Navigating Technical Leadership with Talha Khalid

Why do some people have the ability to captivate a room with their words while others struggle to make a point? Embark on a journey with Talha as he unveils the power of public speaking in his professional life, navigating corporate complexities as a production superintendent. Gain insights into communication's pivotal role in building connections and influencing others. Transitioning from a technical to a leadership role requires unique skills, including leading without formal authority. Explore how communication bridges departments for shared objectives, and discover the impact of special projects on operations and safety.

Talha delves into the significance of relationship-building and effective communication in technical leadership in this conversation. Uncover the art of unbiased problem-solving in manufacturing, overcoming biases, and facilitating proactive discussions. Learn the importance of understanding distinct values in different departments, essential for bridging gaps and navigating conversations with upper management. Join Talha as he shares wisdom on effective communication in today's corporate landscape—don't miss this enriching episode.

NOTABLE QUOTES
"There's a lot of power behind public speaking," – Talha
"That's really cool that you had this desire and you decided to just act on it." – Philip
"Having both sides of the public speaking as well as the technical side has helped me to be able to communicate to executives and help them make more accurate and better decisions." – Talha
"The best tactic to get anything achieved is to be able to understand everybody's views and [use] that to establish a common ground." – Talha
“Had I overreacted and tried to defend or try to be more biased, I would have either hindered the problem-solving process, delayed it, or even caused more issues.“ – Talha
"Just be unbiased and let the facts and truths speak for themselves." – Talha
"Break out silos and facilitate more effective and efficient communication." – Talha
“If the cost of the solution is less than the cost of the problem, let's try to fix it." – Talha
"Let's understand, let's put ourselves in the foot of this other department, see what they care about, and then let's work together to try to bridge that gap." – Talha
"If you're going to go speak with an audience, to go speak to a company, see what kind of values they have, what things are important to them." – Philip
“Not having that bridge cost us a lot, not just in terms of resources, but even in terms of overall reputation and everything else.” – Talha
“Knowing those values, especially within a company, the different KPIs that each department has, can really help build that bond between each other.” – Philip
“[Establish] your work and [let] your work be what speaks for you.” – Talha
“How you treat yourself is how you'll end up treating others, and vice versa.” – Talha

RESOURCES
Talha
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thelyricalnerd/ 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/talha-khalid-clemson/ 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/talha.khalid.7543653 

Philip
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamphilipsessions/?hl=en
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@philipsessions
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philip-sessions-b2986563/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/therealphilipsessions

Transcript

Philip Sessions: 0:15

What's up guys? Welcome back to another episode of the Speaking Sessions podcast. I'm your public speaking and communications coach, philip, and I'm here with Talha, and he is an engineer and entrepreneur living in Greenville, south Carolina, right here with local to me. He uses his process engineering skills to develop routines and processes that can be applied to fitness, personal finance, entrepreneurial ventures and other areas in life. He also enjoys fitness, social dancing, emceeing at events and learning new skills and philosophies.

Philip Sessions: 0:51

And Talha and I have known each other for quite a while. We've been through Toastmasters, we're both engineers. He's now a production superintendent and I'm really excited to talk with him today about communication, both from an engineer perspective but now that he's on that leadership side within a corporation, what that looks like. And it's not too often that we get to talk with people in corporations about how they communicate and navigate those I'll call them political channels within the corporations that we do see, which can be very difficult, and we don't see that as much as a small business owner. But, talha, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Talha Khalid : 1:33

Hey, first off, thank you for having me on the show. I absolutely honored and I am excited to talk about just communication and everything else in the corporate world. So a little bit about myself. I've been in Greenville for about 17 years now, so I went to high school here, went to college here, now work here full time at a German automotive manufacturer in the Fountain Inn Gray Court area. So my initial beginnings with the company was actually as an intern back when I was in Clemson, a rather co-op student. So there was my first footing into the corporate professional world and I quickly learned within my first semester how to navigate those channels. But then from there I eventually graduated, became a full time engineer and now I'm currently in a more production leadership role at my company.

Philip Sessions: 2:23

So let's really kind of dive really into the engineering side first, because when we think of engineers, it's funny. You and I are so contradictory of a typical engineer super introverted, wants to stay behind the computer, and you have an electrical or mechanical engineering degree. I forgot A mechanical engineering, mechanical, okay, so mechanical is a little bit more outgoing than electrical, which I have the electrical engineering degree. So it's funny. But so we're still both way more outgoing than most engineers would be. Super introverted, typically, just wants to stay behind the computer, wants to crunch numbers, whatever that may look like, just don't put you in front of people talking. And so you decided you weren't going to do that. And was that really a couple of years ago, with Toastmasters or what made you decide to actually start speaking or learning how to speak better in front of people?

Talha Khalid : 3:14

So I'm actually going to go all the way back to my high school years, Because my ninth grade I joined our speech and debate club and I did what's called extemporaneous speaking, and it was really there where I learned to present information to a crowd right. One of the reasons why I wanted to do it at the time was just so I can make more friends, you know, be part of a club and get to network with more people. But eventually I realized that there's a lot of power behind public speaking being able to communicate what it is you're trying to express and also, at the same time, being able to take that feedback from everyone else to either, you know, increase the understanding of your world or try to make yourself better. So for me, that's really where it started was back in high school.

Talha Khalid : 3:58

And since then I've just taken that skill and just gradually, just developed it over time and now you can put me in a crowd of 800, 900 people and I'll have no problems public speaking. In fact, that's why I did. This past weekend there was an event hosted in Greenville with the Indian Association of Greenville and I was their lead MC with a crowd of about 900 people. Wow that's.

Philip Sessions: 4:20

That's pretty impressive. And when I was in ninth grade, actually, I took a speech class. I don't even know why I was in there. I think I just got forced to be in there somehow.

Philip Sessions: 4:29

And I was with a bunch of seniors and I was super shy back then. So it was really tough for me and that's not where I started my journey. I just happened to take that class randomly. It was definitely more closer to Toastmasters. And when you joined about five years ago, I think is when I really started kind of doing it then Toastmasters probably about four years ago, something like that, three or four years ago, you know, like right around COVID times and everything. But that's really cool that you had this desire and you decided to just act on it. A lot of people don't do that. So what was that kind of trigger for you just to actually act on that? Because most people they're going to shy away from speaking. For sure. If they're going to act on anything, it's going to be anything but public speaking. So what made you decide to really dig into public speaking?

Talha Khalid : 5:20

So, for me, I've always liked connecting with people. I've always liked understanding different cultures, different philosophies in life and I feel like, with speaking, and public speaking as well, you get to do that. You get to connect with people of different cultural backgrounds, professional backgrounds and for me, like you mentioned in the intro, I love learning new things. I really do, and I feel like public speaking is just one way of doing that.

Philip Sessions: 5:46

Yeah, and I would agree, and with public speaking, it's really the best way for you to be able to connect with an audience and really goes into public speaking communication, that kind of intertwine a little bit there. But through effective public speaking and effective communication you can connect with an audience and too often people don't think about how being a great speaker can help you with connecting, with really influencing an audience as well. So that's really cool that you decided that you wanted to connect with more people, which again is so contradictory to being an engineer and everything like that, that you wanted to be that.

Philip Sessions: 6:26

But I bet that has helped you along your journey being an engineer, being somebody that is extrovert. Has it really benefited you or has it just kind of been like? Eh, it's just, it's been a nice skill to have.

Talha Khalid : 6:38

Actually, in my current role it's probably one of the best assets I have, because in my role I do serve more as a production floor leader. But having that technical background in such a technical environment really helps, because now you can take these very complex technical systems and be able to communi cate to either your folks on the production floor or members that are, or executive members that are way higher up in the organizational chain and be able to explain intricate, difficult technical concepts and break it down into bites and pieces that they can understand. This becomes very handy, especially when you have to propose specific engineering changes to you know higher up executives who might not be as technically sound, and having both sides of the public speaking as well as the technical side has really helped me to be able to communicate to executives and help them make more accurate and better decisions.

Philip Sessions: 7:33

Man, and I agree with you. I feel like that's what's helped me a lot in my corporate career too, is being able to speak, but also having that technical background. Now sometimes I feel that having a really strong technical background has kind of hindered me as well, because, as you know, engineers are hard to find. So when you get a good engineer, a lot of times you don't want to let them go and let them go to leadership or management or whatever that looks like within your company, and so sometimes I feel like that has held me back a little bit too. But it's definitely helped me more than it's hurt me to have the speaking and communication background where I can, like you said, go up to senior management and talk on their level or go down to people on the floor or other engineers and be able to talk to them.

Philip Sessions: 8:21

And I remember when I was a contractor before I got on with BMW, that we had this one situation where we had a bunch of programmers BMW programmers and we had other contractor programmers and so they both could speak programming language, yet neither one of them could understand what the other one was trying to say. And I remember being in that meeting and I just happened to kind of be between them for whatever reason. I was kind of in the center and finally they were just like confused and I said, ok, so what you're saying over here, contractor, is do this thing and you want to do this thing, but BMW is saying you can't do this thing because of this reason. Is that right? Bmw? And I looked at the guy that worked for BMW is like yeah, and then all of a sudden the contractors understood too. But it was so funny because they could they literally could speak the same language, programming wise, yet they couldn't communicate with each other.

Philip Sessions: 9:17

Still, and we see this a lot of times, even if it is the same level, but we really see that a lot when it's a higher level, you know, a senior management to middle management or even senior management down to like the engineering level. That's a big difference between technical and more managerial, more leadership topics and stuff like that. So let's talk about that transition, because you obviously were the engineer there at your company and then you went over into the supervisory, leadership side of things. So there was definitely a huge change there, where you're probably leading people. You're also not doing engineering near as much anymore or at all. So what was that transition like for you to go from more technical to more leadership?

Talha Khalid : 10:06

So for me, with the role I was in, while it is a production superintendent role, my role was heavily focused on special projects. So special projects could be technical projects or non-technical projects. But given my background, my manager knew hey, you know what, I'm going to put you more on technical related projects and be able to drive some of the more technical projects and be able to communicate to the different apartments and get them all to come together to provide a good solution. Because oftentimes, especially in a technical environment like manufacturing, you might have your process engineers and your quality engineers fighting against each other. Meanwhile production suffers because of it and sometimes you as a leader have to step in and say all right, all of us, let's get together, let's make sure we're talking the same language and let's try to achieve our goal. So for me, the transition was not all that difficult because my role was when I was hired out for the role, it was already understood that I'd be focusing 85 to 90% of my time on technical projects.

Philip Sessions: 11:08

Okay, yeah, but I'm sure you're probably like leading your head to lead almost without authority is what it really sounds like in this role. Like, yeah, you're over a project, let's say, but you're not necessarily over these people, so you're really having to influence them and get them to really winning them over as well, to get them to want to work together and work on this special project. And by special project, just, I kind of understand what you mean, but just to make sure, like you're talking about the kind of like a process improvement, there's a certain process and you say, hey, we've either got some quality stuff here or we want to have a faster throughput time, let's say, and then y'all work together as a team to make this goal happen, correct. That's kind of what special projects are in a nutshell.

Talha Khalid : 11:53

Correct Anything to improve the operations quality or safety in our facility, okay, and so what does that look like?

Philip Sessions: 12:00

Because I would say leading without authority is the hardest leadership role there is, especially when it comes to communication. So what are some tactics that you use to win the people over that you're not necessarily leading as a direct report to you, and what are some of those tactics that you use for that?

Talha Khalid : 12:21

Sure, I mean. So first thing is really taking time to understand the problem and understand the different sides. So this means working with our quality team understand what they're seeing and what their concerns are. Working with our process team see what their concerns are. Working with our guys on the production floor see what their concerns are and then be able to take those form a good view unbiased view, I should say, because it can be very tempting to just want to stay in your silo and fight for your side, but sometimes the best tactic to really get anything achieved is to be able to understand everybody's views and then using that to establish a common ground. So for me, that's one of the first things I try to do is establish a common ground between the individuals that I work with.

Philip Sessions: 13:06

So that's why I like that and really relating with them getting that common ground there. Too often people just want to stick with that comfort zone, like you said, especially you being an engineer, having processes being the thing that's driven into us as engineers like process improvements. So going on that process engineer side is definitely the more comfortable side that you could go on and more relatable to you versus the quality side of things. They're really just taking an unbiased approach. I think is a great way to do that. And so have you ever had a time where maybe you started to want to be biased and like what was that internal dialogue for you to help you not be biased towards one side?

Talha Khalid : 13:47

Sure and funny enough, this has happened to me on two different occasions down the last month or two, where we were in a problem solving session and obviously I'm trying to be as unbiased as I possibly can right and try to get feedback from the other groups. But then they kept blaming our production floor members of this issue and there was this urge in me like no, it's not them, it's not them, you have to stop blaming them, right? That was the internal dialogue in my head. And then I remember I stepped aside for a minute while they were discussing some other issues, just took a deep breath and I had to remind myself like hey, I'm here, I'm supposed to be unbiased. This is truly what the issue is like, the root cause to our current problem that we're seeing. Then I need to be part of the solution rather than trying to hinder the solution.

Talha Khalid : 14:34

Sure enough, what our engineering and quality team proposed is what ended up being the ultimate root cause and the solution they put in place. While my team initially did not like it, we did try to work with our engineering crew to make that solution a little bit easier to use. Ultimately, we did fix our problem and, at the same time, our production associates were happy because the solution ended up being something they ended up liking. Had I overreacted and tried to defend or try to be more biased, I would have either hindered the problem-solving process, delayed it or even caused more issues. So there's definitely downsides of being biased. But essentially that was my internal dialogue was hey, stop blaming my people, but then step aside and remember that ultimately, you as a team are trying to solve a goal and the best thing you can do is just be unbiased and let the facts and truths speak for themselves.

Philip Sessions: 15:29

Yeah, I like that and really almost kind of facilitating it. I know I've been where I'm kind of end up being the facilitator of any kind of problem that we're solving and everything, and rather than stepping in. Especially as I'm trying to train new people, that's a hard one for me to not just step in because, hey, I can do this 10 times faster than this person, but if I step in and you show them what to do, or hey, you should probably think this way, well, they're never going to learn for themselves. And then, with you doing that, being unbiased, yeah, you helped, not delay the process of actually solving this problem. But then the other side of that too, is that everybody was bought in to this solution as well, which is really cool. And then you get to see that even your production associates while, yeah, they didn't like that solution at first, they were still able to put their opinion in, versus you being the defender of them, so to say. And then now they're stuck with it and now they don't like you because even though you defended them, you failed to defend them. And then some solution came up. So it kind of worked out for both sides of it because you didn't make anybody mad on either side.

Philip Sessions: 16:38

So really just facilitating, I think it's a great thing and I like that you're really cognizant of that as well. I think too often we don't think about just being cognizant of hey, let me step back for a minute, let me get outside of myself and look at the situation. How am I reacting to this situation? And that's definitely something that's difficult, but it's something that we can learn over time. And is that something that just came natural to you? Or did you have to try and tell yourself at first like, hey, hold on, let's think about this. How did you acquire that skill set as well, just to be able to take a 30,000 foot view of your own situation?

Talha Khalid : 17:17

A lot of that stems from my personal life, where I've had moments of life where I've stepped back, just taken a view of everything and I apply that to my professional life as well especially in cases where we're solving problems. And that's really when you have to step back and remind yourself that, hey, sometimes being unbiased especially in a situation like problem solving, especially in a manufacturing environment that's really where you need to make sure that you have a clear head, try to break out your silos which is one big thing we're pushing within our company is to break out of our silos and facilitate more effective and efficient communication between each of the groups. And I think all the culmination of all those things is how I've been able to develop that skill of just being as unbiased as possible.

Philip Sessions: 18:03

Yeah, that's great, and you mentioned silos and I wanted to get to this other side. So we've kind of talked about people that you know or maybe at your level or they're below your level, something like that. Maybe there's on the engineering side and you're kind of that entry level management, so it's still kind of the same level ish, but leadership versus expert level, if you will, when it comes to either leading up or speaking with that upper management. And I kind of think of silos with this, because we tend to want to just stay in our one vertical, like how are you going in and talking to these different senior level or even mid level management when you're coming up with, hey, we have this problem, this is what we're working on, here's how we need your support. How are you going about that communication? Because that's definitely a difficult thing for anybody to have to go talk with a boss or a leader that they're trying to tell them what to do, versus the other way around.

Talha Khalid : 19:00

Right. So one common denominator in a lot of these cases is dollars, dollars. How much is it cost thing? The company? Right, cause that's one of the biggest things all managers focus on is cost. Right, that it shows up on their key performance indicators everywhere, and they need to focus on that. And that's where one thing I try to do a lot is show the cost of a problem and the cost of the solution, and if the cost of the solution is, you know, less than the cost of the problem, great, let's do it, let's try to fix it Right. So, definitely using cost.

Talha Khalid : 19:33

Another thing I like to do is, especially if it's a department that I don't work with a whole lot, I try to understand what is of value to them, what are their key performance indicators, or KPIs as we call them, what are things that they care about and how can we tie that back to what it is that we care about? Cause sometimes I run a situations where we were two different departments might have very conflicting key performance indicators where if this one improves, this one just by nature will go down or vice versa. But sometimes, having that middle ground and common understandings where, hey, let's, we know we're going to affect each other, but let's see if we can find a balance Right. So it really comes back to what I said earlier was uh, let's understand, let's put ourselves in the foot of this other person or this other department, see what they care about, and then let's work together to try to bridge that gap, man and that that's perfect, right there.

Philip Sessions: 20:25

Cause too often people don't look at that and I know I've talked with clients before just in a general sense, like, hey, if you're going to go speak with an audience, are you going to go speak to a company, see what kind of values they have, what things are important to them, especially if you're in sales, like, hey, I want to go sell my product to this company. Well, does your product fit in with their targets, their initiatives within their company? And if they do speak to that as well, because now your product becomes that much better because your product can fit into their initiatives. And of course you have money, money speaks volumes for sure. So if you can show like, hey, our solution is going to cost X amount and we can get that return within three years or we can get it within 30 days, like, the sooner you can get the return, obviously the better. But if you can show what that return will look like, where they have that expectation, that's a great thing.

Philip Sessions: 21:22

And you're right, those KPIs, the key performance indicators, are great things to look at, especially if you're internal to the company. But if you're not, you know trying to figure out what's important. So let's say, I mean, have you had a situation where you weren't able to figure out what their KPIs were or their values or anything like that, and how did you go about figuring out what those were, what the important things were for them?

Talha Khalid : 21:45

Yeah, there's one situation I can definitely think of this year where I started getting involved with a certain aspect of our business and I was dealing with the department that I don't typically or at that point I never typically dealt with. So they were throwing all these terms out and all these graphs and charts and like what am I looking at? And then I and these are daily meetings that we have and I remember one of the daily meetings as the host I was like hey, would you mind setting aside five minutes after this meeting? You know, kind of walk me through what it is that you're showing and help me understand what is important to your department. And, sure enough, me and him actually spent the next 45 minutes talking about what was important to them.

Talha Khalid : 22:28

And I learned a lot from that, because now I, now I know how they think and now I know what set of inputs they need to be able to get to their desired outputs. And I also took that same time to educate them on our KPIs and our values. And, sure enough, now we have a more common understanding between the two departments, where before that there was no understanding. There was no bridge really, and and not having that bridge in the past. It cost us a lot, not just in terms of resources, but even in terms of just overall reputation and everything else.

Philip Sessions: 23:03

So it was definitely good to build that bridge between the two, yeah, yeah, knowing those values, especially within a company, the different KPIs that each department has, can really help build that bond between each other. Because there's times where I mean, somebody's probably going to have to give in. Well, hey, is this thing that you are pressing on? How important is that to you? Is this like your top initiative? Okay, well, when I'm pressing on, like you know it's, it's important to us, but it's not the top thing. So maybe we'll give into that one a little bit. So then when our top thing comes up, you're hopefully you'll give in and everything like that and we can kind of bring that up. But that way, when we know each other's initiatives or targets or KPIs, we can work with each other and there's usually some kind of solution that can work well, you know for sure, for the one side but should be able to work pretty well for the other side, and you can come up with some creative stuff Once you do know what both sides are looking to accomplish there.

Philip Sessions: 24:01

And kind of going back to what you talked about, that there's sometimes there's departments where when their initiative, their target, it's hit, the other ones goes down, and I kind of think of one. That's pretty, I would say, a little bit more simple to think about. If we slow down the production volume, our quality should go way up, but obviously production's going down. And then advice first if we speed up production, quality is going to suffer a lot. So how do we try and find that middle ground where they can both kind of go up at the same time and they may not go up exactly the same time. One may step up and then we get the other and then you know it keeps going, maybe back and forth or whatever.

Philip Sessions: 24:36

But knowing what those initiatives are, what somebody's trying to get in their department, is super important for us and really just being able to connect. And so it really does come down to that communication. And sometimes it is as simple as, like you did, hey, let's have a five minute conversation real quick to talk about it, and too often people don't want to do that at all. And have you done that anymore? Did you learn that from somebody? Or you just kind of decided intuition to say like maybe I should have this conversation?

Talha Khalid : 25:06

No, again it goes back to my personal life. You know, like I mentioned, I like learning about different cultures and different philosophies in life, and you know, I grew up around a very international community and sometimes connecting with members of international community was literally as simple as hey, that's an interesting set of clothing, or hey, that's interesting food, Can I learn more about it? And then I apply that same to my professional setting as well. You know, with literally just asking a simple question like hey, can you help me understand what it is that's valuable to your department or your team, and then let's use that as a gap to you know, just, let's, just, you know, let's use it as a bridge to fill the gap.

Philip Sessions: 25:43

Yeah, I like that and you bring it up kind of different cultures and stuff like that. It's funny. I feel like maybe it's more media that pushes us out there, but it's almost like it's supposed to be insulting. When you ask a genuine question Like hey, tell me more about that, why do y'all do this this way? And of course you need to make sure that you say it with kindness because it could come off as why do y'all do it that way? And like are y'all idiots? Like is he gonna make sure that you're not saying it in a way that it is that way?

Philip Sessions: 26:12

But when you do ask out of curiosity and really just wanting to learn and educate yourself, I've noticed in my personal life and I'm sure you have too where people really appreciate that and everybody loves to talk about themselves. So when you get them to open up about themselves, it makes them like you so much more because of that. So that's really cool that you take your personal life and help bring it into that corporate world and everything. And so I know we've kind of skated around all this stuff. But is there and I don't really know how to ask the question exactly but when we think about the political spectrum that happens within big corporations. How have you worked to be able to navigate around that? Because, like you mentioned, with your company you started out as a co-op and slash intern.

Philip Sessions: 27:01

I know they're kind of somewhat interchangeable there but then you got on full time as an engineer and now you're in a supervisory role and so you've gotten into leadership, and it's not like this has been over 20 years. Some people takes 15, 20 years to get to some kind of leadership level and it didn't take you that long. So how have you been able to navigate the political spectrum of big corporations to be able to move into these positions that you have?

Talha Khalid : 27:31

So, as far as moving into these different roles go, I definitely let a lot of my projects and a lot of what I've done speak for itself. Obviously, once I've gone through with a project, I normally put together some kind of report, something where management or somebody down the road years from now could read and say, okay, this person did this, this was the issue, this is what they did, this was a solution. So, really, one thing would be establishing your work and letting your work be what speaks for you. That's the first thing. Another thing is just having good relationships offline, cause one thing I've noticed is there are several people who, especially within my company, when they especially after COVID with having to work from home and everything else, you know, their relationship with people on the production floor or in the other support departments is only via teams or some kind of online medium.

Talha Khalid : 28:28

One thing I try to do is establish in-person connections with people. That way they can put a name to a face. You know you can meet them in person and it's just a different vibe and it helps a lot, especially when you're trying to establish relationships with different department heads and department leaders, cause it's a big difference when you just type, you know, versus just seeing face to face. There's just a more I don't wanna say. I guess I can say like intimate connection with someone and just having that kind of connection sometimes can mean the difference between that person respecting you or that person just thinking you're some coworker who they just need to answer to every now and then. You know.

Philip Sessions: 29:08

Yeah, I like that and I agree, ever since COVID it really has changed. A lot of people wanna do in-person meetings and now you see everything's on the teams or Zoom or wherever you know video conferencing that everybody does now, or really it's audio, and at least with some of the companies that I've dealt with, it's all just audio. Nobody turns on their camera or anything like that, so you're really not even seeing anybody. And who knows what's going on behind the scenes there, besides when they just answer the question. And so, yeah, really going in-person and having those connections and it really comes down to networking at the end of the day, just like how you had to network and know somebody to get into that company in order to move up and move around the company the people that you know is how it's gonna help you, which really goes back to small business. But it's interesting how the corporate world, if you want to move up, if you wanna get better, you wanna make things happen, you have to know people and you have to network and that communication has to be really rock solid as well and really just showing that you actually care about people.

Philip Sessions: 30:17

Yeah, yeah, totally agree. Yeah, well, tahoe, I appreciate this conversation. I do wanna get to our last question and I didn't warn you about this beforehand, but maybe you've listened to some of my episodes but if you can only share one message for the rest of your life, what would that message be?

Talha Khalid : 30:34

Just in general, or in terms of communicating and speaking.

Philip Sessions: 30:38

Yeah, in general. Yeah, it does have to be around communication at this point.

Talha Khalid : 30:41

Sure, I've always lived by the quote how you treat yourself is how you'll end up treating others, and vice versa. So that's one message I would definitely stick with for the rest of my life, because if you treat people with respect, it's a sign that you're treating yourself with respect, and when people see you're treating yourself with respect, they will also want to treat you with respect, and it just becomes a nice circle.

Philip Sessions: 31:03

Yeah, and I can definitely see that you do that already, so that's really cool. You're already living out that message, and it's a great message to live out, for sure. Well, tahoe, I appreciate you coming on. If people wanna follow you and get to know you more is I know you've got a lot of cool things going on. Where can people follow you at?

Talha Khalid : 31:21

Sure, so you can follow me on Facebook Tahoe Khalid that's K-H-A-L-I-D and same name on LinkedIn as well, so you can follow me on either of those two platforms. I'm fairly active on both and I'm definitely looking forward to connecting with either local business owners or just anyone who likes public speaking or just life in general. I like to learn new things, new philosophies, and I'm totally open to meeting anybody.

Philip Sessions: 31:46

Awesome. Well, again, tahoe, thank you for coming on. It's been a pleasure and we'll talk to you soon, but for everybody listening right now, make sure you go out there and communicate your message, because your message matters, yep, and thank you for having me on.