Episode 118 – Brandy Champeau

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Automated Transcription

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Brandy Champeau 0:00
Because I have so many ideas, I tend to squirrel. And I tend to have 1000 projects that I’m working on all of these projects at the same time. And it takes real intentionality on my part to get one to the finish line. Because while I’m working on that, you know, all these other ideas are coming in, and it’s great, and they’re all wonderful to me, you know. And so I’m having to, you know, I’m having to intentionally stop and think about this as a business. You know, when it’s your passion, it’s hard to think about it as a business. And that’s something I’ve struggled with all along is that, oh, yeah, this is the business I have to do all this business stuff first. And then I can create.

Richard Matthews 0:56
… 3-2-1

Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. And today I have on the line Brandy Champeau. Brandy, are you there?

Brandy Champeau 1:55
Yes. Hi, how are you?

Richard Matthews 1:57
Awesome. So glad to have you. Brandy. Brandy said she’s joining us from Georgia. And for those of you who have been following along with our travels, we are, of course still stuck in Florida because of our nice COVID crisis. How have you guys been doing up there with the whole crisis there, in South Georgia?

Brandy Champeau 2:14
Well, I’m glad I’m where I’m at. It’s not near as bad as in places like Atlanta or Savannah. So it’s still bad everywhere. We just stay in our house.

Richard Matthews 2:25
Okay, that seems to be the story of everyone’s life right now. So what I want to do real quick, is just do a brief introduction. So people who don’t know who you are, and our audience might get a chance to know you. So Brandy is the founder of Exploring Expression. And what you do is you help parents, caregivers, and educators of K 12. students become the very best expression of themselves. So they can make learning fun, easy and natural, not just for their children, but for themselves as well. So you’re a speaker, an author and a curriculum developer, right? Yes, yes. Awesome. So to start us off, for the interview, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you’re known for, right? What’s your business like? What do you actually sell? And who do you sell it to?

Brandy Champeau 3:07
Well, my business started with children’s books. I write children’s books, especially those, I kind of focus on those with the meeting, special needs or mental health, maybe conservation. And then I’ve made activity books, because we’re all about learning and promoting a learning lifestyle. And so it evolved from there. And now what our business does is, we pretty much run the gamut. We have things for adults, we have curriculum for adults and books for adults. We create curriculum and materials for children, and we try to bridge that gap. I tell people that we’re not tutors. Our job is to help the parents be the best they can be so that they can help their children.

Richard Matthews 3:51
Awesome. And I heard you know, we were talking before we actually hit the record button. You have a new curriculum that’s based on superheroes coming out, was that right?

Brandy Champeau 4:00
We do, coming out next year, I believe it’s May or June next year, Superhero School will be coming out. And it’s an entire year long curriculum. I’m testing my son is actually going through as we speak. So we’re kind of testing. And it’s a collaboration between myself and this lady, Dr. Theresa Stanley, all about learning using superheroes and they’re going to be designing their own superhero and setting them on missions and all sorts of fun things all around it.

Richard Matthews 4:32
That is super cool. What’s the age group targets for that curriculum?

Brandy Champeau 4:37
The Superhero School is for elementary age. Probably, they need to be able to read a little bit so I’m saying second through sixth grade.

Richard Matthews 4:47
Awesome. That’s really cool. So what I want to find out from you then is your origin story, right? So we say every good comic book hero has an origin story. Is the thing that made them into the hero they are today when they hear that story from you? Were you born a hero? Were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to, you know, build a curriculum for students? Or did you start in a job and eventually move to becoming an entrepreneur basically just want to know how you gotta do what you’re doing now.

Brandy Champeau 5:16
I like to say I had to walk through the fire. I had kind of a bumpy past, you know, I’ve been homeless, and I’ve been. I have three children. I’m a single parent of three children. And along the way, if something is your purpose and your passion, it will find you. I never intended to do a curriculum. I went to college, the first time for civil engineering. And it did not suit me and I ended up dropping out. And by the time I went back to college, I had two children. I was a single mother of two children by the time I went back, and I walked in and I said, You know, I need to graduate fast and I need to make a living wage. And the person said, Well, this is what you get. And I said, Okay, I’ll do that. And I ended up getting a degree in management information systems, which has nothing to do with curriculum. However, my very first job out of college was developing curriculum for AWACS crew members for Boeing and

Richard Matthews 6:23
That’s awesome.

Brandy Champeau 6:24
Right? And about the same time, so my older son is autistic, and was born deaf and had a whole bunch of problems and could not function well in a traditional learning environment. And so I discovered as I’m, you know, building these curriculums now for adults and for government people, that my older son just isn’t learning, just isn’t learning. And so it occurs to me that this is really what I spread to people because I’ve been a learner all my life and one of the things We really harp on is that we want to raise learners not students. Yeah. And in this beginning period, I realized that as a student, my son was faltering. He was not being successful. And so I had to say, Okay, how can I help him be a learner? And it kind of started from there. You know, it started from me trying to help my special needs son and then because you know, my daughter, I talked a lot about homeschooling, but my daughter graduated from public school, and did great and it was great for her, but it’s not right for every child. And so through it all through developing curriculum for adults, and then, you know, I took on a second job while because I was a, you know, single mother working at a church nursery, in which I had to develop, you know, develop activities and curriculum for the little ones and I discovered that this was where I belonged. This is, this is what I’m supposed to do. And if I could wake up every single day of my life and do this, then I would.

Richard Matthews 8:10
Absolutely and it sounds like you’re on that path. But it all sounds like you went through the whole trial by fire thing to become the hero you are today, which is a good way to to pick up skills. But you mentioned a couple of things in your story that I just want to pull out real quick. So people, you know, make sure they catch them. And one of them is that you said your son wasn’t a good student. And you’ve changed you started asking yourself a question, “How can I make him a better learner? Right?” And I always like that idea when you start asking yourself better questions, and you start getting better answers. And if you just stuck with something like you know, he’s not a good student, how can I make him a better student trying to, you know, cram him into that mold. You may never have ended up with solutions you have now and I love the idea that you elevated the question a little bit and of course got better results for whatever you’re doing. I know what’s one of the things my dad always pushed on me when I was a kid is like you don’t want to be a good student, you want to learn how to learn. Alright. And it’s a much better skill to know how to learn something than it is to be a good student of something. So, I love both of those ideas, right, the asking better questions and the idea that you were talking about instead of student learner, which is super cool.

Brandy Champeau 9:29
It’s the difference between somebody who waits for knowledge and somebody who seeks it. You know, and that’s the thing that’s the exploring, part of Exploring Expression, is the idea that we are seeking these opportunities to learn, teach, grow and share as opposed to just sitting and waiting for them to be fed to us. Because when someone’s feeding, you know, it may not be you know, it may not be in a way you can ingest it.

Richard Matthews 10:00
Or it may not be something that’s healthy for you even right? It could be poison. It’s one of the one of the things that I’ve always, not always just in the last couple of years I’ve started working on integrating in my own life is like, you need to exercise that learning muscle, right? And you know, there’s always stuff to do for your business and grow and learn there. But I realized, like, I need to sometimes decompress and pull myself out of doing work. And I don’t like to just sit in, you know, do nothing or sit and relax or sit and watch TV or things like that, because that I feel like it shuts my brain off.

Brandy Champeau 10:36
Right.

Richard Matthews 10:36
And I’m much happier when I have a skill that I’m working on learning. Right? So I’ve picked several things over the last couple of years like the piano, started learning the piano and learning how to draw and right now I’m in the middle of learning how to do calligraphy. So like, there are things that aren’t related at all to my business. And it’s just like exercising that learning muscle right. And my son and I are talking about learning to sail. And we’re also my son, my son just really recently got into the Pokemon Trading Card Game. So I’m learning the Pokemon Trading Card Game and all the strategy stuff that goes with that. So you just have like, ways that you can look for things to learn, to work that learning muscle.

Brandy Champeau 11:17
Right, right. And you’ll never know, you said a minute ago that it’s not really related to your business what you do, but you don’t know that yet. It’s always amazing to me how things I might have learned years and years and years ago, come back now and I say, “Oh, well, I’m glad I have that. I’m glad I knew that fact. Because I’m using it here.”

Richard Matthews 11:42
Yeah.

Brandy Champeau 11:42
So it’s amazing how things are related in different ways.

Richard Matthews 11:47
Now, one of the things that I found really interesting is sort of and we’ll talk about this in just a second. My superpower is in the whole system and process of things. And what I found really interesting is as you learn new skills, being able to see the systems behind playing the piano, or the systems behind drawing, helps me be able to see the systems in my business better, right? So it does actually have a positive impact on my business, which is really cool. And also, I think it leads me nicely into my question to you about your superpowers, right? So we say all the time that every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that’s a fancy flying suit, made by a genius intellect, or the ability to call down thunder from the sky. In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, right? It’s a skill or a set of skills that either you were born with, or you developed over a set of over time, it really energizes everything else that you do. And it really sets you apart and helps you help your people slay their villains and get better results in their life. Right. So what do you think your superpower is, but that sort of framing?

Brandy Champeau 12:53
I am. I’m extremely creative. I’m very, very creative. In fact, you know, a previous supervisor of mine called it an “idealator,” not to be confused with idolater. But an idealater, because I have tons of ideas all of the time and I’m able to see connections, you know, I’m able to see a pack of Go Fish cards and say, “Okay, well, we’re gonna use this to learn Spanish today.” In fact, that’s what the kids and I are doing the last week is we play Go Fish. And we have to ask an answer in Spanish because we decided we’re gonna learn Spanish this year. But these ideas come to me constantly more ideas than I can use. And so I think if I had a superpower, it’s I never run out of ideas for how to learn things, or how to phrase things.

Richard Matthews 13:51
I have a name for that skill. I call it ideation which is something a doctor friend of mine was telling me about, and he talks to entrepreneurs a lot about optimizing their health and having the health be a foundation of your ability to ideate right to be able to come up with fresh, new creative ideas. So anyways, it’s always interesting to hear that you come out as a superpower with your ability to ideate and come up with cool ideas on how to accomplish things. It’s something that I don’t see a lot of people hold up as like, “Hey, this is the thing I’m best at” a lot of people struggle and say, particularly creative people don’t hold up their creativity as something that is a superpower for them. Like my wife, for instance, is super creative, same kind of thing. She’s developed her curriculum for our kids, and she does 3D cakes and all sorts of other cool stuff. But she always likes, “Oh, my ideas aren’t that great. I’m not that great of a creator” and those kinds of things. I’m like, “Oh, you just need to stop like you have that superpower.” So it’s cool to hear you say hey and own that and be like “Okay, this isn’t the thing I’m really good at is I’m good at the ideation and the creation process.” So that’s cool.

Brandy Champeau 15:08
Well, I think, as an entrepreneur, every entrepreneur has to have that in some ways, because you can’t start a business without an idea. And I just, I like to say I take it to an art form.

Richard Matthews 15:25
Absolutely, and especially when you’re selling things like curriculum. Curriculum is like this weird mixture of science and art where you have to, you have to get through the science of like learning a thing, but you have to do it in a way that actually engages the child and gets them to, you know, spark their imagination and actually engage with the thing and there’s a whole art to that, that you can’t just, you know, you can’t just say, “Hey, here’s your numbers, learn them. Right?” You have to come up with creative ways to get them to engage. And you know, and digest and learn and actually, like, love that process because if they don’t love the process, you’ll destroy them.

Brandy Champeau 15:59
You’re gonna lose them. And then that find it starts. You know, that’s why that’s why we say we focus on the parents, because a lot of times it starts with the parents. I can create all other curriculum and all the wonderful learning tools in the world. But if as a parent, you think learning is hard or boring, your child is going to think it’s hard or boring. You know, and that’s, that’s what I tell that’s the first thing I tell people because we also do coaching and consultations. And that’s the first thing I tell people when our consultation is if you want to raise a learner, they have to see you being a learner, first.

Richard Matthews 16:37
We have an interesting thing going on in our family right now. My second daughter, who I love to pieces, she is struggling with not struggling with anything in school. She’s struggling with the whole attitude problem of like something is hard, and therefore she doesn’t like doing it because you might get something wrong and like which is funny. Cuz like, we are constantly telling her and her older siblings and younger younger siblings that failure is part of the process and we love that and we celebrate that. And we celebrate failures and we celebrate you know, learning new things and losing in the game that you’re playing and the things that you learn but anyways, like, I haven’t been able to quite get that across for her. And it’s an interesting thing to like, to figure out how you get people to love the process of learning and realizing that learning isn’t always getting 100% right on everything. I finally got it to click for my older son a couple of weeks ago with the whole Pokemon game thing where he, you know, I don’t go easy on him for playing the game and he finally beat me. And he was all excited. And he was like, “Yes, I beat you.” And then you know, we always do a debrief after we play the game. Because it’s a strategy game. I’m like, so where did it go wrong? And where did it go right and these kinds of things. And we got to the end of the game that he won, and I was like, what did you learn from that? And he was like, “I didn’t really learn anything” like everything went right And I was like, “Exactly,” and he was like, you could see the light bulb. He’s like, “That’s what you’ve been telling me this whole time that I learned more from mistakes.” And now he gets all excited when, when things don’t go, right, because he’s like I can, I can do that debrief at the end and figure out how to make it better. So anyways, it’s interesting as a parent trying to figure out like, I can see already, like, if I wasn’t actively pushing them to be excited about the process of learning, that they just, they wouldn’t have the internal motivation to do it themselves. Right, it has to come from you.

Brandy Champeau 18:31
Right? You have to be excited for them until their excitement kicks in. And it will eventually I mean, if you do it enough, it will.

Richard Matthews 18:38
It does eventually, if you do it enough, right, like, and it was it was interesting, because like, you know, we did the same thing. My son went through that same process from like, five years old till about 10, where you have to push really hard to get a minute Finally, like click and he’s like, “Oh, I get all these things that you’ve been telling me.” And so now he’s excited about that process. He’s like, “I want to learn this thing.” And that’s the And like he’s ready to dive in and scrape his knees and learn stuff. It does happen eventually. And then, you know, you end up with people like me, I guess because my dad did the same thing.

Brandy Champeau 19:11
Yeah. Well, and, you know, it gives him the idea that the world is interesting. That the world is interesting. And so we need to learn everything about it. You know, and that’s why, yeah, one of our early products, I have a book that we sell called 100 Things I Didn’t Know Before. And it’s a learning journal. And what it is, is, each day, the child or adult or whoever’s using it, writes about one thing they learned that day, every day for 100 days. And this came about because my older son really struggled, because he didn’t think he was learning anything. You know, he’s got some learning disability, you know, learning disabilities, and everything came so hard and so hard. And he’s like, I don’t know why I’m doing it. I’m not learning anything. And so we started doing this, you know, everyday “What did you learn today? What did you learn today?” And at the end of 100 days, you can look back and you say, “Wow, look what I did. Look what I learned that I didn’t know before.”

Richard Matthews 20:12
That’s awesome. I could see that being really beneficial for my daughter. I could see. I mentioned, you know, her struggle mostly with reading, right? And she reads great. Like she’s gotten to the point where she’s, she’s reading in a second grade reading level. But like, it really bothers her when she runs into words that she can’t read yet that are like third and fourth grade reading level stuff. And you know, she’s in second grade. So of course, she’s not there yet. But she’s like, “I’m just not learning and I’m not I don’t know how to read” and it just really depresses her and I’m like, “But look at how far you’ve come” like at the beginning of this year you couldn’t read it at all.

Brandy Champeau 20:48
Right. You know what’s a great book for that age. There’s a book called The Weighty Word Book. And it’s actually one of the texts we’re using in the Superhero Curriculum. I can’t remember exactly who wrote it, but we’re building this whole worksheets with it. And it’s a book from A to Z of these hard, complicated words. And these little stories that go along with each one. Because, you know, my younger son does the same thing. He’s like, I always went into these words that I can’t read or I can’t do, and he has a tendency to just skip over them. And so we’ve been going through this Weighty Word book, and each time we learn I’m like, “Look at this crazy hard word, you know now” and it’s, it spurs him on to I want to learn other crazy hard words now.

Richard Matthews 21:40
That’s super cool. So I have a selfish question for you since you do this for a living. The thing that all of my children so far have struggled with with reading is looking at words and then assuming they know what it is without actually looking at the letters. I think it’s a lazy thing, but you know what I mean? Really, like they see the first like two letters. And they’re like, it’s a CA must be cat instead of it like it’s actually cab, but they didn’t actually look at all the letters. So they just read the wrong word, is there a way to help teach them to actually just read all of the letters that are in front of them or do just have to, like, bang it through your head?

Brandy Champeau 22:20
I don’t know about banging it through their head. But there’s things that you can get, you know, if you take a piece of paper, and you cut a little rectangle out and put it over the book, so that they can’t see the whole rest of the book, it forces them to focus on those words right there. And it helps with some of that.

Richard Matthews 22:41
Okay.

Brandy Champeau 22:42
Also make sure that you’re having him –

Richard Matthews 22:44
So there –

Brandy Champeau 22:46
So they can’t, you know, especially as you get better at reading, you get to the point where you’re not reading every word anyway. You’re just kind of reading the words around it and then making an educated guess. Right there. Also, you can get these, these passages. And in fact, I do this in my new book, the activity book coming out, I have these passages, and I remove some of the words. And so there’ll be reading the passage, you know, and it’s the same passage from the book. So they’ll read the book, right? Read the passage, and then they’ll come over here and read this and some of the words are missing. And they have to figure out what word goes there. It is a great trick for making them focus on that literal reading. But remember, as they get older, the little reading isn’t as important. It’s the message –

Richard Matthews 23:38
They can actually learn how to – like it seems to me like they’re learning, they’re learning the process of reading and they’re also coming to grips with the fact that their brains faster than their eyes are. But their brains are not ripe yet, but it doesn’t always know what it should be putting there. So, it’s like you have to get the foundation part and then you can start doing the more assumptive reading right which you know, we do naturally as adults, but they’re just like they’re not there yet. So it’s like, we got to force them to focus a little bit more on the basics. And this is some cool tricks. So I’ll share those with my wife and maybe I’ll report back to you how they’re working with our daughter.

Brandy Champeau 24:11
Yeah, and have them read to. I’ll never forget. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the movie What Dreams May Come with Robin Williams.

Richard Matthews 24:19
Yeah.

Brandy Champeau 24:19
There’s a part in it, where he’s with his daughter and his daughter’s coloring all over, like a painting or sculpture or something. And he says, that’s someone else’s art you’re ruining. And she turns and says, “What’s the difference? You weren’t watching anyway?” Right. And I found that my son will slip. If I go through parts and there are several days go by that. I don’t catch it. You know, I try even if I’m working, which, you know, I work and they sit here and they’re reading out loud to me. I try to make sure I catch at least every once in a while. “Hey, that’s not not the right word.” So that they know I’m paying attention even if I’m really not they think I am. Yeah. And it makes them focus harder because they don’t want to be caught on the wrong word.

Richard Matthews 25:10
Yeah, that makes sense. And I like that idea too, if you’re butchering someone else’s art because I have this theory about books and about stories that the author only ever writes half the story. And the rest of the story is written when you read it, and it comes alive in your head.

Brandy Champeau 25:32
Yes.

Richard Matthews 25:32
So, that’s one of my little theories. I try to teach my children about reading is that you know, you’re actually, you’re engaging with the story and engaging with the author and creating it as you read. You’re creating the other half of the story.

Brandy Champeau 25:47
Well think of it as an experience you have if you read a book versus if you listen to the audiobook. Think of how much of a different spin on the book just that person read It brings to it

Richard Matthews 26:04
My kids are sort of obsessed with reading books and my cat just came under my desk and it’s making weird faces. Hopefully he’s feeling alright. So my next question for you then is your fatal flaw, right? So we talked about your superpower being the ideation. So the fatal flaw is the flip side of that, right? So just like every Superman has his kryptonite, or every Wonder Woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad. You probably have a flaw that’s held you back in your business, right? Something that’s you’ve struggled with maybe like, for me, it was perfectionism that kept me from shipping, or lack of self care, which made me allow my clients to walk all over me. But you know, more important than what the flaw is, sort of how you’ve dealt with it, right? how you’ve worked to overcome that flaw so you can continue to grow. And hopefully sharing this experience will help our listeners learn a little bit from you.

Brandy Champeau 26:58
I actually have two. One is because I have so many ideas, I tend to squirrel. And I tend to have 1000 projects that I’m working on all of these projects at the same time. And it takes real intentionality on my part to get one to the finish line. Because while I’m working on that, you know, all these other ideas are coming in, and it’s great and they’re all wonderful to me, you know. And so I’m having to, you know, I’m having to intentionally stop and think about this as a business. You know, when it’s your passion, it’s hard to think about it as a business. And, you know, that’s something I’ve struggled with all along is that, “oh, yeah, this is a business. I have to do all this business stuff first.” And then I can create. And I think I think the other one has to be social media. Social media and I have a love hate relationship because it it takes so much time

Richard Matthews 28:10
Yeah, I’m with you there I am not a huge fan of the social media and even like the stuff that I do post I have to like force myself to post even like just to share my family stuff with the rest of my family who’s like “Hey, what do you guys up to you guys are traveling doing all this cool stuff you should like post a picture every now and then.” So I have a hard time doing in my personal life and even harder time doing in my business, which is why I set up our you know, the sponsor for this show is my business push button podcasts, which does all of the social media stuff through a podcast for me, because I know I’m not gonna do it myself. So it’s solving my own problem there. But the squirrelly thing is that it is an interesting, interesting problem. Right? Because it’s that, why don’t you call it where you have, you have something that you want to get done. And then in the process of doing that, you’re like, I know for me, the way that this works is like I’ve got something in my head that I like this is a great idea. And like you’ve, you think through it, you work through it, you get all the creative parts done. And then you have the last bit which is like finishing it. Right, but finishing it is just minutia, right like you’ve already solved in your head, the creative problem. And now it’s boring. Because you got a new idea that you haven’t done all the creative thinking part. And you want to switch over to that because that’s more entertaining, right? The ideation process and like figuring out and doing the creative part. Like I’m doing that right now I’ve got a series of videos that I’m working on. And the part that I really love doing about the videos is doing all the outlining and the thinking and putting the linguistic stuff together and all the language patterns for how I’m going to teach it. And now that I’ve got all that done, I just have to record it. Right, but recording it’s boring and no fun. And I want to do the next part, the next project. So I totally feel you on that. And like my question for you then is how do you deal with that? How do you actually work on that kind of a problem? So you’re making sure that you’re actually shipping and getting your products finished?

Brandy Champeau 30:09
Well, first off, you know, I’m the queen of time management. And you can’t do what I do without a great, you know, being a single mother, especially it’s kids in the business. And I also work full time, and homeschooling without a grasp of intentional use of every moment of your day. And so I have this calendar, right, I have this calendar that I’ve put, that’s my launch calendar. And so everything that I have in my brain goes on to this launch calendar somewhere and I’ve made a rule that I only can launch so many things in each category. So I have like children’s books, I have adult books, I have courses, I have curriculum, and each one of those goes into a circle and each circle gets a launch window. And so the launch window that’s next, the launch window that’s next becomes hot. And so what I tell myself is every day when I sit down to work on Exploring Expression, I have to spend 50% of my time on a hot item. And then I can work on all of these other things that are coming out, you know, two quarters away or three quarters away or whatever they are. But on my weekly to do list because you know, I keep my calendar and I have my weekly to do list, I have, these are the hot items, half of my half of my Exploring Expression time has to be spent on those and then to happen before I move into all of these other ideas that are coming along the way.

Richard Matthews 31:43
So like getting the thing that you need to get done is sort of your reward for that. It’s getting to go work on the creative stuff that you enjoy more, instead of pushing those final things over the finish line. That’s a cool idea. I like that. I do something similar. It’s not not the same as the calendar idea, but just the idea of rewarding yourself for finishing a thing that you know you need to get done. I always, and it’s a thing that I do with my wife is we always set up an extra, like date night or something that’s like, “Hey, whenever I get this thing finished, whenever I get it shipped, we’re going to go out to dinner,” or “We’re going to go see a movie, or we’re going to go do something that’s just us.” And it’s funny, it’s like it’s a non-business reward. That makes me feel good, it makes my heart feel good. And it gives me extra motivation to go in and get those things done. But you know, it’s just a reward system, sort of, you know, in my own personal little reward system.

Brandy Champeau 32:38
We have to have something you know, you have to have an intentional moment away. Because especially when it’s something that you love, this business can take over your life very easily because you love doing it. One of the things I do is I start and then every day with silence, I get up and I don’t like to have a little chair and set up right next to my bed. I get up and I sit and I breathe. And I just am in the moment for several moments. And then I start my day and then at the end of the day, I take that backwards. And the last thing before I go to bed is I sit in the chair and I breathe and I center myself. Because once I hit that ground running once that time ends, it’s, you know, taken off like a jackrabbit.

Richard Matthews 33:28
Yeah, you got to get a lot of stuff done. And it’s, it’s interesting to say, like, I see the same thing, right? Whenever I sit down to work sometimes, like if you focus so far, you can get a lot of stuff down very quickly. And you don’t have a lot of energy and then when you’ve run out of it, you’re like, Okay, I just need to write, run out of gas, gotta stop and go do something else. Right, let your let yourself recover from it. So, my next question for you then is your common enemy, right? So your common enemy is you know, every superhero has their arch nemesis, so to speak, is the thing they constantly have to fight against in their world. So in the world of business, it takes on many forms. But generally speaking, we put it in the context of your clients, right? The people who are buying and using your products or services. And it’s a mindset or a flaw that you’re constantly having to fight to overcome so that your people, your clients can get better, cheaper, faster, or a higher degree of results. So for your business, what do you think is one of the main like mindsets or flaws that you constantly sort of have to struggle with that if you had a magic wand, you could just bop your clients on the head and remove it? What would that be?

Brandy Champeau 34:34
So many people think that they can’t, that they don’t have the ability to teach their children. They either think they don’t know enough or they don’t have the time or they don’t have the ability. And, you know, we try to tell them that you’ve been doing it all along. You know, so many people come to me and they’re like, I don’t know how I don’t know how we could teach this, teach that or how to do this or how I would find the time or how do I teach something I don’t know. We get that question so many times, how do I teach something I don’t know. And if I could just wave a magic wand and get my clients to understand that if your child can use the bathroom on their own, if your child can dress themselves, if your child can feed themselves, that means you already know how to teach them. Because they didn’t just pick that up on their own.

Richard Matthews 35:31
Absolutely. And I always love that, you know, how do you teach something you don’t know. And it’s one of the things that I think my wife really … because she handles all of the teaching for our kids. And she runs it. I like it, something that I don’t know. And like they’re, you know, my son’s getting some science stuff that’s bigger and more interesting. And it’s funny because they’ll sit down and go through the lessons together, right.

Brandy Champeau 35:57
Right.

Richard Matthews 35:56
For the curriculum, and you know she learns it with him. And it helps him understand things that he can’t understand on his own right, because she’s got the, you know, that higher, older perspective on the same content. It’s sometimes the best teaching is learning with or learning alongside of and I think more parents would be asked to teach their children if they learned that.

Brandy Champeau 35:57
Right. When you’re an entrepreneur, and when you’re a mompreneur, even, you know, you learn how to work, and homeschool, work and parent, you know, and that’s one of the things when a lot of people are like, how do you find the time? It’s that, here’s my desk, there’s my son’s desk. I work while they work. I mean, you learn how to figure it out. And if you want it enough, you know, if it’s important, you’ll figure it out.

Richard Matthews 36:55
Absolutely. I completely agree with that. We do the same thing here in this family. So it’s a super, super true. And you know, if I had to wait until my house was silent in order to get any work done, I don’t think I would ever get anything done ever. So one of these days I’m going to buy a house and soundproof my office, but we’re just not there yet.

Brandy Champeau 37:18
And they’ll just come in, they’ll just knock, come in and say, “Why didn’t you hear us calling you?”

Richard Matthews 37:22
Yeah, yeah, stick their fingers under the door. So the flip side then of your common enemy, right? So if your common enemy is the parents not believing they can teach their children, your driving force is the other side of that, right? It’s the thing that you fight for. Right? So just like Spider Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. I want to know what it is that you fight for in your business, your mission, so to speak.

Brandy Champeau 37:54
Our mission is to get people to understand that the world is a fantastic place, and you should learn all about learning so it doesn’t have to be boring. It doesn’t have to be hard. If you’re striving to become the best expression of yourself, whatever it is that you should be, not what I should not be the best version of me, but the best expression of yourself, learning goes with that. Learners grow and learners expand and learners become better every day at being themselves. And that’s the thing. I wish more people you know, I wish the world would understand, you know, how do we all get along? How do we all get together? We do that by learning about each other and by learning about them ourselves. I had a conversation once with this. I spent about two years going around and talking to a whole bunch of people that I did know that were different for me. And I had a conversation with this Muslim mom.

And I had asked … I said, what’s the biggest problem you see facing your religion and what you do today? And he said, people who don’t understand their own religion, people who don’t understand themselves, because you should spend enough time learning about yourself as you do learning about other people. But it’s that idea that as a society, we need to have value not just education, but learning. We need to value learning about the world, learning about each other and learning about ourselves. Excuse me. Growing every day in knowledge, because it’s worth it and it’s important.

Richard Matthews 39:49
Yeah, I completely agree. One of the little metaphors I always use in my family. Is that you don’t want to be the ripened fruit. Right, because the fruit who’s finished ripening is the one that rots and falls off the vine. How do you always want to be growing and continuing to get better and get stronger and get, whatever it is you’re doing right? If it’s, you know, learning to cook or learning to play a Pokemon strategy card game, right? You constantly want to get better and better at those things because if you stop, you stagnate, and then you die. Right? That’s not the way you you want to live your life especially with your, with your mind, right, which is the, it runs everything runs is the baseline for your health, the baseline for, your ability to, you know, be an educator or to be an entrepreneur and to you know, give your value to the world. It all starts with what’s in your head and if you let it die, if you let it stagnate, then you can’t, you can’t give your value to the world. You can’t be a benefit.

Brandy Champeau 40:54
Well, and as a society, you know, just like you said, If you stop, you stagnate and you die. We can take that from a personal standpoint, to a global standpoint, as a society, if we stopped learning about each other, and we stopped learning about our world, we stagnate and we die. And so, you know, Exploring Expression is all about helping people become learners, become explorers in the world and in their own best expression.

Richard Matthews 41:28
Absolutely. I love that. And it’s if anyone’s been paying attention to our political landscape over the last couple of months, it feels like we need more of that attitude all around the country. So you know, applaud you for what you’re doing and helping people to, you know, to become better learners for your mission. Hope it continues to go well for you. So my next question, though, is a more practical line question. I call this the Heroes Tool Belt. And just like every superhero has a tool belt with awesome gadgets like batterangs or web slingers or laser eyes, right. I wanna talk about the top one or two tools you couldn’t live without in your business, right? Could be anything from your notepad, your calendar to your marketing tools to something you used to create and deliver your products, anything you think is essential to getting the job done. What are the top one or two things that you’re like, I couldn’t do what I do for my business, I didn’t have these things.

Brandy Champeau 42:19
The first thing is my calendar. My calendar is beautiful, and I love it. It’s color coded for the different areas of my life. And I keep not just my business, but you know, my personal life, all of Daniel’s things are red. And Joshua’s things are green and Exploring Expression things are purple, so that I can see in a glance, this is my day. And if there’s specific projects that I need to block out of, you know, for a period of time for that project. I put it on the calendar and I highlight it in all of my things for YouTube. When I think about it, I put it on there. And when I recorded it, I changed the color. And when I scheduled it, I changed it to a different thing. I mean, it’s beautiful. And it keeps me on the straight and narrow. And then I think my second best tool that has been my friend throughout the whole time is Microsoft Office. I think in Excel and PowerPoint

I have a I have a single Excel file that I … My budget file, that it has schedules, it has budgets, it has Christmas lists, it has a spreadsheet snapshot of my life, going back years and years and years and years. In fact, you know, I started about February looking at next Christmas and I started building my list and I was able to look back over the past like six years of Christmas spreadsheet tabs. And I realized I bought a computer every single year for somebody, how is that possible? And so, you know, I’m able to see patterns in what I’m doing. And I’m able to go back and say, you know, “hey, here’s the flow of this curriculum.” If I want, like one of the things that I’m coming out with, I released it before, like a year or two ago, but I didn’t release it well, so I’m bringing it back as a kid, as I’ve designed educational joy learning and style joy kits. And I’m able to go back and remember, oh, here’s where I designed that back in 2017. Here’s where it fits. Here’s where that idea was.

And then I have it indexed to a PowerPoint file, or on the PowerPoint file. I pulled in like, pictures that I get off of Google, or notes or any of these things. All of my children’s books are outlined in PowerPoint first. Because I’m very visual. And if I write it, if I write it on a piece of paper, I’ll lose it. I’m not gonna lie. Or somebody will turn it into a paper airplane, or who knows what will happen to it. And so I use PowerPoint and I use Excel as my mental journal.

Richard Matthews 45:26
I do the same thing with mind node, which is a mind mapping application. I think really well with mind maps. And my favorite thing about them is that I can put ideas together, like list them all out as they come out, like really freely. And then I can organize them like I can drag and drop them into where they need to go. So I can just like brain dump first and then I can go through and like, massage it and that’s being beautiful later, and then I start translating those things into either PowerPoints or books or whatever we’re going to do with it. But you know, same kind of thing. I like to have a nice digital place. Cuz I mean, I can drag and drop things. It’s almost like a, like a sticky note board that you can move everything around. But, you know, if they were sticky notes, same thing, they would all get turned into paper airplanes or burned and signed except science experiments without my knowledge.

Brandy Champeau 46:15
Yes. Well and it gives you the – because the office and things like that are so connected, it gives me the ability, all of my projects are broken down. Because you know, my master’s degree is in project management. Once I realized that this was where I was going, are broken down into individual baby steps. You know, all of my books I have exactly what process that is. I have exactly what steps I need to take. So that when I have a new idea, I can go back and I could say, Okay, I have a PowerPoint smart. What is the smart image flowchart of this type of product? Let me go pull that and stick it over here to give me a starting place. It’s allowed me to compartmentalize all the ideas coming in. And so that I can put them on a chart, I can say, “Okay, here’s where they go on my calendar.” Here’s the spreadsheet where I start to work it out. Here’s the creative PowerPoint where I’m dumping all the images and the worksheets, you know, creating all the worksheets and things like that. So that none of them get lost. You know, how many ideas have you had, that you didn’t write down or put down? And those made a bit, those might have been the next best thing, you know?

Richard Matthews 47:40
I keep my phone next to my bed at night. I think most people do, right, you plug it in, but I always like the notepad thing open because I always feel like I have the best ideas right before I fall asleep. And if I don’t write them down, I won’t be able to sleep because I’ll be like, I have to hold this in my head until morning. And then I don’t sleep. And what’s funny is, you know when after you’ve hit that, once you’ve hit that, like brain meltdown point of the night, where you’re like too tired to have good ideas anyways, I find that like, 90% of the things that I write down in the middle of the night are, they’re just crap. Anyway, from the morning, you’re like, what was I even thinking was I high? But, but every once in a while, there’s gold in there. And I know, it helps me sleep better if I just write them down and make sure that I have them out of my head and onto a piece of paper. Or, you know, in my case, a digital piece of paper. But it’s super cool.

Brandy Champeau 48:33
I text my business partner.

Richard Matthews 48:35
You texted, like, here’s the idea, I have this now.

Brandy Champeau 48:39
And that’s what I do. I have my business partner, that she’s the business behind Exploring Expression. Because, you know, it was clear to me pretty quick that there are things that I’m good at, and there are things that I’m not. And the accounting business piece of it was a big note. So I took on a partner, and I’ll do that. I wake up in the night and I’ll text her you know, remind me to tell you about this idea. I had this one. thing.

Richard Matthews 49:02
Nice. That’s a good idea. I and the other thing that you mentioned was your calendar. And I just wanted to point this out to you because you didn’t know, right? We’re on 120 episodes or so for this show. And probably 80% of the people we have on the show when I asked him what to talk about their tool, they mentioned their calendar, as it being one of the most vital things in an entrepreneur’s life. And I never would have guessed that right, because I kid you not, not even less than two years ago, I got into a sort of argument with my step dad because I was like, you know, I live and die by my calendar. And he was like, “well, that’s dumb.” Like, “who lives and dies by their calendar?” And I was like, “well, literally, every entrepreneur I know lives and dies by their calendar. And it’s like, if it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t exist.

Brandy Champeau 49:47
Right.

Richard Matthews 49:47
And like, my family, and my wife and I are like, we’re down to the point where we’re like, I’ve got a calendar and my wife has a calendar and we have a family calendar. And my wife knows if she wants to do something with me if it doesn’t get put on the family calendar, like it doesn’t, it doesn’t always happen. Because, I’ve got stuff going on with business, and I’m dropping them on the calendar all the time. And if it’s on the calendar, I always like all of my systems check, like they check for busy time they check for other stuff. So like, the calendar is everything. And I don’t know what would happen if I lost access to all my digital calendar stuff. I mean, luckily, it’s like backed up on every device there ever was. But yeah, the calendar is genius. So my other question for you is, you mentioned your calendar, are you a digital calendar or a physical calendar kind of gal?

Brandy Champeau 50:38
I actually have both. I have the Exploring Expression calendar that’s shared with my business partner that we put all of our business on. That’s a Google Calendar, it’s digital. Then I have my personal calendar that goes on my phone that’s got Exploding Expression stuff, plus all my family stuff. And then I have a big wall calendar in our house. So in our house, we have almost like a Grand Central Station spot where we have the learning calendar on the bottom and then we have the big family wall color and on the top.

That once a month I transfer everything from my digital calendar to the wall calendar. So that it’s every time anybody passes it, they can glance, and it’s color coded as well because like, my younger son does competitive dance. So he takes eight to 12 hours of dance a week. And both of the boys are doing karate. So we have three days for Josh and two days for Daniel’s karate on top of four days for dance on top of everything else that you have to get in. And you know, they do some like zoom classes and some other things. So they have to be able to check the calendar. They have to be able to know “Okay, this is when this happens.” And when I’m scheduling, you know, when I’m scheduling out what they’re going to do for their homeschool that day, I have to know what’s on my calendar that I can put on their calendar. So they have a little desk calendar and we have a wall calendar and I have digital. It’s a mad system but it works well for us.

Richard Matthews 52:22
We got the same thing going on. My wife is a physical calendar kind of person like she can’t handle the digital calendar. She can’t stand it. She doesn’t like the digital calendar. All she’s got is one of those cool bullet journals. And like at the beginning of every week, she sits down and makes it all pretty and beautiful and has all this like fancy colors and stickers and other things on it and she has a whole cool kids homeschool stuff on it all broken out by category and all these things. And it’s super cool. But I can’t handle a physical calendar because like, once I’ve liked the way that I deal with paper things is like it’s out of my head on the paper and then it’s just gone. Right like it no longer exists in my universe. So I’ve completely forgotten it. So she does the same thing where she likes: she takes my calendar, that’s all my digital stuff and she’ll transfer the stuff that she needs onto her physical calendar. So, you know, I was just find it interesting to see like where people fall on that like that physical to digital scale for being able to work with their their calendaring stuff and it’s interesting, it’s like seems to be like it’s a 50-50 kind of thing. I wonder if it’s just a personality trait or what it is, but everyone seems to have their own, like, you know, I can only work on the physical calendar, I can only work on the digital calendar.

Brandy Champeau 53:36
And I think, I’ve never been one to be able to use like the calendar journal type of things, because I’ll lose it. You know, I have so many that’s why I don’t keep notes. You know, I have a little I have a little book around here that I jot notes in when I’m in a meeting, but those immediately get transferred to an electronic format because I’ll never see it again. And so the one physical calendar, we do have to be on the wall so that somebody doesn’t walk away.

Richard Matthews 54:04
It can get lost. My problem with writing notes is if I’ve written the note, I then cannot go back and read the note. So I have to do them in digital form so I can read it later. I have to try really hard. Like I said, I mentioned, I’m working on calligraphy and I can make my handwriting really nice, but it takes a lot of time, which is not conducive for note taking. But I can type like 100 words a minute, so I can type faster than the person can talk generally.

…

So my next question for you, is about your own personal heroes. So every hero has their mentors, Frodo had Gandalf, Luke had Obi Wan, Robert Kiyosaki had his Rich Dad and Spider Man, of course had his Uncle Ben. Who were some of your heroes, were they real life mentors, speakers or authors? Maybe peers who were a couple years ahead of you. And how important were they what you’ve accomplished so far in your business?

Brandy Champeau 56:36
I think my biggest hero has to be my grandfather. He turned 100 years old this year. And he was in World War Two and he was a prison guard for a long time. And he really kind of lived off hard life. But every time growing up now we were. I was a military family. So I didn’t see him that often. But whenever I did, he was always okay with the world. And in a life that you know, was hard, he always had the time to sit down and listen to you whatever he was doing. And he was always content with the world. And it’s an outlook on life that it took me a really long time to get to the idea that you know, almost an Anne Frank outlook in spite of everything, the world is still good, and it’s still a good place to be. So definitely he was one of my heroes. And I had an older brother, my older brother was never afraid to go reach out and get what he wanted. And you know, I think I think a lot of my heroes are close to my heart because I didn’t identify that much with a lot of famous people. You know, like anybody from that area. I love Oprah. But sometimes it’s hard to identify with people that you don’t think are like you.

Richard Matthews 58:17
Yeah.

Brandy Champeau 58:18
And growing up and in my, I guess, young adulthood. You know, I had so many so many hurdles and so many things that I was going through that it was hard to look at famous people and say, “Okay, I could be you.” Because most of them it was, you know, Not gonna be you. And so, more of my heroes were people that directly impacted my life. That I could look and say, but for the grace of God go, they looked at me and said, “I see you.”

Richard Matthews 58:55
It’s interesting to me how often that’s the way that question is also answered where it’s Mom or Dad, or it’s uncle or it’s a teacher, that that really made the difference in someone’s life to put them on the right track or put them on, you know where they’re going now. And to me, it’s always been a fascinating question to ask because it always reminds me that, you know, for me, like one of my mental games I played with myself, I guess, that’s the right way to say this is your kids, my kids are going to have heroes, right? And if I’m not worthy, it’s not gonna be me.

Brandy Champeau 59:35
Right? It’s gonna be somebody.

Richard Matthews 59:37
It’s gonna be somebody, someone’s gonna be there and someone’s gonna listen to them, and someone’s going to acknowledge them, and give them what they need when they need it. And I want to be the kind of person who’s worthy of being their hero, and anything that I’m doing right. So that I’m living my life that way. Living my life, thinking about how can I be the kind of person that they look up to and the kind of person who when they have a struggle, they’re going to come and ask, and the kind of person who when they get asked in 20 years, who’s your hero, they say, “it was my dad.” “My dad taught me how to do all the things I need to do. Right?” Anyways, that’s just, it’s one of the things why I asked that question because it fascinates me to find out how many other people have that same sort of experience that same sort of like thought process around, impacting others.

Brandy Champeau 1:00:24
Well, you know, somebody is going to impact your child. Somebody, you know, some I told my daughter all the time, and, and that’s, I’m so glad that now she’s getting ready to turn 20. Turning 20 here in a couple of days. And she comes in, she calls and she talks to me about anything. And that’s a relationship that I value so much, because so many people don’t have that. So many people, you know, growing up and through all the mistakes, she’s probably the one of all of my children who has lived through the mistakes I was making. You know, I tell people all the time, you know, I had to walk through fire to get here. Well, there were a lot of mistakes along the way. And even more so than the boys Samantha, they had to live through that. And for us to have this relationship now, you know, one of the things I instilled upon her is that you can tell me anything. I’ll probably judge, but then we’ll get through it together.

Richard Matthews 1:01:31
Reminds me of something. My step dad used to tell me when we went out like hiking and doing other things and it’d be like, if you fall off the default log, I’ll laugh first, then I’ll help you out. I love that. I love the idea that relationships are such an important part of how we grow and how we build each other up. So I am always just it’s a constant reminder that hey, you know, you have the choice to be The kind of person who’s worthy of being a hero is one else’s life, the way that you act the way that you live, or to not be that way. And always, my encouragement is to always choose to act like a hero, right? Act like someone who’s worthy of having that kind of someone look up to you.

Brandy Champeau 1:02:13
And if you want to be able to teach your children, they have to look upon you as somebody that’s trustworthy. You know, as a parent, if you want to, if you want to raise a learner and teach your children, they have to look at you as somebody who can help them find the answers.

Richard Matthews 1:02:33
Absolutely. Got to be. And sometimes that means I don’t know the answer. Let’s look them up together. Let’s figure it out. Show them how it’s done. Right? Show how you

Brandy Champeau 1:02:41
What did we do before Google and Alexa?

Richard Matthews 1:02:44
We used the encyclopedias. It was torture. My dad used to make me – encyclopedias and dictionaries. So I want to talk a little bit about your guiding principles, right. So one of the things that you know, makes heroes heroic, is it live by a code for instance. Batman never kills his enemies; he brings him to Arkham Asylum. Right. So as we wrap up the interview, I’m going to talk about top one or maybe two principles that you use regularly in your life, maybe a principle that you wish you’d known when you first started out on your own hero’s journey.

Brandy Champeau 1:03:16
Okay, one of my very top ones is I love people where they’re at love people where they’re at, not where you want them to be. And that’s allowed me to, you know, I’m surrounded by people with mental illness and the discussion on mental illness is huge. Both in my life and in my business. A lot of my books for children are centered around that. And you have to learn when dealing with people with mental illness that sometimes mentally ill people do mentally ill things. Right. And so we have to love them for who they are. And you even just like me, you know, in my business or with my children, or with my parents or with people I meet on the street. It’s that, “let me love you where you’re at. As opposed to where I wish you were.” That way when you get there, we’ll both be overjoyed together. So that’s one of the things I try to live my life, you know, and every encounter that I meet with people is, “I love you for you at where you’re at. And I can’t wait to learn something from you.” Because everyone you meet, everyone you meet everyday has something to teach you and something to teach me that I want to learn. So that’s one of the guiding principles of my life. And the other one is, get up. Get up. You know, it’s the world sometimes it’s not fair. It’s not and I talk a lot, a lot I talk a lot in, you know, several of the speaking that I do. I have this series of things called Survival Strategies for When Life Isn’t Fair. And sometimes it’s hard. You know, I’ve been through tornadoes and domestic abuse and all of these things. how do I get from here to living your best life? How to the parents and the people that I talked to, that are struggling? How do they get from where they’re at to their best life? And it all starts with get up no matter what happens? Stand up.

Richard Matthews 1:05:38
Get up, dust yourself off, continue to move. And you know that never give up mentality? Right? Because the only way to lose the only way to truly fail is to give up. Yes, and if you don’t ever give up it’s very hard to hard to lose. And I really love The other one you mentioned to about loving people where they’re at instead of where you want them to be, because what’s interesting is, you know, if you want to help them get there, right, wherever you want them to be, you can’t do it by hoping that they were there, right? You have to love them where they’re at, and help them on that journey. And you can’t help them on the journey if you’re wishing they were somewhere else.

Brandy Champeau 1:06:21
Right. Because all you’re gonna do is make them feel judged. And, you know, coming from a place, I tell people a lot, I’m the person that should not have made it. You know, I’m a single African American mother with three children by three different fathers. The early days, we were on welfare for many years, we’re not now but we were then. I’m the I should be the failure story. But I’m living my best life. Because of that, because A, because of that and because there were people in my life that said, “I’m going to love you where you’re at. Let me give you a hand up.” That didn’t judge that didn’t count me out, that didn’t, you know, and that’s what I told her parents who, you know, they’re wanting to teach her children, but they don’t think they know how they are? They’re this or that, or they have all of these things, the whole world against them. Most of them are just waiting for somebody to say, “I see you. I get it. And trust me you can get here.”

Richard Matthews 1:07:29
So one of the things I have a question I want to ask you, and hopefully it’s not too terrible. I don’t shy away from politics a lot on this show. So one of the things I want to ask you this, because as a member of the African American community, one of the things that I have always sort of thought is that one of the key elements of helping the African American community is education. If we could have more and better education that you know, school choice, private schools, charter schools, home schools, there was more choice and there was more ability to educate the community that would help raise that community up. And I just wanted to see if I could get your opinion on it, since you are an educator in that space and a member of that community.

Brandy Champeau 1:08:17
Absolutely. There should be more and better choices for people of color. There should be. And there’s only one way that we’re going to get there. there’s two things one, how do we get there and two, what do we do until we get there? You know, how do we get there if people have to exercise their rights. That’s what that’s what makes it a democracy. If you want to make a change, you need to vote for it. If you want to change, you have to vote. If you want to, you know, make your voice heard. And so many people say well, you know my story they’d always swing this way or swing that way. And it’s, because if every single person got out and voted and made their voice known, then we would have a truer representation of what this country wants. But right now we’re only at what, like a … percentage, right of people that actually vote. And the second thing is, while you’re waiting, while you’re waiting for education, equality, how are you teaching your children? How are you raising a learner? Because we just got done. You know, we just got done learning about George Washington Carver, right? Because we’re studying botany. We’re learning about George Washington Carver and the fact that he had so many roadblocks but he wanted to learn and if you want to learn, pick up a book, pick up, go to the library, read the news. There’s a way to learn, talk to people, find people who know what you want to know and speak to those people. You know, and I say this for both the color community and the white community, whoever you are, if you’re sitting there and waiting for the school system to teach your child they’re going to do the school system is great. And they do the best that they can. But they have thousands of children they care about. You have one. Yeah, right. And that’s a lot of times, my son’s teachers when you know, the years they did go to public school, I would hear that a lot. I would hear, you know, Ms. Champeau we have 30 kids in this class. And I’d say, “yes, I only care about this one.” And so where they fall short, it’s up to us as parents to pick up the slack. If your child’s not learning math, teach them some math.

Richard Matthews 1:11:01
That’s one of the things that I’ve always been fascinated with, right? So we don’t have that education inequality across all cities and across all, you know, genders and ethnicities yet, which means there’s going to be different levels of slack for different students. And you as a parent, our job is to pick up that slack. And you know, it may not be fair that you have more slack to pick up than another parent does. But that’s, that’s part of your job, right? You pick up and you pick that take that slack, and you fill in the gaps where you need to. And I love that your business is focused on helping parents do that, right? Because that’s, that’s what we’re here for. Right? That’s why we’re what we’re doing to raise our kids is to find out where the slack is and help pick them up and help them you know, the greatest thing that will ever give them this world is raising our children to be a better generation than we were.

Brandy Champeau 1:11:49
Right. And think of think of what our grandparents went through. You know, and I spoke about my grandfather, and I think about what he went through. So that I have the choices that I have now, right? So that I’m able to do the things when my parents got married. So my father’s black, my mother’s white. When my parents got married, it was a terrible thing. And, you know, my mother’s grandparents didn’t even speak to them for years and years and years. But they went through this. And they raised us with the idea that learning is something important. Right? So how do we now as parents where we’re at, if they could do that, with everything that was against them? How do we as parents, where we’re at, raise our children so that our grandchildren can have a better life? What choices can we make now in helping our children become learners? So that so that that becomes our legacy? Our children and our grandchildren, that’s our legacy.

Richard Matthews 1:12:58
I love it. Right? And I tell people all the time, you know, we stand on the shoulders of giants, right? The people who built this country before us, right and have taken care of, you know, a lot of problems that, you know, we get to stand and make, you know, that we still have our problems, right, we got a new generation of problems to deal with. But if, if it wasn’t for our, the people who came before us, we’d be in a much different place. So you know, it’s almost like we owe it to them and omit them from their sacrifice to pick up our struggles and do what we need to do to make the next generation even better.

Brandy Champeau 1:13:32
Yes, to pick up the baton and carry it forward.

Richard Matthews 1:13:36
Absolutely. See, if people tell me all the time, I should avoid politics on the show. I’m like, I don’t think you should. I think we should, you know, the discussions are beautiful when we can have them and have them have them well. So that is essentially a wrap on our interview.

But I do have one last question that I asked all of my clients or all of my guests: it’s called the Hero’s Challenge and hero’s challenge. is really simple. And it’s basically a selfish question I asked to get access to some cool stories I might not otherwise find. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? first names are fine, and why do you think they should come share their story on our show?

Brandy Champeau 1:14:19
Okay, so, so a friend of mine, and she actually contributes to exploring depression, although she has her own company. Her name is Dr. Sheila … And a few years ago, I did an interview with her. That’s how we met. And she has been in the public school system in different facets for over 40 years. And so she has she has as a woman of color, as a woman of color, ending up as a principal for many, many years. And she has this viewpoint of this evolution of education that she shared with me as we spoke, that you know, and I’ll just I’ll just mention one of the things that she told me real quick that was really profound to me is because I asked her what the biggest changes we’re seeing over the because we talked about kind of the not degradation but the issues that are happening in schools these days is.

Richard Matthews 1:15:15
Yeah.

Brandy Champeau 1:15:15
She said that she’s finding that more children and children and parents both, no longer have the words. Now we’re talking about the vocabulary words, to express what they need. And so it’s an issue of communication both with the children and with the parents. That’s making it even harder to overcome, because as a society, I think about it in the time of emojis and all that, as a society, we’re losing words.

Richard Matthews 1:15:51
And that’s really fascinating.

Brandy Champeau 1:15:55
And I say over and over. In fact, one of my giveaways on my website is a book I’ve done called Power Words 52 Words to Learn. Because words are what connects us. It’s what separates us from the ability to speak to each other and to communicate. And the idea that we’re learning that we’re losing hundreds and thousands of words a year, that are no longer part of our vocabulary that are important. And every word we lose, we’re losing a method of expressing our emotions and of sharing, sharing ourselves with other people. So I mean, that’s a talk that she and I had, that I had together, which really is a fascinating subject and just seeing her describe the evolution of the public school system. That’s really great.

Richard Matthews 1:16:48
That’s fascinating. Well, we’ll connect afterwards and see if we can get her on the show. But I have this theory in my head about words that like you know, we think we think in words right? We think in our head like, we are You can’t think without words.So I have, I’ve always wondered like, with my babies as they’re growing up, but I have a toddler right now that’s just picking up words. And I’m always wondering, like, like, what’s going on in her head? Because, like, she doesn’t have many words yet. And perhaps she has more words than we think. Because, you know, you pick up language before you learn to speak language. But at the same time, I’m always like, she, that’s why they break down, right? That’s why they have tantrums and stuff is because they can’t express what’s inside of them. Right? They can’t express their feelings. So they have breakdowns. Right and it almost it almost, you know, you could parallel that like to what we’re seeing with with stuff that’s going on globally right now is you’re seeing a lot of people break down and I wonder if it’s the same kind of problem where you have people who don’t know how, or are not, you know, willing in some way to communicate. It’s like we have this breakdown of communication that’s happening. So anyways, that’s a fascinating story. I’d love to talk with her about it and see how she thoughts on it. But as I said, we’ve, we’ve sort of wrapped to this interview but I have, what I want to do essentially is, is do our send off right into comic books, there’s always you know, the crowd at the end who’s standing cheering for the hero for saving the day so to speak. So as we close what I want to know is where can people find you if they want your help in the future? Where can they know, light up the bat signal and say, “Hey, Brandy, I need you to come help me teach my kids or teach myself.” And you know, more importantly then where they can go to find you is who are the right types of people to say, “Hey, you know what, I really love your help. And I really like to, you know, pick up your books or pick up your curriculum.”

Brandy Champeau 1:18:42
So my website is https://exploringexpression.com/. And if it’s especially parents with children, I have lots of children’s books with activity books and workbooks and full lesson plans. That with them. So really anybody who has a K 12 student can come and get, novel unit studies and picture books and all of those things. But also, anybody who needs help and guidance, getting to their best expression, if that’s,”hey, I need help. I have an idea for a picture book or an idea for a book. And I need help figuring out how to self publish it.” You know, several of my clients, I’m coaching through that process. Or if it’s, “hey, I’m now having my child at home,” because there’s a whole subset of people now, who are all of the sudden home with their children. We all of a sudden do distance learning or homeschool so that if they need somewhere to start, they can call and we do coaching and we do educational consulting. And we also build curriculum. So all of that can be found through my website, https://exploringexpression.com/ but also reach out to me on facebook on Instagram. YouTube, any of those types of places, I’m on all of the social media somewhere. And we would love, love to connect with people.

Richard Matthews 1:20:09
Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on today Brandy, I really appreciate it. If you are listening and you are in that space I know a lot of people are where suddenly you have your kids at home when you have to. You have to pick up a lot more slack in the education than you might have been doing six months ago. If that’s you reach out to Branyi right, pick up some of her curriculum, go through some original stuff. As someone who’s you know, currently homeschooling for kids, I tell you, you can do it. Right. It’s not that it’s not as difficult as you might imagine. After you have to sort of get going, and especially when you have someone like Brandy in your corner who can really help you with that. So Brandy before I hit this, this stop record button you have any final words of wisdom for our audience?

Brandy Champeau 1:20:49
Just remember that you know, you have everything you need now, to be your own best expression. You already possess it and you already know how to teach your children because you’ve been doing it all along. It doesn’t have to be hard, and it doesn’t have to be boring. You know, you can do it.

Richard Matthews 1:21:12
I completely agree. And Brandy, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Brandy Champeau 1:21:15
Thank you.