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Episode 12 · 1 year ago
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Episode 12 · 1 year ago
Kathleen Hamilton - Revolutionising education with GeniusU
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Welcome back to impact go rush. In this episode we've got Kathleen Hamilton, head of product of Geniusu and founder of the purposeful work community, and we're going to be talking about becoming a digital normat, revolutionizing the education system and how you can be more impact driven. Allow and welcome to the impact go rush podcast. This is the podcast for impact entrepreneurs. This podcast aims to amplify the voices of impact entrepreneurs, addressing the United Nations global goals, Akata sustainable development goals. Listening to fellow impact entrepreneurs on their journey in this new goal rush of making a bigger impact. Get inspired to learn how to entrepreneurship. You can grow your impact to make the world a better place, leave a legacy and live a more meaningful life. I'm your host, Windtan. If you're listening to this, there's a good chance that you really are moving towards remote work and becoming a digital nomad, as well as becoming more location independent. But if you're not and you're just starting out on this journey, then you might find this episode really interesting. Or even if you're just starting up building a remote team, this episode is going to be relevant to you. In this episode I've Got Kathleine Hamilton, head of product at Geniusu, the part of the Genius Group, which is the world's number one entrepreneur education group, and their revolutionizing education through their attack platform. Well, if you think that the education system currently doesn't serve our society, you might be right, and this is the episode to listen to, because Geniusu is leading the change in how education is going to be shaping out in the future and it's a fascinating episode if you're an impact entrepreneur, because we all know that as entrepreneurs we are having to learn and collaborate and work with people in a very different environment today compared to what we've been taught in our education, and so...
...in this episode you'll be learning how you can be part of this education movement as well as becoming a better entrepreneur, and not just any entrepreneur, but an impact entrepreneur, because Geniusu is actively combining entrepreneurship with impact and engaging people that are building businesses that are addressing the sustainable development goals. So listening to this episode, I've been part of the genius you community since the beginning and I can definitely say, this is a very, very powerful tool and platform. There are lots of attach platforms out there and support systems and tools for entrepreneurs, but there's nothing like Geniusu out there. So keep listening to learn more. And if you miss the previous episode, we had then Watson of safety net technologies talking about position fishing in his number one advice for entrepreneurs, which has nothing to do with your business but everything to do with how you shure. Then is the winner of the James Dayson war and he's got a traffic light system that helps fishermen fish more sustainably. So if that's interesting to you listening to episode number eleven. Kathleen Hamilton, welcome to the impact goal rush. Tell us a bit about what you do as hit off product at Genius U and and also could you tell us a bit about the purposeful what community that you've found it so thank thank you so much for having me. So, as you mentioned, I'm Kathleen and I am the head of product for Geniousu and I also run an online community called the purpose for work community, and with my work at Geniusu I spend most of my time basically leading the product team, which is like the tech team at Geniusu. Genius Use an online entrepreneur education platform where we actually have a curriculum all the way from, like you know, birth through to old age, where people can have a lifelong learning experience that allows them to understand their genius and their values and their passion and purpose and use that information to guide the road map for their...
...life. And so at Geniusu I spend a lot of time working on the tech side, supporting the team who are building the platform itself and keeping my finger on the pulse of what's happening in Ed Tech, education, technology world and how we can be improving our product so that more people have an easier time using it and have the experience of the lifelong learning on the platform. And then the purposeful work community came out of just a passion project. During the pandemic. For me, I noticed that a lot of my community, my immediate community, my friends. I'm in my mid twent S, so I have a lot of friends who, you know, graduated only in the last few years and who are looking for work and I saw during the pandemic how many people suddenly will let go of their traditional employment and there was a lot of people that reached out to me. I've been a digital nomad for the last three years, since I started working with genius year have been working online and I saw that there was a really big gap in capability of people, not because they weren't able to get remote jobs, but because they actually didn't know what was possible. So the community started off as like the remote work community, and as I was working with people and just providing free content and interviewing people who I knew who also were working remotely to showcase what it was like to do that and to live that kind of lifestyle, I realize that my passion is really also around people doing work that they actually love, that they feel like can make an impact in the world, that they are a bit they feel like best highlights their talents, that they are excited about going to work every day for. And so the remote work community turned into the purposeful remote work community, and then that became a bit too much of a mouthful and I think now that the transition to remote work in the world is really like tying up like I think a lot of people are realizing that remote work is the future and everyone can have the freedom of flexibility that that affords them. So I transition the community just into the purposeful work community, because I think if I can focus on just providing free content and information around how people can be doing jobs that are most in alignment with their values and their passions, then the more fulfilling a world will live in. And it...
...really ties into all the work I do with genius you as well, because all we're doing really is teaching people how to tap into their values and passion and purpose so that they can live a life that they're really excited by. It's really cool. So, for for people who are listening to this, what would you advise him? If they're thinking, how do I get more into the real remote work in experience and how do I find a job in this space? How do I be more location independent? What would you advise him to do in terms of location independence? I think we're at a time now where it is the best time ever to be looking for a remote role, and the other piece of that is this kind of this shift in thinking that goes from understanding how to get a job to knowing how to create a job, and this like distinction in thinking is the thing that I find most trips people up. So if you're someone who's looking for a remote role, realize that whatever skills that you have, whatever you've been doing in previous jobs, whatever life experience or education you have, all lend to a unique identity that you have that allows you to show up and create value you for other people. And when I say create value, what that means is to go to people and understand what their problems are and find ways to solve those problems. That's all a job is, is getting paid to solve a problem that someone else doesn't have the time to solve. That usually is tied in some way to like the income of the company. So, if you're looking for a job, don't go out looking for a job in a way that takes up other people's time, where you're submitting a bunch of resumes, where you're running around trying to get conversations with people. Instead, go with curiosity, go with go with a seeking mindset to go and just speak to people in a field you're excited by and find out what they're working on, find out where their gaps are and find innovative ways to solve those problems, so that you're actually effectively going out and creating a job for yourself. I've had a number of people. You know, Geniusu I do some hiring as well as the management that I do, and when people come to me and they say, Hey, I'd love to have a fifteen minute conversation just to hear about what you're working on, like I'm such and such, and these are the...
...things that I do if there's someone that I can see fitting into the team. If there's someone if they say something where I'm looking for a copywriter. I had a friend WHO's a copyright that comes to me and say, Hey, I'd love to hear about what you're working on at genius you. I've been loving the articles and stuff that have been, you know, getting put out and I'd love to see how I can support the content team. I immediately said yes and two months later she was part of the team full time. So I think there's there's this mind such shifts that's really important from just going and getting a job to actually being able to create a job through showing up with curiosity and with the intention of making someone else's life a bit easier, which can be really an effective way to do it. I loved it because I think that's how everyone gets started. Can you share what is Geniusu and Howard works? Yeah, definitely. So geniusu is sort of like some amalgamation of a linkedin and a course era, right, and you can see now with like facebook and Linkedin, they are shifting as well towards more education platforms. As the world has gone more remote, it's been really abundantly clear that people are looking for further education, like professional acceleration, things that they can be doing to take them to the next stage in life. Genius you, as it started, was really a platform in which entrepreneurs could connect with one another while really understanding what kind of person they were. So we have a number of like personality tests and like self assessments that you can take that tell you what level your business is at, what the next level is you could be going to, and then provides the educational resources for you to actually get that. And a lot of that, to begin with was really self led and what we did in the development of genius you was actually made it possible for entrepreneurs to be uploading their own courses. So when you come on to genius you, you can come on as a student where you're coming just to learn, to absorb content to connect with other people, or you can come on as a mentor where you're coming in to actually add content, to add your products to the platform, to add your courses, which we call my critigrees, on to the platform, or even certifications, where you're certifying your audience to do something. And through all of this we have this kind of like our magic source, is what we call it, or genie, which actually is the artificially intelligent engine that power is the connections, that powers...
...the learning, that actually directs you towards the next best thing for you to be doing for your business or your life, whatever your goals are. And so over the next year we're really going to be focusing a lot of our energy at the development of really making genie intelligent, making sure that there are superpowered suggestions so that you can be guided at every step, because what we've seen in education online is while there's so much information, there's not enough personalization, which we believe is really the next stage of education around the world, which is that people have a personalized path for them to take to get to wherever their goals are and they have the ability to connect with role models very easily. So through the platform you can be messaging or connecting with others based on their passion or purpose or profile type, and so at the same time, this personalization of education actually allows people to create a lifelong learning curriculum in which they're accelerating at every step. so that's kind of genius you in a nutshell and, like the student level, is totally free to join. So I told I encourage anyone listening WHO's curious to go in and even just take the genius test or take the purpose test, which actually aligns you with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal. That is most a match to what you care about and what you're doing in your life, so that you can then be more purpose driven as well. I've been using genius you pretty much since the beginning and it think it's evolved in changed over time, but I loved how powerful a platform it is. In what you've just explain is just a guess, the scratching the surface of what is capable of doing in Puss near. Use it for so many other things as well, and you know there's like a whole sort of store on genius you as well that people can actually put up courses in and package content and services that you can sell on the on the platform, and then there's also a sort of opportunity platform there where you can actually look for jobs and opportunities, put your put your business out there and and sort of advertise different roles that you might come up with. And I've actually started using their and someone actually came to me and that's pretty cool. Yeah, it's actually working. I love it. It's I know it's...
...a new feature. So yeah, for for people who are listening to this and they might already be an entrepreneur, I know genius you has evolved from being an entrepreneur education business and I've been a menty of your dad, Roger Hamilton, who's the the founder of genius you and Genius Group. Could you give the audience a bit of advice on if, if you're an entrepreneur, why should we be more impact driven and why should we be aligned with the sustainable development goals? Yes, so it's really interesting. I actually read a study recently and that's quite a few out. I think there's a site called even like pubs for workcom or something that actually has these statistics and the population, like the new generation generations, as they call the generation Z if you're from the UK. There actually, I think it's something like seventy or eighty percent of that population are paying attention to the values that businesses have. So they're actually wanting to buy from businesses that are aligned with their values in some way, and those values are more often than not, around sustainability, around what is the future look like if we support this business, like do they care about the people they employed? Do they care about the impact they're having on the environment or the populations that work with them? And so I think in the world we're seeing a trend towards the youth being more impact driven and and at the same time that is trickling up, like, I would say, all the generations of becoming more aware as well of the challenges that we're facing on the planet and the social issues that we can be working towards. What the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals do is actually give the framework to all of this. They say these are the seventeen key issues that we need to find solutions for, and they have like a detailed list of the criteria for the solutions, like what actually needs to be meant for this to be done, which, as someone who works on like technical features is really appealing to me, because then I can see actually what the outcome has to look like in order to work towards it. I think it is entrepreneurs like, aside from the economic factor, we've been given this amazing opportunity to show up doing...
...something we care about every day, earning money that allows us to live the life we wish to lead. It seems to me that it is not just a choice but an obligation that entrepreneurs show up and step up to actually be leading the future generations towards a world which we're creating. And I think think that, like the economic factor, the obligation factor, the third side of that is actually that it helps us to do better for our teams. There's like an internal element in which, like when you are purpose driven, you have the ability to inspire. When there's something bigger than you, your business can suddenly take on a life beyond just your own life, which I think is what everyone wants in their business to some degree, to actually leave a legacy. And so the sustainable development goals, working towards something impact driven. And if you choose not to use that framework, that's okay, but just be doing something that makes a difference in a positive way in the world and make it a principle of your business to do so, so that you are inspiring your customers, so that you're inspiring your team and so that you're leaving a lasting legacy. So that's what I would say to to why entrepreneur should be doing that, and I think the how is something that we all discover along the way, but also having like a really clear why helps us to align with other businesses that feel the same way and ultimately amplify our impact out into the world and make an even bigger difference in collaboration. The one of the things that you have done is you've actually launched your own podcast, the Ike GAIA podcast. Could you show this? What's been your experience, you know, what's been your big takeaways for interviewing some of these impact entrepreneurs that you've interviewed? Yeah, the whole like Ikey Guy, a podcast story really came out of, you know, in this in the remote work community that I originally started wanting to show people what was possible when you do understand how to earn a living doing what you really love to do. And the biggest takeaway that that I probably have after speaking to all of these amazing entrepreneurs who have such different stories. Right, like I spoke to some who were running a fitness business, some who worked as like corporates all the way, you know, in fortune five hundred companies, who were like actually leading teams as CEOS and then ended up totally leaving corporate America because, and this is David...
Frown who's an amazing guests, who actually then spoke on what it means to be a socially driven business all to do with how you take care of your stakeholders, not your shareholders, but people who actually have a stakeholding in the long term future of your business. Now and then people like pull done, who have by one give on which actually enables businesses to be doing good. So that these, all these people had such different stories, but the biggest thing was that they all it was not about them, like, for none of these entrepreneurs like, their life was not about them. Their life was in service to something greater and it was never something that that they knew immediately. It wasn't. It wasn't something that they grew up like. For Very few of these people was it something that they grew up knowing about they stumbled into it, and the only way to stumble into something that feels like the thing that you have to do is to just go out and do stuff. Like I had an amazing conversation with Clinton Young, who's also a motivational speaker, who spoke on the whole process of discovery and what it looks like to go out and just play and do things and continue learning and speak to people who inspire you and go out and like follow those callings that you have, because those things are what lead you towards your pet us. So I think this idea of being purpose driven, an impact driven, we often get stuck on like Oh, but how does this work for me? Or, you know, I don't understand how this fits into my life. But you stumble on something that all of a sudden feels so much bigger than you and so much more important than you and that you're just so inspired by that it makes you want to wake up every morning and work towards that thing, solving that problem, achieving that goal. And I think that's the big takeaway from me is that we sometimes think that purpose is just an innate thing, and maybe it is, maybe it's a reminder that we get from the universe when we go out and do these discovery practices. But it's okay if you don't know what it is right now, so long as you continue to go out with the effort of seeking it and actually participating and being inspired by others as well. Thank you for this is and so this is they need last sort of platting advice for audience you like to share. Parting advice would be, if you're sitting here listening to this, you're already in the process of discovery or...
...getting more clarity or seeing how other people are doing things. And I think the the final thing that I would want to leave with is to make impact driven business one of your principles, because, if you're here listening to this, you care about these issues, but it can't just be an activity or an action or thing that you do. It has to be a way that you are and it has to be a principle in your business. So I encourage you to go back to your team's you know, speak to the people involved, speak to your customers, get really clear on what the impact is that you have, what your mission is, and like paste that everywhere and let that lead you and guide your way, and that's really how we're going to be able to work towards achieving all of the UNSTG's by twenty thirty, because entrepreneurs earlier in the possession to be able to do so. That's what I would say. Awesome. Thank you very much, Cathley. You know, for people who want to reach out to you, what's the best way to get in touch? Yeah, definitely. So you can find the purposeful work community group on Facebook, which I'm always hanging out, and you can also reach me by email at Kathleen at Geniusccom or you can find me on Linkedin Kathleen Hamilton, and my instagram where I'm active, which is it's Kathleen Hamilton on instagram. Awesome. Thank you very much, Cathley Paul. Thank you so much one. So there you go. Debt was Kathleen Hamilton. What's been your biggest takeaway from this episode? Let us know in the comment section on our social media page. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe. This will really help us grow our podcast and if you can think of someone that would benefit from listening to this podcast, please do share it with them and in next episode, we've got Kettlecock of share impact and we're going to be talking about what it means to be a social enterprise, but also how you can avoid the common pitface of being a social entrepreneur and her number one advice on starting up as a social entrepreneur. So tuned into next week's episode. Thank you very much for listening in to the end of this episode. We really appreciate you. This is the impact goal rush. My name is Windtun and I'll see you in the next episode.
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