Episode 017 - Is the education system preparing us for business and work success?

Hello listeners it’s Harms here and welcome to another episode of the Seekardo podcast.

Today’s question is a slightly controversial one and we are going to touch upon a few things that may just challenge the way you believe the current education system to be operating.

The main question is, is the current education system preparing us for business and work success?

So we are talking about the education system and is it preparing us for business and work success and I haven’t prepared Ro at all with this.

I’ve got a few questions I want to ask him because he’s now been in business for a long time. He’s also been in a career which took him to the heights in terms of knowledge and education, including acquiring a PhD.

You’ve also got kids as well Ro which I’m yet to experience, but I’ve also just come out the education system gone into work quite recently compared to when you would have gone into work. I’ll be sharing some of those elements as well.

Ro let’s open the conversation and say what is the current educational landscape out there and what’s your thoughts on it?

Hi everybody, this is a real hot topic and thanks for bringing it up. I think it’s a good subject to raise and I want to caveat what we’re about to say to share with you, these are our opinions and in no way shape or form, either myself or Harminder trying to say to you change what you’re doing or don’t do want you’re doing etcetera.

What I would suggest is listen to what we are saying, everybody has different sets of beliefs and it might be that in what we both say some of what we say you go, oh my gosh, that’s so true. And other stuff you say that’s bullshit Dr Ro don’t agree with that, X, Y, and Z and that’s fine.

Every single human being has the right to have their own beliefs, however, that said, I feel very strongly about the subject. So if at times I get a bit over excited or I go into a rant, Harminder’s going to try and rein me in because you’re absolutely right harms.

I have come through two different paths over my life and the first was the conventional path. The second one was a less conventional path. We’ll come back to that maybe you can prompt me on about of history there, but you’ve asked me the question what is the current landscape?

I personally I’ve got two children, one whose five as I’m recording this and the other one who is 11. Neither of them goes through a conventional schooling system and if you want to ask me about that you can. But I made a decision to do some years ago was step back and ask myself the question, do I believe that the current system is actually serving children and do I want my children to go through the system?

Categorically the answer was no.

If you want me to paint a picture I think the current system is set up right now to push kids through a sausage machine, a factory, a conveyor belt, whatever you want to call it of conforming to a set of rules, a set standards, a set of examination standards that are forcing them down a path to go into a career.

That is typically what the education system is set up from the start. It was a way of bringing people from lower class to try and if you go all the way back the middle class and the upper class had the ability to get education. It wasn’t really broadly available to the overall community so the schooling system as it slowly crept in, gave people from a working class background an opportunity at least to get a fundamental level of education. That then teared into college, polytechnic and university, and of course the aspirant people would go to Harvard or Cambridge in this country Oxford etcetera.

Everybody aspired to be at the top level but not everyone could get there, so conveniently then the structure evolved which allowed people to go to, quote on quote different levels of university and then below that polytechnics and then below that colleges. It was the classic indoctrination. It was the classic programming that if you get yourself a good education that will set you apart from the mass of the population, I can’t remember the exact statistics but when I grow up I was told you’re in the top 1% or less if you get a university degree, PhD, from less than a quarter of the population.

The idea was you created an elitism or you created a separation from yourself to other people by getting this education and it’s got to a point now where parents are competing against each other.

Where kids are being pushed into this factory of taking tests now at a young age four, five years of age being taken down the curriculum at such a young age that they don’t even know what the curriculum is leading them to. They just know they have to do maths, history, geography, languages and not just have to do them, but to do them on a standard of taking exams, passing exams.

The pressure on that which is not natural for a young human being is immense. Hence was seeing increases in self harming, increases in attempted suicides, increase in actual suicide, stress levels in kids.

I think one in four or five young ladies for example, are self-harming with a lot of pressure going on around them. Ultimately and I’m sure you’ve got some statistics you’re going to throw at us at some point, but you’ve got people now coming through university and still not getting jobs.

The system I grew up with is not the same system as today. Pressure was there before but it was more aspirant, whereas now it’s more like I have to do this and it’s an immense pressure and we will come back to this in a minute, I’m seeing a lot of teachers in my seminars, my self-education seminars, wealth, personal development, communication.

These are people that are coming through, they’re bringing their kids through and saying I want my kids to go on a different journey.

I see more and more parents disillusion, frustrated, pissed off, there are 400, 500 kids that go to school that my daughters go to and these are some fairly influential parents who themselves are so unhappy with the education system.

I think you’ve been to the schools you’ve seen it and they have come out of London; they have come out of different parts of the country and parts of the world and are bringing their kids to school because they want a different form of education. They don’t agree with conformity because that’s what I believe is going on.

What we’re doing is killing creativity and we are introducing and have been for a long time and I’m going on a bit here, but the concept of conformity. In other words, if you conform to this system, if you take these exams and you pass these exams you’ll be an A, B, C or D, you will fit into this category and get this job, and then you’ll get a mortgage and you’ll get a job for life.

Bullshit, no such thing anymore.

I’m going to stop there.

That’s a great introduction.

I think the listeners at home understand where your stance is on the current education system with that introduction. I’ve been doing research and also from a gut feeling and having supported you on the self-development, personal development seminars and workshops, I get to see all the people coming through.

Ultimately the reason they’re there is because they have almost been failed by that initial education system start, because what I feel is happening now is that you enter school and you are learning simply just how to get a job. With that job it allows you to survive, so that’s essentially what you’ve been taught.

Rather than understand and be taught certain things that allow you to grab the opportunities that are out there.

One side is you’ve been taught how to survive, that is by getting a job pretty quickly, what’s the first job I can get outside of education? The second side is having left education with an open mind feeling like you can see opportunities all around you and then grab them when they’re there.

I think listening to what you said Ro is the curriculum and I don’t know if you agree with this, but the curriculum has probably not changed with the pace of technological shifts, career shifts, globalisation, different emerging markets.

My personal feeling is what we got taught in school and I think they’re still being taught this; you can correct me if I’m wrong with the counter intuitive school that your kids go to.

But they are just being filled and like you said tested and tested and tested with lots of knowledge and on paper it looks like we are all getting smarter but I guess in reality, the question is, are we actually getting smarter? Because the people we see coming into the workshops and seminars and the programs they’re all looking for another form of education which will help them get that work and business success. Would you agree with some of those points?

Yeah this is a good point actually and I think we need to keep pressing the button from your mindset coming from a millennial’s perspective as well. think this is a cracking point is that the system is focusing on academic achievement.

That’s what I’m seeing, even the school my daughters go to. And I’m not here to promote a specific form of education, bearing in mind this has global reach I’m mindful of saying something that people go, we are going to do that because Dr Ro does that.

What I want to say is for example the school where my two daughters go they are even now being subject to in the United Kingdom OFSTED saying, well, you’re not so conventional, so we need you to at least show X, Y, and Z. We need to show this and this in the way the kids are being taught. So everybody is being forced into a process which is all about academic development and not emotional development.

I think you picked up on a good point, we are seeing people coming through at the moment who themselves have got degrees, got university studies or have gone through colleges, but as people they seem, I don’t want to use the word dysfunctional because it’s not correct, but they seem out of balance. There are parts of their make up as people that is lacking, would you agree with that from what you’ve seen?

Yeah I would say it’s the classic case of somebody who is extremely academic, extremely knowledgeable, you asked them a question and they’re going to come back to you with a fact, a statistic. But then, on the other side is a person who is like actually I’m going to Google those facts and I’ll get into this in a moment, but they are just rounded in regards to skills they have, the emotional development, maturity, the way they handle problems and stress. They just seem to have all of this in place and when you have a conversation with them you start to work out actually, they broke out of the conventional education system or they did something slightly different in terms of their upbringing or in terms of what they’ve done after education, which has allowed them to become that person.

Versus a person who walks into workplace and says hey look at me I just got my degree, I’m really intelligent, I’ve remembered loads of things and then they get handed a project and then the stress and the overwhelm starts to fit in.

I think those are the two sides of the equation that we are seeing.

You just picked up on memory there that is a very good point. The concept of being able to remember things is not the same as being able to understand its meaning in your world and how to use it. I know that people listening will say, yeah I’m a teacher or my kids go to a school where they think differently and they act different. Absolutely there are definitely changes happening without a doubt.

Those changes I feel are happening within the schools from certain individuals who themselves are emotionally developed they’ve become more mindful.

Mindfulness is a growing philosophy at the moment, it has always been there it’s more at the forefront now with apps and social media and all these things. I personally see the change happening because of people who are emotionally developed. Teachers, people heading up schools and they want to introduce that to the schools, but unfortunately it’s a minority it’s not an overall global philosophy.

The global philosophy is conformity, if we can get everybody to follow a certain set of rules, take a certain set of tests and measure them against those tests at least we can tell if they’re good, bad or crap or excellent.

There’s all this measure of people without saying, how do those people perform under stress?
Would they be like running a business?
What if we gave them entrepreneurial opportunities?
What about their creativity?

I don’t know if you feel the same way harms?

Here’s a statistic to support what you’re saying and challenge those teachers who feel like, no what you’re saying is completely incorrect Ro. Here’s a statistic and I’ve got a whole bunch of statistics to share in this episode when they become relevant because I wanted to do a bit of research prior to this.

While 41% of teachers cited the ability to retain information as a key skill currently being prioritised in schools. That’s teachers saying 41% of the ability to retain information is the key skill currently being prioritised in schools across the UK. This is a UK statistic. Just 6% of those people that pool of people surveyed felt it would be important for students in the future.

So what they’re saying is, schools are prioritising or they feel schools are prioritising the ability to retain information. That’s the number one priority.

It is clear in terms of the way people are tested and the way the grade is dependent on how much you remember. Whereas just 6% of the pool felt it would be important for students in the future.

That’s an internal conflict there within teachers of the schooling system and I think that supports exactly what you’re saying there. 6% feel knowledge, acquiring knowledge, remembering knowledge, passing tests would be important later in students’ life.

I think for everybody listening you probably know that the stuff you learnt in geography, history, certain sciences are just not applicable to you whatsoever.

It can be quite frustrating Ro because me as a millennial in this amazing world where we’ve got a greater life expectancy, great medical things around us and all this information at our fingertips to have spent 18,19 years in a conventional education system is pretty frustrating. I’ve felt like there’s a large chunk of that, that could have been used elsewhere more wisely.

This conversation can go into so many directions and as you’re talking my brain is trying to rein myself in because I’m asking myself the question, what about the other 94% of teachers?

If you’re standing there in front of a group of kids and you don’t believe the information ultimately is going to be important to students in the future that has to send out unconsciously the wrong message to the kids. It’s not to say that the teachers are doing it deliberately, but your passion towards something you believe is really valuable it’s very different when you’re doing something they feel they have to do because we need to get through this, because the conversations happening already at our school.

Again this is why I’m mindful about talking about it too much, but there are teachers including my daughter’s teacher saying, it’s important that you guys do this level of maths or whatever, because we are being asked to do this now. That isn’t really the way that it should come across in this community.

Parents and teachers need to come together I feel and talk about what is great for the kids, what do kids want to do? We are picking projects that have to be done in accordance with a strict curriculum. What if the child wants to study this or this?

I was with a friend of mine who’s got 14-year-old son, he’s a property investor, he also trades the stock market and he was saying my son said, “dad we’ve got to do work experience coming up and we are supposed to go into a company and see what sort of jobs we want to go into.” And his 14-year-old son said to him, “I don’t want to do that. I want to come and spend my week with you looking at how you do property, how you trade the stock market because that’s what I want to do.”

He has to go back and get permission from the school can I go do it with my dad who is an entrepreneur and financially dependent, as opposed to going into a job. It’s going to be really interesting to see what the school’s reaction to that is. I had the same conversation with my daughter. I said did you know you can make money by just looking at patterns and seeing the way charts move and how patterns occur and she’s like, “how do you do that daddy?” I said I’ll explain it to you soon.

That stuff that fascinates kids and if there’s a fascination in something, then there’s a much greater percentage chance that child will actually study it, learn it and absorb it. But when they’re pushed on things that they don’t necessarily feel they have to do but are told you have to do this in order to get your exams. What message are we telling our kids?

It’s a very different driving force. You’re driven by pain or you’re pulled by pleasure. You’re inspired or you are forced to do things.

Teachers are conforming to what the principal is saying, the principal is conforming to what certain bodies I imagine in the government, education bodies are conforming to.

Now, how are they making their decision? I think that’s an interesting one.

What I find interesting Ro is you have a PhD and this is your opinion at the moment, so I don’t know if you want to explore that? Because you’re somebody who has come through this and I don’t know if it was different in your time more or how you feel about that because you must get challenged on that. “Ro you’re talking about wealth education, you’re talking about creating supplement income, you’re talking about doing something that you’re passionate about. But you spent all this time getting a PhD what are you talking about?”

Yeah and it’s a very good point because I’m talking from somebody who is 54 with kids and I don’t have a job. Whereas back in the early days, young Asian lad in my profession very few people with any ethnicity, colour at the top of their field. The ones that were, were nearly all highly academically qualified with a PhD and I didn’t do that well in my first couple years at university or let me rephrase it, I did enough to get by.

I don’t think you’re alone there.

I parties, I climbed a lot, I did a lot of walking and climbing. I went out and travelled and I liked ladies. I liked the opposite sex so I’d go and date and all that stuff you do at that young age. I was in that zone and I didn’t really have a lot of value on the education. I knew I wanted to do civil engineering because it was going to get me out travelling and I thought if I’m a civil engineer I can go and be involved in projects all over the world.

I think I mentioned this previously but if you like a mentor at that time was a gentleman who is a good friend of mine I still. About four years older than me and he originally from a West Indian background said to me Ro, “You have to stand out. And the way you standout at the moment in our profession is you just can’t be average.” I said what do you mean?

He goes, “You have to stand out by your qualifications, your personality alone won’t get you there. Stick your head down, stop messing around. Your father is not around I’m going to kick your arse.” He literally kicked my arse all the way through it and he said, “Get the qualifications, so at least on paper no one can argue with that when you go for a job interview they can’t argue with the fact you’ve proved yourself.”

That was my philosophy and the PhD was kind of the way of putting myself into a pinnacle where it wasn’t even about me having a PhD, it was about being able to prove that no matter what background I came from I had the ability to focus, get the results I need to get and standout and it would open up doors for me in my career.

That’s why I did it.

It was purely career focused, so having gone that route, but equally parallel to that for about 21 onwards thinking, how can I start a business? I started looking at network marketing, somebody helped me set up a jewellery bit. I used to go around the houses even wives of teachers or lecturers, people in the community and I would go and try and sell jewellery. Can you believe this.

I had this box like a suitcase with different jewellery and I just tried stuff whilst I was studying. The academic side of me was there purely to give me an edge in my profession. You don’t need that now if you want an edge to be financially free.

Don’t get me wrong if somebody is listening to this and you’ve got your kids studying and they want to be a doctor or lawyer, they want to be a PhD or a specialist in engineering, whatever field they are going to need that educational process to be able to go and do research or to go into university, or to go into a specialist field.

My feeling is though Harms is that the children need to be encouraged to have a passion towards it, rather than a case of you have to do this if you want to get results that you need to get into a job or whatever.

I think it’s just the way we’re driving our kids it’s giving a negative association or not the right type of attractive force to those studies. I’m seeing that in my own daughter at the moment. I’m actually witnessing her resist, she’s asking questions, “why do I need to learn this daddy? Why are we studying this particular subject? I’m interested in this not this, can’t I study this instead?” I’m thinking she’s right; I agree with her.

Because we’re talking about work and business success and potentially the current system hindering that, because you just said you tried stuff and that is quite uncommon in people. The result of university is to pass the exam and get your grades, which will lead to that particular job or give you the result that you want.

But what was different in yourself then when you’re saying I was trying stuff. Because I’m not too dissimilar to yourself, but the difference I had is I had a slightly different alternative career route as I started with an apprenticeship.

One of the things I will never forget where they created a very, I think it’s a fantastic kind of educational ecosystem where they allowed you, they simulated lots of different experiences to allow you to try different things and start to build a skill set around that.

Let me share one of those examples. We used to be on a naval base for about three years, I don’t think you are aware of this but one of one experiences they put you in in order to round off these other fantastic skills which they realise as an employer that the school did not teach us, so it was on them to help encourage these kind of skills.

Just imagine the scenario where me and about seven, eight other guys and in my group there were no females. But also in the engineering field there’s not that many females. But at the time it was me and seven, eight other guys and we get put into a submarine simulator. This is actual submarine; it’s a real-life submarine and you actually walk into it. Then they switch off the lights and they start flicking the lights and they say the simulation has now started. The doors are locked and the submarine starts to shake and starts to fill up with water and as a team you’ve got to get out of there.

There’s very little preparation time. It’s all about being in that experience at that moment in time and the reflection on that was phenomenal, just the kind of skills that you nurture.

That does not exist in school that existed in companies having to and almost businesses having to create these environments so that the skills that weren’t taught in school are now encouraged.

But when you learn this and I was watching a fantastic Netflix documentary on babies last night, when you learn the skills younger in life they really embody themselves when you’re an adult. Whereas trying to learn these as an adult is a way more challenging experience. Especially if you’re not in a place where you are constantly learning, which many of the Seekardo members are. They’re constantly putting themselves in place of learning, but if you’re not, it becomes extremely challenging.

Yeah, you’re right because I think what we set up in the Seekardo is an environment to takes us back to that youthful spirit of learning and that’s a good way of language actually.

It’s the spirit of learning, it’s that desire to learn and I personally think it’s built into our genetics as human beings when we are growing we’re absorbing in our cells and neural cells and our neural networks are being formed all the time. They are as we get older but it changes.

You put me onto a book last year about sleep, which is phenomenal and it talks about the fact that actually as we get older, whilst we’re sleeping the conversation that happens between one part of our brain and another part of our brain changes. So having the right sleep sends short-term memory to our long-term memory and kids are very active at a young age, and that desire to learn, is built into us.

The problem I have with it is that it’s dull to some extent even now, and it’s not challenging. It doesn’t stimulate kids.

Kids lose that passion to want to learn whereas if it’s embedded early, like imagine if you had that experience a lot earlier. You’d have always been excited by the idea of practical, hands-on real type of learning.

Where my daughter goes there’s a two, three-acre biodynamic allotment there, so the kids get to grow the vegetables and then they see the vegetables blooming and they get to with hands-on, pull the vegetables out the ground, clean them down and they work out what the weight is. They then work out what they could be sold for to the local organic shops and they see the revenue generated from that.

It’s a practical experience of money and growth and harvesting and then what do we do with the money, we allocate some of it to charity. As opposed to just a theoretical exercise that you’re doing in the classroom. The two are very distinctly different, which is what happened to you what you describe there.

This is what creates what we call significant emotional events. They can be positive or negative, so the learning process can be done the same way. Most people I deal with have had negative significant emotional events, abuse, parents going through a divorce, financial distress, father or mother going bankrupt, creating a significant emotional event which then creates a learning experience.

An unconscious learning experience.

But imagine if the schools could somehow introduce positive significant emotional events.Things that on a monthly basis they do something large or powerful that they remember and they go back and they anchor back to it. Like you said you’re back to that experience. It’s not happening and why? Because the timetable is tight.

This is an issue that I’ve even got with my daughters’ school is that now we’ve got this new introduction of Ofsted requirements etcetera, coming in higher level.

When do the kids get to breathe out?
What about the lunch breaks?

Lunch breaks get squeezed in a lot of schools because they run over a little bit but you’ve still got to get the new lesson after lunch, so instead of being half an hour it becomes 20 minutes.

They don’t get to breathe, relax, eat their food properly and then they stay later after school because of something that’s happened and before you know it the kids are doing what I believe to be the same as working adult’s day. By the time they’ve left home got to school got back, you could be talking about eight till 4 o’clock. That’s a long day for a young child.

And for the teacher. So the statistic Ro is 77% of this pool of teachers that were surveyed found that they are not, and this 77%. It’s an extremely high percentage found that they are not able to do their best work due to the time and resource constraints. That statistic just popped out of the page at me.

So these are teachers now?

These are the teachers saying they can’t do their best work because of the time and resource restraint. Put resource aside because we know not every school is resourced equally rightly or wrongly it’s just one of things that has to be worked on. But the time constraints, that’s challenging to deal with because like you’ve said, they shouldn’t be having a full day’s work experience every single day.

That’s the problem we’ve got is we are conditioning our kids and again remember these are all beliefs, but I’m seeing it.

So what I observe I think I told you this when you came to visit us recently is that, a lot of the parents that bring their kids to the school that my children go to is because they are frustrated with the conventional system where the kids themselves are not just in an intensive long day at school, but then there’s activities after school where parents are saying, “My kids are doing two music lessons, they’re going to a gymnastics class. They’re also going to an acting class and a singing class.” Then little Johnny says, but so and so are doing four, five classes a week mummy. And then the parents are like we need to get you to that.

There’s an unconscious competitiveness with the parents.

So now you’ve got the kids out for a whole day and of course that’s kind of convenient if you’re in a job because now you don’t have to have somebody to look after them, because they’re going to be with another class. But they’re exhausted Harms, they are genuinely exhausted and that also worries me is that children need the natural time to, so there’s a philosophy of breathing in and breathing out. Breathing in when you are studying and learning academically processing and then there’s that meditative which we know is really powerful, breathing out, and that needs to happen.

But what if a child is full on until5 o’clock?

They get home and now they’ve got to do some homework. Mum and dad come back they’re busy, got to prepare food. When does a child get a chance to just breathe out?

If they don’t breathe out the stress builds up and it’s built up over years and then you get these highly stressed or edgy kids, by the time they get to teenage that stress is now focused on getting results and boom, we start to see kids popping. Stress levels, taking drugs, drinking, dysfunctional escaping. And where do they escape?

Where can I escape where people are chatting, I’m not getting judged and I can have fun and it just happens to be on my phone. Instagram, Facebook, social media whatever it is now, there are different ones. Kids are escaping into that world it’s the one place they can be themselves without pressure of all these things from education. You know that world.

I know that world, but the question I have now is, what does that lead to?

When the child or when the person comes out of the educational system, imagine what happens to the person mentally, psychologically when they leave school and it’s a dot, dot, dot.

Because the system right now is they’re not getting the jobs they want. No one is grading them on a day-to-day performance when they hit the workplace or the business place. I know from a business perspective on a daily basis or even a quarterly basis there is no one to give you a grade A for how well you perform in your business that quarter.

Parents are happy that they’ve got through education and are now leaving them to themselves.

Fantastic, you’ve got the engineering job, you got that accountancy job great, so there is no longer a family push anymore. What I loved in school was my social circles, my friends and I’m still friends with many of them amazing people. But when you leave that in the workplace and the day-to-day, there’s very little play social circles which you do get to experience in school. It’s like you leave that system and you get punched in the face. What does that lead to?

One statistic I want to start you off Ro with is 90% of UK workers that participated in this particular study felt stressed in their current jobs with more than half of those people describing themselves at work stressed most of the time.

The reasons for that is excessive workload. But the one I underlined was over emphasis on results, so workplaces and businesses have overemphasis on results, growth, achievement and that is standing out. o the stress thing is a big one.

So 90% and you’ve got to bear in mind as you’re saying this, in my mind I’m picturing this circle. And the circle represents 24 hours in a day.

A human being is spending eight to 10 hours in that environment where they are actually feeling some form of stress. If you’re listening to this and you go well I’m not in that category, I don’t feel that stress. If you can hand on heart tell me you go into work you feel relaxed, calm you feel almost in a nirvana type environment. And when you leave work you feel fuller as a human being. You feel you’ve contributed to the world in a better way, you feel actually that the world has somehow financially paid you back and also spiritually payed you back through the work you’re doing. And you go back to your family as a better person, nourished, calmer you walk through the door at the end of the day and you are overflowing with abundance of love and you don’t have any drained energy at all. In fact, if anything, you feel fuller and you’re able to be present with your kids and there’s no residual stress from work coming in at all. You’re able to spend time with your kids, eat with them, celebrate the food, even prepare it with your own hands. Then relax with your children, allow them to go to sleep, be present your partner, connect with them, kiss, make love feel relaxed and go to bed feeling completely relaxed.

Well done.

Because I don’t see that and I get in front of hundreds of thousands of people every year and I’m genuinely not trying to take the piss, I’m saying surely that would be for the average person on a daily basis the most amazing experience.

You can achieve that not every single day, but you can achieve that if you shift from an environment or a job or a career where you feel you have to do it. The problem is Harms a lot of that stress is because people are there and they feel they have to do it to pay the bills.

Whenever I’ve felt that level of frustration and this is in business as well, is when I’ve committed to something that further down the line I’ve felt less comfortable with or I’ve got to a point where I’ve committed to it, but I don’t want to do this anymore. But I’ve honoured put my word against it I need to see this through and the minute that happens and you’ve seen this with me because we’ve had this conversation a few times, that’s when I go, I’m feeling frustrated, I don’t want to do this.

That’s when you have to question it. Now there is a great quote from and I can’t remember the exact wording of it, but from Steve job she said, whenever I wake up in the morning I start to ask the question, do I want to do this today for too many days in a row, something has to change. And that’s been his whole philosophy before he passed away is do I want to do this today? Yes, Apple. Do I want to do this today? Yes. And the minute he doesn’t want to do this something has to change.

I think that’s a great way to look at things and if you say you don’t understand I’ve got to pay the bills. There you go there, there is that 90% Harminder is talking about because now you’re at workplace not because you love it, you’re passionate and it fulfils you, it’s because actually you’ve got to pay the bills. I’m not trying to be rude because I have been there but it is a conversation you need to have with yourself.

I know today is a bit more freestyle but do you understand what I’m trying to get across Harms.

And that purpose Ro I think what is not taught in schools is imagine if that was the slogan for every teacher and saying everything we learn in class today is to get you as a student, as a person, as a human being closer to whatever that is for you and your world.

But instead the focus is on let’s get you 90+ score in this 90 out of 100 test and the closer you get to 100 you get a pat on the back. Whereas that’s the goal, that’s the end game. The end game is to get a grade in order to get you a job, once you’re in that job what goals are left? You walk into most corporations or a business, a corporation has got hundreds of thousands of employees in so you’re just a number in that place.

Then if you look at a business, especially if you’re a start-up there is like maybe three or four of you, there’s only a small group of you. There’s lots of contrasting things happening and certainly for the property investors listening at home there is just you maybe a business partner and you’re off on the road building a property company, whatever that is in terms of your structure.

Now that is different results compared to what you just described there Ro. The purpose, the passion, that nirvana feeling and I agree it doesn’t happen every day, but it can happen often. More often than not, if it’s in your consciousness and the problem is we’ve not been taught that.

I think that’s a good point and I’ve described it, and if you say, “Do you have that every single day Ro?”

No I don’t, but what I’m able to do is create that environment to such an extent that it’s a majority of the time. I’ve got kids, if I go do an event and it’s a tough event and I come back and the audience have been difficult to work with. I’m bringing that with me so I have to be grateful for the experience, I grow from it and I know that I’m doing it because I choose to do it. But I can’t allow that residual to come into the household and this is the separation because I don’t have to do it, it’s a very different feeling. But when I was in a job and I didn’t like it I didn’t know where to go.

I read a happiness study 10 years ago back at the last recession, it was a lady going around the whole of America and she said the majority of people are, and you’ve just said it here are incredibly unhappy in their job, not because necessarily the job.

They might enjoy a lot of what they do in the job but it’s the fact they don’t feel they have enough choice. They recession meant that people couldn’t lead to go to another job and that sense of not having any choice made them more unhappy in the workplace. Whereas when they had more choice prior to the recession they could live with the fact they weren’t fully enjoying their work because they always had a choice, an option to go find another job and that’s what’s happening at the moment.

The current economic climate is making it more difficult.

People climbing the career ladder are getting frustrated because they’ve realised they can’t jump ship to another company. Graduates are pissed off because they can’t get into the careers they want to get into and that’s leading to high levels of stress and unhappiness, which is a major study in its own right. There’s a whole global study on the levels of happiness going on right now, it has been for the last five to 10 years.

Absolutely and we see that when people turn up to the workshops, the wealth education workshops and that is the main driver. “I want to change. I just don’t know how can you please teach me the tools and technique show.”

Which we happily do, but on that note, Ro I want to refocus us, because I want to focus on the education system not supporting work and business success.

I guess, to a greater extent even life in general later down the line.

What are you seeing with your audiences?
What are you seeing with your clients?
What are you seeing with Seekardo members when they come to us.
What is it not setting us up for?

I’m going to keep coming back to it and you’ve heard me say it a lot in the past. It is the difference between conformity and creativity. A great study done and if anybody gets a chance go and listen to this there’s an 11-minute YouTube video and it’s a hand scribe video. If you go look up Sir Ken Robinson, RSA just put RSA and I think it’s education.

We’ll put it in the show notes.

Essentially it’s part of a TED talk but he talked about the fact that when kids were asked at a young age and there’s a famous study and I think it’s to do with paperclip from memory.

What creative things can you do with paperclip and prior to kids going into education system, these are young kids three, four, five, six, seven years of age. They came up with all these incredible ways, over 150, 200 ways of using a paperclip. They then went back to the same kids having been in the education system for about 10 years and asked the same question and it dramatically reduced down to double digits, ways to use a paperclip.

He clearly said that the studies are showing that our children have lost the ability to be creative by the time they get to the 18 to 25-year-old stage because they’ve been put down a narrow form of education, a conforming system. Business doesn’t yield to conformity business yields to creativity. The world will bend around somebody that is creative but it will smash somebody over who is conforming.

The likes of Richard Branson people like Anthony Robbins has been in business for many years, Alan Sugar, who many of you have watched on UK television. These guys are constantly coming up with creative ways to overcome the challenges in the world and business is all about that.

It’s about solutions. If you look up the word entrepreneur I think it means to solve solutions in French.

What I believe has happened is that as young people coming through the education system now as you discovered, unless you’ve got something else happening in the background in my case, reading personal development and reading early books my audiences that you’ve met with me now as we’ve gone through together coming through the doors. The ones that are seemed to be different have read broadly in the field of personal development. Another word for that would be self-education is a great term.

What they’re doing is they’re saying I want to read broadly in the field of personal growth and business to give myself different options because previously I was just following a set of rules.

The problem with only ever baking a cake with one recipe is you don’t add another ingredient.
What if you just tweak this?
What if you change the sugar out for a non-sugar alternative?
What if you add honey instead of white processed sugar? “Oh my god it tastes different.”

That’s the same thing with life.

That’s one of the reasons I think is conformity versus creativity. I think the other thing is that fear conformity leads to fear, because when people are told if you don’t pass these exams you will fail.

We have now bred a whole generation or multiple generations of kids that are of the belief and I say kids, people I’m meeting at 34 years of age now. That if I try to do something it doesn’t work by default I have failed, whereas you and I don’t look at it like that. We see failure as an opportunity to grow and we don’t say that we have to keep failing but what we say is right try this and if it doesn’t work we test it.

Same thing with social media as you were telling me earlier on, we test for a period and then we get some feedback and we change the strategy.

We have to get young people accepting and I’m having the same thing with my daughter at the moment is, it’s okay to try something if it doesn’t work it’s not classified as a failure.

You’re going to grow through it and unless we teach that early and we teach children that success is broad it doesn’t have to be one specific area. Then they’re only ever gravitate back to study take exams, conform, fit into a certain category, get a job and then stay there.

That doesn’t work anymore.

The world is changing.

We need freethinking, we need collaborative thinking, not conformity. We need creativity, we need people that want to expand not contract. We want people that are actually open to emotional development not academic development. And those five things alone if we can start to nurture that we can have a whole new breed of young people coming through and I don’t think we are doing it right now. That is my personal belief.

I agree.

I don’t think we are doing it as well.

You almost answered one of the questions pretty much that I was going to ask a bit later which was, what skill should we be developing in order to be prepared for business success and work successes?

So you started to hit a few points will come in that moment because it is a fascinating which is in the fear of failure but we’ll come to that in a moment. You said something fascinating which is the fear of failure.

We’ve asked your audiences in different rooms all over the UK when we say to them what are you currently afraid of and fear of failure is almost the first one that everybody unanimously agrees with. It is mind-boggling because these are people who have just come out of school, people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and everybody seems to be afraid of failure and it’s got to be because the school system. I don’t know where else it has come from.

I totally agree.

Added to that the parents are saying,“I don’t want you to fail your grades were too low.”They’re comparing them against other people. That’s the other thing I’m seeing as well in schools it’s this whole, why should a six or seven-year-old be even fucking concerned about what they did in the test versus another five or six-year-old.

Shouldn’t they be outplaying, exploring the world studying and looking at nature. You don’t see a bee sat at a flower saying hey, hold on a minute you just picked up three more bee pollens than I did, shit I need to get back in there. You don’t see animals naturally doing that it’s only human beings that compete consciously against each other.

Absolutely and there is a fantastic book I read recently which I recommend to you Ro it’s called Range and I’ll put that into the show notes as well. Some of the most famous names in the world in history and to date and I’ll put those names onto the show notes as well.

So it’s a bit of an incentive for you to check out the show notes because these people we idolise, we look at as heroes. These people in their childhood Ro it’s been documented is they’ve gone back in history worked out what they did, they did a range of things based on whatever their curiosity led them towards. And as they started to progress, they naturally found the thing they were massively passionate about which then had a massive, influential impact on the world in a positive way.

That is the complete opposite to the current education system and that book is a bit of a window and a bit of a counterargument to parents who are saying, “get the A’s, get a better grade, look at that person they’ve got a better grade.”

I think that book is a fantastic counterargument and also supports exactly what we are saying in this podcast, because it’s there. You only have to look at the most historical famous people and they’ve tried everything.

I was watching a YouTube video the other day Ro on Ricky Gervais. A fantastic comedian, very insightful and does great docu series, great stand-up, very controversial in nature as well. He went from job to job. He was trying this and that, comedy was a certain thing in his family. He was never brought up as a comedian and then at the age of 35 he struck gold in regards to his creation, The Office. That’s a nice example for any creators out there which are currently feeling a bit stuck in a box with the current school system.

This almost warrants another whole podcast. You’re picking up on some fantastic subjects, one of the things that I discovered more recently and it’s a combination of reading and there’s a great documentary I think I might have watched on Netflix to do with genius.

The concept of genius in the mind of geniuses and inventors is that what they have now categorically shown is that the more you narrow down the mind and the experience of the human being at an early age, the neural pathways for that child or that human being get narrowed because the only way to be creative and I it was think creative genius.

The only way to be creative, the only way to come to something in the life and to come up with different alternatives in business, the question is how do we teach our kids is the system currently serving children or is the education system preparing kids for business and work? The answer I believe is no because we are creating conformity.

The problem with conformity is if you narrow down the experience of the child, the young person, the human being what you do is you don’t create enough neural pathways, neural associations for us to be able to come up with an idea. I don’t honestly believe there is any such thing any more as a new invention.

When I wrote my book Turning Point and when I went on stage and you’ve seen me say this, I say, everything I’m going to talk about I haven’t come up with this. I haven’t developed this, it’s a combination of my own experiences worked around other things I’ve learnt from some great people, great speakers and great mentors because the world now has just got all these different experiences.

But sometimes one idea coupled with another creates a different outcome. It might feel different, but it’s really a combination of things we’ve experienced in the past. Does that makes sense?

That makes total sense.

So, what the study showed was that children, young people that have a broader range of experiences albeit some work, some didn’t. It created in the unconscious mind an experience that now becomes a learning that the cells of the brain level, never forget.

Now when you come to the table to two or three years later and you come across a problem, it can call on this vast resource of experiences that you’ve had. Some of which were great, some of which weren’t so great, some more emotional, some more logical and it has the ability to then create an answer.

This is where sleep comes in, which is another whole podcast for us to cover differently and that is where I’m at the moment. We are of the opinion with our children that we want to give them a broader experience. We took them travelling last year for two, three months and we didn’t just stay in one place, we went to lots of different places because that memory becomes something the children can remember. One little incident that happened they can tag that to a new experience in the future.

But if you think about it we are narrowing the kids down into a channel which does not give them the same experience as another child that is going a lot broader. Of course someone else can argue, yeah, but you can’t be a jack of all trades etcetera, agreed.

But if you get the foundations right you can specialise further down the line at the moment the problem is what’s happening with kids is that they’re not getting the colourful experience in life and the different experiences.

Remember, a child sat down studying for an hour on their own in one subject they’re passionate about could be the equivalent of that same child spending three or four days in a classroom with 25 other kids try and have the parent manage the other kids as well as trying to teach the content.

That’s the other thing I want to share with you Harms, I believe that as parents we’ve got to be now thinking about what about concentrated periods of learning, shortness shorter study periods in something they’re passionate about and then go and away and experience it.

Go away and do it, as opposed to four, five days studying the same subject very broadly whilst the teachers not teaching them but having to manage the class as well as their time and all those things.

I know it’s a hot topic and someone could challenge me on this, but all I want to do today is provoke thoughts for people to go away and question what they’re doing at the moment, even how they’re learning, let alone their kids.

Yeah and I’ve got a great example for that Ro in regards to specialism versus general.

I’ve been a big fan of skiing. I’ve skied four, five years in a row and always went with the same group. There was somebody in the group who missed two years out of the four and when he came back on the fourth year, he lagged behind. Now he was quite intelligent. He almost understood exactly what you said, he’s very entrepreneurial person in his spirit anyway. He said sod you guys, I’m fed up of being wound up now. So he went and worked with somebody one-on-one intensively for two days, when he joined us back on day three he just blitzed us.

What he learnt in the intensive period literally was a learning experience for the rest of the team skiing thinking, actually we would probably need to disappear and work with that same intensive coach or mentor that he’s worked with in regards to that ski instructor. Because he had the desire to just be great at skiing, catch up or whatever was going on in his mind and he did it. He specialised, he did it intensively. He was passionate about learning it and then he just did it and he came back and it was phenomenal.

That’s a cool example I just recalled from the top of my memory which we went through versus the whole general teaching where there is 10, 15 of you in a class and that was quite a slow, frustrating experience. I can only imagine what the kids are going through right now.

This is where self-education comes in and to try and bring it back to the original question and if anyone is listening to this and their kid is going through the education system and you’ve made a commitment to that, I understand you might be living there. Your job and everything are now geographically based around there, start to consider the future and I think this is where I want to steer our conversation now to what is the future for your children?

It is not about what we want our children to do but what do we want our children to have the opportunity to experience?

That’s probably a better way to say it, remember language is important with these conversations because I’ll often hear people say I want my kids to do this. I’m thinking well it’s your children’s lives it’s not your life. You’re just trying to maybe pass on a set of beliefs that you want them to have because you didn’t have that experience.

That may not exist in the future Ro with technology, AI, robotics. Entire industries are being destructed, what you think is a great industry for your child which you didn’t get to be a part of is completely shifting.

I agree.

I think you saying that has prompted a word that has jumped into my mind and it’s worth everybody writing this down and even this is a conversation for another podcast is, I think we need to prepare our children to be more robust.

What I mean by that is robust in the sense that they have the ability to change and adapt around what is a massively changing workspace, work environment, economic environment, whatever you want to call it.

I don’t think our kids are being taught how to be robust enough both emotionally and academically is one thing, but emotional robustness is how to deal with rejection. How to deal with a job change. How to face a situation where you suddenly can’t do the same thing you wanted to, because as you say a robotic system or an automated system has taken over what you’re doing.

One reaction is to be angry and to be pissed off and to be frustrated because you spent your whole life studying that profession.

But what if you learn creativity along the way and I think anyone listening to this should be considering what can I do to help my children learn something entrepreneurial alongside their studies.My children if they choose to go on and stay more conventional and maybe they want to take exams and studies and let’s say my daughter wants to be a vet or doctor, that’s fine, but I still want to give her a set of tools to enable her to have financial independence elsewhere.

That comes down to self-education in the world of wealth. In the Seekardo, for example, as you know, in the vault.what we’ve got there is a lot of personal development tools but that includes money management, time management, those sorts of skills. These are all really important skills that people need to learn parallel to any academic qualifications that they’re learning and the question is, what skills would you like your children to have in the future?

I can give a few things which are being cited by experts as well in regards to change in the education system and some fantastic multi-million copy books being sold and they are all now saying the same thing. They agree with what we are saying in this podcast.

So if you were to write these things down which is exactly what Ro is saying in parallel to the academics that they’re doing, which you know if they have to do that, they have to do that, but these are the things to write down.

Number one is collaboration, how easily, adaptable can they work with and collaborate with other people in person, but also remotely.

I work personally with a team all across the globe, business partners, employees, and we have to be able to collaborate. Number two is critical thinking, the ability to think critically and solve a problem which Ro has already mentioned. For example, when you’re conforming as Ro has said you’re following a step-by-step guide.The school system said don’t worry do this, do this and then this is going to happen.

I think Ro where people get stressed and overwhelmed frustrated the feeling of depression and all these things that are coming up in the media right now is, when there’s a roadblock or there’s something that’s slightly different to what was supposed to happen people shut down. It’s like, that’s not what I expected and I don’t know how to deal with that.

Yes this comes back to the whole resilience and I think if everyone can leave today with the idea of starting to introduce the concept of emotional development, emotional robustness in your children and the challenges as well, let’s add another factor here. Social media can create an artificial world for our kids where they believe that,“I can get to that lifestyle fairly easily.” There are these families that travel around the world and do these YouTube videos, which is great and they have lots of followers, but the amount of work and physical time that goes into creating that is as we know, is a lot harder than most people actually appreciate.

That’s a really good point.

A couple more to the list then is compassion. The idea of emotional maturity handling that. Creativity Ro you mentioned that already, resilience was one I’ve just added to the bottom of the list because that wasn’t there.But I think that is needed because when somebody says no, when somebody rejects you, when you feel like you’re failing you need the resilience to get back up.

Ro I love that example you said because there are families out there travelling the world creating a YouTube video. But if you looked at it objectively and you looked at it with a bit of critical thinking you would see that these people are using collaborative expressions, working with a media team. They are critically thinking, they’re constantly bombarded with social media messages, how do they adapt to that? They’re solving a problem.

This is the final one on the checklist, which is they are communicating so, so effectively and magically across the globe.

So the final one I want you to write down is communication and I know Ro this is one of your areas of expertise.

What are your thoughts with communication in the school system right now?

It’s blocked because the parents are frustrated they don’t have a way to communicate and when they do it, it is perceived to be them just complaining or frustrated which they are.

The teachers have got nowhere to go because if they talk to the parents and express their frustration, then I’m a parent thinking oh shit if this is what the teachers are thinking, what do I do?

Equally if they complain upwards they might lose their job and the government aren’t going to listened. There is the constant blockage of communication.

Added to that, this natural fear of looking stupid or failing people don’t communicate in a really open way because it might appear that even on a basic level they’re failing as a human being. You’ve heard me say this a lot in the last year or two and as the new book comes out you’re going to hear me talk about that as well, which is communication is the new currency. It’s the way we exchange thoughts, passions, ideas, financial concepts, how we sell a product, how we sell ourselves. If we can’t master that fundamental and communication happens at two levels externally and internally.

The big passion for many years for me has been teaching people how to communicate internally with their values, their beliefs, self-worth and that is a massive subject, but more recently over the last three for five years has been now showing people how to take that communication from the internal world and express it externally.

I think that’s where we need to help our kids. Children in particular in the teenage years start to bottle stuff up, something fundamentally has taught them that it’s not okay or they feel uncomfortable expressing their feelings to the parent or the teacher and you know why, because they’ve been told if you do something that doesn’t conform to the system, you’re wrong and they don’t know where to go.

So where do they escape?

Back to social media again where they can talk about all sorts of shit.I know I sound like I’m having a whinge but actually I genuinely feel that we do not value this subject enough, we really don’t. We put more value on money than communication where ironically, it’s the other way around.

Ro final question before we wrap up this podcast, which is refocused on the children, the current education system supporting the children with these amazing skills.

Now what if somebody said to you, and I’ve had this a few times, which is okay, but I’ve gone through the education system. I am where I am now I’m struggling in business; I’m struggling in my career.

What are our final notes or piece of advice or where can we guide people and point them towards in regards to learning the skills now.

We’ve alluded to it but I think we should just make it really clear and concise, and also I wanted to briefly talk about the Seekardo meet up which is now open publicly as well. But I wanted you to lead on this.

To help answer that question it would be worth just me quickly mapping out and normally I talk about the seven stages of shifting that happens.

I don’t know if I’ve talked to you about it, you might have heard me talk about the different stages. Typically what happens is when somebody leaves and let’s rewind to a career. When somebody leaves at 18,19, 20, 25 years of age depending on PhD, degree. And they start with hope they go into a career with hope, that’s what we all do. We start that career with the hope that this is going to be what we expected it to be. That’s number one.

Behind the hope then comes over to the excitement of starting a new career. I am getting value; I’m learning and growing and many of the six basic human needs that we have are fulfilled in that first phase of our growth in a career.

So we’ve come through the education system and we are hoping and we are excited number two and what we’ve learnt is going to actually play out in that career that we’re in. Stage three is reality. This is now, after six to 12 months depending on how emotionally developed the person is or how accelerated they are in their awareness of what’s going on in their career and the world around them becomes reality.

I don’t think I’ve ever showed you this map, but this is a map that I actually evolved several years ago when I was coaching people. I was meeting so many fucking people and I was like let me try and map this out. I said how do you start the journey? So I broke it down into the seven parts. We should probably write about this maybe in one of the materials we’re creating. So hope, excitement, reality.

Now that point there the reality typically leads to stage four which I noticed was frustration, which is a good thing not a negative thing by the way. Now they’re frustrated that the hope and excitement they had at the start aren’t being fulfilled. “This is not how I expected it to be. Not earning enough money, not getting the recognition I want.

Not getting the job fulfilment, not taking the path I want to get to.” They will stay in that frustration sometimes for one or two or three or four or five years because they don’t have an outlet. They are being paid just enough to keep them there or they’re still listening to their parents, especially if you come from an Asian culture like me, “you must stay in the job.”

So the frustration carries on until it gets to five, which is pain. This is the pain point.

This is where I’ve had fucking enough. I am absolutely done now. Now, in some cases that could be 10, 15 years, it could be the midlife crisis. In other people like in your case it could be just a couple of years, so every person is different depending on if they’re starting to read and evolve outside of the workspace. This is where the emotional development comes in and that’s stage five.

Stage six now is the pain then leads to one of two things and this is where it gets a bit more complicated. Either it leads to growth i.e. they’re now reading and there is an evolution. They break out the shell and they evolve or they break out the chrysalis and they start to move from being a caterpillar into a butterfly, if you want a metaphor for it.

Or they carry on conforming and you’ve seen this because you left the workplace. You’ve still got friends that are still there Harms after four, five, six years correct?

Yes.

And yet they have the same feeling, so they’re in stage six at the moment, they are conforming, but some people start to go through breaking out the chrysalis and starting to grow.

Which takes us to stage seven which is change and that’s what you went through.

Change will happen through; fuck it I’m going to go get another job and they go to another job and they start back at one and they go through the same process. But they started now at one and they’re 28 years of age, 32 years of age, got a new job great. Excitement, reality or they go through a massive change which is what you did and they go and start a new career. In other words they start a new business, start trading the stock market, go into property and that change leads to a whole different experience or what I call a turning point.

So, step seven, is where I wrote my book. If you wonder where the book came from because I kept watching the seven steps and I was like shit, people need to have a tool for creating a turning point. The book then took people through how to deal with that turning point, which is why it deal with language, beliefs, values the rules around that, the environment, the purpose. Those are the six steps.

I’m going to pause because I can go into a seminar on this. I don’t think I’ve ever shared that with you actually.

No that’s fantastic.

So as you were describing I was scribbling down notes because that’s the first time I’ve heard you talk about that, the growth phase map and I love the fact that at stage seven you’ve got a choice.

You either change and take a new plan up learn something new or just adopt the same plan and then go through the process again. I imagine that the same cycle somebody may be continuously conforming through their entire life. And we have people come approach us at stage seven with the new plan and then we support them through that turning point.

Others go off. Others go back and listen to a partner and then carry on and change their job. That’s not to say the second time around you’re 35 years of age and you go back and go to another career, and then you go back into hope, that is not to say it will repeat itself again if you’ve taken the wisdom of the first time around, the first seven steps. And you go right, I’m more mindful of this next time around.

But most people aren’t. They get waived a bigger flag, more money, new title and then they go back into it. Excitement is there. The problem is Harms I’ll be honest with you, stage five, frustration into pain. That stage if they’ve now jumped ship and they’re 30 years of age for example, that three or four will last longer. You know why? Because they’ve got kids. Because of the kids there is more risk of the security so they’ll stay there longer just because until the kids get old enough and then I’ll make the change.

Then we meet them at 60,55 and they’re like I want to start a of business now. Why didn’t you do that 20 years ago? I had the kids. They’ve gone through two of these places and now they’re on the third phase.

I think if I was to just finalise that before we close out the podcast is if that has been fascinating to you, I would just really simply say for the first time we’ve opened up the Seekardo meet up to the public space as well.

Normally it’s private, a closed group environment only for the Seekardo members who have access to the vault and all these fantastic learnings, but we’re opening up to the public because I think off the back of this podcast Ro we’ve had more people message us and I think this is now on people’s awareness.

If you just head to growthtribes.com/GT-meet up and I’ll put the link in the show notes anyway so it’s quite easily accessible to you. There’s a small ticket price. Come join us on half a day and maybe this is something we can expand on that meet up as well Ro.

I think so and we had youngsters there at the last event and that will happen more and more. We had an 11-year-old, 13-year-old, we had parents asking how to get my children into this environment.

I agree with you and just off the back of that, leaving today’s podcast because we haven’t given you an action plan. I do think it’s worth exploring after this what are the alternatives for your kids. Can you put them on to some self-learning programs could be an online program that you buy, it could be coming to something like the Seekardo.

Start them at least looking into it, so there’s opportunities. I think I told you I was with a 19-year-old lad who at 14 years of age after his father died had a fascination with trading the stock market. He started to self-study his mum then paid for him to go on a stock market training, three-day training, which then led to him having private mentoring. He has never worked since he was 14 years of age and he trades enough now to support his mum as well. He left the education system so there are so many different avenues. Now he might change what if he decides he wants to be a doctor, he can.

This is the beautiful thing about it. It doesn’t have to be a specific way so I would say leave today with some strong questions about what do you want for your kids in the future?

What do you want them to experience rather than what results you want them to have and start to question and ask them what they want for themselves. And is the education system that your kids are in if you fast forward three to five years, is it really where you want them to be? If it’s not then big decisions have to be made and certainly in the Seekardoour get-togethers, our gatherings. It’s a nice face-to-face environment for people to do that as well as online inside our community as well.

Absolutely.

I think on that note Ro, let’s sign off.

As always, everything we’ve spoken about today which was a hot topic will be on the show notes@growthtribe.com/podcast and also don’t forget Dr Ro special Communicating with Impact training, plus this Seekardo meet up which is happening in March.

Head over to the show notes and don’t miss that because we only do it twice a year and this is the first one open to the public.

This is myself and Ro signing off we will see you on the next episode.