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Making an Impact on Lives | Amanda Morin
Using thought leadership to change what people know, believe, and how they act.
An interview with Amanda Morin about developing, curating, and deploying thought leadership to change mindsets and behaviors.
How do you help people see new truths, change their behaviors, and rekindle the spark of insight in their everyday life?
Through thought leadership!
At its best, thought leadership is incredibly empowering. By sharing our experiences, great thought leadership practitioners can help their audiences elevate their lives – day by day. Our guest on today’s podcast understands that process better than anyone. Amanda Morin is the Director of Thought Leadership and Expertise at Understood, a nonprofit organization that is a leader in the fields of education and disability inclusion. Amanda helps those who learn and think differently discover their potential, take control of their education, and find community.
Amanda explains Understood’s mission, and explains how she leads the org’s efforts to build knowledge about learning and thinking differences. Amanda walks us through Understood’s humble beginnings in 2014, focusing on empowering school-age children and their teachers. Through the years, the strategy shifted to include helping individuals take charge of their lives and find strength in their differences.
We discuss the various modalities used to reach a broad audience. Amanda discusses the need for a diverse team, and adapting her thought leadership to be used with websites, the mobile app Wunder, and the podcast she co-hosts, In It, where Amanda gives advice for parents, teachers, and even kids who are “in it” with those who learn and think differently. We also discuss other social media platforms she’s used for her thought leadership, and the types of content that work best on each (and why!).
Amanda draws from a full team of researchers, experts, and content creators, to create the perfect team for any task. By maintaining a pool of talented people, she’s sure to have the right skills for any project. She explains why her job isn’t simply to lead the team, but also to help team members find their distinct voices, lift them up so their ideas are heard, and know when to help them change direction when a project isn’t hitting the mark.
This is a wonderful conversation about deploying thought leadership to help those who might otherwise never be given the chance to unlock their full potential.
Three Key Takeaways:
- When deploying thought leadership, you need to find your audience – and put your insights where they already spend their time.
- Not everyone will have the same entry point (or end goal) for thought leadership. It is important for your audience to have different points of entry, and to consider their disparate objectives.
- When leading a thought leadership team, ensure you are giving a platform to each distinct voice. By raising them up, you elevate the whole team.
Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.
And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!
Transcript
Bill Sherman How can thought leadership make an impact on lives? It takes empathy, insight and a commitment to truly serving the people you need to reach. And some of the best work that I’ve seen in this area. Impact focused thought leadership happens in the world of nonprofits. They’re on a mission to change how people think and act. My guest today is Amanda Morin, director of thought, Leadership and Expertise at. Understood. Understood is a nonprofit organization that serves people who learn and think differently, such as people with dyslexia and ADHD. In today’s conversation, I’m eager to talk with Amanda about moving beyond buzzwords, thought leadership, marketing and creating impact. We’ll also talk about defining and measuring success. And perhaps most importantly, we’ll talk about how to use thought leadership to make an impact on lives. I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Amanda.
Amanda Morin Thank you so much for having me.
Bill Sherman So I’m excited to dig into this conversation around the concept of ideas as the vehicle of exchange where you’re trying to change the world, but you’re not asking for dollars in return, right? So maybe you could set the table for us and talk about what you’re trying to achieve through thought leadership, and then we’ll get into the how and how you measure it.
Amanda Morin Absolutely. So I am, I suppose, trying to change the world is a really good way of putting it that understood we think about shaping the world for difference. And my goal in shaping the world for difference is to make sure that people who learn differently have learning disabilities or ADHD, and the people around them have the information that they need to really feel empowered to change behavior and mindsets so that they can advocate for themselves in the world.
Bill Sherman And so with that, that’s a broad sort of population. And you’re focused on school age.
Amanda Morin We actually so as an organization, we started with school age. So when we launched, we launched in 2014 as an organization that focused on school age, providing information through the people around children, right? So to educators and to parents. And then as we did some strategy, refreshing, we looked at where do we really need to be people’s needs. And it’s people like me because I consider myself somebody who learns differently. The individual, like the individual, is now where we’re expanding and starting to look at how do you provide information direct to an individual so they can take charge of their own lives in ways that are manageable and incremental and so that the world isn’t responsible for changing for them?
Bill Sherman And these sort of connection process I think is fascinating because learning doesn’t stop when we leave school. Right.
Amanda Morin Absolutely. You know, and as a former teacher, I’m always saying to people, learning is a lifelong journey. Right. And so we do professional development as professionals. Our kids are always learning from us our spouses, our partners, our friends. We’re always learning something new. And to me, that’s the commodity. That’s what I’m trying to sell without selling anything is knowledge and information and the ability for people to make change over time that benefits them in a way that feels like they’re living a life that is fulfilling and they can feel like they’re thriving.
Bill Sherman So with such a large potential target audience, how are you trying to reach people? Let’s talk for a moment around modalities. How are you getting these ideas out into the world?
Amanda Morin That’s such a good question. And I think the one thing I would add, it’s such a good question, and the one thing that I would say about that is I am fortunate enough to not have to think about that all by myself, right? I work with a really large team of smart, intelligent, thoughtful, creative people from different backgrounds. We’re looking at those. So, for example, we have a website. Understood. Dot org is the website. We have an app called Wonder. We have podcasts. I’m the host of one of them is called In It. So when you’re living right in it, you listen to the podcast host. We are on social media. We have Instagram, we have Twitter, we have Facebook, we have LinkedIn. We’re trying to meet people where they are. The one thing that we are not yet doing is getting people on the ground, right? So we’re not on the ground talking to people. And that sort of focuses us more in a media space. And it it keeps expanding as we realize where people are that we’re not. We start thinking about new ways to reach people. And our product team is extraordinary at thinking about where are those places and what are the ways to make that happen.
Bill Sherman And that leads to a challenge, right? Because you could come up with an infinite number of places and not only of existing platforms and technology. You know, tick tock today, who knows what, 3 to 5 years from now. Right. And you can always add another platform into the mix. But you run the risk of sort of spreading the peanut butter thin.
Amanda Morin Exactly. Exactly. And I was I was just going to say, it’s about being strategic. It’s about being strategic, about using the platform that you’re on to meet the needs of the audience on that platform. So, for example, you know, I joke about Tick Tock being the place where I just can’t be because I can’t figure it out as much as other platforms. It’s a very fast paced platform. So the information that we’re sharing on something like six on her Instagram is a 32nd ad best information share is 30s at best. We’re sharing our top three things we want you to know about accommodations in the workplace versus on a website where we’re able to share an entire article that is not just the top accommodations, but how to ask for them. The challenges you may face as you ask for them and the questions you can ask. So it’s meeting the needs on that platform. That’s really something we have to think through and the audience, right, Because the audience is change too. How you reach parents is different from how you reach educators. How you speak to young adults is different than how I would speak to an employee resource group, for example. So that’s the strategy component of it is really thinking through what is the best modality for the type of information I’m trying to impart right now.
Bill Sherman And it’s an interesting challenge as well across modality, right? So you can pick up the white paper that you might be giving to an educator or a administrator and say, okay, here’s the white paper. We wrote that. But the challenge that turned that into a tick tock.
Amanda Morin Right, right, right. And as you know, as a thought leader, part of my job is to really think through how do you distill that information in a way that meets the needs of the audience. So a white paper is fantastic for the audience of a white paper, but putting them into actionable steps is a really different kind of thing when you’re thinking through how do I take this information from a white paper and make it something that somebody can take print out and use today to make a difference in their lives? And that’s what I spend a lot of time thinking through. Luckily, I have a team who helps me think that through. Right?
Bill Sherman And we’ll get into the team in a little bit because I want to talk about curating ideas. But before we go there, you talked about the importance of strategy, right? In that sort of what are you trying to achieve? And there’s two components, right? There’s the upfront strategy or you’re planning, and then there’s also the checking in, the measuring and knowing what results you’re looking for. So let’s talk a little bit about both strategic planning for thought leadership as well as the measurement aspect.
Amanda Morin DRS Absolutely. So I’m going to start backwards with you, okay, because that’s how we start this, right? Yeah, we start from a position of what’s the objective and from a strategy perspective, with a social impact organization, the goal is impact. So you have to think through what is. The impact of trying to achieve. We as an organization and myself in particular, think about what is the impact I can achieve in a year, right? So I can’t change the entire world in a year, but maybe I can help somebody learn how to teach differently in their classroom. I can teach them new ways of approaching kids who have learning disabilities. So if that’s my yearlong goal, although that’s a small year goal, I’ll just be like, you know, I start thinking about what’s the impact we want to make and then how do you break that down into components? One of the things that really serves me well as I was a teacher, I wrote Individualized Education Plan goals. And what I had to do was break them all down. Right? So this is the same it feels the same to me. It feels very similar. But the impact is the place to start because your objective is the impact. What is it you want to have people know, believe or change in their behavior? Right. And those are the things that I’m trying to think about. And then you look at key results. What are the measurements of that? And I will tell you, impact is a squishy metric in some ways. You know, as a squishy metric, you have to have a really good sense of what does change look like and in terms of what is change look like, you have to have a baseline knowledge of your audience. You have to know what do they already know, what do they already believe and what do they already do? And having that baseline is really important to start asking qualitative questions and quantitative questions and things like that. Sometimes there are proxy metrics, too, that you have to use. You know, how much engagement do this post get? How many people did they share it with? Where did it go? Into the world is a proxy metric. It just gets kind of squishy. But it’s really interesting to think through what impact looks like at scale.
Bill Sherman You mentioned coming from an education background, and I think in your answer I heard a couple of things that stood out to me from education. One, doing your audience analysis of what do they already know, what do they need to know and how am I going to help them cross that bridge? And then two as well with that, focusing on observable behaviors. I think one of the things that the world of thought leadership can benefit from is looking at other places where metrics have been squishy in the past and you’ve had to quantify them, right? And so learning and development, for example, has had the challenge of, okay, we told them this, check the box. Great, right? But did it influence behavior? And those are two entirely different questions. And thought leadership often, I think, falls back to content marketing metrics or when you’re measuring impact, the number of likes that you get on a post or, you know, a tick tock isn’t a real measure of impact.
Amanda Morin Right? Right. For us, we have done some really interesting things on the back end of our content, to be honest. We’ve done a lot of thinking about tagging. So like, you know, metadata tagging and we think about how do we tag things in terms of what they are in terms of like, you know, if you’re coming in the door and you know nothing about ADHD, here’s a piece that is an explainer on ADHD. Okay. We know that you’ve read that piece and we’ve tagged that as beginner, for example, and it has a bunch of other tags. And if you as a user and I actually think of myself as as a user, this is the website I wish I had when I was sharing this with my kids. I wish I could go back and see my own behavior. The way I could do that would be look at my account and see over time what I’m consuming as content and then go back to the tags and see that journey. Right? So I can see behavior change in tracking the kind of content you’re consuming. Hopefully we’re moving from knowledge based content to changing of attitude content and then changing of behavior content. And that’s a really complex component and a complex way to measure squishy metrics. I think it’s really important to know that there are ways to measure those squishy metrics.
Bill Sherman Absolutely. And so what content are people consuming, if you know what they’re searching on, whether it’s on your site or if it’s tracked by they’ve got an account on your site. Those are helpful ways to get a sense of what that journey is, especially when you’re trying to take someone from novice to someone who’s working on practicing and mastering skills.
Amanda Morin Absolutely. And I think, too, that one of the things that’s. Really interesting is you have to think about multiple entry points, right? Because people are not starting their journey in the same place and they may not be trying to get to the same place in the end. I always think of this as sort of if we’re a GPS system, you have to know where you want to get to. You have to know where you start. But sometimes you don’t turn on your GPS till you’re midway through your trip because you don’t know how to get to the next stop on your trip. And so thinking about what the multiple entry points are for people on their journey is really important because if we start measuring from a baseline, that’s an assumption we’re making. We need to be able to see where people are coming from. I one of the things I actually love to do, this is such a silly thing because I love to do this. I have a whiteboard right next to me. I do a lot of mapping, right? I do a lot of mapping of what ifs. I do a lot of flowcharts. Kind of where you might go next, where you could go next. What you might think about next. What are the barriers? What are going to move you forward, you know? And then I talk to people because I can look at all of the data in the world. But if I’m not having conversations with people and asking them what’s in the way, what’s getting in your way, what are you scared of, what are you looking forward to? I can’t help move people forward if I don’t understand what’s in there. Why? And so I love having those conversations with people to say, what did you find helpful? Tell me what you didn’t find helpful. Where would you like to see us go next? What do you need next? So I can not just map it theoretically. I can also marry that with user insights as well.
Bill Sherman And I think this goes nicely back to strategy is if you’re creating your strategy and your OKRs in a vacuum and you’re not talking to your users and you’re not talking to the people who you’re trying to reach, you’re likely to miss the mark and your measurements will be off and you’ll be really missing both impact and the warning signs that you’re not creating impact.
Amanda Morin Absolutely. And, you know, I think one of the things that we forget about OKR sometimes is that they’re malleable. You can change them. You can change them. And I think that when we look at OKRs, it’s really easy to say this is set in stone, this is where we need to be. Here are the key results I’m looking at. But if you look at them over time and you’re starting to see that we’re not even hitting the mark at all here, that’s when you have to take a step back and start thinking about, did I overestimate the impact that we could reach? Am I measuring it the wrong way or am I not talking to the right people right in That could be the right people internally and by organization or could be the right people. In the world. You know, may not talking to the right parents, the right educators, the right individuals. Am I not having the conversations with other people in the field who are also trying to do impact based work and thinking about how they are measuring that and what success looks like to them to.
Bill Sherman And that constant questioning and that mindset where you’re willing to explore and learn, I think is absolutely essential because the solution from two years ago probably doesn’t work today.
Amanda Morin The solution from two months ago probably doesn’t work today, right? It’s an it’s an ongoing journey for us as individuals and thought leadership. It’s an evolving field We’re always looking at. Hopefully we’re always looking at integrating new insights or other people’s ideas or the way that somebody else has approached something so we don’t have to reinvent it over and over.
Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast. Please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.
Bill Sherman So I want to turn to you mentioned you had a team. So I really want to explore the concept of curating ideas. But let’s first begin with you’ve mentioned a team. What does that look like?
Amanda Morin That’s a good question. And the interesting thing is my team looks different from day to day. I have researchers who will do academic research. We have user researchers. We have external experts that I work with. We have a content team. So I have the joy of creating the team I need from the from the pool that we have for whatever project I’m working on at the time. But I think what’s really important about my team is that they all have really good ideas. And my job as a leader is to lift up those ideas, is to think about what they’re telling me, what they are realizing, how the research from the academic research is matching with the user insights. How do we marry that in a way that can be practical and really supportive of the person that we’re trying to support or the idea that we’re trying to push forward? Or any of those kinds of things. You know, I get a little itchy with the word beta sometimes because I think it’s a word that we can overuse in terms of like, I’m moving you for your walking behind me. But I really think my job is to watch what’s happening around me and lift those ideas up. My job as a leader is to really teach other people how to speak up and show what they know. And feel confident that I’m going to listen when they bring an idea to me, know, in the end result, maybe we’re not going to pursue that idea or the end result. Maybe this is a fantastic idea. Let’s blow this out a little bit. Come back to me with a plan. But it’s about listening, is about making sure that those ideas have an opportunity to see the light of day.
Bill Sherman So do you have a story or example of a moment where you helped to elevate an idea through that listening process?
Amanda Morin I do. I have a researcher who focuses on the intersection of learning disabilities and being a black woman. Right. So this is her experience. And she said to me, all of this information we’re providing is fantastic. I don’t think it represents my community. And I said to her, hey, let’s talk more about that. What’s missing here? And what she said to me is there are a lot of barriers that are not being addressed through what we’ve put together as a plan. You know the information. Is great, but it’s not going to get to my community. There’s too much stigma that you’re not looking at. There are intersectionality and you’re not looking at. And I you know, I took a step back and I thought, you know what? She’s right. She’s absolutely right. I’m not looking at that because that’s not my experience. So what I said to her is, can you explore this more? I want to know about your experience. Can you provide for me your story? Tell me your story and how it played out and how you ended up here. And then can you go talk to other people and find their stories? And so when she did that, she then came back to me. We looked at we you know, we were looking at a set of knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, statements. And we looked at them. And when she said to me, these are very white centric, what I said was, let’s change that. So tell me what I need to do to change that. And it opened up this world of humility. It opened up a world of humility for me, to be honest, because that was something I hadn’t considered. And if I hadn’t listened to her when she said to me, There’s something missing here, there’s an entire group of people whose experience we would have been ignoring.
Bill Sherman I think that’s a fantastic example of not just curating, but listening. Right? And having a team or a group of voices that will give you input and creating the trust necessary for someone to come to you and say, We’re missing the mark here.
Amanda Morin Yeah, yeah. And I and I think that that that is something that we have to create. That’s part of leadership, is creating a space where people feel comfortable speaking up. And telling you I think you’re missing something here. Without fear of retaliation, retribution, humiliation, any of those kinds of ations. Right. Come down the line. And for me, that’s just part of who I am as a person anyway. And it’s something that I just transferred into my role as a thought leadership person. You know, it’s one of those words that I kind of get like it’s I don’t know what to call myself sometimes, You know, I’m.
Bill Sherman I usually use practitioner because and people sometimes raise an eyebrow and I’m like, it’s sort of like yoga or meditation. I’ve learned the basics, but I’m going to spend the rest of my life understanding and trying to improve at what I do. And it’s not check the box. You know, I have a certification. It’s constantly getting better at the practice of ownership.
Amanda Morin I love that. I love that. I think I’m going to have to start using that one. I will always credit you. Thank you. I love that. And that’s part of my job. My role, that’s part of my job is to make sure that people have space to speak up and feel confident that they can speak up and also to coach them on the best ways to speak up. You know, there are I have a lot of people who are just starting out in their professional career. A lot of people come from education. It’s a very different thing to go from education into an organization that works like a business. Even though it’s a social impact organization, it’s a very different atmosphere. And so where somebody might be used to giving a lecture to a class instead, I can say to them, What are the top five things you want me to know from this? Right? Can you bullet that down to the top five things and then give me more detail about those top five things? So it’s coaching them to figure out how to present your ideas in a way that they get heard as much as is giving them a space for those ideas to be heard.
Bill Sherman Well, and you’ve pointed out there’s a need of communicating ideas within the organization so that you can reach beyond the organization. And I think all too often, both within the organization and beyond, the voices that get heard are the loudest ones or the ones that we’re most in the habit of listening to, whether or not they’re valuable to us.
Amanda Morin I think that’s true. I think that’s true. I think, you know, loud voices often get heard. One of the joys of working for an organization that thinks about learning differences on a regular basis is I get to say out loud, I value processing time. I value the fact that you may need a pre read. I value the fact that you may need to come back to me a day after this meeting and provide that information to me because this is my field and I know that people think in different ways, that they process information in different ways. So it’s really. Putting into practice the values that we espouse externally. We need to do them internally as well. And so that cuts down on some of the loud voice component of it. It gives people the opportunity to come back to the table, whatever the table might be. Even if it’s a Google doc, right. That’s the table for the day. And I think there’s an element of bravery that comes with sharing your ideas because. When you’re when you’re value and what you bring to the table is what’s in your brain. Right. Your intellect, Your thoughts, your the thing that comes to you at 2 a.m. or while you’re in the shower in the morning. Right? That’s the value that we bring to the table. It’s really easy to get caught in your own head and think like I thought this was a great idea, but maybe it’s not. And I really want to encourage people to tell me them even if they think it’s not, because that gives us the space to start blowing it out and talking more and realizing maybe it is, maybe it is valuable.
Bill Sherman That process of more ideas, I think, leads to better ideas. Right. Is if you key in to one idea early and say, okay, that’s the one we’re going to run with, whether from a innovation perspective or a thought leadership perspective, you probably have looked at the issue broadly enough to find the best idea.
Amanda Morin I think that’s true, and I think not limiting yourself to what your idea can be, Right. I think oftentimes we come into the room thinking we know what we want to build already, and if you already know what you want to build, there’s not a lot of room to test and learn new things. You know, for example, we often use in in our field, the phrase intervention comes up over and over again. I had another colleague point out to me that intervention often means a really big program, but if we’re looking at small chunks of information, maybe we need to rethink the word intervention and also use like supports. What are the supports we can provide people. And to me it seems like a very small linguistic change. But when we actually put it into practice, it was a huge change in the way we presented information to people because they had this opportunity to look at the information we’re presenting and not feel like they need to spend an entire year on it. It was something they could do right then. This is a support you can implement right now as opposed to this is the intervention that’s going to help you. And it was such an impressive thing to realize with just that one turn of phrase made such a difference in the way we could provide information to people.
Bill Sherman Now, you’ve given me a great transition to the third topic I want to talk about. One Words matter and how they impact how we think. And that is love it or not. The phrase thought leadership. Right. And I know you and I had a conversation around is thought leadership a buzzword, and you had a response to that.
Amanda Morin So I did. And when I said to you, I think was it’s kind of a buzz word. It’s a new up and coming thing to call somebody a thought leader. And it was I think this was in the context of you asking me, how did I get to this place in my career? Right. And what I said is we changed some of the titles around. You know, we thought how the organization like that doesn’t that doesn’t put me in the best light. But really what it said is actually what I do is internal expertise. I do external expertise. I keep knowledge. And so for me, I’m really a keeper and disseminator of knowledge. That’s my job. And if that’s what thought leadership is, that’s great. I’m happy with that. But I don’t feel the need to have this title to it because it’s lofty or it’s the new trend or that kind of a thing. I think there are thought leaders in every organization, whether or not you call them thought leaders. They’re there.
Bill Sherman Absolutely. And some may be practicing leadership. They’re coming up with ideas and solutions and insights. Deep within the organization and places you might not even normally look. And then second, there are people who are doing roles similar to yours where you’re serving as a head of thought leadership and you have it in your title. Other people are doing that work, but they have a different title.
Amanda Morin Absolutely. Absolutely. And a lot of times those are subject matter experts, right? We call them subject matter experts or we call them, you know, I will say as buzzworthy as thought leadership feels as a as a phrase. It does make me feel like there’s a responsibility. I have to make sure I am doing my best work. I am tapping into the best ideas and I am really thoughtful about what I put forward and what I don’t put forward.
Bill Sherman That is beautifully said because if we talk about thought leadership as taking ideas to scale, then we have a responsibility, a professional responsibility to make sure that the ideas that we are curating, that we are amplifying are ones that will do good.
Amanda Morin Yes. Yes. And in my in my field, we have this kind of phrase, all means. All right. And we want to make sure we are meeting the needs of all. And sometimes what we put forward doesn’t meet the needs of all the people we’re trying to reach. And so that’s a time to regroup and think about whether or not there’s a different way to approach it. I was going to say a better way, but I really want to say a different way because there are always different ways and some, you know, putting value on whether they’re better or not really doesn’t look at the fact that. As to whether or not they make impact.
Bill Sherman And if you keep impact as your North Star, then you move beyond the buzzword, right? You move beyond patting yourself on the back and saying, this is thought leadership. Know that that’s not the point of this. This is not just putting an idea out in a book or in a white paper and saying, we got a lot of downloads. It’s at the end of the day, I think one of the things that’s most fulfilling is when you say, okay, how did this touch lives? What did this change? And I’m thinking from the work that you’re in, you have a number of stories and examples of how this creates impact on a very personal level.
Amanda Morin I do. You know, it chokes me up a little bit because the things that make me feel most effective at my job are the messages I get. You know, the emails that somebody says sent to me and says, I feel seen in a way I’d never felt seen before. Or when I do a speaking engagement and somebody comes up to me afterwards and says, I’ve never told anybody this before, but I also have dyslexia and this is something that I’m now willing to start talking about, because you made me feel comfortable doing that every day. I’m hearing from people who are saying this really has made a difference for me and that’s everything to me. I mean, that’s just everything to me is to hear people say, you are changing my life, even if it’s just you’re changing this one aspect of my life today. I have three children, all of whom learn in different ways. I have a husband who has ADHD and a learning disability, all of whom are very comfortable would be sharing that information. My husband. I’m a little nervous here. My husband. Said to me. I love that I can come to. Understood. And I’m not distracted by all of the visuals and all of these other things. I love that I can come to understood and realize I’m really not alone in this. And he’s a quiet, soft spoken to himself person. And for him to say that out loud was great. But even better, we have another podcast called ADHD. A-ha. That is hosted by one of my colleagues. He sent her an email that said, You’re now my new favorite podcast host. Even though I’m married to one of the other podcast hosts because you told a story that made me feel so heard in a way that I hadn’t before. And you know, it’s funny, but it’s really lovely. It’s really beautiful to know that there are people who are willing to take the time out of their day to say, You’ve changed my life in a way that that I can feel good about. Because, you know, we often hear the complaints. Now, people complain more easily than they do reach out and tell you the good. And so those are the stories for me that just they stick with me. And no matter how many times I have a conversation with somebody, it always makes me feel honored that they’re vulnerable enough to have that conversation with me.
Bill Sherman Those are great personal level stories of impact. And I can hear as you get choked up in your voice, but at the same time. I just think those are the things that keep you going every day.
Amanda Morin Every day. That’s what keeps me going, is knowing at the end of the day, all of this thinking, all of the strategy, all of this OKRs and initiatives. There are real people at the other end of that. There are real people who are. Finding their way, finding their path. And that’s what keeps me going every day.
Bill Sherman So as we begin to wrap up, I’d like to ask you a question. I’d like you to think back to when you were just starting in working on thought leadership. Even before you had the formal title. And what advice would you give your younger self starting in thought leadership? I ask that because there are many listeners who are on the journey at that point right now, or they’re just starting out. So what advice would you give?
Amanda Morin I’d give two pieces of advice. The first one is don’t be afraid to fail because failure is where you start learning. Failure is where you start. You know, I like that you look at the word fail in its first attempt in learning a first attempt and learning. And the second thing I would say is we often start out in this field and feel like an imposter. And I think it’s important for people to know or I wish I knew this every day, actually, that you’re going to feel like an imposter sometimes. But your work speaks for itself.
Bill Sherman That is the topic of an entirely other podcast is imposter syndrome. And the question of because you constantly in this field are learning how much you do not know. But I think we’re going to have to save that for another time, another conversation. Amanda, I want to thank you for joining us today.
Amanda Morin It was such a pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much.
Bill Sherman If you’re interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the OrgTL newsletter. Each month we talk about the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Go to the website. OrgTL.com and choose join our newsletter. I’ll leave a link to the website as well as my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Thanks for listening and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.
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