Ep. 356: David Allen and Justin Hale

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: Getting Things Done
Episode: Ep. 356: David Allen and Justin Hale
Date: April 1, 2026
Host: David Allen (GTD®)
Guest: Justin Hale (Crucial Learning)
Theme:
This episode dives into Justin Hale’s journey from leadership and communication skills training at Crucial Learning (formerly VitalSmarts) to adopting and teaching the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. David Allen and Justin discuss the overlap between crucial behavioral skills and productivity habits, the experience of learning and designing GTD training, and the importance of deliberate practice for true behavioral change.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Justin Hale’s Background and the "Crucial Learning" Evolution

• Crucial Learning's name change journey: From Praxis → VitalSmarts → Crucial Learning.
• The confusion over the older names (vital smarts mistaken for vitamins/pharmacy) and the clarity with the new brand.
• Justin’s focus: Helping people develop a handful of “life-changing” skills that matter both professionally and personally.
• His entry into this field: Inspired in college by Edward Deci’s book on motivation (“Why We Do What We Do”).

“I want to take this, this knowledge, this research, this science around why people do what they do and help them be better, whatever that means.”
— Justin Hale, 03:37

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2. VitalSmarts/Crucial Learning’s Training Portfolio

• Books and courses: Crucial Conversations (handling high-stakes dialogues), Crucial Accountability (formerly Crucial Confrontations), Influencer.
• Initial work mainly focused on Crucial Conversations before expanding to Getting Things Done through partnership with David Allen.
• The importance of skills that are applicable in all aspects of life.

"Our big mission is, hey, we're going to take not just any skills, we want to take the small handful of skills that are legitimately life changing, meaning they'll impact you at work, they'll impact you at home.”
— Justin Hale, 06:22

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3. Behavioral Skills: Learning vs. Innate Knowledge

• Both GTD and crucial conversations require learning behaviors most people aren’t born knowing.
• People often avoid crucial conversations (and productivity habits) not because they don’t see their importance, but because they don’t know how.

“When it matters most, we're often at our worst. I think that's true for both crucial conversations and GTD.”
— Justin Hale, 08:41

“To your point of the let's, let's reduce this down to the zeros and ones of what are the behaviors that really make a big difference that you can actually learn but you're not born doing and that you actually have to train yourself to do.”
— David Allen, 08:12

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4. Impact Stories and Motivation

• Deep sense of reward from hearing how these skills transform lives: “this saved my marriage,” “this accelerated my career.”
• Both trainers emphasize the personally fulfilling aspect: getting real-life benefits from what they teach.

“You get emails from people saying this saved my marriage, you get emails from people saying this accelerated my career, saved our team, our company, our hospital. You just say, wow, this is the best kind of work I could be doing.”
— Justin Hale, 09:21

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5. The Problem of Self-Awareness in Productivity

• Many people overestimate their productivity habits, assuming their outcomes correspond with their current practices.
• Lack of feedback on productivity, unlike interpersonal skills where feedback is more direct.
• Burnout, overwhelm, and self-deception highlighted as common issues.

“You don't rise to the level of your productivity aspirations, you tend to fall to the level of your productivity habits.”
— Justin Hale, 13:54

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6. Challenges in Organizational Training & Internal Trainers

• GTD’s impact on organizations: The struggle to build a cadre of in-house trainers, compared to Crucial Learning’s broad reach.
• The challenge of creating training so that “trainer-independence” is possible—enabling a reasonably new practitioner to teach even newer learners, inspired by the belt ranks in martial arts.

“We want to create a model that you could take a nurse practitioner or a nurse manager...and actually help someone else who's even newer to it be able to feel the confidence to be able to try these things out.”
— Justin Hale, 22:21

“The yellow belt could say, well, I don't know how to do that one yet, but I know how to do this one. Let you and me work this together. And so building a model that maps to that I thought was just elegant in terms of how you guys have done it.”
— David Allen, 23:28

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7. The Value—and Discomfort—of Deliberate Practice

• The necessity for practice, feedback, and repetition in acquiring both crucial conversation and GTD skills.
• Learners prefer to be inspired or watch, but transformation only comes with direct, sometimes uncomfortable, practice.
• Including “do it now” segments in training is key for real learning.

“If you're doing a type of practice that you really hate, you're probably doing the exact kind of practice you need.”
— Justin Hale, 25:46

"It's like trying to learn to swim by reading a book."
— David Allen, 24:33

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On the personal side:
  "If you talk about stress free, stress free productivity, that's always something that's on my mind."
  — Justin Hale, 01:38

• On learning new behaviors:
  "Most people would say I'm averse to confrontation. I don't like tough conversations. And it's not because they don't realize how important they are. It's because they have no clue what to say. They have no idea what to do. And so they would rather just go the easy road and not say anything."
  — Justin Hale, 10:07

• On the GTD learning journey:
  "We are never going to be in the position we are in right now, which is... We are new to this. We are looking at this through the lens of someone who's just being exposed to it. And our experience right now is what our learners will experience."
  — Justin Hale, 18:23

• On context-based action lists:
  “[Ana Maria] teaches this idea... First time was really being trained on this idea of, hey, maybe you should consider organizing your next actions according to context... I thought, wow, that's pretty scary.”
  — Justin Hale, 19:22

• On the curse of knowledge:
  "In six months, we will be experiencing what we like to call the curse of knowledge. We will know too much that we'll never be able to be in the position we're in right now."
  — Justin Hale, 18:07

• On practice and feedback:
  “Practice is one of those things that's so essential to behavior change and deliberate practice. The right kind of practice, where you're getting feedback from a coach, you're trying it again... is something that people are very reticent to do, it's uncomfortable, which, by the way, means it probably works.”
  — Justin Hale, 25:24

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Key Timestamps

• 00:09 – Justin Hale’s introduction and background; Crucial Learning’s evolution.
• 03:00–04:23 – Motivation for entering the field; overview of Crucial’s training portfolio.
• 06:59 – Discovering GTD and integration with Crucial Learning’s mission.
• 08:01–09:21 – Discussion on learned behaviors in GTD and crucial conversations.
• 11:47 – Emotional impact of Crucial Conversations vs. the subtler realization needed for GTD.
• 13:54 – “You don’t rise to the level of your productivity aspirations, you fall to your habits.”
• 16:20 – Partnership between David Allen Co. and Crucial Learning, and IP development.
• 18:00–19:30 – Designing Crucial Learning’s GTD course from a learner’s perspective.
• 21:21–23:28 – Creating trainer-independent, scalable models; martial arts belt analogy.
• 24:33–27:18 – The role of practice, feedback, and direct experience in learning GTD and communication skills.
• 27:25–27:33 – Episode wrap-up.

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Summary

This engaging, practical episode explores the overlap between communication, leadership, and productivity skills, emphasizing that crucial behavioral habits must be learned, practiced, and internalized. Both Justin Hale and David Allen reflect on the challenge and reward of teaching these skills, the necessity of habitual practice (even when uncomfortable), and how the Crucial Learning and GTD models are evolving to be more accessible and scalable. If you’re interested in how productivity and communication training can truly change lives, this episode is rich with insights and anecdotes for trainers, practitioners, and learners alike.

Transcript

[Justin Hale]

Foreign.

[David Allen]

Hi everybody. I'm delighted to be here with somebody that I could. Justin, I think I probably call you an old friend by now. Time. Time flies, doesn't it? You know, in terms of have we known each other? So here's Justin Hale. Justin is, I know he's probably the key spokesperson trainer for the GTD process with our wonderful client, our wonderful licensee partner in the U.S. now, crucial learning, they've rebranded themselves out of VitalSmarts into another thing. And Justin, you might sort of inform us about maybe that shift and, you know, and how that happened. Anyway, Justin is great and so he and I have had some, several conversations and of course I've been a resource for Crucial Learning, you know, for this addition to their intellectual property portfolio of getting things done. But I'll stop here and say, okay, Justin, what would you like people in the network that might be listening to this?

[Justin Hale]

Okay, you left it very open. So I'm excited. I could go a lot of different directions here. But no, I'm grateful to get a chance to talk again for people who don't know who I am. I mean, in essence I'll say I'm a pretty normal person with lots going on. So just to start with the most important part of my life, my wife Christine and I live in Utah Here in the US we have four children from 8 years old down to 3, all four of them right inside that area. So if you talk about stress free, stress free productivity, that's always something that's on my mind. And so no, but for me, I've spent about the last 14 years at what was VitalSmarts when I joined it, what is now Crucial Learning. And it's always funny because if you look at the evolution of an organization's name, Vital Smarts used to be called Praxis. Grateful they moved away from that name. A little too academic for me. And now onto Crucial, Crucial Learning, which makes a lot of sense. And so we were excited about that rebrand last year.

[David Allen]

Didn't they think Vital Smarts was, was a pharmacy, was a drug or something?

[Justin Hale]

Yeah, I'd have to clarify that with most people at parties and get togethers with Vital Smart. Oh, what do you do? You okay, you vitamins, supplements? No, no, no, we do, we do leadership training, corporate training. Oh, really? You know, and so, yeah, it's definitely a learning company. Makes a lot more sense. And so, uh, I spent personally, you know, even just for me, going back a long time when I was in college, trying to figure out what I wanted my major to be. What I wanted to study, what did I want to spend my life's work doing? I was walking around the university bookstore and just flipping through the books and I saw this book called why we do what we do. And it was this researcher, Edward Deci. And I just, I mean, I just ate this book up. I highlighted. It was really just about a bunch of research that he had done around motivation, what drives human behavior. I became so fascinated with why people do what they do and it led me to become interested in our industry, led me to Vital Smarts. I read some of their work, especially around influence, and I thought, I love this. This is what I want to spend my life doing. I want to take this, this knowledge, this research, this science around why people do what they do and help them be better, whatever that means. And I didn't really know what that meant. And so I started working at Vital smarts about 14 years ago and then spent quite a bit of time on the road training and speaking and teaching and doing certification courses. And over the last, I'd say six or seven years, been the primary training designer at Crucial Learning. And so that's where.

[David Allen]

And by the way, a little sidebar on that. Tell people what you say. At least the previous to GTD and Charles's work, the portfolio, how would you describe that portfolio that you were training about and et cetera?

[Justin Hale]

Yeah, so when I came to Vital Smarts, the founders had written a handful of New York Times bestselling books and had some training programs to go with those. So the most popular would be Crucial Conversations. People know about. Right. How to talk about high stakes issues. They had another course at the time was called Crucial Confrontation. So you talk about having to re. Explain the name of the company, say Crucial Confrontations. Wow, I hate confrontation. No, no, no, that's not what it's about. That's not what it's about. Thankfully, we rebranded that course to Crucial Accountability. Along the road, trying to talk about how to hold others accountable, performance management. And then when I first started, we developed a training course called Influencer. So at the time that was the portfolio of the courses. And primarily I was spending time training and teaching and speaking on Crucial conversations. And so that was, that was most of my time. Most of my, my energy was around those content sets. And then that's what led us to working with you, which is interesting because you spend all this time training like the same three courses over and over and over again. And so when they said, hey, we're going to partner with David Allen and we're Going to do this getting things done thing. I thought, something new. This is so cool. Something different. And it was interesting because it was really. I never thought of myself as someone who, quote, unquote, loved productivity or even even thought about that word very often. I just had a way of working, I had a way of living that had gotten to me where I was. And I found it helpful. I found it to be something that worked for my style. But in some ways I was. I didn't know what I didn't know. And so it was interesting when we, when our CEO Andy said, we're going to do this partnership before we even met with you. I went and got the book. I bought it online. I bought an old version too. I wanted the orig. I wanted, I wanted you in the old school, David. I wanted the first. And so I bought that first book and I read it before I was.

[David Allen]

I was already 55 or 60 years old, by the way, when the first book was written. So, yeah, it was the old David Allen.

[Justin Hale]

The makeup work they did on that front cover is excellent. So. So it was great. So we. I read that and I just, I just ate it up, every last bit of it. And I just was so engrossed in it. Because for me, I mean, for us as an organization, our big mission is, hey, we're going to take not just any skills, we want to take the small handful of skills that are legitimately life changing, meaning they'll impact you at work, they'll impact you at home. So they're a holistic skill set. We want to find those small handful of skills and we want to go around the world and give people these skills. But that also means you have to

[David Allen]

have the ability to be able to

[Justin Hale]

create learning experiences that actually help people acquire the skills. And so when I was reading GTD for the first time, even before going through the David Allen Company version of the training, I was reading it with this mindset of, oh, I mean, this is very skill based, right? I mean, this is very down to the core of, like, behaviorally, what do I do here and there and in this moment. So I just love that. But I also thought I can immediately feel the impact of how this is going to benefit me in all areas of my life. And so it really spoke to my, like, vital, smart soul in the moment of saying this just feels like a member of the family in terms of our overall mission.

[David Allen]

I have to sort of insert here too. The people who've experienced crucial conversations have said something like, I mean, one of the best Descriptions of it is our most important conversations. We are the most negligent at knowing how to do well.

[Justin Hale]

That's right, that's right. Yes, we like to say, and I

[David Allen]

think that's such a great description of, you know, crucial conversations. And you know, to your point of the let's, let's reduce this down to the zeros and ones of what are the behaviors that really make a big difference that you can actually learn but you're not born doing and that you actually have to train yourself to do. And so that was intriguing to me to see the parallels between, you know, crucial conversations and gtd because gtd, you're not born doing or knowing as to your point, it's like, oh, oh my God. And yet once you learned it, you went, oh, of course, you probably went,

[Justin Hale]

how did I not figure this out Right, Exactly. Yeah, that's so true. We like to say when it matters most, we're often at our worst. I think that's true for both crucial conversations and gtd. And so it really is one of those moments where. But it's also so rewarding because you look at it and one of the reasons why I have stayed doing this work for so long and specifically with crucial learning, is how rewarding it is. So going out and you've experienced this, I'm sure thousands of times I go out and I would teach a crucial conversations class and I'd have somebody come up to me at a break and say, I've needed this for decades to be able to have this conversation with my spouse, or I've needed this for six months because my 16 year old daughter and I don't talk, or I've needed this for three years, I'm stuck in my career, I have no idea how to speak up to my boss and share my opinion so I can be heard. So when you get those kinds of those messages, you get emails from people saying this saved my marriage, you get emails from people saying this accelerated my career, saved our team, our company, our hospital. You just say, wow, this is the best kind of work I could be doing. And so for me, that's really been my sustaining energy around all of this work. And of course it starts with myself. I think even if I was doing work that was fulfilling other people, but I personally wasn't getting the benefit of my own life. I don't know how fulfilled, fulfilling it would be, I would enjoy it. But it's the fact that it fills me so much. I mean, when I first was learning crucial conversations, some of these others Coming right out of university, I didn't, I didn't have the skill set to be able to deal with tough issues. I probably was just. I would just shut down, right? I just wouldn't say anything. Something goes wrong, you just got to sit there and hope it goes away. Most people would say I'm averse to confrontation. I don't, I don't like tough conversations. And it's not because they don't realize how important they are. It's because they have no clue what to say. They have no idea what to do. And so they would rather just go the easy road and not say anything. And I think that that's true to what I, What I noticed with my own career, with my own productivity journey, my own journey around managing my life's work was, you know, I, I would do what worked. And when things got tough, when you'd like to say, when the waves got big, I'm not sure I knew what to do outside of what I just naturally was inclined to do.

[David Allen]

Interesting though. You know, as you describe that, though you're, you're educating me a little bit. I think the lack of ability to handle a crucial conversation is a much more dramatic and immediate aha for people than the aha's they might get about gtd. Because, as you probably know, the people most attracted to what you and I are doing relative to GTD are the people who most people would say need it the least. They already know the value of organization. They already know the value of outcome and maybe action thinking or at least a little bit. But they have, they've run out of space. But I don't think it's quite as dramatic an emotional appeal. What do you think?

[Justin Hale]

Yeah, I agree. At least, at least at first, right? So to your point, when you, when you talk to people, I mean, it's easy to look at, whether it's the news, whether it's politics, whether. Wherever you live in the world, when you talk about a crucial conversation, people immediately go, that's what our world needs. We can't talk, we can't discuss things. So it does bring up. And to your point, people think about, just this morning with my family, just this morning with my boss, disagreement, different opinions. I mean, that is emotionally charged for people. And they think about how tough it is to have those conversations. So I agree with you and I think that it's interesting too, because a lot of people I work with, it's funny because they will, when I work with them, with gtd, I'll say things like, you know, here are some of the behaviors that we find that when you do consistently, you get these incredibly impactful outcomes. And a lot of people say, yeah, I do that. And yet I'll say, wait a second, wait a second, tell me about your daily experience. And they'll say, oh, I'm overwhelmed and I'm burnt out. That's a big word right now. I'm burnt out. I just have so much, I just can't focus. I'm just distracted. I'm letting people down. And I said, wait a second. You're telling me you do these behaviors and yet you're experiencing these outcomes? I'm not so sure you're as self aware. I think that I get the impression that throughout our lives more people have given us feedback about our poor interpersonal skills at times than they have given us feedback about our poor productivity skills. I think about starts back in college when you do teamwork and they have a team project and there's always those one or two people that don't pull their weight and nobody says anything. We all say, oh, now we know who those two people are. The rest of us are just going to have to do it all. And we just accept that. Okay, sort of accept that. And I think that that carries over into our organizations. And from a productivity standpoint, people aren't as self aware as they should be. They assume that where they got comes from what they did. And often that's not the case. And so, and so I think that it's that moment of self awareness that people lack often. And then when you start to actually dig in like you and I do with people and they start to realize there is a direct and disproportionate connection between my poor results, my poor outcomes, my poor emotions and my own poor habits. You know, I was the other day, I was, I love this, this quote we were posting online on one productive minute. This idea that you don't, you don't rise to the level of your productivity aspirations, you tend to fall to the level of your productivity habits. Right. Like it. And so this idea of wherever your behaviors are really determines your success. And I think a lot of people aren't as aware as they should be of their own habits.

[David Allen]

Well, I guess probably because anybody who's going to give them the feedback about that has got to be better at it than them. And how many of those people have can you count on one hand, you know?

[Justin Hale]

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, that's right.

[David Allen]

And you know, for a boss to hold Somebody accountable to their project list means they got to have one.

[Justin Hale]

Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

[David Allen]

So, you know, it's kind of the blind leading the blind out there, I think, relative to gtd. Interesting perspective on that too, but interesting too, because. Hope you don't mind me sharing this. I mean, one of the reasons I think Andy and you guys were interested in developing some new IP was you got some funding from private equity that said interested in growth. And you already had your IP pretty much matured and formulated out there. Wonderful, by the way, in terms of your instructional design, your technology base and so forth that you're using for that and how well you market it too. But then, you know, it was delightful to then wind up, you know, just almost serendipitously through our conversation with Andy about, well, what are we missing about how to build internal trainers inside of organizations? And, you know, we had 120, you know, vitalsmarts had 10,000. I think we're missing something. What are we missing here? And so, you know, that was a wonderful and very creative, I guess, maybe 12, 18 months. I don't know how it spent us, how long it spent us to create the relationship, but I guess we were the first sort of IP that then vital sports and then crucial learning took on. But lovely that it mapped to the DNA, as you stated earlier, about just these crucial behaviors.

[Justin Hale]

Yeah.

[David Allen]

That makes such a difference for people that they can learn and that they're not born, you know, doing so.

[Justin Hale]

Yeah, it was, it was a very easy, it was a very easy transition too, for us, because like I said, when you start to read the book, you start to get a feeling for it. You say, oh, this, this is, this is highly impactful, personal, professional. It does all these things. It's behavioral. There's a research that supports it, which is a big thing for us, a big qualification. It can't just be ideas that someone thought of and have no support in terms of the research. Now you did come up with these ideas many years ago, but now the research is clearly saying, yep, that's been the case all along in terms of how the brain works and, and, and, and memory and stress and all these things. But what I find interesting, that was really fun for me. One of, one of my, one of the books I really, really love in our space is a book called Rookie Smarts. And it's this woman, Liz Wiseman. She lives in the Bay Area. She wrote a book later on called Multipliers as well. But her book Rookie Smarts is all about this idea of her argument really is to say, when you're hiring, really, you're trying to hire someone for a great position, the tendency is to hire someone who's maybe overqualified because they'll be so skilled, they'll be successful. And she actually argues the opposite. She said, you should hire people that are slightly under qualified. But she says what you really want to hire for is someone who thirsts to know what they don't know. Right. There's power in this pursuit of knowledge. And the sometimes the best people to have are the people who are trying to figure it out, people who want to know, who want to learn. So I bring that up to say I was helping design the crucial learning version of getting things done training. While I was learning getting things done for the first time as an individual, as a participant, a lot of people might say, well, that seems odd. You should be an expert of many years. You should be a practitioner of many years.

[David Allen]

And.

[Justin Hale]

And I remember saying to my team, and we sat around, we went through the David Allen company version. We were first being introduced to the content, and we all sat down and just talked for a day. What are your impressions? What are your thoughts? Where are some of the nuggets, those kinds of things? And I looked at everybody and I said, hey, we are never going to be in the position we are in right now, which is in six months. We will be experiencing what we like to call the curse of knowledge. We will know too much that we'll never be able to be in the position we're in right now, which is we are sitting in the position of every learner we are going to sell to and teach to in the future. We are new to this. We are looking at this through the lens of someone who's just being exposed to it. And our experience right now is what our learners will experience. So we better take all the value we can from being new to this in this moment. So I think that was really actually helpful for us to not fully understand it because we didn't have bias.

[David Allen]

Totally, totally, totally elegant and cool. Good for you.

[Justin Hale]

Yeah, it was so fun. I was so fun in that way. And it was also the beauty of it. I mean, of course that's painful, but that's also the beauty of it. I would call you and email you. I mean, you were there with us, I think, for a week, and I would come to you and ask questions you thought were probably so simplistic, but for me were the challenges that now I see new learners, new, new people introduced GTD are experiencing Just like I did. And now of course I have the curse of knowledge because sit here and say, how could you not understand that? I mean, it's so simple. It's just boom. And it works. And I remember looking at you asking things, whether it's about projects or whether it's about, you know, next actions in a day to day format, or how things interact with each other or tools questions that I had. And I asked these questions over and over and over again. Things that were difficult for me at first to kind of grasp or get onto. I remember having this really funny conversation. We're in the middle of the training and our good friend Ana Maria, who's who's been, you know, a master trainer for you for many years and just an incredible practitioner and just a great friend and she was training us. And this was the first time I'd been exposed. I mean, I read in the book, but the training really hit it home. First time was really being exposed and being trained on this idea of, hey, maybe you should consider organizing your next actions according to context. So she teaches this idea. And my mind goes, whoa. Like, I never really thought of that. I had this to do list. Every Monday morning I would print off this Word document and just said at the top to do list in red. And it was just, that was it. And I printed off every Monday and I carried it around with me to every meeting and I would add things to it. And then on Friday I would update the Word document and then I would print it off again when I came back to work on my morning. And I trusted this thing and definitely worked, worked pretty, pretty well for me for the time. But I said to her, she shared this idea and I thought, wow, that's pretty interesting. But I also thought, wow, that's pretty scary. And I was, I was, because I had this way of approaching things. And I looked at her in the middle of the course and I said, Anna Maria, I'm going to be honest with you right now. I just want to be transparent. I believe you that this will help me be better and more efficient, have what I need when I need it, but I'm not yet sure how that's going to work for me. And she was great about that. I just was sharing my fear of like, I get it and I've never thought about it, but I'm scared, I'm fearful, I'm worried, I want to go here, but I just feel so comfortable where I am. And you're telling me if I try some of these things, I'm Going to go here. And that fear that, that, that moment of apprehension, that moment of excitement of something new, of can I try this out?

[David Allen]

What if it works? Work?

[Justin Hale]

What could happen? What could that mean for my life? All of that I tried to bottle up as I thought about how do we design a course that welcomes that, that transparency, welcomes that vulnerability and also then guides people along in an effective way, the way Ana Maria did. But to your point earlier about being able to help someone who's maybe not an Anna Maria or an experienced master trainer, I wanted then to be able to say, how do I design a version of this course that someone who is pretty new to it could train and actually help someone else who's even newer to it be able to feel the confidence to be able to try these things out. How do we make the course in some ways trainer independent so you don't have to be a 10 year expert to be able to stand up in front of a room, teach the course to a group of people that are maybe you're two months in and they're brand new and you can stand up there and look like an expert and still inspire and enable them and help them grow in ways that, that you yourself are still trying to figure out, but that you could still help them have that experience.

[David Allen]

And so we want to create a

[Justin Hale]

lot, you know, good.

[David Allen]

Yeah, I'm saying that's. I think one of the things you guys have done so elegantly is to build a model that you could take a nurse practitioner or a nurse manager, you know, because you've had so many in your early years, served so many healthcare clients for which, oh my God, that they can learn to manage crucial conversations, how much improvement to human interactions and feelings happen in those kind of environments. So, yeah, God bless you. I mean, good work. At the same time, being able to build that. Well, I use the analogy because again, I got a black belt in karate in karate schools. The schools have different belts, but usually they're sort of white belt, yellow belt, green belt, brown belt, black belt. That's a traditional kind of a model. We found that a yellow belt, which is sort of the first level of graduation, could teach a white belt as long as there was a black belt available. So as long as they had the model of what the total thing looked like, the yellow belt could say, well, I don't know how to do that one yet, but I know how to do this one. Let you and me work this together. And so building a model that maps to that I thought was just elegant in terms of how you guys have done it.

[Justin Hale]

Yeah.

[David Allen]

Thank you.

[Justin Hale]

Yeah. What we tried to do and watching a lot of your approach, because when I was going through it the first time, I had the advantage that probably 99% of people don't, is which I had you. I had access to you and Ana Maria. And so one of the things that we had talked about as we sat down, as we said, there'd be massive benefit, of course, if each person could see a model of the way David Allen approaches this. Not to copy him, but to understand the black belt. Belt and say, let me watch the black belt. Let me go. Okay, Let me. Let me. Now that I understand the principle of what he did, let me make it work for me. And you had a number of videos online, and I said, some of these should be in training. People need to hear. Hear us teach them about clarifying and then watch someone spend 90 seconds clarifying and go, oh, there it is. Or hear about the importance of being deliberate about capturing. And then watching someone capture for two minutes and going, ah, that's what it looks like to do this thing that's

[David Allen]

like trying to learn to swim by reading a book. You know, it's.

[Justin Hale]

It's. It's amazing.

[David Allen]

I don't think it can do that.

[Justin Hale]

It's amazing how often when I'm teaching, say, crucial conversations, and I will say, I'll teach them a skill, for example, like how to create psychological safety when the other person gets defensive. And we'll teach the idea, and they'll say, oh, that's really brilliant. I love that. And then I'll say, okay, now we're going to practice. Then go, right? Like, right. And I look at them and say, I mean, if you wanted to, you know, kick a soccer ball like Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, and you could just watch them, you know, read a book, or I could tell you how they kick a ball. It'd probably be fairly helpful, but you probably would never kick that effectively. But what if I took you out on a field and gave you a soccer ball and made you kick 10 or 12 or 20 or 100 or a thousand? Don't you think you get better faster? And they're like, okay, I get it. Practice is one of those things that's so essential to behavior change and deliberate practice. The right kind of practice, where you're getting feedback from a coach, you're trying it again, you're doing it over and over and over again in the right way, is something that people are very reticent to do, it's uncomfortable, which, by the way, means it probably works. If you look at the research on deliberate practice and acquiring skills to become an elite performer, one of the things the researchers say is if you're doing a type of practice that you really hate, you're probably doing the exact kind of practice you need, right? And so, like, if you're sitting there, if you're good at shooting free throws in a basketball court, you probably don't need to shoot free throws. You probably need. Need to be shooting in the corner, three pointer with someone in your face. And so I think that when it comes to gtd, it's the same kind of thing. And that's one of the things we try to implement was this idea of, I want to see someone do it, and then I need to be forced to do it myself, which makes me uncomfortable. I often like to sit back and just be inspired and then end a training program. Wow, that was so inspiring. And yet I don't do anything different. But if I'm forced during the training, say, in crucial conversations, to be given a scenario and to have to turn to someone who's also been given the scenario, they play the role of sort of the responder. And I have to use the skill I just tried, and they get to. They get defensive back at me. They make it feel like real life, and I have to then use the skills I just learned. Wow, that's much more valuable than being told, here's a little script to address defensiveness. You know, I mean, and so at gtd, it's absolutely the same way. And we try to implement that so often of saying, I taught you how to capture. They go, that's so cool. That's so cool. No, no, no, you do it now. You know, especially when we're doing a virtual course, they say, okay, take three minutes and capture, capture around the space right now, look around where you're at. Where is something hanging around that doesn't belong where it is the way it is? Start capturing that, right? And. And they start to go, oh, okay. And so this sense of learn, do, learn, do is something that we really value and we've tried to implement with gtd. And I think that people who actually, after they actually get over their sense of okay, and they start practicing these things, they go, oh, I thought I got it before, now I get it. And now I realize that I don't know how to do it.

[David Allen]

Thank you, Justin. This has been great. A lot of people are going to find value out of this. So much more to come, as you know.

[Justin Hale]

Thanks, David. Sam.