The Talent Forge: Shaping Workforce Behaviors with Jay Johnson

Speak To Be Understood: The Human ROI Of Language with Stacy Richter

• Jay Johnson

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Fluency isn’t a streak; it’s a human connection. Jay sits down with Stacy Richter, CEO of Live Lingua, to unpack why real progress happens when we move beyond vocabulary drills and into immersive, person-to-person learning that mirrors how we actually speak, negotiate, and care for others. From a Minnesota medical center reducing interpreter delays to a manufacturing team winning trust across the border, Stacy shows how learning a language shifts teams from transactional messages to transformational relationships.

We get candid about brain science, too. That “rusty” Spanish you think you lost? It’s still there. Neuroplasticity means pathways reactivate under pressure and context, whether you’re navigating signs in Guadalajara or opening a meeting in German to change the tone in the room. Apps and AI are great gateways—low-friction ways to spark curiosity—but they can’t teach timing, tone, or the cultural rituals that make a joke land or a deal feel respectful. Native, trained tutors can, especially when they tailor your learning to your real world: intake questions for nurses, technical terms for engineers, or the phrases you’ll use on the factory floor.

Ready to build skills that travel with you and bring people closer? Listen now, then subscribe, share with a colleague who works across borders, and leave a review with the language you’re tackling next.

Meet the Host
Jay Johnson works with people and organizations to empower teams, grow profits, and elevate leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. For inquiries, contact jay@behavioralelements.com or connect below!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jayjohnsonccg/
Speaker Website - https://jayjohnsonspeaks.com

Jay Johnson:

Welcome to this episode of the Talent Forge, where together we are shaping workforce behaviors. Today, my guest is Stacy Richter, who is from a company called Live Lingua. Now, language is an absolute important aspect of any globalized business or any business that's dealing with customers. And oftentimes we find ourselves in a situation where English may be the second language for some of the participants. And Live Lingua is a solution that helps to develop language skills. And I'd like to say, welcome to the show, Stacy.

Stacy Richter:

Awesome. Thanks, Jay. It's great to be here with you and the Talent Forge.

Jay Johnson:

So this is such a fascinating thing to me. And I'm gonna share right out of the gate uh a little bit of embarrassment. I have had probably six years of Spanish language training, but I don't get to utilize it very often. I most certainly wouldn't feel comfortable giving a keynote in it. Uh, but it is something that has always fascinated me. It was never a priority when I was growing up in the education system in the US. But you have made this opportunity for people to essentially develop one of what I see as one of the most important skills, um, important skills that we could actually develop. So let me ask this question. How did you get to making this your passion, making this your career trajectory? And, you know, how important is learning another language, in your opinion?

Stacy Richter:

Yeah, yeah, that's a loaded question, Jay. I really fell bass backwards into it, literally. Uh you know, one of my favorite quotes, and I think it's often quoted to Seneca. I'm not sure if it's misquoted or not, but you know, uh, luck is when opportunity meets preparation. And I joined Live Lingua a little over two and a half years ago as a CEO, but it took me 25 years to even get to this point, long before I ever knew who Live Lingua was. And, you know, to give you the short version of my story, I grew up like a lot of us did, you know, and our parents are teaching us to go to school, get good grades, come out, get a good job, and you know, eventually pay a free mortgage, and you might be able to afford to retire. And that's exactly what I did. You know, went to school, got good grades, came out with an undergraduate degree, and went started my first corporate job at a Fortune uh 1000 company, international company. Um, but I'll tell you what, those two years were absolutely miserable. And uh I knew that's not what I wanted to do. I always wanted to be the CEO of a large multinational company, but I knew I was never going to be the top of this company. So uh I decided to leave and I did the only thing that I knew how to do, and that was go to go get more schooling. And uh so I ended up getting an MBA and you know, and I did it in a condensed uh timeline, but one of my professors said to me, He's like, Stacey, he's like, this MBA program, he's like, There's some technical things you're gonna learn and retain and some skills you build. He's like, But there's two things you're gonna take away from this the most. One is you're definitely gonna outgrow the position you're in. And two, you might even outgrow the company. And that's exactly what happened to me. It was, you know, we finished up our program March 31st, and I knew, man, what I'm doing now I was in sales and marketing for a small oil and gas manufacturing company. I said, this isn't it. This is not my career for the next 20 plus years. And I literally drove three hours north to Emmonton and met with my sales manager, and I gave him my resignation on April 1st. And he looks at me, he's like, Stacey, this is a long way to go for an April Fool's joke, and it's not very funny. Like, this is not an April Fool's joke. I said, No, no qualms, no, yeah, we can keep a relationship. There's no bad, hard feelings here. I just, this is not what I want to do. And I didn't know where I was gonna go, Jay. And when um I resigned, I didn't know what I was gonna do, and I was stressed and worried, of course. So you know what, but again, opportunity comes when you know preparation uh is lucky. So a good friend of mine had approached me, and that's where we started our very first marketing agency and uh had my first venture as an entrepreneur. Long story short, to shorten this up, 20 plus years of acquiring businesses, using my marketing skills to grow and scale and exit them, um, I found myself in Live Lingua. And the co-founders at the time were looking for an exit. I was involved with another venture company who uh actually bought them out. And I was in place to re uh exit the co-founders, hire another CEO, build a marketing system so we could scale this business. And as it turns out, um, over the first uh couple of months of working with the team and seeing what we do and how we serve people, I fell in love with the company. And I approached a venture company and the co-founder said, hey guys, I understand the company and the business model. Um, I think I am the best person to be the CEO of this organization. Everybody agreed, and here I am two and a half years later. But talking about the language part is I had an understanding of learning a second language and its challenges long before I ever knew about live lingua. Because part of my degree I spent uh studying in Germany. Now, similar to maybe part of your education experience, I spent two and a half years studying German in university from Calgary. And I learned more German in the three to six months I was in Germany than I did over two and a half years of studying. And that was my first clue into what the power of language can do. My confidence went up, right? My it was a skill nobody could ever take away from me. And um, I was able to communicate with people around the world um who also spoke some German and some English. Now I wasn't great at German, but come full circle 360 degrees. I literally was on a in a meeting with an MA company of Austria. I was able to open the conversation in German, and I'll tell you what, the dynamic of that meeting changed a hundred percent. It was way more collaborative and participatory from both sides because I could bridge that gap between our languages. Now we didn't host the meeting in German, they spoke very good English, but the effort and um and connection we made because we had that in common was amazing. So that's kind of my story into Live Lingua and why we're here today.

Jay Johnson:

Well, that's incredible. And you know, what what an awesome way to kind of like just take that leap and have the courage to be like, all right, this isn't it. Let's go to the next. I don't know what the next is, but I'm gonna know that this is not it. And I I wish people would actually do that more often. So that's that's really powerful, Stacey. Thank you. Yeah, for me, and this was an interesting, this was an interesting aspect. Um I thought I had forgotten everything that I'd been trained in Spanish, and then uh was working with an international client where I traveled to Guadalajara, Mexico, and within three days, I did. I felt like I had I I remembered a ton of what I thought was gone. Um can you talk to me about that? So, like, what is it that's happening when we learn something and then you know, don't use it? Obviously, it gets a little rusty, and then that sort of comes back. It seems that language is one of those key aspects that does that often. And between your and my shared story, it just it's it's interesting to me.

Stacy Richter:

There's definitely something there, and and I'm gonna go on a limb, because I'm not a neuroscientist by any stretch. I just maybe a little more well-read than than a lot of people on the topic. But when you think about what learning any new skill does, is the neuroplasticity of the brain, it rewires your neurons, make different connections, and it creates these pathways for that skill to take hold. So a lot like when you were learning Spanish, I was learning German, we were maybe not knowing it at the time, but we're creating those neural pathways. And that has muscles have memory as a result of that. So if we don't use something, it doesn't 100% atrophy, eventually does come back, sometimes more quickly in others, depending on the skill. So the benefit of that language learning is that skill that nobody can take away from us because it will always be there. Those pathways in our brain are always going to be there. We just have to light them up, like going to Guadalajara or meeting on, you know, getting on an MA meeting with an uh, you know, an Austrian broker. Um, we just have to light those pathways up again. And it does come back very quickly. Not unlike a physical workout, right? If we go and we have we have a skill in a sport, whether it's hockey, baseball, basketball, whatever it happens to be, or just working out the gym, when we take some time off and we go back to it, yeah, it might be a little wobbly at first, but then the muscles come back, they have the memory of all of the training that we've done. And language skill is no different. It just resides in the brain instead of in our biceps and in our thighs, for example.

Jay Johnson:

Well, and I love that. So I as a as a behavioral scientist, I do study neuroscience and and you're spot on. And one of the cool things is when I was when I was in school, when I was younger in school, they always said, well, learn a language as a child because you know that's the easiest place to learn. And and that seems to be true. And we do know from cognitive neuroscience that our neuroplasticity is at its highest peaks up to the age of about 23 to 25 years old, give or take, obviously. But uh the good thing is is within the last several years, neuroscience has definitely demonstrated that neuroplasticity lasts throughout our entire lives. So if you have an audience, if you have not learned a language and you want to, don't be discouraged. You can teach your dogs new tricks. But let's talk a little bit about live lingua because I think it's important how we learn different things. And we all have different, say, learning styles or approaches, um, different learning styles and approaches. And a lot of people probably assume a live language is going to be something like uh, you know, Rosetta Stone, where you're gonna sit behind a computer and you're gonna learn, or it's gonna be something like uh Duolingo, where you sit and you know do some kind of app-based whatever. But live ling was a little bit different, uh, hence the name. But go ahead and let's talk a little bit about that approach.

Stacy Richter:

Yeah, um, great point, Jay. When we talk about tech the influx of technology for language learning versus conventional language learning, is um what is the best way or the fastest way to learn a language? And I think it's universally accepted that full immersion is the number one way to learn a language. Pick up, move to a country where that's all they speak. If it's Spanish, go somewhere in Latin America where they speak very little English if that's your first language, and you will you will learn Spanish very, very quickly. You're forced to adapt that way, and you will learn very quick. It's full immersion. That's not possible for most of us. Most of us just can't pick up for six months, leave our the comfort of our homes uh in Calgary or you know, otherwise, and live in the country and just to learn the language. So the second best way is to simulate full immersion. Now, thankfully, the co-founders of Live Lingua had figured this out many, many years before it was even ever popular. One of the very first companies to do an online lesson, and this is long before Zoom, uh, where we were doing Skype lessons online, but it was full immersion. So when you're working with a native Spanish-speaking tutor or a native German-speaking tutor, and all they're talking to you is in that language, it's a way to simulate full immersion, but from the comfort of your home and your desk. So when we're talking about live tutoring, that's the second best way to learn a language is online immersion with a native-speaking live tutor who is professionally trained in teaching, right? It's not just a matter of finding somebody who knows how to speak Spanish and can try and teach me Spanish to anybody off the street. Because as we mentioned, we all have different learning styles, whether it's kinesthetic, auditory, visual. I'm a very visual person that it's very important we have a tutor who's professionally trained in teaching a second language, as well as being a native speaker of that. So that's where we are a lot different than the technologies that are emerging. And some of them you've already mentioned. Those are great supplemental tools, but we get more students who have gone on a 400, 500-day Spanish streak and then realize when they traveled to Latin America they didn't really know how to speak Spanish. And so they come to us say, I need help because that didn't work the way I thought it was. Uh, so I need help. And they generally need full online immersion to do that.

Jay Johnson:

Oh, and and that's that's really funny because yeah, learning from a textbook and then real-world application. I I'll share a quick story that I did find funny because not all Spanish language is the same. And in the very, very short time that the US was permitted to travel to Cuba. Uh, this was a number of years ago. My dad had always wanted to go, so I took him to Cuba. And we had uh we had a home stay with uh a place that you know had multiple rooms and everything else like that. It was an incredible experience. And the the house mother that was there, I will never forget, she was messing with me so bad because Cuban Spanish is very fast. It is very fast. It's a dialect, there's a different, you know, intonation on specific words. And I had sort of practiced geared up, utilizing one of the apps to try to help me like recall some of this before I traveled to Cuba. And it was just so fascinating because I I was like, if you slow down, I can actually understand more of what you're saying. And she just sped up on me and just she was laughing. She was like, get faster, get faster. But I think it's just interesting that the immersion aspect of it really brings it out in us. And I I don't know this for certain, but you know, as part of as part of learning and as part of language, one of the ways in which our brain learns is when there's a release of adrenaline and actually cortisol. We think of them as the stress chemicals. But when we're stressed, is actually when our brain says, oh, this is important. We need to retain it, we need to do this. So the immersion and being in a space of, hey, I am I'm out of sorts here. I I don't know what to do. I can't read these signs, I can't do this, puts a little bit of stress brain and probably certainly you know intensifies how quickly we end up remembering, oh, that means stop, or oh, peligroso, that means danger. Don't go down that way. So exactly. Let's take this to the corporate side because I I I did see, you know, and and an after review, I think this is where it becomes really important for our audience, right? When we're thinking about workplace behaviors, our workplace is expanding consistently, whether it's our customers, our clientele, whether it's our vendors, our suppliers, or even whether it's the coworkers there. Um, you know, while English has become more universal, there is still an advantage to speaking in uh multiple different languages. So let's talk about that. What have you seen as CEO of Live Lingua? What have you seen across the corporate landscape and the importance of uh learning new languages or implementing new languages in the workplace?

Stacy Richter:

You know, Jay, I've seen a division on two sides of the same coin. One is the transactional side of languages and communicating, right? Do you understand the words that I'm saying and the meaning that I'm giving? Okay. That's the transactional side. And that's generally where technology has really supplanted live tutoring and general study, because we can handle the transactional side. Anybody can jump on Google Translate, right? Type in what they want to say in their language and have it translate into another language. That's the transactional side and it has its place. But when we're talking about business at the corporate level, whether it's small to medium-sized business that, you know, I'm working internationally with a VA firm to, you know, for some assistance, or I'm a Fortune 500 and I'm dealing with thousands of employees all around the world, is the transformational side of language learning. And when I first started working with Live Lingua two and a half years ago, I was thinking almost initially of the transactional side at the corporate level, because right, we have to deal with people cross-border, whether it's US to Mexico, throughout Europe, Asia, whatever it happened to be, that there are some employees that are going to need to speak the language to be able to communicate. But that was still really transactional. And when we started working with a lot of US firms and training their teams to speak Spanish or some of their international teams to improve their English, for example, um, there was an entirely unintended benefit that I didn't foresee. And that was what it did to the teams and the cohesion of those teams. I'll give you one example. We worked with the Medical Services Center out of Minnesota, and they strangely enough have a large influx of Latin Americans uh in Minnesota, which I would we I would never have predicted.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, I know Scandinavian population because they like the cold too. Uh I would not have guessed Latin American population.

Stacy Richter:

Uh, me neither. So again, you know, a new surprise to me, but as a welcome surprise. And what they found was that they were having difficulty treating a lot of their patients because of language barrier. Um, and they relied very heavily on interpreters where they'd uh it would take up to an hour, maybe two hours to get an interpreter on phone. It was very expensive to do. And it's and what they were because it's such a high-touch industry in the medical services, they were not making a connection with their patients, right? They these are people who are coming from countries where they generally don't trust institutions, whether it's government or medical. So to use a language transactionally, they weren't making that connection with their patients, and it wasn't serving anybody. So we started working with them in Spanish, and of course, they became better at serving their patients because now they're speaking Spanish, they don't have to find interpreters and they're um moving on. But the unintended benefit that I never saw coming, Jay, was when we trained a team of 10 or 12 people in a cohort, was now they found a common mission and they started practicing on their own outside of their their private and group classes. They started using Spanish in the lunchroom with each other so they could practice amongst each other. And the the uh what's the word I'm looking for? The connection the team made just changed their entire team dynamic outside of what the transactional side was doing. So to be able to offer that to a group of people in a corporate environment, um, you can only imagine how that makes a corporation uh you know much more productive, right? Their employee retention and engagement is going to go up as a result because now they have taught their people or enabled their people to learn the skill nobody can take away from them that also happen to actually apply to their job. So there's the two sides of the coin. It was the transactional side that everybody could see coming, but it was the transformational side that like, ah, there's the magic moment we're all looking for. And and and that's what we tend to focus on when we're working with small and medium-sized businesses or you know, as as big as Fortune 500.

Jay Johnson:

Well, I love that. And I'll I'll dip into a little of the behavioral science behind it. When a team undergoes a shared struggle with a common goal, it is something that actually can massively improve motivation, performance, productivity across a number of different sectors. So now you've created uh, you know, that opportunity for them to say, hey, not this isn't this isn't uh, you know, this isn't natural for all of us. We were all started at at sort of zero. Now it's on us to overcome this. And they're doing it not just because of their own self-learning, but they're doing it to create a better positive impact on the people that they're serving. So that's such a sweet spot of human transformation. That's that's really powerful. I I wanted to mention something else that I think is really fascinating. So um, I and I I didn't even mention this to you beforehand. I didn't think about it until you brought it up. One of my very first focal points was cultural adaptability. And it was working with um students, students who had come from international, you know, literally how I became a trainer was students that were coming from international to our university here in Detroit, Michigan, and helping our university faculty have better relationships and interactions with those student populations. I translated that to the healthcare space. And I've I've probably trained cultural adaptability with about six or seven thousand different workers in the healthcare space. But exactly what you said is so true. We have an entire section on that designated to how do you address gaps or language barriers? Because in many, and it's not just and it's not just Latin America, in a number of different um uh uh cultural minorities in the United States, we do find there's a little hesitation, and and rightfully so, a little hesitation towards uh the healthcare system. So the fact that you're able to bridge that by um supporting a team and being able to communicate in that native language is is so powerful. So uh let's let's take a look at something else because you know, if if I'm in the audience and I'm listening, one of the things that I'm gonna be thinking to myself is, oh, AI. AI is gonna help us solve these language issues. You know, eventually I'm gonna have a little bug in my ear. And there already are some technologies, albeit I have tried, I've I've tried at least one. It was not effective. Not effective. I was actually speaking with a Japanese counterpart and I said something, and the look on his face was absolutely surprised. We discovered uh through a process of scientific rigor, we discovered that I, you know, uh that I said something that was probably inappropriate to at the very least, and we had a great laugh about it. Um but I I I won't be uh I won't be crude on the podcast, but uh we do know that there's a lot of technological solutions that are coming that are supposed to be ideally uh creating the conditions for real-time communication. Do you think that that'll ever take away the need for us to learn languages or for us to be more uh global in our communication patterns?

Stacy Richter:

I'm so glad you asked that question because Jay, this is something I've struggled with over the last two and a half years and even before, is the technology pendulum, which ways of swinging and how far does it go? You know, the short answer to the question is no, I don't think it will decrease or take away from our need uh for actually learning a language. Uh, and if anything, it's going to increase the need. Because the technology pendulum has flung so far to the right that AI was the exclusive solution, whether it's some of the apps you talked about or some of the you know evergreen programs you could take for self-study. And the pendulum swung so far that way that people lost, and and COVID amplified this really, lost that desire for a human connection, right? This person to person, um, even though we're on a screen on a video, we still have a connection because I'm not talking to my phone, right? It's even better than teleconferencing. But we're starting to see the pendulum start to swing back to this human connection piece because at the end of the day, we are emotional creatures. And the the phone is not emotional with us. So we do need that understanding and connection from another individual and a sentient being that gets it. So I don't think that it's ever going to replace what we do with live tutoring or actual language learning. And I I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's actually gonna increase the need because what I love about technology, depending on whether or not I want to look at it as a threat or an enabler in my business, is that it has brought hundreds and millions of people to language learning that otherwise would not have ever explored it. Right? To you know, take the time to sit at your desk and jump on a call with a live tutor once or twice a week is a commitment, not just financially, but a commitment of time and and energy. But to jump on an app for five minutes, practice some vocabulary, the transactional side, that's brought millions of people thinking that I want to learn how to speak Spanish. I want to learn how to speak German. This is just where I start. Otherwise, they would never have started. And it lights that language learning fire, they start to get a the taste of what it is to learn some of the language. Maybe they also, you know, are watching their favorite movie, and there's a little excerpt in there where they're speaking German, like I'm a big diehard fan. So there's I love when the German parts come up because like I know exactly what he said, right? Maybe they get they get that taste of, oh my God, I understood that one sentence because I practice the vocabulary, I want more of that. And then they start to find avenues in their life to apply it. Now they start meeting other people who speak the language, and it's about that person to person. So where I think technology and um live tutoring, the way we deliver it, um, there's an intersection or enablers for each other, and people will eventually transition from the AI, you know, self-study programs into jumping into uh an immersion style program and say, I actually want to do this. Now it's not everybody, that's for sure, but it's it has opened up for hundreds of millions of people who otherwise would never have even thought they wanted to learn another language.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah. No, that makes total sense. And I I I would agree with that. I think in many cases, technology, technology is like the nutra suite of, I'm gonna call it the nutra suite of connection, right? Like we feel like we're connected because of social media, AI, whatever it is, but it's not the same as true human interaction. It doesn't, and even just from a neurobiological standpoint, it doesn't actually trigger the same depth of neurotransmitters when you and I are face to face shaking hands or you know, sitting around a coffee table. So I I agree with that 100%. The other thing, as you were talking, I thought about of, you know, it and I'm I'm I'm trying to think about how this functions within the world of technology, but let's play the play the game of I'm doing something in maybe one of the apps or I'm utilizing uh Chat GPT to do some translation for me. I would imagine that when working with, and and I've had the luxury of speaking in about 40 different countries at this point in time, many, many different languages. Uh body language is something that's semi-universal in many aspects, but there's a lot of different nuances in a lot of different cultures. And I'm thinking of my German colleagues, and you know, cross your fingers here in the US is like cross your fingers that it works. And in Germany, it's press your thumbs, you know, press thumbs. And I found that to be like what as I was learning, but I would have never gotten that without immersion, without being there, without seeing them do something. Oh, we've got to press, because it's just not something that you're gonna learn in an app or in a GPT or some of that sort of cultural nuance of even things like sarcasm or other things. I would imagine that live lingua does a great job having it be that immersive thing of kind of picking up on some of those cultural aspects as well. Can you speak to that maybe a little bit?

Stacy Richter:

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, talking about the cultural aspects, context means so much. And when I first started at Live Lingua and exited, uh, the CEO, the co-founder, and his partner, he said to me, He's like, Stacey, this is my philosophy on language learning. He's like, You truly understand a language when you can tell somebody a joke in their native language and they get it, they laugh, right? Because there's so much context there. Um, and that's exactly it. So the with full immersion, right? If we talk about the best way to learn a language is to pick yourself up and move somewhere where they don't speak your native language and they only speak the language you want to learn, maybe it's moving to Colombia. Um, the challenge is I can only learn that dialect from those people with online immersion. If I get exposure to lots of different tutors across lots of different geographies, Latin America being one, as you mentioned, Spanish is just not Spanish. There's Spanish in Mexico, even throughout Mexico, it's different. If you go, you know, from the Yucatan to Mexico City, it is still different. German is the same.

Jay Johnson:

You've got high German and low German area, you have yeah, down in uh Berlin and totally totally.

Stacy Richter:

So we have a student who's taking online tutoring in an immersion environment has the ability to say, okay, I've met with a tutor from Colombia, I've taken some classes. What about a tutor from Argentina? What about a tutor from Mexico? What about a tutor uh in Barcelona? And we can get all of those aspects and context of all the different types of Spanish and you know, some of the nuances of what they how they say. The exact same thing. And why, most importantly, why they're different. Because it's so linked to the culture and history. It's not just that they say something different, right? There's a reason why we say cross your fingers in North America and in Germany they say press your thumbs. And it's nothing to do with just being different. There's a cultural development there. And by being involved with a person who has grown up there, which is important that they're a native speaker, right? They've grown up culturally, they know all the context. They can share all of that with you in the moment, in the moment that matters. Because the way one of the best ways we learn as we don't as adults, and you mentioned this earlier, children learn a certain way, and adults can learn just differently, is we have to have context to be able to embed that into our learning style faster. So it means using words and conversations, we we're not naturally going to talk about. If I'm a fan of baseball and we just had the World Series, I will learn more talking about baseball topics in Spanish than I will trying to memorize a list of related words and conjugations of verbs. So that is a big piece of that is we get the context and the practice of something that matters to us, we'll remember and retain, and of course be able to retrieve a hundred times faster if it has meaning for us. So that's what online immersion does, that we have that level of flexibility from multiple tutors and areas, uh, as well as giving us our own context.

Jay Johnson:

I love that because I have and I've been to a number of different Spanish speaking countries, and in each of them it does. It takes my ear at least a couple of days to be able to kind of pick up the nuances of different things. So being able to do that is that's a pretty cool, that's a pretty cool opportunity. So let's let's kind of take it from here because me personally, I so I have a uh a behavioral elements program. We've got 14 guides in different countries. And obviously, I could look and say, wow, it'd be really great if I started to learn different languages that I could speak with these different guides. But let's take it to just the random person that might be listening, who's not the CEO of a company, who's maybe their interactions, they have some interactions with a customer who speaks Spanish. Okay. Uh what would you say to that person to say, hey, take this, this is what it's going to do for you as an individual, not your company, not whatever. This is the impact it's gonna have on you as a person by learning a language and maybe being able to communicate with your client, customer, whomever it is, a little bit more in their language. What does that look like?

Stacy Richter:

Man, uh, as an individual, what the language learning, and I'll use my own personal example. As I mentioned, I I'm not a polyglot, I'm not a professional language learner. I don't speak and learn eight different languages as a profession or career. I learned German many, many years ago. I've lost it because I wasn't able to practice and keep it up. I am actually learning Spanish right now myself. My entire team is in Latin America. I'm the only one who's not fluent in Spanish. So I am learning just like everybody else at a beginner level. So if we want to say, what does this outside of my career, what does this do for me individually? Um, well, my because I'm burning those neural pathways that we talked about, my problem solving is 10 times faster than what it was six months ago. My creative thinking is probably a hundred times better than what it was six months ago. And of course, my confidence has gone up, even though I'm barely conversational, Jay. I'm not talking we have to go full fluency to get the benefits of language learning. It's I'm barely conversational, but my confidence has gone up tenfold because I can start a conversation with my entire team, who are all Spanish tutors, by the way, so they know their stuff. Uh, I can feel comfortable starting a conversation there. So outside of just the communication and connection with an individual who's speaking another language, it's all of the things that it does for me individually because I'm taking on a skill that's difficult to do, it's uncomfortable, uh, it requires a little bit of work, but it's something nobody can ever take away from me. So my problem solving is better, creativity is better, and my self-confidence.

unknown:

Right?

Stacy Richter:

Not unlike going to a gym. One of the things about language learning that you know I'll pass on to your audience here is it's a skill nobody can take away from you, but it's also a skill nobody can do for you. You can't outsource it and you can't delegate it. So if you want that, the benefits of creativity and problem solving, and of course you get to communicate with people from another country in their own language, um, the language skill is absolutely amazing.

Jay Johnson:

I love that. And you know, it's interesting that you say that about curiosity or uh creativity in particular, because one of the things I I've got a couple of friends who are are linguists and polyglots and speak eight, nine, ten different languages, everything else. And when I'd had a conversation, because I studied communication, but it was the communication theory and practice and science, et cetera. Uh, but getting a better understanding of like even how specific languages shape particular words is because of, you know, even the most simple one is that there's a masculine and a feminine version of words in particular languages. Okay, well, what does that mean? Where did that come from? How did that develop? There's a history and an architecture that comes from that that really does have like a beauty to it across different languages, but being able to kind of switch between those different places. One of the others I just recently learned, there's a word in Japanese that is very specific. And I thought this is in relation to like emotional intelligence. There's a word in Japanese that's and I couldn't tell you what it is, but it's a particular word that is the emotion you feel when you get a bad haircut. And uh, you know, I do know that there's particular words in German like Schadenfraud, uh, the feeling that you have of excitement and glee over somebody else's misfortune. There's cool nuances that we can actually even have a better understanding of our own emotional systems through languages of others. So that creativity, that sort of like critical thinking, super powerful. Thank you for that. Let's switch gears. What about the business, the business objective? You know, we you talked a little bit about the healthcare space of like, all right, you're gonna get better patient satisfaction scores. You might be able to prove patient interactions, and ideally you're gonna end up improving patient health outcomes because of these better communication and better interactions and better fostering of trust between each other. What about other businesses? What would be the business case for say, I am uh I'm the CEO of my company and I'm gonna invest, or maybe one of my employees comes to me and says, Hey, it would be great if we could all learn this language. Will you invest in our professional development? What's the business case for something of this nature?

Stacy Richter:

Yeah, and I think where you're going with that, Jay, is what's the straight up ROI? If I'm gonna put in X, you know, when does Y pay off? And that that's a big question, it always comes up because at the end of the day, you know, we're investing in our people. There should be a return on that. And some uh direct investments have direct returns, um, right? Dollar in, dollar out. I I can give you a couple of different examples, but I'll focus on one. We've we have a manufacturing association client out of Ohio, and this is their story, not mine. And uh I'll share what I can because you know it was in confidence, but one of the when I asked them why they started working with us, the gentleman said, you know what? Um, we have clients and partners in Mexico, and they all speak really good English, and we're you know, we've been working with them for years. And he's like, I was down there, down in Mexico at an event, meeting with the CEO, and this is what the CEO said to him again. I'll clean up the language from what he told me. He's like, You come down here and expect us to know English perfectly, but you won't even make an attempt to learn our culture and understand us. And it hit him, right? Then in there, he's like, You're so right, right between the eyes, right? That's the polite version, and and that's why he said, Yeah, uh I'm gonna go out and learn Spanish. And he's he's one of our best students. Um, he started with us individually and said, My team needs to do this too. And as a result, we ended up training 10 or 12 of the his team members, and the direct result of that within a year, and and I'm not saying we are the catalyst 100%, but they are end up opening up distribution centers in Mexico. Now they've been working on that, but I I can tell you definitively that even just being somewhat conversational in Spanish and showing that you're making this effort to understand language and culture um can directly be attributed to having a better relationship and closing a deal that it might have eventually closed, but I'm pretty sure it closed a little faster and that the operations run a little smoother. So uh when we're talking about business development and sales, that that's uh the direct ROI for the business case of, hey, I need to train some of my people on how to speak this second language because we're dealing in these markets. Right? That's that's probably the biggest ROI factor outside of all the soft skills and things we can talk about.

Jay Johnson:

Well, and it's interesting because I do a lot of work in the manufacturing space, and I do find it to be interesting that you can have two groups, uh supplier and you know, uh whomever and OEM that are working together, that both are located in Ohio and Michigan, both English as the primary and native language, and still have so many miscommunications between them just because of the natural, the natural problems or flaws that are built within the communication systems. So now you add the complexity of two different languages to it, two different interpretations, two different functions, et cetera. And a lot can go wrong in that manufacturing space. It makes a lot of sense. And, you know, where precision and quality are concerned, we definitely want some precision and quality in our communication. So all right. Well, this has been a fascinating discussion. We've not actually addressed this on this show. Um, but you know, behavior, communication is a big aspect of behavior and connection, we do talk a lot about relationships. We've never really addressed what does it look like to think about how can we behave in a way that would connect with people more, especially by learning their language, because it seems like such a big challenge. So I'm gonna ask one more question. How do you help people get over the idea? Because when you think about like, all right, learning, learning can be difficult by itself. As a talent development person, as somebody who has studied adult learning, it can be scary. There's a lot of uncertainty, it's change, it's hard, it's practice. I do the first week and I'm like, ah, I'm terrible at this. I don't want to do it anymore because it's uncomfortable. How do you help somebody navigate that motivation? Because I think a lot of people would love to speak many languages, but never take that first step because they're afraid or because it's hard. How do you motivate them to kind of take that first step?

Stacy Richter:

The first step is is actually the easiest part. It's the last mile that's difficult, right? So the first step is everybody wants to try and is willing to try. And I and I'll say the first step um, you know, is generally for most people the biggest, but from our perspective, it's generally the easiest. So to get somebody to take the first step, um, it's all about try, try before you buy, right? So we do uh lots of different options to try group classes for free, take a few different um private classes for free, and experience what it's like to be on a language learning class, because that dispels all of the prejudgments most people have about what it's like to learn a language with a live tutor. Because what most people will find when they think about learning a language, it's oh, I'm gonna get a vocabulary list, I'm gonna have to memorize 20 words for my next class, the conjugations of all the verbs, the the um the genders of all the nines. That's exactly it. And we know that doesn't work, right? But what people find out is when they can try something with zero risk and zero expectation, and most importantly, zero judgment, then they are so much more open to the experience. Then they find out how much fun it really is to start learning a language. Because as we talked about all you know already today, it's the context. We're talking about topics we know and enjoy talking about, whether you enjoy knitting, you sports, you know, whatever you you do for work. And that's the emergence style to become conversational, is talking about things you know. So then you learn the vocabulary of words you use every day in your native language. You're gonna learn those words and their context in the other language, and that becomes fun. And when something becomes fun, it now encourages repeat behavior, as you you know very well know more about behavioral science than anybody. So um, that's the key is try before you buy, and it has to be fun when they get there, which is why when we talk about some of the apps you talked about, they've made language learning extremely fun, right? The the cortisol and the dopamine hits you were talking about earlier flooded with those types of emotions from playing those games. They're designed to do that. What they're not designed to do is help us actually retain and learn the language. So if we can make it, if we make it fun and contextual within that that person's life experience, that's the difference. That's what keeps them coming day in, day out, looking forward to doing homework, if you can believe that. Looking forward to doing exercises and practicing because they're uh the speed of the results goes way faster when we get to talk about things that we know, like, and trust.

Jay Johnson:

Love that. Such a such a great answer. And I'm gonna add one thing to it. Yeah, and this is for the audience. Do the hard thing. Less than 2% of the people take the stairs. And it's those people that often build up strength, resiliency, perseverance, and all the things that make us successful in both life and the work. So even if it gets hard, do the hard thing. It will build your resilience. So, Stacy, that was a perfect answer. I love the idea of jumping in there and just enjoying the experience, and particularly from that immersive standpoint, I think is such a unique and novel way to really engage and to learn. So uh, Stacy, if our audience wanted to get in touch with you, learn more about live lingua, how would they reach out?

Stacy Richter:

So, anybody who wants to reach me personally, you can find me on LinkedIn. Um, my handle is the real Stacy Richter, S-T-A-C-Y. There's no E, S T A C Y R I C H T E R. You can find me on LinkedIn, connect with me there, send me a DM for anything related to Live Lingua and programs. You can find us at live lingua.com, our website, and live lingua across all social media handles, uh including LinkedIn. So reach out to us on any of those channels.

Jay Johnson:

So this has been an awesome conversation. Definitely something a little, I don't want to say out of my comfort zone, but I, you know, the flashbacks of not being able to execute language as properly as I wish I could. Uh, no, this is this has really been wonderful, Stacy. So thank you for coming on, sharing your expertise and sharing your wisdom and opportunity with our audience today.

Stacy Richter:

Thanks, Jay. I had so much fun talking with you and looking forward to hearing from some people at the Talent Forge. That'd be amazing.

Jay Johnson:

Awesome. And thank you, audience, for tuning into this episode of the Talent Forge, where together we are shaping workforce behaviors.

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Jay Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements

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