200th Milestone Episode with Majid Samadi (Returning Guest) from EPISODE 1 on ”Why We Began This Podcast”

All organizations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year.”― Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action Watch the interview on YouTube here https://youtu.be/hP854mDG9do On this episode you will learn: ✔︎  The vision for The Neuroscience Meets SEL Podcast, from Majid Samadi's eyes, watching the podcast grow from the early days when it was just an idea. ✔︎  Why SEL skills are important in today's classrooms, and Emotional Intelligence training in our corporate workplaces. ✔︎ How Andrea held her vision for interviewing high quality guests with an experience over 12 years ago, of running The Teen Performance Magazine. ✔︎ The TOP 3 Guests from Majid's point of view in the past year. ✔︎ How to monetize a podcast, and why this step is crucial to sustain any idea. ✔︎ The "behind-the-scenes" of this podcast, from someone whose office is next door to where all interviews are conducted.   Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning podcast, for our 200th episode milestone, with a reflection back on “The Why Behind Our Podcast” which is the #1 question people ask me when I share that I host this podcast. I hope that we can all learn something about “why we do what we do” as we reflect back on the past 100 episodes (that covers 2021 and the beginning of 2022). I’ve asked a special returning guest from episode #1[i], Majid Samadi, senior regional sales director at Lexia Learning[ii], and my husband, to join me as we reflect back on “why we do what we do”, as Simon Sinek would say. Welcome back.  I'm Andrea Samadi, author, and educator from Toronto, Canada, now in Arizona, and like many of you listening, have been fascinated with learning and understanding and applying the science behind high performance strategies that we can use to improve our productivity in our schools, our sports, and workplace environments. My vision with this podcast began 3 years ago, and I think it’s important to step back and take a look at “why” we began this podcast, since “the why” should be behind all of our work to keep us moving forward. As we think about “why” we do what we do, I hope that you reflect on why you do what YOU do, and see if you can gain insights from your why, to drive you to new levels of awareness, as we do the same. I chose Majid Samadi to join me on this episode, because he’s really good at launching big ideas, especially those ideas that have a clear “why” behind them. It was Majid who encouraged me to publish my first book, The Secret for Teens Revealed to put the ideas I learned from the seminar industry into writing, and when I mentioned that I was thinking about launching a podcast in early 2019, when my website had a podcast theme, his first words were “how can I help you to begin?” You would think that the person in our household who met Simon Sinek (me) would be his biggest fan, but Majid would be a much bigger fan of Sinek’s work than me. Every year he trains his sales team (at Lexia Learning—a company that provides structured literacy solutions and professional learning to students and educators across the country) on Sinek’s “The Golden Circle” so that his sales team launches their year with a clear why behind what they will be doing, to kickstart their year. I’m always looking for a new angle to think about “why we do what we do” and I recently saw Mathew Portell’s[iii] keynote speech at Butler University’s 6th Annual Educational Neuroscience Symposium and it opened my eyes to a new way to approach this episode.  Mathew Portell, who is currently in his sixth year as principal of Fall-Hamilton Elementary, an internationally recognized innovative model school for trauma-informed practices in Metro Nashville Public Schools, opened up his keynote for the Neuroscience Symposium with a completely NEW way of looking at our why. At least it was for me. Before I bring Majid on, I wanted us to all think about why we do what we d