I knew I had a lot to offer myself. I knew that there was, like, if you give yourself a chance at this, no matter how hard it's going to be, you'll, one, at least you'll know, and two is that you never know. It could work out. You could, Quincy, the kid who couldn't pass calculus the first time, the kid that struggled in high school, maybe this is a new legacy. This is, this is where all arrows were leading to this moment with this new clarity and focus and motivation to get through this. Maybe this is where you can show you can do it. It is yet another great day to get better. Welcome back to another episode of Becoming Undone, the podcast for those who dare bravely, risk mightily, and grow relentlessly. Join me, Toby Brooks, as I invite a new guest each week to examine how high achievers can transform from falling apart to falling into place. For Dr. Quincy Conley, they spent today helping faculty improve their teaching at A.T. Still University. They've become highly rewarding and fulfilling, but they weren't exactly always what he'd expected or planned to do with his life. Self-described as a mediocre high school student who found most of his early successes through sports, it wasn't until later when a mentor emerged in high school that ideas of becoming an electrical engineer began to take root. Eventually he found himself in snowy North Dakota, nearing the end of a degree, with plans to be on a beach on the sunny island of St. Thomas. That is until the terrorist attacks of 9-11 closed that door. A gifted teacher, Dr. Conway is also a skilled interviewer. As you'll hear, he turned the tables on me and got me monologuing about my past. But above all, Quincy's story is one of never being satisfied with what you know today and to relentlessly pursue your better, no matter what direction that pursuit might take you. I hope you'll enjoy episode 41, Learn, with my friend Dr. Quincy Conley. This week we're fortunate enough to have a new friend. I've been working on a project to try to build a teaching and learning center at my university and I had the good fortune and pleasure of interviewing Dr. Quincy Conley a week or so ago. Dr. Conley is the director of the teaching and learning center at A.T. Steele University. He has a really great varied background and that's one of the reasons I wanted to invite him to the show. He was formerly Senior Educational Design Researcher at Pearson Higher Ed and has a varied academic background, PhD in Educational Technology from Arizona State and an MS in Instructional Design and Technology as well as a BS in Aerospace Science from the University of North Dakota. Quincy, welcome. Hey, thanks for having me Toby. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you. Looking forward to the conversation today. Usually start with a bit of a softball. What did you want to be when you grew up, when you were a little kid? Yeah, great question to start off. I wanted to be everything, I think. From a firefighter to, I think I wanted to be the president of the United States at one point. And maybe my Hot Wheel days, I wanted to be a race car driver So I had quite a bit of diverse interest as far as what I wanted to be when I grew up Well from the looks of your bio it took a while for you to settle in on on any one thing kind of Had some really cool and on the surface not necessarily Connected paths and I think that's part of this show is to really help people focus on the fact that sometimes we don't have to have just a linear path to where it is we want to go. So start at the beginning, wherever that was for you. Yeah, I think that as different as it might seem, I actually think that there is a theme for me. And when asking people, my loved ones, friends and family over the years, did you ever see me end up in this position? Some say yes to my surprise. They always thought I'd be around education. I'm surprised to hear that. But how I ended up in this is, you know, going back to my formative years, high school, I wasn't a very good student, but very active in sports and activities, afterschool activities. I got hooked up with a group that was like a mentorship for high school students who wanted to become engineers. And I'm not sure how I got involved in this group, but I fell in love with it, the idea of being an engineer. And I got a mentor and went on tours and so to learn more about what engineering meant. And I can't say that I ever probably understood what engineering was back then. I probably only understood it later in life after going to college a couple of times. But I wanted to be an electrical engineer of all things. So fortunate to have some athletic stuff going for me. So I went to college, ended up in college and took up electrical engineering naturally, was way in over my head. One did not know what I was getting into, did not know what the real job was. Lots of math, lots of physics, right. But also just underprepared. My other interest probably detracted from my focus on my grades and having the prerequisite skills to thrive in college. So I would say my undergrad, I really struggled mightily, which kind of led me all over the place to try to experiment and try to figure out what it was that I wanted to do to make my way in life. So yeah, I would say that's kind of the beginnings that kind of the trajectory for me. Engineering probably was just a mechanism for me to get into a capacity where I would be helping others. Teaching, something around teaching, in front of the classroom type thing. As a kid, one of my favorite memories was getting worksheets. Not the ones my teacher would give me, but you know, multiplication tables, mom would bring them home and grandmother would bring them to me. And I could do that for hours as long as it wasn't real, as long as it wasn't assignments. But I would I would approach it as it was. Right. I love school. I love the concept of school. Just didn't know how to do it until later in life. But that would say that's my earliest beginnings. Yeah. So you mentioned athletics and its role that it played in getting you to college. Would you just tell us a little bit more about that? What sports did you play? And what was that transition like? Eventually, we all kind of hang up the jersey for the last time. Talk me through that for you. Sure, yeah. So yeah, I played a lot of sports badly. I really, my earliest memories of sports, T-ball, baseball, probably there all the way through high school. Soccer, even for a stint or two, got into soccer and basketball. Basketball was my main thing. My passion, loved it as much as I loved anything in my life, loved basketball. I wasn't really good at it enough, made it to the high school basketball team, but you know, JV, you know, backup mostly. But one thing that came a little bit more naturally for me was football. Got into it once I got to high school. Didn't care about it as much as other sports, but could play it reasonably well. Well enough to play high school sports and then ultimately walked on. I had a couple of schools, couple of universities, got a partial scholarship and was able to mix it up, have some great experiences, meet some great people, form some great relationships as a result of football. D2 level, mostly. And yeah, you know, I think I made the most of it. If I had to go back, I probably would have applied myself a little bit more to see where it could go. But again, another theme, learning how to learn, learning how to fill in the gaps, learning how to get better. I think I still was trying to figure that out. I still think was trying to figure that part out. Yeah, I think that's certainly been a theme that's emerged in the show so far is lots of times, whether it's sports for some people, it's it's arts, but whatever that early identity that we align ourselves with, it can sometimes fuel us to new paths that we wouldn't have considered. And so for a lot of athletes playing in colleges is almost like the bait that's dangled out at the end of the fishing rod, if you will, that gets us to college, whatever that is. But you find yourself at the University of North Dakota and studying aerospace science. You get that bachelor's degree. And I love how you framed it earlier, that it wasn't as disparate as a lot of people might think. And how, and we've talked about this even previously, that good teaching and content knowledge don't have to be these completely separated animals. And so your master's is in instructional design and technology. How did you make that decision to go from more of a hard science in your bachelor's to looking at how to teach it in your master's? Great question. I really I'm excited to answer this question because this is probably step two or three of that theme that kind of starts to build and gets really loud later in my life. But going back to this idea of electrical engineering and playing sports, the first school I went to only had free engineering. So it was inevitable that I was going to have to transfer somewhere else if I wanted to pursue this. And so I started to seek out opportunities, schools that I thought I could continue to play football and then also pursue this engineering. And I landed at North Dakota, notorious, famous for their hockey and their aviation program, turns out. Did not know that at the time. So I'm on the football team. I'm in study table. I'm in engineering. And, you know, a lot of my teammates, you know, hour, hour and a half, they're done with their homework and engineering. I was 10 hours, you know, a night trying to figure this out. Mostly my own doing, but really, really, really struggling. Probably after a semester or two getting C's, you know, working so hard and not really thriving, feeling like I was thriving, I had to make a decision. I had to check in with myself and say, is this really what I wanted to do? Where am I going with this? I'm putting in all this time and effort, it's not really paying off, and I'm not even sure what the payoff is, even if I could find a way to graduate. So there was this floating part of my career, my college career, undergraduate college career, where I was like, oh, do I need to change majors? What do I change my major to that I can graduate without spending another couple of years? And then, you know, I wanted I wanted I was starting to grow up, I think, where I was like, I need to think about the longer term here. I want to I want to make a living for myself. I want to have a career. I want to, I want to do right by myself. I want to do right for myself. So this is where I was hanging out, you know, small, cool, small town. So you meet, you, you see the same faces. You, you kind of all going through it together. You're growing up together. A lot of my friends were in aviation, one of the bigger programs, one of the prominent things. And then, you know, I was like, well, something I'm good at. I got involved in a student organization. was geared towards aviators, student aviators, and came over there and fell in love. I was like, oh, this is pretty cool. This is different. Oh, I took a class. I was like, yeah, I can do this. I think I can do this. Meteorology, a little bit different than physics, calculus-based physics, but I'm hanging in there, right? So anyway, I switched majors and switched to aerospace science with an emphasis in air traffic control. And my goal was to get hired on with the FAA. And this is right around 2000, 1999, year 2000. And now I'm productive in my homework. I'm not staying up all nights, hours of the night. This felt a little more natural for me. And my energy, I think my motivation kind of peaked too because now I'm approaching my junior year. I'm getting a little bit more serious about things. Yeah, it's starting to pay off a little bit for me. After a bit of a winding path to find his way, Quincy had graduated high school and managed to leverage his athletic ability to help offset the cost of pursuing those early dreams of becoming an electrical engineer. However, after night after night of long hours of study and less than stellar grades to show for them, he started to consider other alternatives. Through friends, he discovered an academic home in aerospace science. Classwork became enjoyable again. A bright future with a steady, good-paying job with the Federal Aviation Administration as an air traffic controller likely awaited shortly after graduation. However, as we've discovered so many times on this show, even our best laid plans can be swept away in an instant. And that's exactly what happened to Quincy. But making a big leap to this master's, get this, so the timing sometimes dictates things as much as anything else. So finish up the aerospace science, feeling real good. I applied for the FAA to go to the islands, St. Thomas, that's where I wanted to go. So I go from 10 hours a night, homework, engineering, not knowing what I'm gonna be able to do to, I might get a job in St. Thomas and hang out on the beach on my off time, right? So I think I'm doing pretty good for myself. And unfortunately, 9-11 happens right around that same time. And one of the reactions to that was the FAA ceased hiring air traffic controllers and anything related to that. So all my training, right, everything was green, green, green and heading in this direction. So now I'm floundering again. Yeah. I'm trying to figure things out a little bit and ended up working as a student taught for a semester. Hated that. Had the math background from engineering, taught high school math. I was like, this is a struggle for me. And then I went to Amazon, got hired as call center representative, did that for a minute. Here I am again, picking up all sorts of different background experiences and skills. And then my old advisor became the chair of the old air traffic control department. I was working as a bartender at a restaurant. He, small call is down still, he shows up and he goes, I've been looking for you. And I'm like, I'm sure you weren't. I've been here the whole time. But he's like, no, seriously, we are training air traffic controllers from all over the world. The program exploded. You are a great student. Would you come back and help me as a GA? We need people in the labs to be guides for these students. Program is just booming right now. Would you come back? Here's what we can offer you. And you would start at 8. You'd be done by 4 every day. Get a good lunch. And I'm like, yes, I went from a bartender, call center environment, working around the clock. Like he wouldn't even finish what he was doing. And I was like, where do I sign up? So, yeah, so hang in there with me. But so this is where it gets interesting. So I take that job as a GA, I do it a semester or two, it turns into an adjunct instructor job. Theme. We're seeing the theme again, right? He had taken classes. He was an instructional designer. And if at the time you told me, hey, Quincy, go take these classes, you're going to be an instructional designer. I was like, do I have to wear a hard hat? I don't know what this word means. I didn't know what it meant at the time. He's like, just promise me, you don't take this one class. You'll take this one class. It was like intros, foundations of instructional design. The context here was that we worked in this high pollutant aerospace science program with these 360 simulators, voice activated, jumbotron 70 foot screens. We had all this technology around us and FAA, as you might guess, has these manuals that are as thick as an encyclopedia. We would stand at the podium and read to our students out of these things and then and then like get up and like take a model airplane like literally from Hobby Lobby and like move it from here to here to represent some movement at an airport. In the meantime, we've got million dollar simulation two feet from us. And so I started to put these concepts together of like, there's gotta be a better way to help transfer what's in this book to the students so that they can go perform this and get jobs and do these things. That's when the lightning bolt struck. So there was three things that were happening. I was now an adjunct so I could take classes for very cheap. I took my first instructional design class. I was also in the context where I was around some of the most amazing technology I'd ever seen before. Simultaneously, I was in a room full of students. I was in a room full of students. So these things came, this is when the lightning bolt happened, where I would say, that's when I found my destiny. I think that's when I became online with my destiny of being an instructional designer, which a learning scientist, a learning designer, somebody that can understand how people learn consumer fast. That's so powerful. I think all of us have to reach that point in this learning and teaching and learning space. We have to all, I don't know if anybody comes to this open-minded. I think we all kind of have these preconceived notions that if you know it, you can teach it. And I know you face this in your job now where you have to help. You got to kind of lead people to that realization on their own. No, no amount of preaching or proselytizing or manual reading, whatever that is, can take the place of someone just having that epiphany where they're like, this is a craft and I can refine this. I can get better at this. I'm not just born a good teacher or not. I can actually acquire these skills. And that's so cool to hear you say that. So you do this MS in instructional design, and it's just a straight path to your current job. No, not at all. It's still pretty circuitous to get there. So following that MS, where do you go from there? How do you end up at Arizona State? Yeah, so another fantastic journey for me. So now I know what I'm going to be doing to my last breath. An instructional designer is somebody that understands learning, supposedly, right? So I'm training to do this. So after my master's, I really was determined to go get work experience in the corporate sector. Traditionally at that time in history, most people went towards K-12. I'm an instructional designer. I'm going to go teach teachers in the K-12 environment, maybe a nonprofit, sometimes a government job. But really what was happening was a revolution in the industry where businesses, Fortune 500 companies were recognizing, we need to figure out training. Like there might be some magic that can happen that we're asking them to do. So not sure why, but I was like, this sounds fun. So when I graduated, what I did is started looking around, took some contract jobs, ended up, uh, getting a contract job at American Express to be an instructional designer, to help with some, some call center training, developing some call center training. So I was doing this type of stuff, got picked up at Thomson Reuters for a minute, went to some really cool places, went to Bank of America, some really cool places, met some really cool people, got some really cool experiences. But what was happening, and this has continued to happen in corporate America, is the sensitivity to training is tightly, tightly, inversely proportionate to the market, to the economy. So as the economy booms, more training, people are willing to spend money. Yeah, come right this way. You know, uh, I'll, I'll, I'll drop some money. We need to, you know, people in here to help with training, but the second things get tight, it's the first thing to go, right? It's the first thing to go. It's a cost, right? It's an expense that they try to ditch. It doesn't generate revenue. And most people, academics or not, they're like, I went to school. I can do this. I can, you know, I don't need to pay somebody to do this. What's the big deal. I'll throw some PowerPoints together. Right. And you know, there we go. We'll save some money. And this went on for quite some, some time until another incident in the market. 2008, 2009, the market crashes, right? We go into a deep recession. It's hard. It's hard to be an instructional designer. I was going through small peaks and valleys with the career, but I would say there was two things driving me at this point, approaching this juncture when I was starting to feel the tightness. Now what I'm doing is I'm taking multiple contracts because the full-time training gigs were dried up. And now I'm like pulling my hair out. Those of you that are tuned in to the live stream can see, it's all gone. But this idea, like I was taking on too much because the volatility of the market, right? So I was just trying to stay liquid. I was just trying to pay my bills at this time. So I was like, darn this, what could I do with the skills that I have that would be more stable, but still let me be in this learning centric role where I can do these things. And that's where another moment of fortune, I look around and say, you know, I need to go back to school again. I want to go back to school again. I need to continue to grow my skills so that I can have a stable career, a stable life. As a fellow PhD, I get the sentiment you just heard Quincy express. From the earliest days of my life, I remember everyone that I respected telling me to get an education. Get those grades. Get that degree. So I did. Through four different colleges and universities in three different states, I plowed straight through and I earned my PhD before I turned 30. And in the years since, I started to think that maybe it wasn't as important as I'd once thought. I mean, watch Good Will Hunting and you'll walk away convinced that all you really need in the world is a library card and you can become anything you want. Pretty much for free. But for me, and for Quincy, there's something about that formal education process that just simply cannot be replaced any other way. It's one of the reasons I'm guilt-ridden as I record and edit this podcast tonight. I got an Econ test on Monday. But it's also one of the reasons that Quincy decided he wasn't gonna be satisfied with just getting older. He wanted to get better. Arizona State, I even looked at the U of A, hated rival down the street, but U of A had a curriculum in instruction. ASU had a pretty world renowned instructional design, educational technology PhD program. I chose ASU, I met with them, it felt right. I was, I was networked in the area. I knew people that had went to the program that could vouch for me and that I could get good perspective on what I would be required to do and saved up my lunch money. The contract gig to put some money in the bank and dropped it all, dropped it all. Had a real good gig going at the time. Gave it up. I knew, I knew if I wouldn't do it, then I wasn't ever going to be able to do it. And I just, I did it. I did it. I had help from girlfriend who is now my wife, who supported me and we made the decision together and I went back to school and went in with abandonment. I was going to get this done as soon as I could, as hard as I could to create the most opportunities I could have for myself at the tail end of going after the PhD in edtech. Right. That's great. Obviously a lot of fear associated with that decision. If you're like most people, what did you tell yourself to counteract or to quell that fear that you face by going all in on this new path? Great question, Toby. I think I told myself a lot of things. What are you doing? Are you sure? I would say I knew I had a lot to offer myself. I knew that there was like, if you give yourself a chance at this, no matter how hard it's going to be, you'll, one, at least you'll know. And two is that you never know, it could work out. You could, Quincy, the kid that struggled in high school, maybe this is a new legacy. This is where all arrows were leading to this moment with this new clarity and focus and motivation to get through this. Maybe this is where you can show you can do it. And I don't think I knew how, but I just had a feeling and I wanted to see it through. Yeah. Yeah. I think for a lot of people, when we look at whether it's actual failure or perceived failure, lots of times this thing's completely outside our control. 9-11, downturns in the market, companies downsizing, all those things are completely out of our control. But if you're a perfectionist like me, you still internalize it and blame yourself for those things. But if the path were completely linear, like if you knew at the age of 12 or 15 that you were going to be in your position now, you would have taken a different route. Your veto would be shorter. Your experiences would be much less diverse. Talk to me about how that path that is kind of meandered, as most of ours do, has made you better at what you do today. Even though you might not have chosen it, the end result is a better prepared you for the job that you're filling right now. Yeah, I would say Path has served me well, besides some amazing stories. My friends often tease that like I've lived multiple lives, having taken a winding, twisting path to get to where I am. I would say all along, I knew I wanted something better for myself and for those that some I didn't know that were going to be with me. I wanted to be able to bring just a different stability to my life and that if I could collect skills, if I could pay attention to what was happening when I was at, you know, American Express doing rollovers and PowerPoints and stuff, like this could come into play later, you know, I think, I think I could do something with this. Going to Intel and talking to engineers who wanted nothing to do with me because I was nothing more than taking up their time away from their designing and the wafer and all these things, but understanding like, oh, if I can learn how to be consultative, if I can learn how to listen, if I can, if I can synthesize information and try to translate it to where they are, these things might come in handy. You went through this with your training, right? Your PhD training. What do we do? We take ideas, we build on them, we synthesize them, right? We write them for the audience, the target audience. So I think it's just collecting those skills, bringing them along, not throwing them away and appreciating them. But also I would say utilizing those things like, oh, this is hard. Or when I was at the downturn of the market, or I'm not gonna be on a beach in St. Thomas anymore, using that to fuel me to the next thing. Like, this doesn't feel good, this is a terrible feeling. All right, how do we get out of this, Quincy? Like, let's go. I think it served as good motivation to get me to the next thing. Yeah, so today you serve at AT Still. There's some points in between, Boise State, Pearson, higher ed. So that process led you to where you are today. What do you think were the lessons you learned from the completion of that doctorate until you arrived on the doorstep of your office today? First and foremost, how to communicate. I think the dissertation is quite an anomaly, an amalgam of many things. But you're communicating, and you know this as well as anyone, you've had 50,000 interactions of communicating to get to that dissertation, right? Let me ask, did you do qualitative analysis? I did, I did a qualitative. So you did 100,000 conversations, right? So it's all these little mini interactions that I think made me a better communicator. The part that I found was the most daunting part of the dissertation, the lead up to the dissertation is learning how to write. I was ill prepared for the writing portion from the classes that I sat in. Oh, a 10-page paper on topic X on Monday, see you then, right? Uh-oh, figuring that out. And then the challenging type of writing that you do, twist your brain into pretzels, scientific writing, and you gotta take out your personality and these type of things, right? And then just sit down and write a book, essentially, right? These type of things, those were all daunting. So I would say those are some of the skills underneath there. But since communicating, I would say, one thing I noticed, and I'm still checking in on this idea, I feel like I have, I speak with a bow horn now, that I didn't have prior to earning the doctorate degree. I don't know if that's a me thing. What do you think, Toby? Do you have that sensation? You show up and you say something and everybody's like, whoa. I don't think I'm there yet, brother. Okay, okay, okay. Just checking. Yeah, it might just be you. But no, I do get it. And I think that's a, for me, the doctorate was always a goal that I wanted to achieve, but it was in some ways, if I'm real honest, it was like validation. Like I wanted to prove that I could do it. I wanted to prove that I had value and that I was worth being called doctor. And so for me, there was a big now what moment when I got that doctorate, because it didn't fill a hole in my soul. It was just a degree on my wall. And I think for a lot of doc students that are expecting that, you know, like the heavens open and the beam of light comes down and now I'm doctor. That doesn't happen. Like you're just, you just have to be done one day. And you're still the same person. I mean, you're changed, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't as transformative instantaneously as I expected it to be, but it was transformative kind of process outcome that I wasn't expecting. Like you said, the communication, the persistence, getting a freaking committee together at the same time. Like, that's the hardest part of getting a PhD for me. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, and I'm trying to connect to this. I agree totally with everything you said, you know, the personal pursuit all those things. You mentioned feeling you wanted to prove this that you could do it. Who do you think you were proving it to? Wow, you're flipping it around and asking questions of me. You know, I think part of it was to myself. I was a first-gen college student, grew up fairly modest means, teeny tiny school in the middle of nowhere. People from my high school didn't tend to go on to get their doctorates or become lawyers, and some have. There's certainly, I don't mean any, if anybody's listening, this is no disrespect. It's just, it wasn't what I see today in larger, there just weren't that many opportunities. Part of it was like, I just felt this obligation like if you can then do and prove to yourself that you have what it takes and it's for me it wasn't about ability it was more about persistence it was just doing the work getting a PhD is a process it's not just a magical accomplishment so I don't know maybe my parents maybe my grandparents but I think in deep down I just kind of wanted to prove to myself that that somehow I I I could do it. I had that that ability We'll have to cut this part and put it on your podcast Yeah, I appreciate it I think there's you know, I I see I felt the same way I feel similar I really like though the idea of like I you you felt some sort of obligation to do so because there was a chance that you could and you did. I'm sure you did with Flying Colors. That's powerful. Like testing your potential, living up to your potential. That's what it sounds like to me. Well, I don't know, maybe we're venturing off course, but if you'll allow me to go there. Please. Before we started really talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, and privilege and those kinds of things, I didn't grow up rich, but my dad worked all the time. He's a coal miner, blue collar, and my parents were married and together. And I just really felt like I came from a stable home and I found a way to get it paid for. I kind of owe it to everybody. There's no reason I shouldn't be doing this, right? And I say I was first, it's actually more complicated than that, my sister, seven years older than me, she was a first generation college student. She went away to a four year school, and my dad actually got laid off, lost his job, the coal industry took a big downturn, and between the time my sister went to college and I signed up for college seven years later, my parents actually enrolled in community college and got their nursing degrees. And so, like, my first day on a community college campus, everybody was like, oh, you're Jim and Sharon, it's not what you want, like, yeah, that was my parents. My mom stood in line and bought my college textbooks for me because she was in line to get hers. Just a weird situation, and so, for me, the grad school, I got graduate assistantships working as an athletic trainer, that's how I ended up at Arizona, I wanted to work in athletics. And we ended up teaching in teacher ed because it was really the only program that would work around our work schedule in athletics. I naively thought that if I knew it, I could teach it too. And I kind of had that same experience where you end up in this curriculum and instruction class and you're like, wait, you can get better at this? And I was a semester deep in grad school before I really bought into this idea that teaching is an acquired thing. And I was a late adopter, but once I finally got it, you realize that this is a message that sadly the world needs to hear is that good teaching doesn't just happen. You have to beat on that craft. You have to refine it. And I know you're in that space working with healthcare practitioners who, top of the class, you know, maxed out the standardized tests. They just assume that they can teach because they've always been the smartest person in the room. And that's just not always the case, maybe, but maybe not. Yeah, spot on. You know, you're making a lot of sense. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing. That makes a lot of sense. I think that's gonna stick with me. Thank you. No, I appreciate that. I apologize. I kind of went off into the weeds there a little bit. I love it. So you end up at AT Still and you're in this learning and design space. For those not familiar, most universities, general academic campuses have had these teaching and learning centers for 20 or 30 years. It's kind of a newer thing in healthcare institutions and AT Still would certainly be part of that. So talk me through your initiation into this space in your current job. What was it like making that transition, leveraging all those skills and the education and all the experiences? Now you're just greeted with open arms on a new college campus. Yes, tons of sarcasm. No, yeah, it was, it was a hard left. Frankly, when, when I was coming from Pearson, the software, educational software world, I was really finding my groove that the Pearson, once again, volatile work environment, ups and downs and lefts and rights, I was looking for something more stable and the timing yet again, came up and I said, let me give this a go, let me give this a go. Let me give this a go. It was close for me. I feel like it was in my backyard. And I just wanted to throw my name in the hat to see was there anything here and to get to know this opportunity. And my wife was a healthcare previously at the same university, so I had context. I had a little bit of context of how it worked inside and out, at least I thought. I met the team, the department had been around for five, six years prior to me arriving, but they really wanted to do things differently. And I show up and I'm like, yeah, you know, my PhD training, we do things with data, we make data driven decisions. We're going to do these things in here, you know, we're going to do. So I think I brought some operational aspects as well as some strategic acumen to the table, why I think that the team chose me to come in here. But I don't think I fully knew what I was getting into. However, I had been at previous universities where I was the academic taking advantage of these type of departments, faculty development type departments. So how bad could it be, right? I was always going towards those things. But I had the doors blown off my reality pretty quickly to the sense of the pace of how fast the curriculum moves at a health science university, and it's all health science graduate level. So there's no reprieve and going to engineering, which I might've been more comfortable, or math or biology, which, you know, they haven't found new bones any times recently. So the science behind those things have stayed relatively stable, whereas healthcare seems to be working at a changing, evolving at a faster pace. So that was eye-opening, but they were very open to this idea of one person coming in and saying, there's some science behind this, we're science and health science oriented. There's this thing about learning in the brain and in neurology and cognition. And we particularly, this particular school has subscribes to whole person, treating the whole person and training the students, professionals to become whole person practitioners. So I just connected to that and said, OK, it starts with how you teach them, right? Teach the whole person and away we went. But they've been very receptive to these ideas. They, you know, they still struggle like, hey, I've been in school a lot longer than you. Why are you telling me about learning objectives? And I'm like, well, it's going to guide your instruction. It's going to keep things on the rail. And then you're going to be able to guide them towards those board scores and these things. But yeah, I think I think once I got the acumen, once I got kind of the temperament, we gotta go, gotta be real responsive. Once I spun up on those things and understood what motivates them, that they do wanna deeply connect with their students, they want their students to be top of the class, hitting the ground running, they wanna do these things, they want them to be empathetic. I think modeling these things for them, being an empathetic instructor, modeling that when I do workshops and seminars and even one-on-ones with them, I think it's really carried what we hope to accomplish a long way. We've been able to publish for some of them. We've been able to publish some of the results that we, you know, some of the evidence of the directions we're going. Are we going in the right direction and doing things with evidence? The evidence is pretty positive, keeping us going in the right direction. Yeah, that's great. I think you've really shared and I appreciate your openness. There's lots of lefts and rights. I'm thinking of this in terms of a graph and x-axis is easy for us to talk about. Like I've made a pivot here and I transitioned there, but I think people, if you'll allow me to group myself, I think our generation and maybe even at the risk of overgeneralizing guys of our generation. We don't talk about the Y-axis very much, the ups and downs, the emotional toll that the lefts and rights can take. What were some of the low points for you on this journey and what did you learn from it? Ooh, from the whole journey or from the A-tist? The whole journey, oh gosh. The whole journey, I would say, lately I have felt that this too shall pass. The storms will turn into sunny days if you just wait. However bad it feels today, it will probably not feel so bad tomorrow. At the same time, the day after that might be gloomy again. So to be able to ride the wave of the ups and downs, try to stay a little bit more level, but also taking action to get through those, to weather those storms. It isn't enough to just say, you know, this bad thing happened because I didn't do X, Y, Z. It's going to take care of itself. No, I need new skills. I need new skills to thrive at these different places that I was along the way. But I would say, I would say guilt. To me, I associate the ups and downs with my ability to manage my guilt. Man, I hate that that happened to me and it's all my fault. Yeah. Maybe it's not, probably it's not all your fault. But if you can overcome that feeling, that sensation, that emotion, I find that I've been more quickly to not just hit the highs to get to the sunny days, but just stay level. Just stay level. So for me, I would say that's probably one of the biggest takeaways is guilt really hasn't served me well. And recognizing that later in life, the more you experience it and bump into it enough times, you start to learn the lesson, right? But I would say self-forgiveness is probably the counter is, hey, something bad happened. It's OK. You're going to be OK. Sunny day is coming tomorrow. Yeah, that emotional response is so default and a lot of bad things happen. Megdala hijack, the emotion takes over and the rationale of the higher centers take them offline. But you're absolutely right. That guilt can can really hijack our joy and it keeps us from really appreciating growth in the process. I guess the connected question to this, I love the Socrates quote about, you know, the unexamined life isn't worth living. You mentioned a couple of pivotal things that you had no control over, 9-11, market downturns, those kinds of things. Is that a perspective that you've gained over the years, or do you feel like in the midst of it, you had sight of the fact that, you know what, this sucks, but I'm gonna get through this? Yeah, I think practice maybe, even at an early age. I mean, back to the early college days and just sitting there and just totally being perplexed at what my next move is to be able to, to take whatever that is to pass this class, to pay a bill, to get my car fixed, because tires are bald and all these things that happen. Then I was like, I literally don't know what to do. But now it's like, okay, that is a thing that has happened, but it isn't the thing that has happened. There's more life to be lived here. And let's do something, all right, to solve that. Okay, do your research. What do you think is going to help you get unstuck on this thing? So yeah, I would say it is a refined skill, if you want to call it a skill. It's something that I pay more attention to now. And I feel more comfortable with it when bad things happen. Like, okay, we're going to do this and we're going to be just fine. Being laid off, getting a paper rejected, however silly that sounds, like big or small. It's okay. Like we're, there's something else. And it's not just relying on the notion of like, something better is around the corner. Everything happens for a reason. No, I'm gonna go make something happen. I'm gonna take, you know, the corrective course of action here. I'm gonna put my attention towards those things. Paper didn't get accepted because X, Y, Z. It had some typos. It didn't fit the job. Oh, my bad. Let's fix that. And let's get to the next place. Yeah. I think in academia, there's this prevailing notion that you're not really ready for a job yet because you haven't been there long enough. Like you've got three years of experience. You really needed five. And to me, that's asinine. Like, I don't want to just 365 days from now. I don't want to be a year more experienced in my role. I want to be a year better in my role. And the idea of growth along the way. I'm not just flipping a calendar until I'm now suddenly magically qualified for this position. What can I be doing in the meantime? What for you has been pivotal or keys to your growth along the way? as far as my growth. I talked about, you know, reconciling some of the grips with guilt and it's, it isn't really, it's not a helpful emotion and self-forgiveness has been helpful for sure. I would say, you know, trusting myself, developing your instincts. That's something professionally that I have noticed is you get a gut instinct about something like, I don't know if this is the right job for me, or I don't know if this project is going to go the way I want it to do, or even, you know, other more important things, relationships, these type of things. Trust your instincts, learn to trust your instincts. I don't know if you feel the same way, but when I don't trust, I felt it, this is not a good idea, Quincy, don't do it. And I'm like, nah, let's keep going. You know, that then I'm like, they all should have listened. Right. So I would say I would say counting on myself in that sense. And then when I can't like, how do you make decisions? Where do you get your information from? Because I would argue we're only as good as our process. And so maybe that's my conclusion to answer your question is developing and refining your process. Yeah, love that. So you've been in your role for a few years now. What for you is left undone? You're highly accomplished in multiple different industries and areas. What's left on your to-do list? Oh gosh, lots. I want to back squat 300, 315 pounds. That's my goal for 2023. I have this goal of I want to be a really good biometric learning researcher. What that means to me is I use biometric sensors, facial expression recognition, eye tracking, EEG signals. I interpret those to be able to make sense of learning experiences. out there about flow, finding flow. And if the longer, faster you can stay in flow, the ideas that more likely you are to learn, grow and become an expert someday at something. So there's a lot of research on this. And I wouldn't even say I'm an expert at flow, but I am trying to be an expert at the methodology of understanding of depicting flow. And so this is a big goal for me. The technology is changing daily on the ability just to, to interpret these signals, to collect them and process them quickly. And then to be able to say, voila, here is what I think is happening among 150 people that, you know, before it was this big clunky monitor and you had to put your face on it. And that wasn't very intuitive and tough people to learn. Now, we can put glasses that are as light as your favorite pair of sunglasses, Ray-Bans, and then send them off into the world to study, to go to lectures, to do these type of things, to study online, a lot of software, digital software out there. And so this is something, it's part of my training, it's part of my 20, 30 year training of wanting to be a good student and a good educator. So this to me is probably a goal that will extend my years. So I hope. That's awesome. Two things here. First of all, I love your knowledge as well as your application of AI and machine learning. I've had these discussions and I know you have too, chat GPT has just exploded on the scene, but the angry mob with the torches and pitchforks, like properly applied, a torch or a pitchfork is a valuable tool. So let's stop, I've even seen people go into handwritten assignments for students just to make sure, it's like, let's teach students and faculty for that matter, how to use these tools not not to to run from them and secondly I love that you mentioned the whole person development part of your job and that your first goal was to back squat 315 That's fantastic. I love that you are living that out Well last question and it's an oddball sometimes people have a ready answer for it And sometimes I don't I love music and the emotions that it can often represent What song would you pick as the soundtrack of your life and why? Oh, a song for a soundtrack of my life. Oh, gosh. I'm not sure. I'm going to think this out loud with you, but I'll say somebody like Ella Fitzgerald. One beautiful voice, right? Very, very elegant, but also, you know, the queen of art, the origins of R&B, but also jazz, right? Jazz is kind of unpredictable, waning and wandering a little bit, but tells a beautiful song in the end. Yep. I can see how that represents your journey for sure. Okay. That's awesome. That's a great question. Well, Quincy, it's been great having you. I felt from the first conversation we had more work to land like, man, this is a great interview. I've got to get this guy on. So I really appreciate the fact that you were willing to come on. Wish you nothing but success. Again, Quincy serves as the director of teaching and learning center at A.T. Steele University. Also does speaking and has a social media presence. For those listening, how can I follow your work? Absolutely. I'm on Twitter, at Quincy Conley. You can find me usually retweeting an interesting study related to the learning sciences or Chad GBG these days. But love for you to follow me and love to follow you back, absolutely. Awesome. Well, Quincy, thanks again for being with us. All right. Thanks, Dr. Brooks. Well, you didn't have to Dr. Brooks me right there, but what are you going to do? I love the story within Quincy's story. While his journey has been one filled with twists and turns, chosen paths and unexpected detours, and both disappointment and discoveries, through it all he eventually found understanding and clarity of purpose in his life. I'm thankful for his time and I hope you enjoyed our conversation. For more info on today's episode be sure to check it out on the web. Simply go to undonepodcast.com backslash ep41 to see the notes, links, and images related to today's guest, Dr. Quincy Conley. If you enjoyed the show, I've got just one simple request. Would you be so kind as to share it with someone else? It would really go a long way in helping me spread the word about the show. Surf on over to undonepodcast.com, click the contact tab in the top menu and drop me a note if you know of any story that needs to be told. I'm always on the lookout. So if you or someone you know has a story that we can all be inspired by, let me know. Coming up, I've got legendary University of Washington strength coach and founder of the popular Iron Game Chalk Talk podcast, Ron McKefree, as well as former Minnesota Timberwolf and Phoenix Sun Chris Carr. Also on deck I've got motivational speaker Tim Kite, as well as former American Gladiator Darren Malibu McBee. Stay tuned. This and more coming up on Becoming Undone. Becoming Undone is a NitroHype Creative Production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at Becoming Undone Pod and follow me at Toby J. Brooks. Listen, subscribe, and leave us a review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time everybody, keep getting better. you