“We talk about one world, one language. When you get to values, we all generate our thoughts and decision-making based on what’s a value to us in our life. And when you understand and honor that in another person, you’re able to make a connection“
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Reflect on when, in your life, that you have had a moment of realization that the person in front of you has experiences, perspectives, and insights that differ from yours but that you can see, nevertheless, have value and impact in understanding the world and its people more deeply. Perhaps that moment came to you in interaction with a child, in a meeting at work, when watching a video from a different culture (inside or outside your own nation). Was it unsettling to you in any way? Did it change your approach to experiencing and understanding the world in any way? For this week’s guest, Susan K Younger (bio), the concept of perspective and connection as she experienced it when hearing about the B.A.N.K. personality typing approach not only captured her imagination but changed her career path.
In today’s global reality, perspectives and experiences that vary widely come into closer connection than ever before. At the top level, language comes into play in shared vocabulary and all the structures and nuances of a shared idiom. The more we learn of our own and others’ languages, the more that connection and understanding can begin.
At the next level, that of our perspectives and approaches to life, we do well to have a “language,” too: one with its own vocabulary and syntax with which we express ourselves to others–and within ourselves. Then we can learn the “perspective language” of others, and recognize the humanity within.
However you choose in your life to bring language into the center to create connections and bring peace where conflict might otherwise appear–through entering into others’ languages and cultures through study and travel, through learning the language of perspectives and strengths–it is imperative in this interconnected but struggling world that you do so. It is urgent.
Please connect or reconnect with ways of knowing yourself more deeply, as Susan offers here (see her bio for more information) or as I offer through Gallup coaching, and in that way make the connections that bring mutual respect and investment in our common welfare as a global community.
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Transcript
[Introduction to the guest and the podcast]
Norah Jones: Hi, Susan, I’m delighted to be with you because one of the things that you have brought has been a sensitivity to how people use words, how people use language, and have applied that in areas that touch on the ones that I have in my background, which is education, primarily, educational publishing, but you take it in other directions as well, so how did you get drawn to this training of people’s ways of interpreting the world and conversing in a system called B.A.N.K. Help us to understand you and what you’re doing?
Susan K. Younger: I was first introduced to it just about six years ago. It was August of 2015, and I was attending a conference and you know how you go to conferences and you’re sitting there going, I know I’m going to hear something great. I didn’t come with any intention to add anything new to my bag of tricks. It was more of a chance to reconnect with friends and just be kind of poured into as a learning kind of a retreat. And the first speaker of the conference ended up presenting B.A.N.K. Code. And I found myself sitting at the back of the room as I always do, because for me, I’m taking in the whole room.
Norah Jones: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Susan K. Younger: I’m that person who instead of wanting to be in the front of the room, I’m in the back of the room. And I take in the energy of the whole room and see how they’re receiving it. And for me, if the message from the front of the room can reach the back of the room, that tells me that speaker has presence as well.
Norah Jones: Wow.
Susan K. Younger: And Cheri Tree, the creator of B.A.N.K. was talking about what she called a sales program. And every time she said sales, my brain translated that to relationship building and connecting person to person. And I found myself thinking back to meetings I’ve been in when I was in retail design, and architecture, and construction where people were talking to each other, but they both were coming from their point of view and not hearing the point of view of the other person who was much closer to them than they recognized but they were so focused on their message, that they couldn’t hear the message from the other person.
Norah Jones: Wow.
Susan K. Younger: And I thought, oh my gosh, she has figured out what I could sometimes see intuitively to connect with people. And she has put it into a package that makes it possible to share with others how to address a conversation, recognizing the values important to the other person. And in a sense, framing your words so that they connect with them without losing yourself in the conversation.
Norah Jones: That’s a powerful statement.
Susan K. Younger: I thought how powerful.
Norah Jones: Yeah.
Susan K. Younger: How powerful and pardon my language. But I thought crap, I’m taken on a third thing. I’m going to add something… I was not at a point where I was looking to change what I was doing. And yet I knew that this was something I would be working with the rest of my life. I signed up that day to become a trainer. We now have the ability, and I became a coach with the program last year. And it’s too powerful because we talk about one world, one language. And the fact that when you get to values, we all generate our thoughts and decision-making based on, what’s a value to us in our life. And when you understand and honor that in another person, you’re able to make that connection, so whether it’s a sales conversation, asking them to engage in an activity at work, asking a student to engage in learning a lesson, a child to eat a dinner they’re saying, no, I want nothing to do with, whatever it is, you are engaging with another person and asking them to join you in that conversation in life.
Norah Jones: Phenomenal, phenomenal.
Susan K. Younger: Yeah.
Norah Jones: Well-
Susan K. Younger: And I was like, I’m in.
Norah Jones: And again, to go back to that wow moment where it’s… I think a lot of people, at least I do… I’ll speak for myself, all right. And that is when one first takes a look at things like this one potentially feels a sense of manipulation. But in fact, you’re talking about being authentic to yourself, and listening, and being authentically connected to the other person.
Susan K. Younger: Absolutely. Because the way we frame this up with four personalities, we actually look at it that we all have all four personalities, so we can find that part of ourself that maybe we don’t turn to as frequently and recognize what that is for ourselves and how we can tie into that to honor the other person. And when you look at it that way, it’s completely different than a manipulation. It’s finding that side of yourself to pull that forward.
Norah Jones: And it’s interesting because you’re not coming at it from a sense of vulnerability there. I was almost expecting that to be a word. You’re actually talking about bringing in your strengths.
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: But having the confidence to stand in that.
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: And to welcome and invite the other. Susan, not everyone yet is familiar with B.A.N.K., I assume you have in your resources an invitation to link to a B.A.N.K. Code for the individuals that follow up from this podcast—for which I thank you—as well as links to your own sites.
Susan K. Younger: Right.
Norah Jones: And to LinkedIn and so forth. So excited about people exploring themselves, and you, and B.A.N.K..
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: But since many may not be familiar with it. What is B.A.N.K. Code?
Susan K. Younger: B.A.N.K. Code is a methodology that was developed to identify how people make a sales decision. And I, instead of calling it a sales decision, call it a buy-in, they buy into the idea or the activity you’re asking them to engage in. And when you do this, it takes less than 90 seconds to identify your B.A.N.K. Code. When you start studying this or using the technology, that is part of the link I have shared with you for your resources, you can crack the code of somebody else. And as we say, you can take it to the bank. Now that might be the relationship bank instead of the money bank.
But I also know in business, when you build those strong relationships, you tend to have a better business. When you engage in education with your individual students and your partners on the education team, be they the other teachers, administrators. You pull together abilities to leverage the students, wanting to know about things. I think everybody can think of that one teacher that seemed to understand them and encourage them to learn something that they would have maybe never, ever gone after.
Norah Jones: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Susan K. Younger: Or some experience that made them say, this is what I want to do with my life. I was watching a movie that’s a few years old yesterday about the backup singers. I think it’s called 20 or 50 Feet from the Stage or something [20 Feet from Stardom].
Norah Jones: Yes. Yes.
Susan K. Younger: And one of them was saying something about we do it because we love to do what we do. And that whole just being sucked into something, hearing somebody sing made them go, ah that’s what I want to do. Something pulled them to be part of it. Didn’t push them away. And they had to engage because it was so much tied to who they were.
And we really love the idea of being able to help everybody figure out what is it that makes your heart sing, makes your mind want to be, actively pursuing those things that really make you feel like life is beautiful. Not necessarily the framework that frequently is put out that’s it’s all about the money, but about what is it that really makes you have the life you want, not what somebody else wants for you, but what you want.
Norah Jones: What you want.
Susan K. Younger: Yeah.
Norah Jones: The four letters of B.A.N.K. in the concept of B.A.N.K. Code.
Susan K. Younger: Right.
Norah Jones: What do they stand for Susan?
Susan K. Younger: B is for blueprint. And when we talk about Blueprint, we can think of like my background in architecture, that very detailed drawing, that step-by-steps process. People that identify first as Blueprint are the people who will follow a rule, who are all about the tradition, about the system and support it takes to put something into a structured process. They’re the ones you never want to be late for a meeting for because that tells them you disrespected their time, and therefore you disrespected them.
Action is what A is. And Action is what we call the movers, the shakers, the moneymakers. And you can all think of that traditional A style need to be in front of the room, man. These are the ones who are showing up late and the party doesn’t start until they have arrived. They are like, oh right and now about me. Now let’s talk about what do you think about me? The conversation is always with them at the center of it.
Norah Jones: Fascinating.
Susan K. Younger: And they are powerful and fun to be with. And they bring an energy to something because they are willing to take risks. These are the ones who will shoot that cannon, and run for gold, and do all of the things that the rest of people are going now, wait, let me think about this.
Norah Jones: Uh-huh [affirmative]. Interesting.
Susan K. Younger: And then we’ve got the N for nurturing. And when you’re Nurturing, you’re all about building community. It’s that heart to heart authenticity. These are the people who if you do not look them in the eye, they pretty much feel you’ve been a little bit shifty and got something to hide. But the Nurtures frequently, somebody will say, well, they’re not very good at stuff because they are so soft, but you know what they are is great connectors. And sometimes somebody will discount them because they don’t boast about who they know. But yet when you say, gee, I was looking for an introduction to so-and-so, it’s that Nurturing person that says, oh, I know them, or they’re my next-door neighbor, but they’ve never made a boastful comment about that.
Norah Jones: Interesting.
Susan K. Younger: They’re the one with the heart of gold. And so that nurturing is kind of a warm, glowing golden color.
Norah Jones: Wow.
Susan K. Younger: And then K is for knowledge. And Knowledge, is that person who sometimes we might call a geek or we might call them a wizard because they can think of A to Z how to make something happen and they can get so lost in their head that frequently they’re the quiet person standing on this side. And people think they are either stuck up or something, but really they’re just lost in thought.
And we also use the color green with the Knowledge, because when you think of an Excel spreadsheet or the code that drops down in the movie, The Matrix, both of those are green. But we will also say sometimes they’re green with envy because that Action person is up on stage just touting this new program that’s been put together, but it was the Knowledge who created it.
Norah Jones: Interesting, very interesting.
Susan K. Younger: They didn’t necessarily feel recognized for their brilliance. And the thing about Knowledge is you don’t want to make them wrong. You want to present them with enough information because they’re the one who vets themselves, all the information and makes that decision. Nobody really sells knowledge, knowledge needs to sell itself. And so if you’ve got a student that you’re really having a hard time with, sometimes that’s a child that really needs to just be presented all the options for them to sort through and dig through on their own.
Norah Jones: That’s fascinating. Now you’ve just connected that to a student, so for example, let’s say that you have a student, okay?
Susan K. Younger: Yeah.
Norah Jones: Let’s do a little bit of this, all right. You have a student that has taken the profile and it turns out that they are in this order N-K-A-B.
Susan K. Younger: Yeah.
Norah Jones: All right, so N-K-A-B, and they’re sitting in the back and they’re not engaged and they’re just doodling or they’re dragging themselves in and not connected, so where do you start for example, with a student like that, or actually Susan, I’m going to broaden that out. We have lots of folks that listen from governmental and nonprofit organizations, ones that are related to group individuals.
Susan K. Younger: Right.
Norah Jones: That are not always included in the conversation, marginalized, invisible. And as you know, one of my subtitles, well, the subtitle for my website is “Find your voice.”
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: If we take a look at you have an individual, so we’ll broaden it from the child in the classroom, but as you wish.
Susan K. Younger: Anyway, yeah.
Norah Jones: But you’ve got this N-K-A-B personality, and you’re trying to help them to re-engage or re-enter the world and find their path. What kind of things do you say to that kind of person, for example?
Susan K. Younger: That N-K together, that Nurturing being ahead of the Knowledge means this is a person who really wants to be connected, so you might look to see, do they have somebody that is their trusted best friend? Do they have some business associates that they use as either mentor or a co-creator with? And look at how to create that team and then develop the leadership segment for them to lead some project together, so that person doesn’t feel like they have to do it alone because they really like being connected to team. You might look and see if they have some bit of knowledge that’s driving that nurturing where they’ve felt they’ve been hurt in the past that nurturing side can turn ugly when they feel they’ve been disregarded and thrown aside. And that makes them pull back and it can make them strike out with some really nasty comments sometimes, so maybe that’s where it seeming like they’ve pulled to the back of the room and aren’t engaging.
They may be shy, they may be introverted or they may be somebody who’s got a great connection outside of the environment they’re in. And you want to just ask them about where they feel most connected, find out what drives that nurturing side, and then help them put that into the knowledge they want to gain. But with A being that third code, they are driven by action when under stress, so you may find this person to be one who, when things get really stressful, man they jump to the front and they’re ready to just leap like a bull.
Norah Jones: Interesting.
Susan K. Younger: Through something because they feel it’s important to move forward, to run from that problem, to find a solution fast. And that action may be pushing that nurturing and knowledge up. They are less about the system, they’re less about following what was the tradition and more about making a new way, so they may seem like a troublemaker, but actually they’re a problem-solver.
Norah Jones: What a refreshing view. And I can imagine, Susan, connecting that kind of refreshing view is part of what caught your attention, imagination in life.
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: And that which you see in others you work with. And again, moving to the folks that tend to listen to this podcast in the educational, linguistic, cultural, and identity world. What kinds of folks have you worked with that are engaged with those clients, if you will? Have you seen breakthroughs in working with educators, organizations such as that?
Susan K. Younger: Yeah. And what I love about it is it becomes the sort of thing where people go, ah, I get this now. Now I see that student from a new point of view. Or man, that teacher that I thought was giving me trouble was really trying to motivate me, but they were doing it from a Blueprint standpoint. I’ve got a friend whose daughter is truly Action. She is not a child who can sit still to learn. Her teacher is a Blueprint trying to tell her, this is what we’re doing, we’re doing it this way, sit still do this. And the child is having trouble engaging. And the mom is like, what did I do wrong? And it’s like, nothing. However, you were dealing with two different approaches to how to get this done. And the teacher needs to understand the student, but the student also needs to understand that the teacher is working from a framework that they’ve been given and told they have to stick to, so how do you create some way for there to be movement in a classroom, without it being disruptive to the rest of the room?
Norah Jones: Same.
Susan K. Younger: How do you find those things that will engage in a different way? And there have been families where most of the family was Action and the one child didn’t match the rest of the family. They were either Blueprint, looking for a standard, let’s do it at this time, let’s do it in this way. And the rest of the family’s like, we don’t even know what time we told you we were going to show up. And there was one young man who his dad is a trainer and businessmen and he and his wife and his daughter all lead with Action, but the boy leads with Blueprint. And the boy one day said to his dad, why do you lie to me?
Norah Jones: Whoa.
Susan K. Younger: And he goes, what do you mean?
He says, well, you say, we’re going to leave for soccer at 4, but at 4:20, the rest of you aren’t ready to go. And the dad realized his son has everything prepped the day before, is ready to go. And he became aware that he, his wife, and his daughter had to learn to respect that child’s need to be ready to go at 4.
Norah Jones: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Susan K. Younger: And once they started doing some things to correct their behavior, instead of correcting the son. The son’s grades came up, his engagement with his family came up and the young man came to his dad at like seven or eight and said, “Dad, I love you,” for the first time.
Norah Jones: Oh my goodness.
Susan K. Younger: Because he felt he’d been seen and respected. This kid now at twelve has created his own business and stepped into his assets of creativity because he felt seen and such. Other families have said, it’s kept somebody from being a Knowledge that was with a family that was very high in Action. All of a sudden recognize, hey, I’m the smart one in the crowd. Wait a minute. I’m not the dumb one, I’m the smart one. That sets me apart in a different way. And when the family recognized it, they then had a conversation and realized this kid was close to suicidal, but just being recognized for his own knowledge, all of a sudden gave him a level of respect that changed that situation.
Norah Jones: Phenomenal, Susan. And that’s a powerful message that the child was, again, this is, you’re talking about family situations.
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: And you’re talking about a suicidal, even.
Susan K. Younger: Yeah.
Norah Jones: Expectations because people felt so lost.
Susan K. Younger: Lost.
Norah Jones: You’ve worked with dropout prevention as well, right? Or recovery.
Susan K. Younger: Yeah.
Norah Jones: Can you tell us about that? Because that’s powerful to be able to understand. You can tap into things that can heal and include people.
Susan K. Younger: And some of these kids drop out, not because of their lack of desire for education, but something in their family life or something in their environment isn’t supporting them to be able to get there. But when you give them an opportunity to learn with the flexibility to meet a schedule that allows them to still work, because maybe they had a child or maybe somebody in the family was sick and they had to go to work so that it would help support the rest of the family. Some of these it’s the external things that are influencing the student to be not able to engage in a classroom environment. And when you give them opportunities to engage, they can change some of those things and go after what they hadn’t been able to do in a regular structured environment.
Norah Jones: Powerful. Now, Susan, once again, we’re just talking about, notice how I put that, by the way.
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: A person that’s doing podcasts on language and culture.
Susan K. Younger: Exactly.
Norah Jones: We’re just talking about words.
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: And we’re only talking about four words. I mean, I’m a Gallup Certified coach.
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: We have 34 words, I’m looking at my top five now, which by the way, have to do a lot with nurturing and meaning. These words have power. And as a coach, I work with these 34 words and help to illustrate what they mean.
Susan K. Younger: Yeah.
Norah Jones: These are four words. What are some of the strengths that you have found of working with four words?
Susan K. Younger: Well, we put 12 words behind each of these four words, so we have 12 words that identify the values of each of the four primary codes. And I love that you brought up the Gallup because I have done the Gallup survey of strengths and I’m a Learner Strategic; thinking is my primary one. But when you look at my code, my third one is Knowledge.
But when you understand that, the reason I want to learn is to serve the community to create exciting things. When you put the Maximizer, and Arranger, and Positivity, and Strategic behind learning, then the nurturing and action, my wanting to do things to create a fun environment for us to live in—notice “fun,” I put in there, which is an action word.
Norah Jones: Ah, okay. All right. I like “fun” as an action word.
Susan K. Younger: Yes. I like to have that community around me, but one of my friends said, geez, when you throw a party, you’re hiding in the kitchen and the rest of us are in the living room talking. And I’m like, yes, but I’d love to be able to listen to all that laughter. And the stories I hear coming out of it while I’m having the fun of cooking a meal that… Living alone I’d rather cook for others than cook for myself. And so you start to do those things, but also I’m not that… Blueprint being my last, I’m not that one who’s everything is prepared before everyone arrives.
Norah Jones: But if you’re getting a lot of value out of being in the kitchen and listening from afar, you’re having, if you’ll pardon the expression here, your cake and eat it too.
Susan K. Younger: Exactly, so it’s serving my Nurture, Action, Knowledge, Blueprint in a way that if I force myself to try and do everything early, I would be unhappy.
Norah Jones: That’s phenomenal.
Susan K. Younger: And as long as no one is feeling stressed, they come to relax, and enjoy, and be served.
Norah Jones: Susan, you’ve spoken then here about these four anchor words which are-
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: It’s easy to memorize actually, I guess it’s the one reason why as Gallup coaches we use only five for the top five, right?
Susan K. Younger: Right, right.
Norah Jones: When you’re sitting down to train your folks, when you yourself are doing it, you’ve got a lot of words that are supporting that one word. And have you ever seen a person that didn’t understand or is this something that is so based on, well, the one language concept of the message of the B.A.N.K. Code, the language of did I understand correctly of value?
Susan K. Younger: Yeah.
Norah Jones: Does this tap on everyone that you’ve seen so far? Have you had any of them that didn’t understand this language that you’re trying to share?
Susan K. Younger: What I find is they look at it and think it’s so simple that it must be built upon something else.
Norah Jones: Ah.
Susan K. Younger: And yet at the same time, we jokingly say you can’t unlearn it. That once you understand the four words, Blueprint, Action, Nurturing, and Knowledge, and you get the fundamentals behind those four to know what those values are and start to see what occupations, and likes, and dislikes those four have, you can’t unlearn it. I can sit and watch a silly movie or even a commercial and find myself coding the activities of somebody in the movie. Oh, they just turn to the stress of their nurturing or their action, they’ve been hurt in the past, things didn’t happen, they don’t have a process, whatever it is, I start seeing it through the lens of B.A.N.K..
Norah Jones: Interesting, interesting.
Susan K. Younger: And it’s simplicity that makes it so fabulous. Einstein said anyone can complicate things, it takes a genius to simplify.
Norah Jones: This is true, is it not.
Susan K. Younger: And I love that statement. And what’s been fun about this is you start looking at it and you think, okay, I got it. And then you see something else. And you’re like, wait a minute. I just see a new twist because the more I see it, the more I learn. And so, that’s where when you talk about Learner being my first in the Gallup, there’s always something to learn here.
Norah Jones: Yeah.
Susan K. Younger: There’s always something to see and expand upon. And I love that kind of support in this community. What has come forth for me is that getting to help others to find themselves and then recognize that they’ve been living with somebody as a family member or husband, wife, or life partner for a very long time. And all of a sudden you tell them something about the B.A.N.K. codes and they go, oh, crap. I just recognize something I’ve been doing, and that always irritates them. Yeah. You just explained what’s been going on here for 20 years.
Norah Jones: Isn’t that something?
Susan K. Younger: Yeah.
Norah Jones: It’s like the insights in that particular case of say the love languages had for so many people.
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: That read about the… bringing to the forefront that which has been hidden because it’s part of just quote-unquote, who we are.
Susan K. Younger: Who we are and how we show up. And it shows up in our actions and how we pull in at times. That becoming silent because something made us stop and think. Or becoming loud because something triggered an angry memory that just made us feel small.
Norah Jones: And uncovering that in a way, part of the aspect of using words that have been already established as you are doing, as Gallup has done, as B.A.N.K. Code does here. And another color-coded way, by the way, is the opportunity to depersonalize those words for a few moments, give people a chance to kind of step into the corner of their fight ring.
Susan K. Younger: Yeah. Well, and bring forth the emotional intelligence. That’s why, when we’re doing a coaching program, we start with the personality piece. And then we talk about the sales piece, which is that buy into a decision. But then the third piece we bring into it is emotional intelligence, empathy, that ability to understand ourselves and then understand and create influence for others to be able to motivate, but to also in a social norm, understand what the requirements are of where you speak up, where you don’t speak up. How you speak up differently for one situation than you would for another, and to be respectful.
When you start to put that emotional intelligence on top of the personality intelligence, you’re able to create that deeper understanding and behave in a way that where you might have exploded before you start to go, wait a minute, they are doing the best they can. How can I help them to get past what’s irritating them so that we can talk about this in a way that is still surfacing the very uncomfortable things to talk about, but it allows us to do it without turning it into a shouting match or a dishonoring the other person, when you’ve got questions.
Norah Jones: They are doing the best they can. Isn’t that always a powerful concept to bring to our thoughts, conversations, and actions with others. Crack the B.A.N.K. Code report that you are kindly providing for my listeners to be able to access.
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: That’s a hefty report. Can you tell them what it is that they will find and what they might gain from it, just by taking advantage of your kind offer and what other pathways then come from it, potentially?
Susan K. Younger: When they crack their code through the link [www.crackmycode.com/getresults], which has got that access code behind it of GETRESULTS, that will let me know that they’ve cracked their code, so I would be able to, even if they’ve got questions afterwards, follow up with them. They would get an email that says, here’s the link to your personal profile, that report is 22 plus or minus pages. Starts out by saying, here’s what the four codes are, Blueprint, Action, Nurture, and Knowledge. And based on the order of yours, this is what drives you first towards a decision. And this is how you take that second code and leverage it in. How you take that third code and bring it in and why the fourth code either isn’t as important to you, but still is part of you.
And when you start to see it from that, how the four codes play together, you start to go, oh, I now see myself, how can I now do this with others? And that’s why with our subscription, you could crack unlimited codes all month long, so if I ran into a million people and ask them all to crack their codes, they’d all get their report.
Norah Jones: Brilliant.
Susan K. Younger: At the same time, it sends me a report that says, this is the best way to engage with this person. I get a second report that says, here’s the things you need to know to respect them, here’s some trip wires. And then we’ve now created the AI link for LinkedIn that in a one button push, it tells me what somebody’s code is so that if I’m introduced to somebody on LinkedIn, I can find out how to start a conversation with them based on that profile, so that I don’t start by going down a path that’s going to irritate them to begin with.
Norah Jones: How come you were late to this conversation?!
Susan K. Younger: Yeah.
Norah Jones: Don’t ever start that with me and I won’t start it with you. We’re both be at the end.
Susan K. Younger: Yeah, and then it’s funny too because if somebody is Blueprint and you show up ahead of them, they’ll typically apologize to you for being late, and they may still be 15 minutes early to the appointment, because they just are not used to having anybody else and beat them to an appointment.
Norah Jones: Yeah, yeah.
Susan K. Younger: And you start to recognize just how serious some of those things that you don’t think count for you are incredibly important for somebody else and how you need to respect it in a way you maybe haven’t in the past.
Norah Jones: Susan, you have just in other words, spoken about the interculturality that has been such an important growth in world language education here in these last few years, a decade or so with understanding sometimes for the first time for young people, that they themselves have a culture while they’re learning about others. And that to withhold the judgments because they too come from a perspective.
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: And here it is in this very powerful form as well. Thank you for offering this opportunity to my listeners.
Susan K. Younger: And here’s the other thing, Norah. The cards online when they go to that link are in 30 languages, so we already have reached out to more a hundred countries across the world. And those values pretty much track to the various cultures, so you might find a culture that is more Blueprint than another. You might find a country that tends to be more action-driven than another. And when you start to see that and kind of identify some of those factors that culturally drive us to be connected or to look at somebody as different than us, because it isn’t our primary code. You start to understand, you have to dig deeper into your understanding of them to really connect with their values. We also have the icons on the card, so if there is one of 30 languages that isn’t there, somebody can look at the pictures to do it, or kids who don’t speak a lot of words yet.
Norah Jones: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Susan K. Younger: We’ve coded kids down to like 3, 4 years old.
Norah Jones: Well, and it invites inclusion of those whose literacy may be lower level as an adult even.
Susan K. Younger: Yep. Right.
Norah Jones: But it allows them to participate in what could be a truly well emotionally lifesaving opportunity.
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: If they have felt overwhelmed in their cultural or linguistic circumstances.
Susan K. Younger: Yes.
Norah Jones: That’s phenomenal. Well, Susan, I honestly we could chat for the rest of the day. I would learn so much and we would all sit down and be mesmerized by you and do our strategies together. But to pull this particular podcast together, what’s the very last thing that you want to make sure that you don’t leave today without letting my listeners know?
Susan K. Younger: That every one you meet is special and unique in their own way. And sometimes it’s very hard for us to see it until we start to look at what is unique in ourselves and unravel it. And then look at where we can find the similarities in them to start knitting together, a relationship.
Norah Jones: Powerful.
Susan K. Younger: I truly think that when we sit down with somebody in a calm way and start a conversation, we frequently find we have way more in common than we ever thought we did with somebody that is completely different than us. When you look at the values of life and what supports you in living, there’s something you can connect on with everyone and not saying they’re going to be your best friend, but it certainly makes it more powerful to be able to find out who they are and what makes them tick and how you can all work together to make the world a better place.
Norah Jones: Beautifully said. One world, one language.
Susan K. Younger: One language.
Norah Jones: One humanity, we’re all on the same path. Thank you very much, Susan, for sharing these insights. You’re obvious strengths of compassion, and nurturing, and skill. Thanks for sharing that today with us.
Susan K. Younger: Norah, thank you. I just always treasure my time with you because you are such an incredible woman.
Norah Jones: Thank you.
Susan K. Younger: Thank you.
Norah Jones: Thank you for that and take care. And we look forward to our ongoing conversations.
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