Intentional Curiosity

Robert Avinger (00:01):

Could my manager have done a better job of providing me with feedback? Absolutely. It's still my responsibility to really bring a degree of intentional curiosity into that conversation, learn as much as I can about the feedback that was being provided so that I can understand it and I can ultimately do something about it. And so two things about that. Intentional is about making a choice in the moment, taking a breath, and then making a choice that's different from what may be automatic. And then curiosity is simply that notion of wanting to know more, wanting to learn as much as you can about the feedback being provided so you can understand it at a deeper level.

Troy Blaser (00:50):

Hello, welcome to Simply Feedback, the podcast brought to you by Learning Bridge. I'm your host, Troy Blaser, and I am excited for today's conversation. We are thrilled to have Robert Avinger as our guest. Robert is a seasoned leadership talent and organizational development consultant and the president of Avinger Consulting LLC. With over 30 years of experience, Robert has been empowering individuals and organizations by fostering strong intentional relationships that drive exceptional business outcomes. He has previously held senior leadership roles at AllianceBernstein and Tivity Health, and is also deeply involved in community service as the board chair of Senior Ride Nashville. Robert, welcome to Simply Feedback is so great to have you with us today.

Robert Avinger (01:36):

Thank you so much, Troy. I'm thrilled to be here. Excited for the conversation.

Troy Blaser (01:41):

Yeah. We'll start with a question that we ask of each of our guests, but I wonder if you would tell us about a time that somebody gave you feedback. Maybe it had an impact on your career or your personal life, but is there a story that you could share with us?

Robert Avinger (01:54):

Absolutely Troy. There are actually quite a few stories. I don't think the podcast is long enough to tell them all, but if it's okay, maybe I'll share two. One from the beginning of my career, very early in my career, and one from a more recent experience. So the early one in my career, so I started my career as an instructor with the North Carolina Outward Bound School. So for listeners who may not be familiar with Outward Bound, it's a wilderness based experiential education school where we would take students into the wilderness with the intent and purpose of personal growth and development as opposed to survival skills, et cetera. But that first summer that I was an instructor I led three courses back to back 23 day courses and a 23 day standard course included kinda backpacking, rock climbing, whitewater canoeing, community service, et cetera.

Robert Avinger (02:46):

And there was a particular student, a young woman on one of my courses who was challenged physically to complete a lot of the activities. And I was really diligent and intentional in supporting her and challenging her to lean on her peers to help her navigate the challenges that she was having. And she ended up completing the course successfully. And it was great. We went on and that fall I received out of the blue a letter, it's a handwritten letter from this young woman's mother. And the feedback in that letter was really remarkable. It was a expression of her appreciation for my role in her daughter's experience on that Outward Bound course and the difference that it made not only in her daughter's life, but in the life of their family. And it was incredibly empowering for me to receive that feedback. And certainly affirming to me that I was on the right path with what I was choosing to do with my career. And it really helped solidify my intention and my aspirations to do more of this kind of work in the personal development realm, if you will. And I still have that letter. I pull it out on tough days and I read it.

Troy Blaser (04:05):

Yeah.

Robert Avinger (04:05):

It's kind of reaffirming again. So that's a piece of feedback that I got on the early stage of my career more recently, and kind of the other end of the spectrum, I was at an internal corporate role and it was during a midyear review with my manager and my manager gave me some feedback, uh, that was pretty challenging. And it was feedback around the experience of my peers on the HR team that I was not collaborating. And in fact I was the opposite of not collaborating. I was uncollaborative and it was challenging feedback. And I tell the story because one of the things that I really think is crucial to feedback, we talk a lot about giving feedback and the importance of giving it the right way. Receiving feedback, I think is equally, if not more important.

Troy Blaser (04:58):

Yeah, absolutely.

Robert Avinger (04:59):

And I did not receive that feedback well. So I'll be a little bit vulnerable in the moment. I was frustrated by it. I was quite angry about it. I got in defensive mode and ultimately it actually did, in my view, as I look back on it and reflect, it did irreparable damage to my relationship with my manager. And within a year I was no longer at that company in that job. And I think that was kind of an inflection point. My, again, being vulnerable here, my inability to receive that feedback in a really positive way had some pretty significant implications for my ability to perform well there, my relationship with my manager and ultimately my tenure. So anyway, two kind of alternate stories there about receiving feedback.

Troy Blaser (05:49):

Such a great contrast. I mean, that first story about receiving the letter from this young woman's mother, number one, what a great way to start you off. Right? Like you said, very affirming in terms of what you chose to do. It can be easy for people in general to overlook the positive feedback to think, you know, they probably already know that they did a good job. I don't need to tell them that, but she took the time to send a handwritten letter. And boy, that has made a difference for you in all the years since then.

Robert Avinger (06:20):

You're spot on. And I think that positive feedback, that appreciation as a form of feedback is something that we often, we don't put those two things in the same conversation. Like we don't consider them to be feedback. So we often hold back on giving it.

Troy Blaser (06:37):

Yeah. And you were in your first year as an instructor, I imagine there were ups and downs to that and to get that affirmation to say, okay, there may have been some hard times, but you're doing a good job and you're definitely influencing at at least this person. How long did you stay at Outward Bound?

Robert Avinger (06:54):

All in basically three years.

Troy Blaser (06:56):

Oh, that's cool. As a much younger man, I worked at a family camp for a local university. Brigham Young University has a family camp up in the mountains. It wasn't necessarily the kinds of instruction that you were doing Outward Bound, but you know, worked on the ropes course, high ropes, low ropes, a little bit of that team building and things like that. But just the fact of spending so much time outdoors, we were up in the mountains all summer long. What a fantastic job. What a great opportunity for you to be a part of Outward Bound as well. Okay. So now thinking about the other end, the second story, and like you said, that importance and the challenge of receiving feedback graciously that can be so difficult. And you probably had no idea that that could be a turning point in terms of your career at that particular company just by going in for that evaluation that day.

Robert Avinger (07:47):

Absolutely. It was, um, it was surprising and in the moment, unwelcomed. And so it definitely had an impact for sure.

Troy Blaser (07:57):

At this point. You may be glad for how your career progressed, but if you were to give that self that version of you some advice, looking back, what would you say?

Robert Avinger (08:06):

Well, it's interesting, Troy, A lot of my career, especially over the last 18 to 25 years or so, has been in the space of leadership development. And, I can't tell you how many times I've actually in workshops, in developmental experiences, in coaching leaders, I've coached them about the importance of receiving feedback graciously and how to manage that in a productive way. And yet when I was faced with it myself, right, we're all human and we all have this tendency to want to self-protect and want to take care of ourselves. And that triggered that defense mechanism was immediately turned on for me. So it's challenging. One of the things that I often share with leaders that I'm coaching or working with is I talk about this notion of intentional curiosity. And if you can bring a degree of intentional curiosity into a feedback conversation, regardless of how the feedback has been presented to you.

Robert Avinger (09:12):

Now let me go back to my story. Part of my defense mechanism, or part of my judgment of the feedback is I judged my manager in the quality of the feedback that she gave me. It wasn't timely, right. It was in my midyear review, and the feedback that she was referencing was from about four months earlier. So it didn't tick the timely box. Right. It didn't include real specific tangible examples of when I wasn't being collaborative, so it didn't check that box. And it was also what I would consider to be triangulation. Right, so she was providing feedback from others on behalf of them. All that to say is, could my manager have done a better job of providing me with feedback? Absolutely. It's still my responsibility to really bring a degree of intentional curiosity into that conversation. Learn as much as I can about the feedback that was being provided so that I can understand it and I can ultimately do something about it.

Robert Avinger (10:15):

And so two things about that. Intentional is about making a choice in the moment. Taking a breath and then making a choice that's different from what may be automatic. And then curiosity is simply that notion of wanting to know more, wanting to learn as much as you can about the feedback being provided so you can understand it at a deeper level. So thinking back to my experience. I should have brought intentional curiosity to that conversation, and I think it would've changed a lot of things about that. It would've maintained perhaps a stronger, or maybe even strengthened my relationship with my manager. I would've understood kind of the nuances of my manager's expectations from a collaboration standpoint. And it certainly would've given me a way to interact with my peers that could have been more effective and more productive. Looking back on it, the feedback was spot on. There were several things that I had done that absolutely were not very collaborative in nature. And so it was valid feedback and had I brought intentional curiosity to that, it would've made all the difference in the world.

Troy Blaser (11:27):

Yeah. I like that idea. Intentional curiosity. You said making a choice to be intentional. That can really be a challenge because it sounds like your amygdala in your brain got triggered and at that point, it's kind of like a runaway train. There's not much you can do about it until that fight or flight sort of gets a moment to calm down. You're counting to 10 or whatever it is, the more rational part of your brain, your prefrontal cortex can come in and say, okay, now let's ask some questions. Now let's be curious about this feedback and things like that.

Robert Avinger (11:58):

And I think when the feedback doesn't necessarily align with the best practices of giving feedback, you're that much more apt to react, have the amygdala kinda leading the way on those reactions.

Troy Blaser (12:11):

Especially where you're in the, you have enough knowledge to know that the feedback is not being given in the best way. So it's sort of, that's now a roadblock to you receiving the feedback because you're, well, you're not doing it right. Do it. Right. And then I can receive it in the right way. That's right. Well, I mean, I was going to ask you, what are some of the biggest difficulties you've seen related to feedback? Maybe that's one of them, right? Is just that when our own brains get in our way with that fight or flight response, when the feedback comes,

Robert Avinger (12:39):

I think you're spot on. It is receiving feedback and how you receive feedback has lots of implications beyond just the feedback itself. It has implications for the relationship with the person giving you the feedback. It has implications for your own awareness of how you're showing up for your team and for your peers and and for the people that you're working with. And that basic human nature of wanting to protect ourselves can often get in our way of really receiving feedback in a productive way. The other challenge, which we also mentioned, equating appreciation with feedback. And truly sharing your appreciation for someone and not just your appreciation at a surface level. Like, thank you for leading the meeting today, but thank you for leading the meeting today. Here's the difference that that made to me and the other participants. So really taking it at another level is a really powerful and empowering form of feedback that we often gloss over.

Troy Blaser (13:45):

I like that. Yeah.

Robert Avinger (13:46):

And so that's a challenge that I see with feedback as well, is we just forget to share our appreciation with people.

Troy Blaser (13:52):

That extra step of you provided leadership in the meeting. Here's what happened after the meeting that maybe you didn't see that you would appreciate knowing, or in the case of an instructor, yes, you had my daughter for 23 days, but here's what happened after she came home that of course you wouldn't have known about. That's a useful way to think about if I'm going to share feedback. That's what is most interesting and maybe most helpful is what happened that you weren't able to see. I wanted to ask you about this project. So I guess while you were at AllianceBernstein, you helped to develop a career conversations toolkit. Is that right?

Robert Avinger (14:27):

That's correct, yes.

Troy Blaser (14:29):

Will you tell us a little bit about that toolkit? What was the purpose or the objective and maybe why you decided to work on that project?

Robert Avinger (14:36):

Absolutely. It was a fun project to work on how give credit where credit was due and had a small team that I led and the bulk of the work was generated by my team. But you know, as most organizations do, we had an engagement survey that we did every year. In fact, twice a year, where we were really canvassing the organization around a set of questions to understand the engagement levels of our employee population. Not only the engagement levels, but why they were engaged or why they weren't engaged. And over the course of a a number of surveys, we began to see a theme, especially in the comments. And oftentimes in those surveys, the really juice is found in the written comments that employees write. But we found a theme, especially from our more junior, younger professionals, that they were missing tools and resources to help them think about and navigate their career, whether that career was at AB or potentially led them elsewhere. And so that led us to begin to think about, okay, what are some resources and tools that we can give them all based on the principle that each individual owns their own career. We don't as an organization, have responsibility for your career development. You have responsibility for your career development as an employee and as an individual.

Troy Blaser (16:01):

Your career exists outside of your job at this company. Right.

Robert Avinger (16:05):

Exactly. Yes. And what we do have a responsibility for is to provide opportunities to give you the resources and tools, but you've gotta embrace those and use those. So we built this toolkit and it began with a pretty in-depth reflection exercise where we led employees through a reflection process around reflecting on their past experiences, their current strengths and opportunities and their future aspirations. And then based on that, we would point them in certain directions to go get resources and tools that they could tap into to support navigating them more in line with their aspirations and where they wanted to go. And then we would also give them feedback around where aspirations were maybe misaligned with strengths. And to say, okay, well that's great you have that aspiration, but let's have a further conversation around how do we maximize your strengths and how does that potentially shift your aspirations based on that?

Robert Avinger (17:08):

And that's a program or a process that's probably not necessarily earth shattering. It's probably something that lots of organizations may have. We actually took it a step further, and I think this made it differentiating, which is we built a complimentary toolkit for the managers of those employees to really give the managers the resources and tools to have the right kind of conversations with their employees about their career. So part of the feedback we received in the engagement survey was, my manager never talks to me about my career. And that's an important skillset and an important responsibility that a manager has not responsible for their career, but to engage them in conversation, to encourage them, empower them, and to coach them on how to navigate their careers. So we built that complimentary toolkit for managers and got lots of great feedback from managers about how useful it was, and it really gave them a sense of comfort and a way to talk with their staff about their careers. And I'll just say one additional thing about that toolkit for the managers that was critical. A big piece of it was really encouraging managers to change their mindset about their team members. And what I mean by that is oftentimes managers come into managing their team saying, I can't afford to lose Troy. Mm-Hmm. If lose Troy. I'm way behind the eight ball. And so that mindset of I can't afford to lose Troy makes me not want to talk to you about your career. Because the risk is you're going to go get another job somewhere.

Troy Blaser (18:53):

Yeah. You don't want to seed that idea of, oh, I, I should go somewhere else or advance in my career.

Robert Avinger (18:59):

Exactly. So we began to shift that mindset for managers. It's okay if your team members leave for another job. We'd love for that job to be at AllianceBernstein. And let's keep them at the firm as opposed to losing them to competition or to another organization. But to loosen that sense of protection of your team, I think was an important mindset shift for managers to, to make that was part of that toolkit process.

Troy Blaser (19:28):

That's fantastic. It's really cool to see different ways that you incorporated feedback. You had the employee engagement survey that was giving your team feedback in terms of what tools would be helpful, but then the kinds of feedback that the employees were engaging in the reflection. And then to have those conversations with their manager about their careers. That's fantastic. I love that. So I wanted to talk about your consulting firm. So great. You spent almost 20 years in sort of a corporate environment, right? With a couple of different companies. But now recently you started a consulting firm, Avinger Consulting. Tell me a little bit about that decision. What was that like? What do you see as the advantages now working in your own company? What kinds of problems are you able to solve for others that maybe you weren't able to do in a corporation?

Robert Avinger (20:15):

Yeah, great. Thank you. So the process decide about launching Avinger Consulting was a wonderful process. One that was lots of reflection. I did some writing and I talked to a lot of people and ultimately landed on the timing is right. I think I have something to offer that is potentially unique and differentiating and value added for organizations. And so Avinger Consulting is a sole practitioner. It's just me. Mm-Hmm. And it's rooted in the belief, Troy, that organizations are really nothing more than a network of relationships. In other words, an organization can have a really great idea, a great product, a great strategy to go deliver that product or to sell that idea. It can have really smart people, it can have a comprehensive plan to go execute on that strategy, et cetera. But if the relationships within the organization are suboptimal, or even at worse dysfunctional, it's going to impact your ability to achieve the kind of results that you want to achieve.

Robert Avinger (21:28):

So where I think I can help is coming into an organization and really helping that organization build a systemic capability around developing, strengthening and sustaining productive relationships that systemic is an intentional word. So it's less about coming and fixing a dysfunctional relationship. Hey, Troy and Robert don't trust each other. They're really fighting. They're, they don't collaborate, et cetera, et cetera. Fix them. I can do that. But that's one relationship in a network of a hundred, a thousand tens of thousands of relationships that exist even in a small organization. So that's the basic premise. How that gets delivered is really through three channels. There's executive coaching. So I work directly with executives to kind of develop that mindset around a relationship orientation. And then the behaviors that come out of that team building. So working with Intacct teams, cross-functional teams, new teams, maybe teams that have been around for a long time but have hit a plateau.

Robert Avinger (22:36):

Whatever the context of that team, there's opportunities to strengthen relationships and build capabilities around relationship building. And then the third area is when you think about organizations of a certain size, most people in that organization report into a frontline or mid-level manager. And in my experience over the last 20 plus years, working inside organizations, that cohort of leaders is often underwater. They're being asked to produce individual results and they're being asked to manage a team. Oftentimes they've never been trained on how to manage a team. So building leadership development experiences for that cohort of managers is that third kind of channel of delivery that I think I can help organizations with as they look to build that relationship capability. So that's Avinger Consulting. It's brand new. I just announced on LinkedIn in June of this year. And it's been great. I love it. I've got some good clients. I've got a pretty healthy pipeline and it's a lot of fun.

Troy Blaser (23:41):

I was going to ask, how is the transition from working for corporation to that entrepreneur on your own, having to cover, maybe you're having to wear a lot more hats than you used to have to wear. How's it going?

Robert Avinger (23:52):

It's going well. I've got, as I told someone the other day, there's a little bit of a low grade anxiety about a lot of things. But overcoming that low grade anxiety is just general excitement and having a good time and so far some success. But you're right. Wearing lots of hats. I've always had a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit. I got that from my dad. My dad was a entrepreneur. He was in academics for a while. He was a PhD in economics and was a professor of economics at Davidson College in North Carolina for a number of years. But then got into the business world and was very supportive of the entrepreneurial spirit. Watching him and learning from him embedded that spirit in me a bit. And it's, uh, I've really enjoyed it.

Troy Blaser (24:34):

An exciting new phase of your career, it sounds like.

Robert Avinger (24:37):

And one of the things I will also say is I've been overwhelmed by the support from my network of colleagues, from the jobs that I have had over the last 20 to 25 years. So really supportive and helpful as I was talking to them as part of that decision making process that I referenced, but also more recently too. So it's been great.

Troy Blaser (24:59):

That's neat. Well, kind of at the beginning of our conversation, you shared a couple of stories about times when you had received feedback. I know in your career you've had a chance to coach others and be a part of the feedback process kind of from a third person perspective. So I wanted to ask if there's an experience or a time when you've seen feedback cause a point of inflection in someone else's career or someone else's life, either for good or bad. Is there a story there that you could share with us?

Robert Avinger (25:27):

Lots of stories. We can go in a number of different directions. One that comes to mind, and this was a number of years ago, one of my roles inside an organization, I, I worked very closely with our executive team, our c-suite team. And one of the things that this c-suite team engaged in was debate. Right? And you hear the value of healthy debate and good conflict, et cetera. But there were times where those conversations would go off the rails. In looking at those experiences and kind of watching as someone responsible for engaging with them and trying to keep them on the rails, it was wonderful to see how they began to develop the capability to give each other feedback around how to engage in healthy debate. And there was one person in particular, he and I actually had lots of great conversations and our relationship started off kind of rocky, but through giving each other really robust comprehensive, productive feedback, our relationship did a 180.

Robert Avinger (26:35):

And that also had an impact on his relationship with others. It was really encouraging to see, and in fact, he's moved on to other experiences and he's actually in my pipeline for a possible engagement. So it's, uh, coming full circle with that. It was a really great experience just to see the value of not holding back when it would've been easy to hold back. And not only the value of solving a problem in and of itself, but the value that that had on the trust and the strength of the relationship going forward. And it gave him a new capability to use with the rest of his peers. So it was really, it's really helpful to see. That's

Troy Blaser (27:18):

Cool. I guess I would say, uh, maybe here in the United States, we could use better debate skills between, uh, you know, when you look at the political scene today,

Robert Avinger (27:28):

No doubt, no doubt.

Troy Blaser (27:30):

Is there a book or a couple of books that have significantly influenced you that you would recommend to others?

Robert Avinger (27:36):

Great question. I'm just finishing up actually reading a book. It's the latest book from Peter Block.

Troy Blaser (27:43):

Okay.

Robert Avinger (27:44):

He's kind of one of the elder statesmen of the leadership development and organizational development. A really in depth thought leader in this space. And he put out a book last year, taking a lot of the content through what he's learned from one of his lifelong mentors, a guy named Peter Koestenbaum. The name of the book is Confronting Our Freedom: Leading a Culture of Chosen Accountability and Belonging. It's not an easy book, right? It's not one of those books that you can kinda sit on the couch and read. I had to sit at a table highlighter notebook.

Robert Avinger (28:18):

I had to get into it. And it really caused a lot of reflection. And in essence, it is a book about this whole notion of freedom and inside the context of freedom, looking at the constructs of motivation and accountability and how oftentimes as managers we're led to believe you have to motivate an individual, or you have to engage an individual, or you have to hold someone accountable. And really this book kind of turns that notion a little bit on its head to say no. Each individual as a human being has the freedom, right. To choose being motivated or to choose accountability or to choose kind of responsibility and engagement. And as managers, our job is to create the environment where it's really easy for people to make that choice. And it's, that last part may not be a new concept, but Block's book really helps solidify that notion in terms of what managers are responsible for.

Robert Avinger (29:19):

A lot of what we've been talking about is the challenge of receiving feedback and this whole notion of freedom. What does that mean in terms of how we receive feedback? We can receive feedback with that intentional curiosity, the freedom to really choose to listen to that feedback in a really productive learning development way. Or we can choose to listen to that feedback or receive that feedback in ways in which we try to navigate around the environment. And so this whole notion of freedom and that, in its title, Leading a Culture of Chosen Accountability and Belonging. As a function of confronting that freedom. It's a really compelling and thoughtful book that I've enjoyed reading.

Troy Blaser (30:08):

I really like you pointing that out in that mid-year evaluation. I think the stereotype is that, well, my manager's going to give me feedback and I just have to listen and do what my manager says to do. You know? But I think you're pointing out, and I agree that no, you have a choice first in how you receive that feedback. And you can choose to be intentional about it. It's not just preordained that my manager says this and I'm going to have to do it no matter what it is. But there is that choice involved, and I really like that idea, that concept. So you've just started Avinger Consulting. Are there any projects that you're working on that you're especially passionate about right now that you want to share with us?

Robert Avinger (30:48):

One of the things that seems to be coming up in a lot of the conversations that I'm having with my network is the problem that organizations are having around onboarding managers. So organizations may be in a period of hiring up based on having a new contract or growth, et cetera. And with that comes the need to hire new managers, whether those are internal hires where people are getting promoted or hiring externally. And it goes back to this whole notion of generally these managers are frontline kind of new managers. And how do organizations spend the time on the front end to really orient them and onboard them into the culture of the organization where they are leading their teams in alignment to the expectations that the organizations has around leadership. And a lot of organizations don't have the resources or tools to do that, or the time really they're running and gunning and they've gotta deliver to client commitments, et cetera. And so six months in a manager looks up and says, gosh, I don't, I don't even know how to go about doing what I'm doing.

Troy Blaser (32:07):

I've been doing this job for six months and I don't even know what I'm doing yet.

Robert Avinger (32:10):

Exactly. Exactly. So investing in an onboarding program that is more than just your typical transactional onboarding program, but really kind of digs into what it means to lead your team, how to lead your team. And then I think the other piece that happens with it that I'm really excited about, and it goes back to the premise of my consulting practice, is all of a sudden you've got this peer group of managers who have a really strong relationship with one another and can lean on one another and help one another and challenge one another in their roles as managers. And so beginning to wade into a little bit of a design process around what does that manager onboarding program look like and how might it be a value add to organizations that are facing the challenges of how do we bring new managers in, in a way that really engages them, secures their longer tenure, and ultimately has an impact on the teams that they lead as well.

Troy Blaser (33:13):

You mentioned this has come up for you a few different times now in your work. Do you have a sense about why this is sort of a recurring theme right now

Robert Avinger (33:21):

In talking to organizations it is a concern about turnover and the impact that turnover has on an organization, and how can we address turnover from the very beginning? So that's one piece. The other is a realization that oftentimes managers are, and I'll say it this way, they're in over their head, and I don't mean that they're not capable. But it means they're underwater with the amount of pressure and the volume of responsibilities that we've given them without the development that comes along with it. So it's really a recognition that we need to do a better job of developing our managers. And a great place to start is when they're brand new. I think that's really where it's coming from.

Troy Blaser (34:11):

Yeah. When they're brand new is probably when they need the help the most.

Robert Avinger (34:14):

Exactly. And one of the impacts of that is the engagement of those managers. Like the appreciation that comes along with, oh, wow, you're investing in me. You care about my development and my growth. I really like this place. I'm going to stay here and really dig in and do my best work. So it's good.

Troy Blaser (34:33):

I'm, I'm going to choose to stay here.

Robert Avinger (34:35):

Exactly.

Troy Blaser (34:36):

Well, Robert, I really appreciate the conversation that we've had. We're kind of reaching the end of our time, but if people want to know more, if they want to connect with you, is that something you're open to? And how would you recommend that they do that?

Robert Avinger (34:49):

Absolutely. I'm always interested in networking and building relationships. Right. Relationships are where it's at. So you can find me on LinkedIn, Robert Avinger, and I'm based in Nashville, Tennessee. I think there are a couple of Robert Avinger out there, but I'm the one in Nashville. And then my website for my consulting practice is. My email address is on there. I've got a a way that you can get in touch with me on the website and I would love to hear from you.

Troy Blaser (35:16):

Fantastic. Well, thank you again. This has been an interesting conversation. I've really enjoyed getting to know you a little bit and the things that we've been able to talk about today.

Robert Avinger (35:25):

Likewise, Troy, this has been, this has been a lot of fun telling some stories, and I really appreciate you all inviting me to participate. Thank you very much. Good to get to know you as well.