Trust is fundamental in marketing. Without trustworthy marketing, products and services, no matter how excellent, will languish because today, by default, audiences doubt what marketers say. What this means is learning businesses need to do the work to collect and use evidence to back up their marketing claims.
In episode 388 of the Leading Learning Podcast, co-host Jeff Cobb talks with Melanie Deziel about exactly how to do that. Melanie is co-author of Prove It: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust.
Drawing on an elegant and simplifying framework from Prove It, Melanie and Jeff discuss five types of claims businesses often make—claims about convenience, comparability, commitment, connection, and competence—and three types of evidence that can back up those claims—corroboration, demonstration, and education.
The conversation is both thought-provoking and highly practical. If you’re looking to make sure your learners see you as a trustworthy source of content—and you should be looking to do that—then this episode is for you.
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Melanie Deziel: [00:00:00] For us as marketers, what that means is that all the messages we are putting out, our audience is meeting them with doubt. By default. We have to acknowledge that reality. All of the recent studies on this back it up, that folks just don’t believe what we say.
Celisa Steele: [00:00:18] I’m Celisa Steele.
Jeff Cobb: [00:00:20] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.
Celisa Steele: [00:00:28] Trust is fundamental in marketing. Without trustworthy marketing, products and services, no matter how excellent, will languish because today, by default, audiences doubt what marketers say. What this means is learning businesses need to do the work to collect and use evidence to back up their marketing claims. In this episode, number 388, Jeff talks with Melanie Deziel about exactly how to do that. Melanie is a former journalist who’s spent the last decade helping individuals, teams, and organizations unlock their creative potential and organize their creative effort, with a big focus on trust.
Celisa Steele: [00:01:07] Melanie is the co-founder of the Creator Kitchen mastermind for creatives and the author of both The Content Fuel Framework: How to Generate Unlimited Story Ideas and Prove It: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust. Drawing on an elegant and simplifying framework from her book Prove It, Melanie and Jeff discuss five types of claims businesses often make—claims about convenience, comparability, commitment, connection, and competence—and three types of evidence that can back up those claims—corroboration, demonstration, and education. Their conversation is both thought-provoking and highly practical. If you’re looking to make sure your learners see you as a trustworthy source of content—and you should be looking to do that—then this episode is for you. Jeff and Melanie spoke in November 2023.
Journalism Skills Help with Marketing
Jeff Cobb: [00:02:09] Can you say a bit more about that background as a journalist? Because I think that’s so important to the work you do and really stands you out.
Melanie Deziel: [00:02:15] Absolutely, yes. I studied to be a journalist. I always thought I would end up in a newsroom, and, timing-wise, I studied when we weren’t going to digital newsrooms. We were going to the analog style. I thought I would work in a print newspaper, and that’s what we were doing. I studied investigative reporting, arts and cultural criticism, and a lot of the things that have gone by the wayside as things have transitioned more digitally. So there wasn’t necessarily a home for me in the more modern newsrooms. And that’s when I realized that a lot of the skills and things that I had learned as a journalist—being able to find stories, being able to interview folks who may not want to be interviewed and pull out their expertise as a broader context, the ability to take feedback from lots of different stakeholders on a deadline—a lot of those skills were really as useful in a marketing context or a sales context as they were in journalism. So I really thought this is an opportunity for me to share what I know in a way that’s going to help other folks in the industry hopefully be able to tell better stories and create a deeper connection with their audience.
Jeff Cobb: [00:03:12] I think it’s almost certainly going to come out in this conversation how that background and those skills have served you well. You speak frequently. You write, obviously. We’ll talk about, particularly, one of your books, I think, in our conversation.
A Mastermind for Creators
Jeff Cobb: [00:03:25]I know you’re also doing this initiative. I don’t know how you characterize it—a project, initiative, company—the Creator Kitchen. Can you say a little bit about that?
Melanie Deziel: [00:03:32] Yes. The Creator Kitchen is a mastermind group for folks who consider themselves to be creators. We’ve got about 55 members, but that varies from filmmakers to podcasters to authors. We’ve got all kinds of different creative folks. And really it’s a partnership between myself and Jay Acunzo, another great speaker, author, prolific podcaster. The two of us had been chatting about how there’s so much advice today about how to 10x your business and make 10 times more content. We wanted a space where we could take a step back and really focus on the quality and the craft and honing those skills because, at the end of the day, if your message isn’t powerful, if it isn’t resonating, then having 10 times more of it’s not going to help you much. So we have assembled this crew of amazing creators from all different walks of life, and we’re really just focused on increasing all of the core functional skills of being a great communicator and effective storyteller. It’s been a whole lot of fun to get to work with these folks and see the growth alongside. It’s just as much fun for us as facilitators as it is for the members to watch that growth happen in real time.
Jeff Cobb: [00:04:37] I think those kinds of groups can be so powerful. In fact, we do something similar ourselves with a part of our audience. And certainly there is so much content out there that anything that’s going to help to raise the quality of that content and really make it much more meaningful to people is, well, very much appreciated these days. I know you’ve put a lot of thinking into how you do that effectively. And so let’s dig into some of your thinking around this.
Why Marketers Need to Focus on Trust
Jeff Cobb: [00:05:01] I want to first reference your most recent book, Prove It: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust. And, in that, you make the point that trust is just fundamental in marketing and sales. For the sake of our listeners, could you explain what trust is in the context you’re talking about? And I’ll ask you to do that first and then make the case, in brief, for why organizations need to focus on building trust.
Melanie Deziel: [00:05:29] Yes. So the two—why and what it is—I feel are really intertwined. What we know from looking at data is that historically our audience would trust the things we say as marketers. They just believed it. They thought we were giving them face value, with few rare exceptions. They thought, if we’re saying these things, surely someone somewhere is regulating it, and it must be true. And, in this day and age, in this digital-first day and age, the age of fake news, AI, deepfakes, and all these other things, the audience no longer has that liberty to be able to believe the things they see or to take them at face value. So, for us as marketers, what that means is that all the messages we are putting out, our audience is meeting them with doubt. By default. We have to acknowledge that reality. All of the recent studies on this back it up, that folks just don’t believe what we say.
Melanie Deziel: [00:06:18] Now that could be depressing. We could get upset by this, but it’s also an incredible opportunity to realize that, if we are willing to acknowledge that fact and to build that reality into the work that we’re doing, we can then create more trustworthy content. We can bring in outside sources. We can peel back the curtain and show folks what’s happening so they can see it with their own eyes. It really gives us an opportunity to make it so that they don’t have to decide to trust us. They can see the truth for themselves, and they don’t have to rely on our word as the sole source of information about our brand, our products, our services, our courses, any of these opportunities that we’re putting forth. If we acknowledge that they’re going to meet it with doubt before anything else, we take that as an opportunity for us to really go out of our way to provide backup for all the things we’re saying, so that hopefully we can build that trusting relationship with them.
Jeff Cobb: [00:07:10] It’s really serendipitous because we’re in the midst of some work where, just this week, we got some survey responses back for one of the organizations we’re working with that showed that the people who are attending their events and their education do not actually view them as an unbiased source. That’s one of the things they rated lowest in, which really knocked their socks off that that’s the way. But the fact is, even if everything that they’re saying is truthful and valid and they’re doing their job, people bring a lot of baggage to their purchase decisions these days, don’t they?
Melanie Deziel: [00:07:41] Absolutely, yes. They’re not only bringing their own personal experiences, and more so than in the past; they’re also bringing their values and the things that they care about in the world in terms of causes and things like that. But, yes, they also have a whole bunch of past experience of getting ripped off, of having bought a course, and it wasn’t what they thought it would be, or ordering a product, and it came, and it was a cheap knockoff imitation. They have these experiences now that make them even less likely to trust us, through no fault of our own sometimes. Like you said, we may be fine, upstanding citizens. We may be providing awesome products, delivering on every promise. But it’s that whole “If one of the M&Ms is poison, you’re a lot more careful reaching into the bowl,” and that’s the view that a lot of customers take, where we may not be the bad guy in terms of not delivering on our promises, but there’s always a chance, and they don’t know who’s who until we take the opportunity to show them the truth.
Partner with Tagoras
Celisa Steele: [00:08:35] At Tagoras, we’re experts in the global business of lifelong learning, and we use our expertise to help clients better understand their markets, connect with new customers, make the right investment decisions, and grow their learning businesses. We achieve these goals through expert market assessment, strategy formulation, and platform selection services. If you’re looking for a partner to help your learning business achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact, learn more at tagoras.com/services.
Convenience, Comparability, Commitment, Connection, and Competence: Five Categories of Marketing Claims
Jeff Cobb: [00:09:10] In the process of marketing and promoting themselves, companies, organizations are always making claims about themselves, and you categorize those claims, which I think is very useful as a way to think about things and then be able to do something about them. And those categories are convenience, comparability, commitment, connection, and competence. Could you give a little explanation of each of those, and what kinds of claims are generally entailed in those?
Melanie Deziel: [00:09:40] For sure, yes. So these buckets, I don’t claim that they represent every possible claim type that a business can make. But what we looked at—my co-author and I on the book—as part of that research, we looked at tons and tons of business copy and sales assets, and, by far, those five categories where most of the claims we saw could be categorized. It’s a useful thought exercise when you’re looking for your own claims but also identifying them in the wild, so to speak. Convenience is one of the biggest ones, and we see that anytime a business or a campaign is making a claim about something being easy, being accessible, being cheap, being quick, being simple.
Melanie Deziel: [00:10:18] There are lots of synonyms out there, but where we’re really arguing that this product is going to, in some way, make your life easier, cheaper, simpler, more streamlined. It’s giving that promise of “This is going to be an easy experience to work with us.” We tend to see this a lot with regards to shipping times. So anywhere you’re seeing overnight shipping, free shipping, or same-day delivery, those kinds of things are often a convenience promise. We see it a lot with return policies. You have a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there’s very little risk. Those kinds of things. But, really, convenience—if you have an element of your messaging where you’re focused on telling folks it’s going to be easy to work with you, that’s probably a convenience claim that you’re seeing there. So let’s see what’s next up. We have comparability.
Jeff Cobb: [00:11:03] Comparability, yes.
Melanie Deziel: [00:11:04] Yes. This is really where your claim is based on a comparison point to something else, and so you may be saying we’re the strongest of all the options. We are the most experienced. We’ve been around longer than anyone else. We have worked with more companies. We have more partners, more awards. Whatever it is, it’s a comparison point against something else. Now, in most cases, we are comparing to a competitor of some kind. We are the only accredited one. You’re saying that the others may not be, but it can also be in comparison to doing nothing. That’s also a valid comparison—that, in working with us, you’ll achieve five times greater results than if you didn’t work with a partner on this. So anytime that your business claim about yourself really relies on some other comparison point, whether that’s a competitor, a different type of solution, or inaction, that’s a comparability claim, and you’re going to have to prove that comparison is valid.
Jeff Cobb: [00:11:58] Right. And then commitment.
Melanie Deziel: [00:12:00] Commitment, yes. This is the values point we were talking about earlier. Increasingly and especially with younger audiences like Gen Z and Millennials in particular, they’re very inclined to make purchases based on alignments with their own values. So that would be a commitment to sustainability, to equal pay, to supporting a particular social or political cause, for example. It could also be things like diversity, equity, and inclusion. There are lots of different values that fall into this category. They may want to support only companies that offer their employees a fair wage. So anywhere where, as an entity, your business having a commitment to a particular value or cause is part of what’s driving that desire to work with you or part of what’s making it more likely that they will return and provide loyalty to you as a business.
Melanie Deziel: [00:12:50] And this is one of the categories where not providing proof is one of the most damning, honestly. Because, in many cases, when we’re making a values-based purchase, it has to do with our identity. I consider myself to be sustainable and eco-conscious. Therefore, I’m making this purchase because you are also sustainable and eco-conscious. If I find out that’s not the case, that I, as someone who’s sustainable and eco-conscious, have made this very wasteful purchase because you are not telling the truth, that’s not just a disappointing purchase. That’s like an insult to identity. It feels like a betrayal. You’ve made me do something that I don’t agree with. So that is where we often see the most backlash, if you can’t actually back up the claims that you are sustainable, committed to diversity, that you offer a fair wage, and all these other cause-based claims that businesses are often making.
Jeff Cobb: [00:13:37] And then connection and competence.
Melanie Deziel: [00:13:40] Connection and competence, yes. So these two, oftentimes I think there’s a little bit of confusion between commitment and connection because they can feel the same. You could be very committed to your employees, for example, or committed to your customers. But, when we talk about connection, that’s really a two-way relationship. So when we say connected to our customers, that’s that I know your name. I know your birth date. You’re not just a number. It’s Olive Garden, ”When you’re here, you’re family.” It’s a different standard. It’s not transactional. It’s truly relational. And so we see this a lot with service-based businesses, where you have your dedicated point of contact who knows you, who you can call any time.
Melanie Deziel: [00:14:18] It’s really about that relationship, that they’re going to be there for you. This is also especially true with services and businesses that are of an ongoing nature. So, if it’s supportive in nature—maybe it’s therapy, or it’s a coach; it’s fitness or health support, these kinds of things where that ongoing relationship is really important—we tend to see more of those connection claims too. You’ll have your dedicated, committed, connected advisor, coach, or point of contact that’s going to work with you. So that’s very important too. It’s often one of the reasons people will make a purchase, one way or the other. It’s based on where they feel they’re going to have the deepest connection with the person they’ll be working with. And competence we put last in the list not because it’s least important but because I think it’s kind of table stakes.
Melanie Deziel: [00:15:03] I joke at the beginning of the book that, if your claims aren’t true, this book will not help you at all. I cannot help you trick people. That’s really not what we’re talking about here. The baseline understanding is that hopefully all of us are good at our jobs. We’re delivering a quality service, a quality product, and what we’re hoping to do is prove that to the audience. Now we still have to back up that claim. You still have to prove that you know what you’re doing, and you get good results, and you have, in fact, worked with X, Y, Z partners that you said you’ve worked with, things like that. But it is sort of table stakes. I think people will often make their own judgments on competence based on the evidence they see. So it’s some of the others where we have the most control to make the biggest difference on. If we’re creating good products, that stuff often speaks for itself, but we do need to be able to prove a lot of those other ones much more strongly.
Which Kinds of Claims Are Most Valuable for Learning Businesses?
Jeff Cobb: [00:15:51] Right. Thanks for taking the time to walk through those because I think it’s just helpful to be able to categorize things in that way. I’m wondering—and the answer may just be it depends, and that’s certainly fair if it is—but, from the standpoint of an organization whose product is knowledge, education, learning, that’s what they’re selling, that’s what they have to convince people on, I’m wondering if any of those are more valuable than others. And part of what’s in my mind is certainly the competence box you have, you definitely have to check that if you’re actually trying to convince people you know what you’re talking about. So I’m thinking, particularly out of the others, maybe some of these learning businesses need to be focusing on one or more of those others more than they are right now.
Melanie Deziel: [00:16:32] Yes, I think you’re spot-on. As is often the case in marketing, the answer is it depends, but I can steer you close to one or the other, depending on your particular challenge or your particular focus right now as an organization. So, if you are worried about market share, if you are trying to take business from another entity, or you have really stiff competition, then I would focus on comparability. That’s a place where you’re going to be able to say that our course or our offering is, again, the only accredited one, or it’s faster to complete. You’re really anchoring your offering in comparison to what you know to be another choice that you may lose out to on occasion.
Melanie Deziel: [00:17:08] Comparability will be big if you are focused on market share or worried about a particular competitor, especially if they’re a new competitor that’s really splashy, and it’s got a bunch of ads out there. That’s a place where you may want to focus on comparability. And, particularly for adult learning, I think if you’re focused on adult learning, convenience is more important than ever. If that is a selling point for you, for the offering that you have, really lean into that. Talk about how flexible the hours are. Talk about what’s available online or replay. Talk about the timing and pacing of the learning. Talk about the different ways it can be accessed. Can I watch this on my phone, for example, versus having to be at my desk? I think if convenience is one of the selling points, if that’s something that’s important for you, then I would really be focusing on proving that out with as many backup examples as you can to help make the case that this really is something that could fit in their lives. It really is something they have time to do.
Corroboration, Demonstration, and Education: Using Evidence to Back Up Marketing Claims
Jeff Cobb: [00:18:07] An important follow-on to these categories of claims that you set up is that you offer three ways to actually use evidence to back up the claims, which is really important. So you talk about corroboration, demonstration, education. You’re very systematic, I have to say. It’s really nice. In each of those three ways, you have two methods or approaches. For example, under corroboration, you have experts and witnesses. Under demonstration, you have stories and documentation. And then, under education, information and coaching. This is all coming out of your book that I’m referencing, Prove It. I really like the approach—very clear, elegant, simplifies what really could be a messy process. I’m wondering, is that your journalistic background coming out, or how did you arrive at that approach?
Melanie Deziel: [00:18:52] It’s funny. I think it’s a combination of two things. One, it is definitely the journalistic background. Like I said, the process of writing this book involved a lot of analysis and not in a rigorous academic sense. I didn’t conduct a statistically significant study. It was more me looking at a lot of the things that I know have been successful with brands I’ve worked with and out in the marketplace, seeing what those trends are, seeing what’s been working well, and identifying that these are some common categories. But I also happen to be autistic, and so systematic thinking is very core to me. I can’t help but think in this way, in this organized, structured way. My first book is actually a matrix in its organization as well. It’s a 10×10 matrix. So it’s just the way my mind works, which is really valuable, hopefully, for creating clearer systems.
Melanie Deziel: [00:19:38] But where a lot of the organization and the naming for these types of content came from, this type of evidence that you can use, comes from the world of law. You mentioned corroboration with experts and witnesses. I felt like that was a really familiar framework. Most of us have either had some experience in a courtroom or have seen a courtroom drama—there are plenty of them out there. And so we’re familiar with this idea that, okay, our defendant, which is us, as the brand, as a marketer, has said something, and we need to back it up with experts, somebody from outside of our organization who can lend some credibility. And then witnesses, people who have experienced it themselves—our past students, our faculty, whoever it is that has seen this stuff in action and can say, “They’re not just saying that. I was there. I learned. I grew. I achieved these results myself.” So I tried to combine the simple format but also a familiar analogy that I thought people might be able to have a reference point for.
Branding Specific Products and Lines of Business Versus the Overall Organizational Brand
Jeff Cobb: [00:20:32] Fantastic. It really does work. It does help to systematize it, bring it together in a way that you can really make it useful. Now, so much of what you talk about applies to brands. We’re all familiar with big brands out there, and certainly they make plenty of claims that they have to back up. One of the interesting things about our audience is oftentimes they’re operating under the umbrella of a bigger brand. So they might be within a trade or professional association, or they might be within a university. Those institutions, those organizations have their brand out in the marketplace for the larger audience they’re serving. But then, within that, there’s this learning business that’s offering the continuing education, professional development that often doesn’t necessarily have a brand of its own. What you’re saying about the overall brand, can you take that down to a business line or the specific products that business line is offering?
Melanie Deziel: [00:21:24] Yes, absolutely. I use brand just because I think, for most marketers, that’s the common language. But, absolutely, it’s whatever you’re offering. It works if you have a service-based business. It works if you’re a small business. If you have different products that do different things, you may rely on different types of evidence. I think the advantage that many of your listeners will have is that they do often have a big brand that gives them that competence proof just by being there. If you get to come in and say you’re associated with this university, this association, this well-known organization, that’s a stamp of competence and approval that comes with that. It’s wonderful to have that. And I think, even operating within that, you don’t have to feel like you are building that credibility for your sub-brand, but really for the product, course, or program that you’re selling at that particular time.
Melanie Deziel: [00:22:12] So thinking of, as an example, if your larger organization is sending out an e-mail about a particular program, course, or offering that you have, thinking, “How can we, in this piece of communication, make sure that we are emphasizing and providing backup for how convenient this is? We know the audience is busy, and they might think they can’t fit this in. How do we provide evidence for that? What experts could we call in or witnesses could we have to back up the fact that this is doable within their current schedule, their current lifestyle?” So looking at every sort of communication opportunity as a chance to sprinkle some evidence in there. And I like to think of the evidence as seasoning. You can sprinkle it over whatever you’re doing. You probably won’t be using all six types of evidence in a single Facebook post or something like that, but it’s a seasoning you can add where it makes sense and where it would enrich the value of that communication.
Jeff Cobb: [00:23:02] That’s true. You probably don’t want to overdo it. Pick your battles, basically.
Melanie Deziel: [00:23:07] Yes.
Building Trust Around Education-Focused Products
Jeff Cobb: [00:23:07] We’ve touched on this a little bit already, but I think it’s worth spending a little more time on, just given the nature of our audience. In a lot of cases, for a brand, when you’re building trust, it might be a consumer product. It might be a car. It might be something physical that’s being sold in a retail-type situation. But, when you’re talking about information—you’re talking about courses, coaching, all of that stuff—anything different about building trust in that environment?
Melanie Deziel: [00:23:37] Yes, I think what’s interesting about this—and please correct me if I’m wrong—but my instinct says that most people are not engaging with info products for the product itself. It’s for the results that those products will create for them. Surely that’s true of other things. Health and fitness—they want to lose weight, whatever. But I think, particularly for adult learners especially, they’re hoping to be qualified for a promotion. They’re hoping to go into a new area of business, a new industry. They’re hoping to advance their career or make themselves better positioned to be hired for a job. There’s some broader goal there. My goal is not to take a course. That’s not the goal. My goal is not to get the certificate. That’s a means to an end. And so I think particularly focusing on the results that you are creating…. I work with a lot of universities in terms of messaging, and we often focus on graduation rates or how many are hired within a certain period of time after graduation, those kinds of results. The degree, the certificate, the completion of the program are a means to an end, so let’s make sure we talk about that end so folks understand that this is the correct means to that end.
Jeff Cobb: [00:24:44] I think that is so important because I think many of the organizations that we work with are much better positioned to deliver that desired result than some of their competition is because the competition is really about how can we put it out there cheap and easy for people to go through and check the box, which is fine—you’ve got to do that—but it doesn’t necessarily achieve a bigger result.
The Impact of Emerging Trends on Trust in Marketing
Jeff Cobb: [00:25:09] A lot is changing out there right now and impacting the world of marketing. What are some emerging trends in marketing that you think have the potential to impact how organizations go about building trust with their audiences?
Melanie Deziel: [00:25:23] Yes, I think there are a couple things that I’m keeping an eye on, and I know consumers are too. I think, in marketing, we’re a little bit navel-gazing. We tend to worry about things that are insular, and I think AI is one of those things. I think the average consumer is probably not thinking about AI and the impacts of generating text out of nowhere, impact on their daily life. It’s something we think about as marketers because we are generative in nature, so it feels competitive. But I do think that that is going to create a lot more content out there. And that will, just by nature of sheer competition, mean that we have to create better content, more trustworthy content, more accurate content in order to compete. So I think that’s a reality we’re up against.
Melanie Deziel: [00:26:04] And I do think that, especially with recent news in the last few months, the profile of things like deepfakes or AI-altered images, it becomes less clear what is real and what is not. And, for the average consumer, that can really only have the effect of increasing doubt even further and, therefore, has the effect of increasing the importance of evidence and multiple types of evidence because a single image alone may no longer be enough to convince someone. They’re not sure if that’s real. But, if we can come in with an expert testimonial, a quote from one of our students, the image showing this, we can bring in multiple forms of evidence and, hopefully, build a case to successfully defend that we’re someone worthy of their time, their money, and their attention.
Jeff Cobb: [00:26:50] Yes, it seems like, if you’re combining good evidence with good relationships, you’re going to be fine. But that’s hard work to do both of those things.
Melanie Deziel: [00:26:56] It really is, yes.
First Steps for Building Greater Trust for Brands and Products
Jeff Cobb: [00:26:58] I suspect that any learning business professional, leader who’s listening to this is going to say, “Yes, great. I get it. We need to build trust. So let’s get to it.” What’s the first step? What do organizations need to do to assess where they are right now and then start moving forward?
Melanie Deziel: [00:27:16] There are lots of ways that you can get very technical about this. There are agencies you can hire who will do brand perception studies and all of these kinds of things. If that’s how you operate, if you have the budget and the time, by all means go for it. But, for a lot of us who are working with leaner resources, that’s not really within reach, and so we have to take a little bit more of a scrappy approach. And what I would say is your first step is probably to take a look at what you would consider to be your major assets and your major messaging. So, if you have a Web site where you do most of your sales, for example, or if most of your leads come from social media, look for the most impactful place, and then I would audit the types of claims that you are making there. For example, you might see, “Oh, when we’re on social media, we talk a lot about convenience, but we don’t actually quantify the time anywhere. Maybe we should talk about how many hours per week, per month, per year, so we can give that some more oomph, give it some more backup.” I think that’s really your first step. Identify those major communication points, those hubs of major impact, and then see what kind of claims you’re making so you can see where you might need to put a little more seasoning of evidence on there to up your game a little bit.
Approach to Lifelong Learning
Jeff Cobb: [00:28:24] We’re all about learning here at Leading Learning, obviously. That’s the name of the podcast. And, because of that, we always like to ask guests who come on the show about their own approach to lifelong learning. And I know you think of yourself as a lifelong learner. I know you are a lifelong learner. So what are some of your specific habits, practices, sources for continuing to grow professionally and personally, for that matter?
Melanie Deziel: [00:28:48] I am a huge audiobook nerd. That is my number-one source of learning probably because I’ve got a little one. I’m on the go, and so the amount of time I have in the car, on a plane, wherever, is much better, and I’m able to get a lot more reading done that way. So the way to my heart is usually through Audible or the Libby app. This is another one I love to tell people about. Your library likely has a relationship with the app called Libby, where you can rent audiobooks for free from your library, just like you would with a physical book. Those are my go-tos: Audible and Libby. And the other thing is I have a really firm policy that, if you are not getting new intake, you cannot create new output. And so, for me, I try really hard to force myself outside of typical genres. Even if I read every business book in the world, I’m still going to be missing so much broader context for humans and psychology and interpersonal relationships and history. I feel really strongly about going outside the algorithm when you can and trying to consume, whether it’s music, movies, TV, books, whatever that’s outside of where your comfort zone is because you get so much better outside context when you’re mixing in new ingredients. So those are some of my go-tos for my approach to learning.
Celisa Steele: [00:30:10] Melanie Deziel is a keynote speaker, co-author of Prove It: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust, co-founder of the Creator Kitchen mastermind, and a generally savvy thinker and content creator.
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