements like a line and an arrow and a square and a little glorified stick person called a star person. Like they're not rocket science. So you can capture information in a way that is bite size but you're not also trying to capture everything at the same time. So I think that's like the extra.

Speaker 2: 5:59

There's sort of like the in the moment power of sketch noting, which is like challenging your thinking while you're listening to something and trying to understand it in the moment and break down complexity and gain some clarity. But then there's the second benefit of now. You have this visual representation of what just happened and it will help you remember it. I think that's my favorite out of all.

Speaker 2: 6:22

Of the value of sketch noting is the memory retention because, like you were just telling me right before this podcast that you were at a conference and like how much information was at that conference and how much have you actually remembered after the end of it? With so many speakers and so much awesome stuff, it's so hard to remember it all. And if you can have this little snapshot of the key ideas, the main lessons, the lessons learned, the things that resonated with you, then you can remember it, not just to remember it, because that's a nice thing, but then maybe actually put some of that learning into action. Which is what I would hope many of the speakers would want you to do is like, yeah, word it, but like maybe do something with that information.

Speaker 1: 7:07

Well, I think there's a lot there that's really powerful because I'm thinking of it from the other side. I've never done sketch, noting or anything. I try to do interesting, different ways to remember things and take notes. But when I'm speaking and I'm the person on stage, like I try to be very careful about the number of main points that I have in a talk. So my talk at inbound was 45 minutes. I was like really I can do three things and if I try to get people to remember five, eight, seven things, they're not even gonna remember them all, let alone put them into action. So it's like okay, I can have three things and then I wanna anchor them to something with feelings that we don't really remember, facts and numbers and a lot of data unless we write it down. But I love what you're saying with the drawing is that we can capture these emotions and the feelings or the situation that we wanted to and now we're anchoring in some other things that make it more memorable.

Speaker 1: 8:07

So I did a couple of magic tricks and some audience interaction stuff to just demonstrate the point and then people remember how you make them feel. And I think that's what is cool about the sketch notes is, if you think about it like a comic strip is that you can make people feel things. You can make them remember the situation and the context as much as the factor or data that they had to memorize, and that's really cool.

Speaker 2: 8:32

Yeah, yeah, like I oftentimes will like if a speaker is telling a story, you know I'm not like writing out the whole story, but I'm writing something that sticks out from it, like it's the lesson at the end of it, for it was like a funny little character or what have you. So when someone looks at it later, they're going to go oh right, I remember when he did that magic trick. Oh my gosh, I remember when he did that thing. Right, to help you jog your memory and enhance your learning in that way. Definitely so, and I appreciate speakers like you for not trying to cram a million things in 45 minutes. I appreciate that. That's why I did like a little bow when you were saying.

Speaker 2: 9:07

I was like, yeah, yeah thank you so much for doing that, because some of the smartest people in the room when I do these events is they're the hardest to capture because I think they just want to share too much. I wish the example I give is like you're just sharing like a chapter of a book, you're not sharing the whole book. People Like I, it's like people can't remember you talking about the whole book in an hour, but they could remember a chapter, like remember like one or two of those main lessons, but yeah, I think really even more than the chapter you're really just sharing, like the outline.

Speaker 2: 9:43

Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1: 9:44

That's the philosophy, the high main points of each chapter, but not the whole book, and even then maybe it's the sections of the book. That's kind of what I try to think about is, when I'm outlining the speech is like, what are those main sections of the book? Like, okay, we got to have the setup, we got to have the punchline and then we need to have, like, the take away or action item. Those are the three things we can build around and then we can add in, depending on our time and number of people in the audience and stuff, some different things to make that happen. But I wanted to talk to you a little bit about doing this live, because I think that's crazy. I always think about it ahead of time when I'm building my slides. I try to do the same thing. I want powerful images and maybe like three to five words and a title. I don't want to put all of the information on a slide. I did win an award last week for the most words on a slide, but it was for a very good reason.

Speaker 2: 10:38

Yeah, okay, okay.

Speaker 1: 10:40

And I gave it with like a QR code in the corner so people could scan and download it and have it and stuff later. But that was the whole plan, that was the whole book put together and we didn't even really talk about it or dive into it. It's just like I wanted to show people what the completed one page plan for their sales process looked like. But the rest of the time I'm trying to keep like big pictures and a title, hardly ever even put bullet points on a slide because I feel like they're not gonna remember the bullet points either. So unless they're absolutely necessary.

Speaker 1: 11:14

But I'm wondering do you do this ahead of time for people and what's the difference between a prepared presentation and the one that you're creating, as you're listening in the moment, with a sketch note.

Speaker 2: 11:28

Yeah, so 99.9% of the time I have no idea what the speaker's gonna say before they say it. I prefer it that way. There is an element of risk. I take a risk every time I do that.

Speaker 2: 11:43

It makes it fun, it's risky a risky lady, but so I'm curious to see what you have to say about my comment here. But if you do a good PowerPoint presentation right, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to know what they're going to talk about. Like you're going to read things and you're going to see some images, but it's not in context, it doesn't have the voice explaining it. So when people ask me, do you want PowerPoints ahead of time, I always say no because of that reason and I'm like if they didn't justice, if they did it right, it shouldn't actually give me a whole lot of insight necessarily, like maybe a graph that I might want to redraw, I don't know, maybe, but most of the time, unfortunately, folks just have like walls of text on these lights anyways, and I'm like I don't know what they're going to say, like and I'm thinking about going into it. I'm thinking about what I think they're going to say instead of being in the moment and listening just like everybody else and capturing what they're actually saying, right?

Speaker 2: 12:48

So I don't like there's so many decisions you have to make in the moment, I can't also be distracted by what I think is coming up next, so I just decide you know, that's sort of how I've always done it. I've done this for 10 years now. It's how I've always done it. It's how I prefer to work. There's been, you know, a couple times in my career that you get there and it's a mess. One of the smartest people I've ever captured or I'm a famous, I'll say famous. I won't mention his name, but one of the most famous people I've ever captured was one of the worst experiences of my life, Not because I was terrified that he was so famous, but the fact that he was all over the freaking place with his presentation.

Speaker 1: 13:29

And the more famous people are the worst presenters and thank you for saying that.

Speaker 2: 13:35

That is what I have said. It is, and I get it. They're so smart and they have so much wisdom to share and they're just like blah. It's either they're all over the place or they just say all this stuff and it doesn't make sense. And I actually had.

Speaker 2: 13:48

And so I was on the stage in front of like thousands of people with this guy and absolutely terrified and he was all over the place. I was all over the place and I didn't feel good about what I created. I was like this is like one of the biggest moments in my career and I feel awful because I felt like I didn't do a very good drawing. And the conference organizers came to me the next day and they were like how was that last night? And I was like I'm not going to lie, it was really hard. I was feeling so embarrassed because I felt like you could compare some of my drawings for some of the other speakers had done that day and then this one and I just didn't think it was a good of drawing, like it wasn't as good as some of my other stuff. And yeah, they were like yeah, we felt bad for you up there and I was like okay. So from that moment on I was like, if I'm feeling this way, there's a really good chance other people are feeling this way.

Speaker 2: 14:44

So, you know, when I get into, when I've been in a situation since then because like that was like 2018, that's quite a long time ago now when I've been in a situation since then, I'm like it's okay, because other people probably feel the same thing. I know I'm not alone in my oh, my gosh, what's happening feeling yeah.

Speaker 1: 15:03

Well, yeah, I think there's so much done back there. I love all of what you just said. You made my heart happy.

Speaker 1: 15:09

I love the world on the same page. I'll take them in reverse order. So I've been in that situation to and I've seen so many speakers that I think it's either like a celebrity glow and people just think they're smart because they've been successful, but those things aren't necessarily true. There's a lot of luck and timing and or other people around them, or they're just not speakers Like they're really good at being a computer programmer, but they're not really great at being a speaker, and I think there is a lot of stuff there, but Also I love that you said you're the professional.

Speaker 1: 15:45

So if you're having trouble following a talk and you've done hundreds of these imagine somebody sitting in the audience for the first time hearing something like this.

Speaker 1: 15:53

They're not following these stories, the speaker's not closing the loop on any of these points, and so they're struggling. Number two I love what you said about doing it live, because I'm very much that way for this podcast. Sometimes people ask for the questions in advance and I go. Well, I wish I knew what they were going to be, but I don't know where this is going. I hope we're going to have a good time. I'm going to listen and ask you about your life and career, and so I think there is some magic to doing it live and to listening and being present in the moment, rather than trying to force something into the whole or to get a timing right and try to nail something. You have to practice so much and I'm sure you'd feel this way too that if you really did work with that same presenter over and over again and every single one of their speeches, you would know where they were going.

Speaker 1: 16:45

You could work with them on timing and stuff and be like, hey, we need to close the loop on this story so that I have time to draw. You could probably create a nice choreographed presentation to do live with them.

Speaker 1: 16:56

But for me it's not the same, but then it's just like a robot. You might as well have recorded that and just played the video for everybody, because it's not in the moment. It's not that magic of capturing the feeling and the mood that day. And, like you mentioned, how many other speakers have they heard my presentation is different if I'm going after lunch or in an afternoon mall than if I'm the first person to kick it off or the closing speaker. Even if the content's the same, the presentation needs to be different, and I think that's a little example of the magic that you're talking about. And then, finally, I also wanted to highlight and I feel like I'm just re-saying all the stuff you said.

Speaker 2: 17:35

That's OK.

Speaker 1: 17:37

Yes, when I'm giving a presentation, I try to tell people that I know what I'm going to talk about, but I don't know what I'm going to say.

Speaker 1: 17:46

And so I leave room for that magic that I know the main points that I want to communicate, I know my opening and my closing and how I want people to feel and what the main takeaways are likely going to be. But if I script it all out and I wrote it out and I time it and I do all the transitions between slides and I put all the things on the slides, then it gets into some sort of like machine again where you lose the magic it loses the timing of stuff.

Speaker 1: 18:16

That is so fun. So I love that you highlighted that magic, because I think that's part of the playfulness and the not knowing what's going to happen next or where it's going to go is part of what makes the tension, of making things interesting in our life and it's OK to have bad ones too.

Speaker 1: 18:35

You know some are going to be better than others. If you do 100 drawings, you know one's going to be the 100th best and one's going to be the best. There's no way to avoid it. You want maybe those proportions how far apart they are, to be closer together than further apart. Sometimes that's just the magic, and I think people struggle sometimes with doing it in the moment and being OK with maybe it not working out or it being a little bit better. Yeah one.

Speaker 2: 19:05

Yeah, yeah, one side's a little crowded, or you felt something wrong, or you don't like your drawing that you did, or what have you? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:13

Now I want to flip back and ask you a little bit about more about your career and how you got into this and everything, because I find that also fascinating, that you know probably no fifth grader right now is saying like I want to be a professional doodler when I grow up, because they don't even know that's an option. Yeah, and I noticed that one time that kids graduating college now will have nine different career like jobs in there throughout the rest of their life, and seven of them have not even been invented yet.

Speaker 2: 19:47

Wow.

Speaker 1: 19:48

Yeah, I'm a certain professional doodler. We didn't know we're things when we graduated. So yeah only a little bit about your journey. Have you always tried to be artistic and creative? Or did you like, go and you know, take a history degree or something first and then have to come back?

Speaker 2: 20:06

Yeah. So I've always been very creative. I'm like, and I am a bit of like the black sheep. The family people are like how is she? Like she's the artsy one, like I'm like the weird artsy one in my family oh, that's cool.

Speaker 2: 20:20

But there was a lot of rhetoric. You know, can't make money as an artist, don't waste your money at art school. And my family, would you know, be making fun of those art kids that went to school and now they're going to leave art college and not have any money and I won't have, you know. So it wasn't even an option, like I didn't even consider it because it was just so ingrained as like not possible, which was frustrating. And then I, you know, I was a smart kid in school. I was taught in my class but I didn't know what I wanted to do and I had to spend all my own money and get loans. And I didn't want to get loans if I didn't have to. So if I was like, I'm not going to go to university if I don't know what I want to take. And I remember sitting around talking with folks those last few months of high school and everyone's telling you oh, I'm going to do this, going to do that and I'm like I just want to be a mom. And people are like what? And I'm like I just want to be a mom, that's I don't know what I want to do. I just I have this desire to be a mother. I'm very nurturing.

Speaker 2: 21:23

I always worked with kids, like I worked at camps, I did all the things with kids growing up. So I decided to go to early childhood education because there's a transferable skill. I was like, well, I'll do this for now, until I have my own kids, and then I'll know how to, like, raise them properly. Which was a joke. It's just a. That's a joke. You throw that education at the window when you have your own kids. I do have three. I have three children, so ages five, seven and 10. So I did do that.

Speaker 2: 21:56

But I started working after college. I was like crap, maybe I don't want to work with kids. And but I was like, well, I got this, I got to do something. I almost became a sign language interpreter. Almost did that. I went and took all the prerequisites to get in. I didn't do it, but I I almost did it. But while I was doing the prerequisites, I got a job at a family center and worked with parents and kids and it was awesome. And my last few years I was there I worked as a facilitator and I absolutely fell in love with facilitation how to help groups navigate their own ideas and I loved it because I thought maybe at one point I wanted to be a teacher and then I learned about facilitation and I'm like facilitation is way better because you don't need to know anything, so it's really a it's really a Don't give away my secrets.

Speaker 2: 22:46

You're just like really good at asking the right questions and navigating safe spaces and I just really fell in love with it. And then, after doing that for a couple of years, I had another facilitator friend of mine say you know, there's this thing called graphic facilitation and there's like a one day workshop and I'm going to go if you want to go. And I'm like cool and I took a course and I was like this is it.

Speaker 2: 23:09

Like it was just beautiful coming together of the facilitation world. I've already developed my listening and my thinking and my synthesizing. Now I just have to feedback in words instead of pictures. So you know, I had a couple of kids la la la.

Speaker 2: 23:24

But then after well, after I had my second one I was like, okay, I really wanted to figure this out and do it properly and do a full time and build a business around it. So and that was like, yeah, so I've been doing it for 10 years and I started building a business about seven years ago and I'm a very goal oriented person and I'm very high achiever. So when I set my mind to something, I'm gonna do it, no matter what. So I just tried to figure it out, like I I guess I was very entrepreneurial but didn't know that I was Like the entrepreneur, like being an entrepreneur just sort of came very naturally to me.

Speaker 2: 24:01

And I saw my husband build a business. He has a landscaping business and I saw him do it right out of high school, like he went to horticultural school and then he built his business and he didn't have any business experience and I'm like he's pretty smart guy, I'm pretty smart. If he can figure it out. I can figure it out, like I know it's a completely different business, but you know, I think it might not. If it wasn't for him, I might have thought, well, maybe I have to go to business school and figure this out. But I'm like, well, he figured it out. And then I was meeting other graphic facilitators and graphic recorders and sketchnoters that were building businesses and I'm like, well, they can figure it out. I'm sure I could figure it out, I'm smart enough.

Speaker 1: 24:37

So yeah, I love that, I love the confidence and again, I can relate to so much of that. I kind of said that my family had two arms of it. My mom said to the family, like her great grandmother was a piano teacher and they're very artistic and musicians and passion designers and graphic designers all kinds of things and my dad said the family was the exact opposite. It was like all boys, very business school, all salespeople, all driven, very go-getter type A personalities, and so I kind of felt like I landed in the middle.

Speaker 1: 25:10

But I did have some better, I think, childhood messages there that it's OK to be playful and creative and have fun and that entrepreneurial stuff is OK too, that if you need money you can find a way to make money. It doesn't have to be a soulless job. You can have fun and make money at the same time and you can do it. And I think that's a real gift that hopefully we can both share with everybody else listening and watching today that there are cool ways and that's what this podcast is all about to have fun and make money, follow your dreams and passions and get better at it along the way. And hopefully, if your husband watches this what I heard was if he can do it, I can definitely do this, yeah.

Speaker 2: 25:56

My husband will help us.

Speaker 1: 25:59

Yeah, that's awesome, and I think you also get to design the life of your dreams too, I'm assuming with your kids and other stuff that you maybe take some projects or don't take some projects, based on how that impacts your life. And people say balance. I don't like the word balance, but yeah, life choices and consequences and impacts, which is, I think, a really cool thing too. How has that? Worked out for you.

Speaker 2: 26:28

I like to work, so I do have a harder time. I really did take a lot of time off this summer and I feel good about that, so I'm a little frantic now, but whatever it is what it is. But before COVID, I was 100% in person. I was traveling all over North America multiple times a month over into Europe, and I didn't realize how stressful the travel was until I didn't have to do it anymore. I was forced to stop, so it really made me well one.

Speaker 2: 26:58

I had to basically rebuild my business from scratch when COVID hit and luckily I had some tech clients that still had money to pay me to do things.

Speaker 2: 27:08

But it really made me think Like honestly, I have a hard time sharing this because so many people struggled during COVID, but COVID was the best thing that happened to me, to be honest, even though it was really hard in the beginning basically rebuilding my business from scratch.

Speaker 2: 27:24

It really forced me to figure out how to work from home and at the beginning of 2020, I was like I want to try to figure out how to work from home more. Be careful what you wish for. So I really tried to stay as virtual as possible and as local as I possibly can and I have turned down jobs that I would have to travel for this year and last year a bit, and I just have to be okay with it and I have to trust in the universe that it will bring me another project that's gonna fit my needs better. And I have some like ongoing clients that hire me for multiple things a year and a couple of things a month sometimes. So I just have to lean in on that and it does allow me to have, of course, way more flexibility because I can just like roll it a bit and roll into my studio after the kids get on the bus.

Speaker 1: 28:26

And the virtual only have to be prepped from the way. Stuff, if I wanted to be.

Speaker 2: 28:31

Yeah, and like some of my clients, they still incorporate the in-person aspect by taking my Zoom screen and projecting it on a large screen in the room or two little screens in the room and I'm like that's just as good as me being there.

Speaker 2: 28:46

Like I do miss the vibe. There's just a vibe of being there and capturing live. But it's still great, it's still better than nothing and I get to work with awesome people and I think over the years you just you learn the hard way by working with people that aren't the right fit. So when you get a little feeling like this might not be the right fit, you just say no and trust that your experience and how you show up for your clients will just kind of pay you back over time. So I've sort of let go of the reins a little bit when it comes to trying to find new clients, because the majority of my clients this year have been repeat clients or they found me through word of mouth or what have you. So that comes with time, obviously, but I feel kind of in a good place when it comes to that. So, and that's what really allowed.

Speaker 1: 29:38

Congratulations on that. I think that's really cool and there's a lot of good stuff again there that people can take away from that, and I think there is magic to being in person and there's some powerful things there and there's some magic to doing things virtually and easily. And you can do different tools and have people collaborate on a whiteboard or a drawing or something together, exactly Live as easily, and it sounds like you're making really cool choices for what works for you, and then you can always change it too.

Speaker 2: 30:08

It's what it's like.

Speaker 1: 30:10

You want to go back to live. You can just start taking some of the live gigs.

Speaker 2: 30:13

Exactly, exactly, like there's nothing ever set in stone, and I just sort of run my business with my intuition and experimentation, because you can never fail if you're just, if everything's just like a playful experiment, right?

Speaker 1: 30:26

Yes, I agree, and you nailed it. So do you want to play a game?

Speaker 2: 30:32

Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it, I'm ready.

Speaker 1: 30:36

We're going to play Two Truce and a Lie, so you can play along at home or in the comments right now. Guess which one is true and which one is a lie. Do you want to go first or second, ashton?

Speaker 2: 30:48

You go first, because I got to change one, because I mentioned something in what I talked to.

Speaker 1: 30:52

I had to be careful too. I wanted to tell one of my stories because I was thinking about it.

Speaker 2: 30:56

Ok, I'll come up another one. You do that.

Speaker 1: 30:59

We're talking with Ashton Rodenheiser. You can find her at Minds Eye Creative or sketchnoteschool and then, if you do slash book, you can get the beginners guide to sketch, noting perfect what you want to draw and start drawing your own notes. And if you obviously need a meeting professional do-ler for your next meeting and add some color and flair to what you're doing, talk to Ashton at Minds Eye Creative. Ok, ashton, I have taken a speed reading course, I have taken an ice sculpting lesson and I have become a certified LEGO facilitator.

Speaker 2: 31:43

I'm going to say the first one, the speed reading. No, actually, is that the lie?

Speaker 1: 31:52

I was dyslexic and so in ice sculpting I had to take speed reading to get me back up to average, and now I feel like I'm well above average on the speed reading. Never done the ice sculpting lessons. Oh, ok, I saw somebody do that live at an event one time with the chance awesome and sculpting and stuff which is cool, but last week I got certified to teach people how to play with LEGO and I can't think of anything cooler that I wanted to do this year. So awesome that's awesome, let you go.

Speaker 2: 32:23

All right, I have met the Prime Minister of Canada, I have built a library in Kenya and I founded an art at night festival and ran it for seven years.

Speaker 1: 32:39

Ooh, ok, when we get some specifics, that's interesting.

Speaker 2: 32:44

That's true.

Speaker 1: 32:45

I'm guessing you would have changed it if that speaker you were talking about earlier was the Prime.

Speaker 2: 32:49

Minister. So no, it wasn't him no.

Speaker 1: 32:57

I'm going to say the middle one here too.

Speaker 2: 33:01

The library in Kenya. No, I did that, dang it. Yeah, I've never met the Prime Minister of Canada. I've never met him.

Speaker 1: 33:09

I have a really funny story. I met I can't even tell the whole story, but I met Barack Obama coming into a restaurant that I was coming out of after we both spoke at a conference in San Diego, so that's the closest I've ever been. I wouldn't really say I met him.

Speaker 2: 33:27

It was like a.

Speaker 1: 33:29

Yeah, fun. Well, that was cool. Thank you so much for playing and you win because we both failed, so you get a free 30-second commercial here. Any final thoughts for us? Or tell us about Minds I Creative and what you have going on at Sketch Note School?

Speaker 2: 33:46

Yeah, yeah. So if this is interesting to you for your next conference or meeting or strategic planning session whatever you're working on would be so fun to chat about, I will come in person. I'm just picky. I'm just picky. If it's the right fit, I'll come in person in order to help you out virtually at your next event. We can certainly chat about what that would look like. And if you're like, this sounds really cool and maybe I want to take my doodling to the next level and experience the benefits of visualizing the information, you can grab a copy of my book called the Beginner's Guide to Sketch Doading Emphasis on the Beginners. I really handhold you through the process. I also have an online community. If you grab the book and that you really want to kind of dive into it more and have some more handholding and support for me. All that information you can find at sketchnoteschool and I got a free newsletter if you want a Sketch Note tip of the week on Saturdays too. So lots of good stuff to check out.

Speaker 1: 34:48

Nicely done. Again, ashton Rodenheiser is the guest, and the Playful Humans podcast happens every week. If you haven't subscribed, hit the like, share, subscribe buttons. Wherever you're listening or watching this, we would love to have you back, and if you want to rediscover the power of play, go to PlayfulHumanscom. We do team building events. We host virtual game shows and different types of play shops for people I mentioned. The LEGO building, or brainstorming, is awesome as well, and until next time, if you can't be good, be good at it. That's what I always say Good later, don't wait for tomorrow.

Speaker 1: 35:25

Live for today, keep on chasing the sunshine and go out and play.