140: Unlocking Learning Potential: Julie Dirksen on Behavioral Change and Instructional Design

Holly Owens (00:01.263)
Hello everyone and welcome to an amazing episode we're going to have. We are rebranded. We are now EdUp L &D, which stands for Learning and Developing. My name is Holly Owens.

DaNadia Johnson (00:15.068)
And my name is Nadia Johnson, and we're your hosts.

Holly Owens (00:19.247)
And we are super excited today to have a returning guest, but she was on the podcast. It was like two years ago, I think now. Julie, it's been a while. And I'm excited to have you back. So we have Julie Dirksen here. And if you don't know her, she does a lot in the instructional design, learning development space. She is the author of Design for How People Learn, and most recently, Talk to the Elephant. She has different.

Julie Dirksen (00:28.178)
It's been a while. It's been a while.

Holly Owens (00:44.526)
workshops and sessions and resources, you need to go check out Julie. She is the Jane of all trades. She does everything. I'm a huge fan of Julie. I know Nadia is too, and we're happy to have her back on the show as we are launching this rebrand. So Julie, welcome on in.

Julie Dirksen (01:01.586)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

DaNadia Johnson (01:01.66)
What?

Holly Owens (01:04.014)
We're super excited to talk to you. And I was just thinking like, I really need to do questions personally for Julie because, you know, we've already talked about, you know, all the other things and last episode I was pretty fangirly and I'm not going to be like that this time because I feel like I've gotten to know you a bit better. But for the people that don't know you and haven't heard of all the wonderful things that you do, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey into the L and D space?

DaNadia Johnson (01:17.5)
Yeah.

Julie Dirksen (01:32.146)
Yeah, I mean, I started in learning and development the way I think a lot of people do, which is you're good at your job, so they make you a trainer. And it's now like 30 years ago that that happens. I'm old and I've been around forever. And then eventually I got interested in training, but I also got interested in things like user experience design, although we still weren't calling it that in the 90s.

DaNadia Johnson (01:41.508)
You

Julie Dirksen (01:59.634)
And some other things. So when I went to graduate school, I kind of focused in both areas. I spent most of my time and my degree is in instructional technology from Indiana University, but I also spent a lot of time over in user experience. And I worked for Allen Interactions, an e -learning consulting company after grad school for not quite a decade. And then I've been independent, but I'm probably best known for, as you mentioned, Design for How People Learn in

roughly 2010, I wound up talking to a publisher. And it really seemed like we were kind of missing our sort of first book for people coming into L &D. So many people come to it because they know their topic, but they don't necessarily know how to teach it or communicate it to others. And so we kind of needed that like book that was not too academic and not too kind of intimidating, but that was a good book to kind of hand to somebody who's just getting started. And if you were

Holly Owens (02:38.958)
Mm -hmm.

Julie Dirksen (02:55.346)
If you were doing that in something like user experience, they give you Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. And if you're doing it in graphic design, they give you Robin Williams' Non -Designers Design Book. And I felt like we didn't have that for L &D. So that's what Design for How People Learn is. And it seems to have worked out that way. Like...

Holly Owens (03:11.629)
It completely has. I use it in the courses that I teach at the graduate level and it breaks down, it breaks it down so well and my students are always giving you accolades about how much it's easy to understand and the simple graphics and the examples that you use. They love that and then they are able to relate it to what we're doing in the instructional design courses. They absolutely raves about your book.

And I remember last episode, I asked you if you're gonna write another book and you're like, I don't know, but we're gonna get into all that today. So, so glad to have you here.

Julie Dirksen (03:43.794)
Hahaha!

Julie Dirksen (03:50.642)
Yeah, absolutely, thank you.

DaNadia Johnson (03:50.844)
Yeah. Well, I mean, we could actually go ahead and get into it now. So like I'm in. Yeah, like I'm excited. So could you tell us a little bit about your new book? Like who is the target audience for this book? And kind of thinking like what prompted you to write this book? Because I know Holly mentioned you, you said you were going to maybe like take a pause there. So yeah, like, can you tell us a little bit about the new book?

Holly Owens (03:56.332)
yeah, let's get into the book stuff.

Hahaha!

Julie Dirksen (04:20.882)
Yeah, so the new book is Talk to the Elephant Design Learning for Behavior Change. And if anybody's familiar with the first book, they understand that I kind of organized it around gaps. So what's the gap between where the learner is now and where they need to be? And if the gap is knowledge, then a lot of the stuff that we do around communicating knowledge or helping people remember things works great. If the gap is sort of procedural, and we've got like step -by -step performance, there's sort of tools for that.

DaNadia Johnson (04:26.268)
Who's in there?

Julie Dirksen (04:48.21)
If the gap is a skill, which I usually define as anything where people need practice to be proficient, then there's a set of specific things we can do there. If the gap is a habit, then it has some extra kind of wrinkles to it in terms of how do we help people with habit formation. Sometimes the gap is motivation. Like they know what to do, but they still aren't doing it. Sometimes the gap is, you know, environment like.

DaNadia Johnson (05:11.068)
Yeah.

Julie Dirksen (05:14.642)
it's easier to fix the environment or the system than it is to try to fix the people. And so the book, Talk to the Elephant, really hones in on that motivation one a lot. Environment comes into play too, because that's kind of the counterbalance to motivation. You can either hopefully improve people's motivation so that they'll do the thing, or sometimes it's their motivation is fine and you just need to make it easier for them to do it, which is more on that environment side.

And so, yeah, I described the kind of the use case for this new book is people know what to do, but they still aren't doing it. So if you have this situation where you've created a learning experience and people seem to understand it and they seem to get it, and yet they still aren't doing it, it could be commenting on user records or it could be wearing their safety glasses or it could be, you know, cross selling products to customers or it could be.

Holly Owens (05:49.963)
Yep.

Julie Dirksen (06:06.962)
you know, any number of different things. It could be, you know, properly disposing of injection equipment for a vaccine, you know, in vaccine sites, you know, whatever, whatever the thing is where they know what to do, but they still aren't doing it. We can get into some of these other sorts of things. And a lot of times it sits in motivation, but it's all it's good to kind of look across the spectrum of what are all of the reasons why this behavior might not be happening in the way that we want to have it happen.

And one of the things that kind of came out of that was I was working on an AIDS and HIV prevention project in like the mid 2000s. And by then, like people had gotten the message, right? This wasn't the early days of AIDS prevention. So people knew that like, for example, condom usage was super important to prevent HIV spread, except so it wasn't a knowledge problem anymore. So what else was going on?

And when I went looking for kind of tools to add to my toolbox, because just telling people louder and more emphatically does not seem to work very well.

DaNadia Johnson (07:10.556)
Right.

Holly Owens (07:10.794)
or spamming them with tons of emails with information.

Julie Dirksen (07:13.682)
Yeah, or telling them they suck if they're not doing it. I see that happening still a lot and it makes me crazy because I'm like, why do we think this is effective? Historically, it hasn't been. Just kind of shouting at people a lot. And so it becomes a really interesting area around what are all the factors that can cause somebody, if they know or have the ability to do the thing that it's still not happening.

How do we diagnose those problems appropriately? Because sometimes it's misaligned incentives. We're saying you should do this, but the incentives all steer us towards a different behavior. Or sometimes it's delayed or absent feedback. That's probably the most common thing I see. You're supposed to do this good thing, but nothing happens when you do it. And so you kind of stop trying after a while. It could be fear, anxiety, or discomfort. I know I should talk to my health colleague about

the fact that they're not really washing their hands enough, but boy, that's a super uncomfortable conversation to have and I just don't want to do it. So there's this whole slew of things. And if we're not solving the right problem for people, if we're not really understanding where the thing is falling off, is it that they're not motivated? Is it that they're motivated, but it feels hard and they're not ready or they're uncomfortable with it?

Holly Owens (08:18.314)
Right.

Julie Dirksen (08:36.114)
Or is it that they've tried a few times, but they're having trouble maintaining because they're not really getting good feedback? Is it that they actually have been doing it for a while and now it's starting to fall off? These are all different stages in the journey of behavior change. And we need to make sure we're helping people solve the right problem and looking at what are the ways that we can support motivation better? How do we help people feel competent? And how do we help people feel?

feel connected to each other and how do we help people feel like they have some control over the situation? Those are all variables that have a lot to do. If somebody doesn't feel like they have any control and they're not good at it and nobody cares if they do it, then guess what? The behavior is not going to happen. So it looks at all of these things. It kind of takes chapter seven in the first book, which was on motivation. And really, yeah. And really, there was so much more to talk about.

Holly Owens (09:27.338)
One of my favorites. I love that chapter.

DaNadia Johnson (09:30.108)
I do it.

Julie Dirksen (09:33.746)
So it kind of goes full book length on it. And it relies on a behavior change model called COMBI, which is Capability, Opportunity, Motivation. And it's based out of University College London's Center for Behavior Change. Susan Mickey and her team kind of looked at a bunch of different behavior change models and sort of distilled out one that could be really comprehensive. And so that's the model that the new book leans on. But yeah, it's lots of that and it's lots of case studies about how do we apply this and what kinds of solutions are out there. And...

how do we diagnose and then how do we start to triage different solutions that will hopefully be more effective in helping people with some of these challenging behavior change questions.

Holly Owens (10:13.674)
Mm -hmm. You know what? Like, I would just want to hand the Smeezer book that I work with because if I get one more request about a PowerPoint or if I get one more request about, I don't know, insert said V -I -L -T or I -L -T presentation here, I am going to scream. It's a lot to deal with. And if they read this book, it's so difficult to articulate.

what we mean as instructional designers when it comes to behavioral changes, they just want to check it off the list. They just want to be like, this is done. They took this assessment, they got an 80, they've met expectations, but then they come back to us and they say, well, working at Amazon Pharmacy, we have things, MREs, medical related events, which are bad. People not getting the right prescriptions, people not getting the right information or things like that.

So the behavioral change didn't happen. They just memorized something. Yeah, it's definitely a challenge.

DaNadia Johnson (11:17.208)
Yeah. I think plays a huge role. Like I studied education in psychology. So like, I think it's, it plays a huge role in a lot of things. And I think a lot of us don't like dig into that piece of it. So that's exciting. Like I, that seems right up my alley.

Julie Dirksen (11:36.882)
Great. Yeah.

Holly Owens (11:37.993)
Yeah, so you're gonna love, well, the next question is, go ahead, Julie.

Julie Dirksen (11:43.122)
Ha ha.

So the next, which one was the next question remind me?

Holly Owens (11:46.857)
So let's dive into the behavioral psychology side. So it seems like every time I read your books or reread your books or have discussions with my students, I see how much psychology and behavioral psychology and instructional design are connected. So can you give us your take on the behavioral psychology and how it influences instructional design?

Julie Dirksen (11:52.69)
yeah.

DaNadia Johnson (12:03.1)
Yeah.

Julie Dirksen (12:03.25)
Mm -hmm.

Julie Dirksen (12:12.242)
Yeah, I mean, there's been this whole field of behavioral science that's been really kind of coming up and coalescing into a single field. And the origins of it were a lot of behavioral economics that was very big in like 2008, 2010. The Richard Thaler Kass -Sundstein nudge book came out and kind of alerted people to this. And nudges have been kind of getting beaten up in the research literature a little bit. But honestly, they're just a tool in the toolbox. They're not the answer to everything. So.

So we look at kind of this question and people are coming in from like public health or, you know, sales or safety or, you know, marketing or, you know, people are coming in from a lot of places and now kind of it's turning into, you know, this behavioral science domain where really it's this focus on behavior change. And a lot of times it's kind of things that are designed to be used with different populations and things like that.

I was just watching a webinar with Amy Buecher who wrote a great book on behavior change called Engaged. And she works for a company where they do a lot of healthcare messaging. So it might be things about medication adherence or getting your vaccines updated or making your annual appointment or any of the kinds of health, you know, health things that they want their population to kind of keep up with over time.

And people can opt into this program where they get these messages, but they do a lot of work to find out, well, which what type of message do you open? You know, what are you going to respond to? What's going to actually nudge you into, you know, making that appointment or refilling your prescription or whatever the behaviors are? And so there's so much happening in these different spaces about how to interact with people. And we have we have kind of a double duty motivation problem when we're in learning and development.

because we need to motivate people to engage with the learning materials just to begin with. But then we're also talking about behaviors that they're supposed to do when they're back on the job. So we need to deal with that motivation too. So we get the double barrel of motivation challenges. Yeah, right? And so the pandemic was the biggest behavior change experiment in the history of the world, I am convinced.

Holly Owens (14:14.215)
Yeah, have fun. Have fun.

DaNadia Johnson (14:16.86)
What?

Holly Owens (14:26.503)
Yes.

Julie Dirksen (14:26.93)
And there was a lot of research going on about what was working and what was not working and things like that. And there's a lot of stuff that's not hard to do or not even that hard to figure out, but what is actually going to work with our audience and being able to approach it with an experimental mindset. Like I'm going to try something and I'm going to actually collect data and find out if it's working. So one of the biggest things around a lot of

One of the biggest things they found in the pandemic behaviors, which we already knew, but the degree to which it was really important, was information coming from a trusted source. Well, a lot of times in L &D, we're the voice of the organization, and we have to do the official version. And sometimes that's a trusted source in some organizations, but in other organizations, it might not be. And so like, you know.

Holly Owens (15:09.446)
Mm -hmm.

Julie Dirksen (15:19.538)
The sales trainer telling me the experienced salesperson that I should do something differently is going to be received very differently than another experienced salesperson saying, hey, this worked for me. And, you know, like that's just like that's a very small, simple strategy, but it's one I don't see us using very often because it's kind of doesn't fit into our mindset of how we do. How do we do this? But thinking about who's the opinion leader, who's the trusted source within a population, who do they need to hear from before they're going to believe this message?

you know, these are, there are all of these kinds of strategies and we don't, they don't, they don't necessarily show up as top of mind. You know, and one of the things about it, a different podcast I was on, Amit Garg was giving me a hard time about just how complicated all of the tools were in the book. And I'm like, well, first of all, I tried my best to not make them complicated, but humans are complicated. And there are a lot of stuff. And I'm, I'm not suggesting you do this, you do this for every single behavior.

Holly Owens (16:11.942)
Yeah.

Julie Dirksen (16:17.362)
But when you have those really tough, challenging, crucial behaviors where if these don't work, the kind of initiative fails, yeah, maybe you need to put this level of effort in.

Holly Owens (16:26.759)
Absolutely, I 100 % agree with you. And I think that the way you broke it down, I mean, like there's different levels and different scenarios of like you're saying different actions and interactions you have to.

you have to deal with and like, you know, there's new hires or there's people that need to be retrained or there's people that are leadership needs to be trained. So that's a whole different conversation. And, you know, especially if they haven't been into these systems in a while or, you know, those kinds of things. And yeah, I really think every time I read your books, I always think a lot after them and reflect a lot about what I'm teaching and what I'm doing as an instructional designer. So I want to say thank you for that. But yeah.

It's it's just it is a lot and the brain is very complex. The brain itself is very complex.

DaNadia Johnson (17:12.22)
Yeah, one thing I've always said with psychology is like, one thing it has taught me is that there is no black and white. Like there's always a lot of gray area. There's always a lot of different angles and different scenarios and situations. And so it can be complex. So thinking about change behavior.

I wanna know what are the top three strategies for designing effective learning experiences that actually genuinely change behavior? Like what would you say those top three strategies are?

Julie Dirksen (17:50.962)
Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the big ones that I just mentioned, obviously, is is getting getting the word out from trusted opinion leaders who who is the trusted source for this audience that they're going to actually listen to and how do you engage with those people. And that relates to another strategy that, again, I don't always see being used. You know, I hear a lot in workshops about people who are really frustrated with the old guard. You know, these are the like senior people who've been around forever, who are super resistant to change.

We know a lot of change efforts kind of come at them with here's the training, go take the C learning and then change how you do your jobs. Which if you think about it to somebody who has 20 years on a job, that's super disrespectful. Like we don't care what you, all of this knowledge you have about your job, we're just going to tell you the right way to do it. And we know better than you do about your customers or your, you know, your environment or any of those kinds of things. And so one of the big strategies I see not being used nearly enough,

is engaging some of these particularly experienced people, but honestly engaging lots of people in your audience in the conversation of here's the goal that we're trying to accomplish. This is what we're trying to do. Help us, let's work to, you know, kind of co -design or co -create the solutions for how we fix this together so that people get their opportunity to have some buy -in and to, you know, have like some investment in the solution.

as opposed to something that just gets kind of forced down on them. I was talking to a guy who did workshops for people. He did computer programming workshops. And he would be talking to them about something that he was hoping that they would do more of. And he said, well, he used to have this slide that sort of said, here's why X is important, like commenting your code or something. Here's why commenting your code is important. And he said, I just changed it to a slide that says, you tell me why commenting code is important.

So he would elicit it from the room and he's like, the whole day would go differently. Like if they had the opportunity at the beginning to say, this is why I think this is important, then their attitude would be completely different to basically everything I said the rest of the day. So, you know, like the idea that we don't treat our learners as like unruly kindergartners who need to be corralled or brow beaten into finishing their e -learning, but as partners in, you know,

Holly Owens (19:51.205)
Mm -hmm.

DaNadia Johnson (20:12.956)
Thank you.

Julie Dirksen (20:14.642)
solutions and that part of the learning process is to engage them in what should we be doing? How do we do this better? How do we, you know, if this is the thing that we all agree we're doing, how do we disseminate it? You know, those kinds of things and have it be more of a conversation. Now, I totally understand that that is harder than uploading the course to the LMS. I get it. But if something's not working, maybe it's time to try something else.

Holly Owens (20:33.796)
Yes it is.

Holly Owens (20:43.844)
Exactly. Exactly.

Julie Dirksen (20:44.554)
So, and I do think the last one is really looking hard at the question of how do we make this new behavior as easy as possible? You know, honestly, like, if I get any motivation from my learners at all, but I make the task is really simple or really easy to execute on, then we're, you know, that motivational messaging can sometimes have a dent and sometimes it doesn't, it just depends.

But honestly, making it easy to do pretty much always helps. You know, so.

DaNadia Johnson (21:15.548)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (21:15.587)
Yeah, we call that happy path at Amazon and pharmacy. Yeah, happy path. There is sad paths, lots of them, but the happy path is where we're going.

Julie Dirksen (21:19.442)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

DaNadia Johnson (21:19.532)
There's a...

Julie Dirksen (21:26.386)
Right. Yeah, because I tend to think one of the things I say sometimes is that I think the primary responsibility of instructional designers is the ruthless management of cognitive load. You know, we're our job is to figure out how do I help you with this complicated thing, but make it not feel overwhelming. And I think that that's still true when we're dealing with the behavior change. If your perception is this is complicated and horrible and overwhelming, and I have the option to ignore it and kind of just keep doing what I'm doing.

people are going to avail themselves of that option pretty often. So how do we fix that as much as possible?

DaNadia Johnson (22:03.004)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (22:03.075)
Yeah, I always say I mentioned cognitive load quite a bit in some of my meetings because people are just, it's so text, it's so text heavy, some of the things that we get and I'm like, this is way too much. How do we simplify this and make it more understandable, you know, for an, for accessibility purposes too, it's supposed to be like at a sixth grade reading level. and they're using all these very like terms I don't, I've never even heard of. There's so many acronyms and things like that. So definitely.

Julie Dirksen (22:21.042)
Right.

DaNadia Johnson (22:30.556)
Yeah.

Julie Dirksen (22:30.738)
Yeah, the acronym thing. Somebody was in one of my workshops and they were explaining their behavior change problem and they used like 19 acronyms to explain it. And I'm like, I think I might know one issue right now. Yeah, there's probably other stuff, but I think I can identify one thing just out of the gate. So.

Holly Owens (22:34.531)
I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.

Okay.

Holly Owens (22:42.402)
I got it. I identified that.

You

Holly Owens (22:54.018)
So, you know, you've been in the industry for a very long time. You're very well known. We get a lot of inquiries from our audience members. Nadia does, I do, through LinkedIn, about working in this industry. You probably are aware of the influx of transitioning teachers who are coming into the L &D fields and, you know, they're just interested in instructional design, LXD, all different kinds of things. So...

Julie Dirksen (23:10.29)
Hmm.

Holly Owens (23:19.427)
If you had to tell them, like give them the best advice about jumping into this field, like what would that advice be from you?

Julie Dirksen (23:28.755)
Yeah, I mean, I think the big one for people who want to get into it is to just make sure that you understand kind of what people do with their days. Jane Bozarth and I have had this conversation quite a lot. There's a logic to transitioning teachers looking at instructional design because of this instructional component, right? I have all this teacher training. I think this might transfer over. But the way that a second grade classroom teacher spends their day and the way that an instructional design doing software training,

spends their day can be very, very different, right? And that's fine. Like we've always had people coming in from teaching who have loved it and been, you know, they're people who are interested in the technology. Right, exactly. I think it's a fabulous path in, but just make sure, like if you're somebody who really thrives on, you know, the energy of the classroom and, you know, that one -on -one connection with people, like being, creating...

Holly Owens (24:07.33)
Nadia myself.

Julie Dirksen (24:24.786)
you know, software training in an e -learning program is probably actually not a great fit, right? Like it's such a different way to spend your day. And so, and you know, it's no, it's no shade on anybody in that situation because it's really like, you know, I think, I think career development is always about kind of like finding your superpowers and kind of leaning into them. Tim Ferriss, who is an interesting individual, but he has one thing that he says that I really like, which is,

Find the thing that's easy for you to do that other people find hard. And that that's probably one of your unique offerings, right? And I think it shouldn't just be easy, but it should also give you energy in the end. When I was an early instructional designer, I spent a lot of time writing out step -by -step instructions for software and taking screen caps, which I did not particularly enjoy. And I'm happy to be done with it. I did not have to do that anymore. And if the AI wants to take that task, I'm fine with it. But.

Holly Owens (24:56.77)
Ugh.

Holly Owens (25:18.817)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

Julie Dirksen (25:22.706)
But I did love like unraveling the problem of what's, you know, what is this audience need and understanding that and then kind of, you know, digging through the material and trying to figure out how do we organize some way that people can understand. And I really liked, you know, the rhythm of project work, right, because you had kind of a beginning, middle and end and then you'd kind of wrap and go to the next thing. So like there were a bunch of things about the field that I really loved. And if you can.

find those things in instructional design, then it's a great path. I think it's a wonderful field to be a part of because honestly, most of us wind up interested in it because we are good at helping people. And so it means that everybody you work with is we're all a big bunch of helpers. And that I think makes us nicer to be around than in some other fields. But at the same time, if the things that you love about teaching are not

have nothing to do with sitting at a computer or nothing to do with like dealing with big piles of documentation and kind of beating them into, you know, beating them into better shape or, you know, dealing with a lot of procedural knowledge or compliance training or any of those kinds of things. And, you know, maybe this isn't the right thing. Maybe classroom facilitation, you know, for training departments or something like that would be a better fit where you're still getting that one on one contact or you still feel like you're helping people. I think there's a lot of ways that people can go, but I do think.

that awareness of what do you actually do all day long and is it a good fit for you is a really important thing to figure out.

Holly Owens (26:54.433)
Yeah. Yeah.

DaNadia Johnson (26:58.428)
I think that's like really sound advice. I think a lot of transitioning teachers and people wanting to move in the field just kind of like flock to it thinking that they'll like it, but don't really like find their niche within the L &D umbrella. Like they kind of just see like, instructional designer, I'll head there. But there's so many different roles in L &D. Like there's so many things that you can do and finding that is so important.

Like I knew that I loved the lesson planning part, the thinking about the curriculum, the thinking about the learning experience piece of teaching, all of the logistics and the cutting and the, it was fun at times, but just wasn't what I wanted to do all the time. So I think that that's such a great point. And I really hope that our audience really like takes that into consideration when thinking about.

Holly Owens (27:56.768)
Yeah.

DaNadia Johnson (27:57.66)
moving into the field. Yeah.

Holly Owens (28:00.641)
You definitely, you definitely like in a play, you're the lead as the teacher, but once you get into instructional design, you're more the stagehand, more the backend process. It's a transition. And I noticed too that a lot of teachers come out with a lot of trauma from being the lead, you know, and they have to deal with that. And they're just like, well, I don't know, like the routines are so different. So that I agree with Narnia, that's really sound advice and thinking about what you love.

Julie Dirksen (28:01.074)
Yeah.

DaNadia Johnson (28:09.788)
Yeah, you're.

Julie Dirksen (28:09.938)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Holly Owens (28:30.208)
what can translate into instructional design and what's good there.

DaNadia Johnson (28:35.26)
Yeah.

Julie Dirksen (28:35.954)
Yeah, like making a PowerPoint deck for a talk is like a fun thing for me. I'm like, I'm going to find some cool art. I'm going to do this. And I'm going to pick this stuff out. And like hours will fly by and all this kind of stuff, like all the float state stuff. And so not everything I do gets to be fun. But obviously, there are people for whom making a PowerPoint deck sounds tedious and unpleasant. And so being able to kind of, again, find the things.

Holly Owens (28:40.352)
Yeah?

DaNadia Johnson (28:40.508)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Holly Owens (28:45.344)
Yeah.

Julie Dirksen (29:04.306)
Like I said, I don't think they necessarily need to be easy. I think stretch is fine. You know, like stretch goals and things like that are fine or learning new things are fine. But ultimately, you know, if you're doing the wrong thing at the end of the day, you feel totally ground down. If you're doing the right thing, you might feel exhausted, but in like a good kind of charged up way. And that's what you're that's what you're always looking for. And so if you don't find it in in sort of some of the traditional instructional design spaces, then, you know, look elsewhere. But.

DaNadia Johnson (29:19.896)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (29:20.256)
Yeah.

Julie Dirksen (29:31.858)
But just be aware of that because sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference. You know, like I used to do a lot of project management and then when I finally stopped doing it, I was like, wow, I kind of hate project management. I'm really happy to not do it anymore. You know, but you did it because it was like, I need to learn this skill and it's an important part of my professional development. And then at a certain point, you're like, now I don't have to. You know, I still have to do some project management, but I try to avoid it if I can. And certainly,

Holly Owens (29:44.511)
No.

DaNadia Johnson (29:44.7)
Hey, hey, why is that now?

DaNadia Johnson (29:57.34)
Exactly. Yeah.

Julie Dirksen (30:01.906)
Mostly it's managing my own project, so I'm not trying to manage other people and things like that. But looking for the things that give you energy is the bottom line.

Holly Owens (30:07.199)
Yeah.

DaNadia Johnson (30:15.036)
Yeah, I can totally resonate.

Holly Owens (30:15.711)
I 100 % agree with you because in the proj... yep.

So like finding the things where the time you're saying just flies by instead of like struggling for certain things I struggle with. And I'm probably in the minority here, but I love project management. Yeah, yeah, we're around, we're around.

Julie Dirksen (30:34.578)
And I'm glad that those people exist in the world. I think it's great.

DaNadia Johnson (30:40.844)
We have energy and I'm like, thank you. I'm so excited now that I don't really have to even touch the project management side of learning design. I love it. I'm like, yes. I was like, that totally resonates with me because I was like, yes.

Holly Owens (30:52.51)
Ha ha ha.

Julie Dirksen (30:57.074)
Yes, you and me, Nadia, we're on the same track on that one.

Holly Owens (30:59.938)
Hahaha!

DaNadia Johnson (31:07.483)
Well, this has been an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for joining us, Julie. We're coming up on the end here. So I want to ask you, where can the audience find you? And what are you looking forward to in these upcoming months? Is there anything exciting that you want to share with the audience that we didn't cover? And then also, where can they find you?

Julie Dirksen (31:32.946)
Yeah, I'll make sure that I give you links for the show notes and things. My main website is usablelearning .com. I also have one course up, one e -learning course up at designbetterlearning .com. I'm hoping to get some more up there soon, but you know, everything takes longer than you think it will. But and then the books can be found on kind of all of the major outlets. I have book pages on my website.

but also Amazon and Barnes and Nobles and things like that. The best, if you're in the US, the best place to buy the book is peachpit .com. And if they use my last name, you get a really nice discount on the books on the peachpit .com website. They do do free shipping. And so it's the best place to buy them in terms of...

DaNadia Johnson (32:17.852)
Oops, we left it out.

Holly Owens (32:20.542)
my. I like that.

Julie Dirksen (32:27.122)
in terms of both price and, like I said, free shipping and things like that. Unfortunately, once you ship abroad, it starts to get a little bit more expensive and you have to deal with shipping and customs and some things like that. But if you're in the US, that's the best place to do it. But it should be available pretty much everywhere. I also have a Facebook group for and it's the book title of the first book, Design for How People Learn. And there is lots of instructional designers there. And it's been a little bit sleepy lately because I've had a few things going on, but I'm going to.

Holly Owens (32:55.453)
Hahaha.

Julie Dirksen (32:56.85)
try to kind of get back in there a little bit more often. And it's really a tremendous community if anybody has any questions, this is a place to go ask and get feedback on things. So.

Holly Owens (33:09.213)
Absolutely. The ID community, like you said, we're just, we want to share, we want to collaborate, we want to help everybody that we can. It's really a great, a great community to be a part of. So thanks again, Julie. We appreciate you and can't wait for people to hear this episode.

DaNadia Johnson (33:25.084)
Yes.

Julie Dirksen (33:25.938)
Yeah, thank you.