Deep Diving into Research for Speech-Language Pathology with Meredith Harold

Introduction Audio 00:00

The best we can do is be transparent. Like I said, Be careful not to gate keep information and be careful that we're never presenting biased information in any way.

Mai Ling 00:15

Welcome to exceptional leaders with Mai Ling and Martyn, where we give you front row access to intimate conversations that are shaping the way the world is supporting people with disabilities. If it's happening, it's being shared here. I'm Mai Ling Chan. And unfortunately, Martyn Sibley is not able to join me today for this episode. But he definitely has listened to the episode and he knows all about our exciting interview with Meredith Harold (https://www.meredithharold.com/), in honor of speech and hearing month, May 2020. She has an absolutely wonderful story of deep diving into research and helping other speech language pathologists to quickly access important information, timely information. And it's just been an amazing story that she shares on her own personal interest and how this is just flowered into an entire team into all of the different areas of expertise, which are pretty broad. For speech language pathologists, we can work across the ages, from birth through end of life. And so it's really hard to be an expert on all of the things that are going on, and staying up to date, specifically on the research that's coming out to support and to also help to shape how we're providing our clinical services. So, I'm really excited to share her story and interview with you. But before we get to that, I wanted to let you know that I am already working on Becoming an Exceptional SLP Leader, the third book in my anthology series Becoming an Exceptional Leader. 14 authors are going to be joining me and you can watch our progress on either Mai Ling Chan Instagram, or Mai Ling Chan SLP Facebook pages. And please get ready to download your free digital copy and order the paperback version on November 5th. So very excited to be sharing this with you and highlighting some amazing people in speech language pathology. So, before we get to the next piece, we really want to engage with you and invite you to connect with us. Let us know your thoughts about the show. If you have any ideas for someone who would be a wonderful guest to be spotlighted on the episodes, you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and go to our XceptionalLeaders.com page, make sure you sign up for our mailing list because this is how we can stay connected with you and our shows and any special events and discounts that we have just for you. So, without further ado, I bring to you my interview with Meredith and really hope that you enjoy hearing how she's created the informed SLP for us.

Mai Ling 02:42

Well, I am so excited to have Meredith Harold here with me, you are definitely someone that I have respected and just loved from afar, Meredith. So, this is great for me to get some one on one time with you. Of course, we're not alone. We're with every listener who's listening in on this session. And I'm also really excited to have you here because we are launching this in May, which is Speech and Hearing month. So, thank you for organizing your schedule so that we can get this interview completed.

Meredith 03:08

Of course, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat with you for a little bit. Yes, you know, you're probably most well known for being the CEO and creator of the Informed SLP (https://www.theinformedslp.com/). And I know that it is a family business. And I'll put that in quotes. But there's so much going on behind the scenes. And for someone who is not, who isn't aware of what the informed SLP is, we definitely are going to deep dive into that. But this show is also about a little bit about your journey of being a speech language pathologists and creating it, this you know, so this is why we call this exceptional leaders because there are a lot of people who are deep diving into research on their own and applying it within their clinical situations. But you really stepped up Meredith and took the lead. I mean, this is not even a big enough word, to give us a way to really clarify and quickly go into the areas that we need. And so, I've really loved this. In addition to all of this that you've been doing, you're also accepted the role of the current president of the Kansas Speech Hearing Association. And then also, you're active on the ASHA CRIS Committee (https://www.asha.org/), which is also EBP. So very exciting. I actually don't even know where to start. So out of all of this, what is the most, I guess, pressing right now for you? Well, if listeners are wanting to kind of follow through the journey to you know how I ended up in the position that I'm in, I am right now, we can sort of talk about that. So, I got my PhD really young I was one of those students that went from my undergrad straight into my doctoral program and I stayed at the University of Kansas for a decade while I was...

Mai Ling 04:46

Wow.

Meredith 04:47

And that whole time I was working in research labs, you know how most students have like a part time job that they do. My part time jobs were pretty much always working in various labs. So, I worked in multiple labs as a research assistant toward the end of my doctoral program I wasn't sure whether or not I wanted to continue on an academia. And I was getting a little burnt out. And I needed to stay in the city that I was in for a little bit longer just for family reasons. And typically, when somebody graduates with their PhD, they move, that's the norm within academia, like you get your degree in one place, then you move to a faculty position in another location.

Mai Ling 05:20

Yeah.

Meredith 05:20

So anyhow, so right after my PhD, I decided to become a school based SLP for a while, because I thought to myself, well, if I'm going to be producing science in our field, I better know what it's like to be an SLP, like that experience will be valuable. So that would be a really good thing for me to do for a year or two, whatever. So, I took a school SLP job, and got my rear end basically handed to me. I had no idea how to be an SLP I was completely clueless, even though I knew all the things like I knew all the things like I was like a walking, you know, textbook, you know, but I had no idea how to be an SLP whatsoever. You know, what I'm thinking is don't let them smell the fear. I'm like walking in, you know, to my first, you know, school job like with a PhD. And people are like, do we call you doctor and I'm like, I don't think you should, because I have no idea what I'm doing. But it felt like starting over again. And it was in a lot of ways starting over again. But the interesting thing that happened is I just kept staying like year one, I was like, actually, I want to do a second year. And by year two, I said actually, I want to do a third year. And then that ended up turning into almost six years of me working in the schools, because I liked it. Like I didn't realize that I would like it because it wasn't part of my original plan. But I loved being a school based SLP. And in fact, the only reason I left was because a local university basically was like, come on, come on, don't you miss academia, because there's a PhD shortage, and I was someone with a PhD. And they had a position to fill. So, they basically talked me into coming back to academia, and I missed it a little bit as well. You know, I missed being in a university setting. But I had this break between ending my last school-based job and starting my first Professor job where I was a stay at home mom for a while, with twins, with twins. Yeah.

Mai Ling 07:13

Yes, I need to jump in with that. Because that is like an entirely huge jumping into parenting. You know, it's not just coming home with one baby and you read, you know, the book on how to take care of one child. And this is twins. So that's like a tie. We call it like a spike, you know, in technology. So, what did that do for you know, how long did you stay home? What did that do for your whole island?

Meredith 07:35

Nine months between my last SLP job and my first faculty job. Yeah, with babies basically, at that time, I think there were about one and a half or so. But that's actually when I came up with the idea for The Informed SLPs. When I was a stay at home mom, I think I guess like my brain was wandering, you know, I liked mothering my children and being a stay at home mom. But there were lots of like, think time, as I'm, you know, playing with them, and what not. And so basically what happened is, as I was in this transition phase, I was thinking to myself, you know, what do I have to contribute? What can I contribute to our field that I'm uniquely qualified to offer and that would bring me joy? And when I started The Informed SLP, it was basically me just responding to the fact that when I was a school based SLP, it hit me like a ton of bricks, what it actually felt like to do research for a clinical caseload, as opposed to doing research for a research project, or a dissertation or a paper, they are just completely different animals. And I didn't realize that until I was forced into the situation where I had to do it for myself. So, I was like, you know, I'm efficient at reading research, I'm competent at it, I can do this fast. And I know what school based SLPs need. So I'm just going to commit to reading, you know, 60 journal articles per month, 80 journal articles per month when I will, cuz yeah, PhDs can read things a lot faster than an average person, so I could barrel through these things. I was used to that. I couldn't do it while I was a full time SLP though, like that was too much. But you know, if I added it kind of into my free time and evening time, it was a little bit easier. But I just started reading journal articles on my own, and then explaining to clinicians what they needed to know from those journal articles. Because an individual journal article, as you know, it was like 15, 20 pages long. And most of that stuff, a clinician doesn't need to know there's bits and pieces, the clinician needs to know that you kind of extract from the thing. So, I extracted that information and essentially translated it into what school based SLPs need to know. And I was doing it because I was like, you know, this is what I would have wanted somebody to do for me. This is what I needed somebody to do for me when I was a practicing clinician.

Mai Ling 09:49

Incredible.

Meredith 09:50

Yeah, I started doing it as a hobby. Honestly, like I wasn't intending to start a business. I thought that I would just do this fun thing on the side as a service to our field. Kind of just like a blogger does, you know where they just start blogging because it's fun to them. That's essentially what I did. And the user base just grew like crazy. Like, after one year of me doing it for free, we had an email list of over 10,000 people with super high open rate, like, people were reading this thing, you know. And so, my husband is a business guy. And he basically was like, okay, so you've been doing this for over a year now, in your free time, maybe you should actually charge people rather than donating, you know, 100 hours of your own free time every month to this project. And I was like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. I'll charge people for it. That's the logical thing to do, right? And then the business just became bootstrapped from there. Like, once I started charging people for it, I had money that I could hire on other people. So, I hired on other people to help me do research, other people to help me write. And we basically just grew and grew and grew and grew the thing over a period of a couple years, and tell, it got to the point where we were covering all of our field's research. So now we have a staff of almost 60 people and cover all of our field's research, like every tiny, little niche, we cover it. And that's a massive amount of information. Like, you know, knowing the labor that it takes to do this task for SLPs, just makes it appalling, and hilarious and ridiculous that anybody would ever think that SLPs should do this on their own. I mean, there's hundreds of journal articles in our field published every single month, every single month, and it's a lot of work to dig through and read them all. So, we basically offer that service.

Mai Ling 11:36

You know, you touch on so many important points here. The one thing that's coming up right now, though, is that when you get your license, it's so generalist, I mean, you really could walk in and do from birth to death, you know, really, throughout the entire spectrum of life. And there isn't really a test, you know, when you decide to go into a school versus decide to start at a at a hospital, it's the person that hires you on, you know, and looks at your experience, up to that point, to be able to be effective, clinically effective, and look at your experience, but keeping up with research, you know, across that spectrum, because we have a lot of us who will do school base, and then do drop in on the weekend and do home health, you know, or do AAC on the side or, you know, there's all these other areas. And that whole spectrum of information, like you're saying is so out there, you know, it boggles the mind that as speech language pathologist, we kind of are expected to be able to dabble in all of these, because you may see a student whose hearing impaired or you may see a student who has swallowing issues, you know, whether it's in the home or in the school, and it's just incredible, Meredith, I love, love, love what you're doing. And, you know, for our listener, I can't even think of another field that has this wide breadth of information that is also so tied to evidence based research, you know, if you think of the other therapies, right?

Meredith 12:52

Yeah, our field is a lot broader than other disciplines. It's honestly harder for SLPs, who are generalists to stay up to date with things than it is for some other, I won't name names, because then you'll end up hearing from people that are like, no, it's hard for me too.

Mai Ling 13:09

Right, right.

Meredith 13:12

Yeah, and, you know, the funny thing is, is a school based SLP, for example, is actually in some ways responsible for way more research than our field scientists. Our field scientists are specialists. So, they're like experts in stuttering or experts in childhood apraxia of speech and motor speech disorders are experts in child language disorders. Staying up with that information, where your kind of responsible for like one or a few topics is so different than being responsible for a wide range of topics. It just feels very different.

Mai Ling 13:48

Exactly. And then as you got outside your own scope of interest, was it more difficult for you to identify somebody who would be reviewing and doing things to that same high-level rubric standard that that you were looking for?

Meredith 14:01

Yeah, so I hired closest to my areas of expertise first. So, like, we expanded from school age stuff to like early intervention stuff, which I also knew a lot about. And it took longer until I was ready to add on like adult and medical topics, like asked me a dysphasia question, I will fail it. I'm not even sure if I could pass the portions of the Praxis at this point that are on the stage because I know nothing about that. So essentially, what I had to do when I started hiring those people, is consult with as many people as possible. So like when I hired our adult editor, and when I hired some of the writers who work in our adult medical section, I had to bring in a bunch of PhDs on the back end and have them help me hire them essentially. And then we also have a lot of quality checks within like there's never anything that's published on our website that hasn't gone through bare minimum three or four people, oftentimes six or seven people in order to quality check it so we spend an hour of labor on Yeah, like quality assurance too, because our resource wouldn't be valuable if we had frequent errors in it. And I'm kind of the type of person that really doesn't want to have any errors in it whatsoever, a lot of checks in place to make sure that we don't. So.

Mai Ling 15:15

And that just brings me again to that this level of higher standards. Have you as the company, I guess, had an overall effect on research? Because now you know, someone who's out there, I don't do research, so I'm not really speaking about this in a very ignorant sense. But, you know, thinking, Oh, you know, The Informed SLP is going to be looking at this, and I want them to accept it and recommend, you know, my findings, have you found any type of influence any increased influence?

Meredith 15:42

Well, there's kind of different ways that you can have increased influence. But one of the things that you mentioned, that's kind of interesting, that's another sort of fun fact about our fields research, is the stuff that we cover within the informed SLP is only the things that are immediately clinically applicable where like, if you knew what you know, occurred within this journal article, like what the data showed, you could do something different this week, or this month, that only applies to somewhere between five to 10% of our fields research. So, the vast majority of our fields research is actually not immediately clinically applicable. And so, the kind of interesting thing, that's another thing that our fields, scientists, nor clinicians really realize until they start digging into it. But that's one of the things that SLPs drown in, because you can look something up and read titles and read abstracts and think it'll be useful. But then you read the entire paper, and you're like, actually, I can't apply that. And there's lots of reasons. So, like, a good example would be technology or software that doesn't yet exist for clinicians. It exists in the lab, and they're testing things out, but you can't buy it, you can't download it, you can't use it. And so like, it's cool that somebody is working on it, but you can't do anything with it yet, or highly theoretical papers are like that, or even like a lot of our fields, neuro Imaging Research is like that, where it's like, okay, that's cool that they found this difference in the brain between autistic children and neurotypical children. But that difference in the brain doesn't yet tell us how we should change our assessment or treatment techniques. It just informs future research. So that's a lot of, you know, kind of what we're offering is like going through that volume. So then going back to your question of, you know, how what we're doing affects our field scientists, I don't know that it's affected necessarily the type of work they're doing. Because knowing what clinicians need and knowing that our fields research needs to at some point be clinically applicable and highly useful is something our field scientists knew already, like they're doing that they're working on that right. But I have, I have noticed that a lot of our field scientists are really happy that somebody is basically marketing their research for them. Like, right, the thing that wasn't happening before, and that really can't be the responsibility of the scientists to like, go out there and constantly tell people about and essentially sell their research and communicate it. Because their job is to do the science not to like travel and spend time on social media like talking about their science, they do some of that, but they can't do enough. And so, we basically take on that task.

Mai Ling 18:07

That's, that's wonderful.

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Mai Ling 19:33

Now let's get back to our amazing interview. I'm thinking the word controversy. So, there have been some topics of controversy and one that comes to mind is ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis). What have you found in terms of research and being a voice in this ABA versus not and speech therapy controversy?

Meredith 19:52

Yeah, there's so many controversies within our field and it's been it's been interesting, navigating that. So, there's sort of a couple levels of this. So first of all, what it's called in science, when you find something that needs to not be occurring in clinical practice, either because it's, you know, pseudo-scientific, and we have evidence to suggest it doesn't work or because it's considered to be abusive or harmful in some way, or anything along those lines, the process of getting rid of that stuff is called D implementation. And D implementation is kind of painful, to be perfectly honest. Like the informed SLP doesn't do a ton of it, we tend to focus more energy on telling clinicians what to do rather than what not to do. We actually do like the bare minimum when it comes to D implementation. But there's lots of reasons for that. Sometimes, it's because it's really complex and labor intensive to do. Sometimes it ends up opening up the business to lawsuits. So, like for the informed SLP, we actually have to consider the fact that we're a business. And if we run around saying that other businesses like courses or products shouldn't be used, it actually opens us up legally, in some ways that I don't always love going down that road. But I also, it's also really important to me that we never prematurely serve as gatekeepers. So like, going back to like the ABA research that is highly controversial in our field right now, where you've basically got folks who were like, you can apply ABA, and you know, helpful, ethical ways, and it's a highly valuable science. And then you've got other folks who are saying, we need to stop using ABA, because it has too much of a connection to a history of like abuse and stuff like that, or harm. It's really important to me that my team doesn't prematurely jump on a side, and instead, presents information and the most balanced way we possibly can without ever withholding information or gatekeeping. information. So, like we fully scout ABA journals, and we share information that could be clinically applicable or relevant. And then also discuss some of the potential cons, you know, like, here's the pros and cons here, the you know, red light, yellow, light, green light things to consider. So, it's not easy. That's one of the hardest things we have to deal with is those controversial topics. And then how involved are you? Because this is happening in all different areas? And like I said, it's such a wide general range. Is it like a morning talk? Is it a monthly talk? Or is it when it's happening, you know, okay, we need to get Meredith involved. I'm involved in all of those discussions. I'm not the sole decision maker in those discussions ever. But I'm, yeah, but I'm involved in it. And then we and we basically just watch for when we need to deal with certain things. And there's certain topics that our team has internally been having meetings on and discussing and dealing with for months and months and months and months on end, that we still don't necessarily have a perfect pathway for. Because a lot of the really difficult topics are difficult for a reason, you know, and the best we can do is be transparent. Like I said, be careful not to gatekeep information, and be careful that we're never presenting biased information in any way.

Mai Ling 23:11

Alright, so I want you a little personal, how does that feel for you like this the heaviness of this responsibility?

Meredith 23:16

Oh, it's so much heavier than anything I've ever done before. Yeah, I mean, my current role, I had a student interview me a few weeks ago, who's actually one of the staff of The Informed SLP. And she was like, if you could do it differently, would you have chosen this path? You know, like, and I was like, Yes, like, I would choose this path again, like if somebody you know, said, if you could push a button, then like, do this exactly what you're doing versus not do it would you still, you know, choose to push that button. And I would, but the interesting thing is, it is so much more stressful and so much heavier than previous roles that I've had. So I have to be really cautious, like, as a business owner, to take as much off my plate as possible, and to role release as much as possible, and to allow people around me to support me in decision making processes in order to kind of lighten that load of it. I've got a really good staff of brilliant and highly thoughtful and ethical people at The Informed SLP who take a lot of that load on with me. So...

Mai Ling 24:20

That's great. It sounds like you've grown into that processes, as we all do, because it's really hard because we are that type of personality. And I've been told that A type personality is not a thing that that's actually kind of like horoscopes. So, I was told not to use that. Even the Myers Briggs is up for questioning, you know, and now I'm talking to you, I'm like, ooh, probably shouldn't talk about that. But I know that you personally have been kind of like walking this very strict line of rules and ethics and standards. Because in all my different roles, I have reached out to you to do things and you're always like, I got to really consider this I'm going to have to pass you know, and I'm always crushed. But most recently, I asked if you would join us on our next book, which will be the third in The Become An Exceptional Leader series, and you said yes, and I am so very excited. And I'm wondering, this is before we've started to do the writing. And so, our listeners kind of hearing this before the chapter, and I'm going to actually link to this chapter in the book. But I'm wondering, do you have hesitations, Meredith about what you can share, because I do want to, I want this to be like the Brene Brown vulnerability, like we want to really know you and know, you know, the behind the scenes, but do already have to be thinking about like, okay, you know, I need to be careful about how I present,

Meredith 25:32

Not when I'm presenting information about myself, and how I run my business, which is probably what I'll end up writing about. And a lot of them, because I think I have a lot of, you know, good insight and stuff that can be shared about kind of climbing up the leadership ladder, whether or not you meant to, you know, like in some weird ways, like, I'm not someone who really thought I would be where I am, it just sort of happened. But the responsibilities that come with it, and the you know, what happens when you start to see things from a bird's eye view is really interesting. And I'm actually, you know, really transparent and honest, as a human being. The only time I have to be cautious is when it comes to D implementation stuff, like I said, like pseudo-scientific things in our field, I have to be really careful. Because people tend to want to reach out to me and say, is this EBP or not, like, put things in perspective for me, you give me a guess list and a no list. And so that's what I have to be cautious about doing is about not like serving as the endorser of things. Because there's a lot of ways in which that's highly inappropriate so I have to censor myself.

Mai Ling 26:45

I could totally see me texting you about something now. That's so true. So I'm glad that you told me that, I'm going to ask a question that is that I feel everybody should know the answer to because I think we've all been exposed over the last couple years, but definitely in the last year, it's exploded. And that's pronouns. And right, I see you nodding your head, we're on zoom. So, I get to see her. So, what is it that everybody needs to know at this point?

Meredith 27:09

About the topic of pronouns that they aren't predictable, that you can't look at someone and take guesses and make assumptions and stuff like that, and that it's important to start to, you know, teach our clients as well as teach ourselves about the fact that, you know, you can't look at someone and make assumptions or read their name and take guesses and that you've got to start to learn human beings for who they are, and give them the words that they, you know, want you to use for them. So

Mai Ling 27:40

Excellent. And I know that this is impacting our field in the education field, because we were taught, you know, generations worth of what to use and how to use it. Is there research that's coming out? Has there been research that's coming out that supports how we should be making the transition, and you know, the importance of making the transition?

Meredith 28:00

You know, I haven't seen research on so I think what SLPs want to look want, what they think they want is like research that explains to them how to teach this, like in pediatric caseloads, like how do I teach pronouns to my kids and stuff like that. But I'm not so sure that that's actually what we should be concerned about. Because there is a lot of research to suggest that mis-gendering people or mislabeling them or not using specific names or pronouns, when they've told you what's preferable to them, is highly harmful and increases rates of suicide and mental health issues and stuff like that. So that research is alone is enough that SLPs should be able to have conversations with kids on their caseload that show them the flexibility that's inherent in language and how we can be flexible with language. Because our job as SLPs is to teach kids about language in a way that allows them to recognize that it's flexible, that you know whether or not it's pronouns, or words or you know, accent or dialect, or whatever it is that there's lots of different quote, right ways, and lots of different good ways to talk. And, you know, honoring that, which is also I think, good for the mental health of the kids on our caseload as well, you know what I mean?

Mai Ling 29:20

Absolutely, absolutely. And even for adults, also, that just came up in, I had to take a course on harassment in the workplace, and that came up and talked about, you know, if you refuse to use the pronouns, that the, that your coworkers are asking you to use that that now can be seen as harassment. So, this is an outlier, you know, from our industry. So, is this something that you would include in order to support you know, the use or in the transition of the use of pronouns?

Meredith 29:47

You mean something to include within clinical practice?

Mai Ling 29:50

Yeah,

Meredith 29:51

Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. And, you know, our field has the history of being really linguistically rigid. And that's something that we have to move away from, and that we have to start incorporating into our instruction is less, less rigidity, and more joyful exploration and learning of language, you know?

Mai Ling 30:15

Absolutely and I'm thinking we lead by example. And so if we're using these pronouns correctly, and we're referring to our friends, you know, in the class and in our, in our workplace with the correct or with the requested pronouns, then they will hear that and it becomes natural and organic. And, yeah. Wonderful Well, this is great. Thank you, Meredith, this was wonderful to get time with you. And I'm sure our listener has learned something today, even if you're not a speech language pathologist. And then also, I am one of those people that I left college, you know, after my master's, and I did not read research, I love just reading synopsis. So, I really don't, you know, enjoy opening and reading. So, this is a wonderful service for someone like me, who definitely needs like the highlights and the bullet points. So, I am so very grateful to you and your staff, and for everything that you're doing. How can we stay in touch with you? And is there anything coming up that you want us to know about?

Meredith 30:31

For sure. Yeah, so my personal professional website is meredithharold.com. And so, you can always grab my email from there or get links from there with things that I've been working on. And then The Informed SLP can be found at theinformedslp.com. And the big thing on my plate for 2021 is The Informed SLP is about to launch a brand-new website, which with a bunch of features that SLPs have been asking us for. So, I'm pretty excited about that. I don't know that I can add anything else to my 2021 to do list. So, I don't know, maybe I'll have something else exciting in 2022. But for now, that's the thing.

Mai Ling 31:38

And your chapter in the Becoming Exceptional SLP Leader book, yay. Okay, well, wonderful. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today.

Meredith 31:45

Thank you.

Mai Ling 31:47

Thanks so much for joining us for this episode. And I invite you to connect with me directly at mailingchan.com. We also want you to let us know what you think about the show ideas and how we can continue to help you or referrals to a great guest through our Facebook group at Xceptional Leaders Podcast, or email us at xleaderspodcast@gmail.com.

Martyn 32:08

Yes, Mai Ling, I totally agree to that.  I know we're both really mission driven people. And for me, it's always been this big mission to have a world that's fully inclusive for all people. And in the end, that's probably why we've bonded and come together so well on this podcast, Xceptional Leaders Podcast(https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/xceptional-leaders-with-mai-ling-chan-martyn-sibley/id1435433350),, because we get to meet cool people, give them a platform to share their story, and really just make such an impact in the disability world. Love it. Also, for everyone listening please do head over to disabilityadvisors.com This is the magazine that I co-founded about 10 years ago. We've got a free mailing list there for all the latest article, news, and discounts for the shop if that's your kind of thing. And definitely do get your copy of Becoming An Exceptional Leader book. We want you to get as much information as you need and to be as successful as you can be.