Liz Fraley and Janice Summers on Meaningful Content Mixer

Hosts Sara Feldman and Bonnie Chase invited Liz & Janice to join them on their podcast, Meaningful Content Mixer.

In their 6th episode of Season 1, we joined them to talk about structured authoring, why we created Room 42, a virtual video and podcast series creates space for both academics and practitioners to gain insights from each other, and why getting out of your comfort zone leads to more meaningful content.

Some excerpts

Liz on benefits of academics and research: "I love talking to the academics because they're the ones who have the luxury to dig into something that they see as being meaningful or going to have meaning somewhere along the way. ...They can talk to 5000 people in 50 countries to get data, not just survey their friends on LinkedIn. They can gather real data that is meaningful for the rest of us to adapt and use in our own work."

Janice on benefits of connecting with research: "I think it's important, that bridge that we're creating, and that conversation that we're creating is how they can take advantage of this research that's going on, that's fresh. If you listen to this from a practitioner's perspective and you're trying to convey scientific information to a lay person, technical understanding, understanding the arts and humanities of the person that you're communicating to, and integrate that into the language that you use. Then you can benefit from that research that was just done."

Liz on the method we use in our training and consulting services: "It's about discussion and argumentation and dialogue to stimulate critical thinking. This is not in any way new, but not everyone does it. We are weird in the world of consultants because we have always done this with our customers. We don't just say: here's what it is, throw it over the fence, have a nice day. [Rather], let's work this out until both of us can verbalize it, then we know we know. We can take action and dig out those assumptions, those underlying presuppositions that blind you from taking an action because you don't even realize you're making that assumption. It's not always comfortable, but getting out of your comfort zone."

Janice on getting out of your comfort zone: "I finally figured out how to turn off algorithms on one particular channel and I turned it off and I'm like, oh that's interesting! All these new interesting things started showing up. Otherwise you're only getting spoon fed the same stuff over and over and over again and there's nothing fresh and exciting, nothing to stretch you.

On the role of TPC professionals, including trainers like ourselves:

Liz: I feel that our responsibility as content creators is to be worthy of the time we ask for from anyone. We ask people for a certain amount of time and it is our job to captivate them for however long we have asked for their attention.

Janice: And to provide them the guidance that they're seeking in the most expedient way.

Listen Now

From the Meaningful Content Mixer podcast (Season 1 Episode 6)

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