#73 Practicing Communication Skills with VR Technology – with Robson Beaudry

Technology entrepreneur Robson Beaudry shares how we can use VR to practice and improve our interpersonal and communication skills. VR can accelerate and improve our practice, beyond alternatives such as role-playing or watching ourselves. Key insights include the power of meta-learning and the impact of listening versus talking…

RESOURCES

Robson Beaudry

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robsonbeaudry/

* Twitter: @cavetocreation https://twitter.com/CavetoCreation.com

* Cerdio

* Recommendations:

* After Hours podcast

* Thinking Fast and Slow – book by Daniel Kahneman

Talk About Talk & Dr. Andrea Wojnicki

* Website – https://talkabouttalk.com

* Podcast – https://talkabouttalk.com/podcasts

* Email – [email protected]

* Free Weekly Newsletter – https://talkabouttalk.com/blog/#newsletter-signup

* Book Andrea for a free 20min “communication skills training” consult

* Andrea on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/

* Podcast episode on “What is Practice” with Dr. Nadine Kelly, YogiMD: https://www.talkabouttalk.com/72-practice-with-nadine-kelly/

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Andrea Wojnicki: Thank you Robson, for joining us here to talk about how we can use technology to practice our communication skills.

Robson Beaudry: Thank you, Andrea, it’s great to be here.

AW: All right, before we get into the main topic, can you please share with us some background about your project that you just finished up?

RB: Yeah, absolutely. So Cerdio was a venture I co-founded with a friend of mine. Essentially, when the pandemic struck, there were a lot of things going on, I was involved with the contact tracing initiative at MIT. And he got in contact with me and really said, Look, I’m talking to this company that works with a lot of medical laboratories, and they’re having a real difficulty with some of the digital transformations they suddenly need to make. So Cerdio was really a chance for us to come in and start to help these labs, which are absolutely key in the COVID testing process, do things around test booking, test verification, really important things for them. We been doing that for the last year, we were just recently acquired. So it’s been a great chance for me to not only continue to develop some of these entrepreneurial skills that I’ve been working on for a while, but also make an impact within the pandemic.

AW: Wow, I just have to start by saying three things. Thank you for doing whatever you could do to basically help us combat this pandemic. Secondly, congratulations on the acquisition of Cerdio. And thirdly, I have to say, as a communication expert, it is not lost on me how much crafting it must have taken for you to articulate what you were doing with this complicated technology to explain it to someone like me in layman’s terms.

RB: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, kind of any entrepreneurial activity or anything,