 turn on the recording. And with much joy, I would like to introduce Dr. Erna Lant as our first speaker this year for the CCN PLC. Erna has worked as we were just chatting about in the field of AAC for many years, starting in South Africa and then more coming to, not Canada, coming to the, coming to the United States and doing some work there with Indiana University. I heard Erna talk at ASHA two years ago in LA where she was talking about the work that she was doing on this book, which I love. And I was absolutely smitten by her approach to meaning making and I would say the human side of AAC, sort of the privileging of that. So I am delighted to, I should also say, Erna has a website that has lots of wonderful resources and I did send that out with the list of this. And another claim to fame that she has is she was an SLP for Martin. Pistorius, is am I saying it correctly, Erna? Yes, yes. The, the, the, the, who is the ghost boy and I think many of you have read that book and so that she's, she's done many marvelous things and will continue to do so. Not the least of which would share some of her thoughts and experiences and her perspective with us today. So welcome, Erna. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you, Kathy. It's a real privilege for me to be here and to talk to everybody today. Yes, and just to give you a little bit of an update on Martin Pistorius. I wasn't his SLP, I was his employer. But also, I just recently saw him because I visited him. He lived in the UK in London and it's just outside of London actually. You know, they've got he and Erna as well. I've got a little baby. So I went to see the baby and here are what great joy. In any case, you know, you know, I just wanted to say, you know, very nice to speak to everybody in the beginning of the school year. As some of you might know, I do a work as a consultant in the schools. So I spend my life these days basically going to schools and supporting teachers and therapists in dealing with the kind of challenges that I experience, you know, and over the years, I think before I come to realise that the group of kids that we work with in AAC in particular, really is so diverse and complicated. It is always nice to just have another set of eyes and then to have a sort of collaborative approach to help us solve our problems or at least not necessarily solve them, but find new ways of thinking about that. So that's what I do come and do. You know, really enjoy it a lot. So I really sympathise and I empathise with people who start in the beginning of the new school year with all the frantic activity and getting to know new, sorry, let me just put this off, with new students that one needs to get to know and faculty members, you know, new faculty members that one has to work within school, and not least of all the administrative issues that one needs to deal with and get to know. So it's really easy right in the beginning of the year to feel overwhelmed already in the start of a year. And this presentation that I have for you today is really about the core of what really matters. It's about the quality of our interactions with each other and with the clients that we serve. It's not the frequency of the interaction. It's not about how we communicate with the people that we work with. It's also not how much time we spend with the people that we work with. It really is focused on what happens between us when we interact with each other. You know, it's quite possible for one to go through a whole day of interactions, talking to kids, faculty, sharing very little, home and being really burnt out, even in the beginning of the year. And I think it's very important that we reflect on that and ask ourselves, why do we feel like that? Why don't we recharge during the day? And then also to put ourselves in the shoes of the kids and thinking, what does that feel like when I get home? You know, how much did they experience during the day that actually built them and that created that kind of closeness that adds to our lives? So really, if you listen to and you read my book, I think at the really core of the issue here has got to do with gain. It's got to do with how much do we gain when we're together? How much can we actually grow together? How much can we sort of really enjoy together? Because I believe that those things go very closely together. So as my summary said, you know, I'm going to focus on meaning making and really look at two aspects. The one is the importance of participation. If you can't have a main means of participation, obviously it's very difficult. But we traditionally in speech and language pathology has been very good at focusing on participation, getting people to speak, getting people to take turns, you know, and lengthening and having sort of extending our interaction with each other. So what I'm really dealing with today is not so much how do we communicate, but what happens? And a pivotal part of that is the role of engagement. In other words, how engaged are we when we actually interact with each other? The reason why this is so important is because that's the basis of friendship. And, you know, the basis of peer interaction, which we know is so important in all our lives. So the goal of today is only two thoughts. The one is to talk about what made this most, the quality of our interaction with our clients, our colleagues and our friends. And as I said, as an AAC therapist, obviously my primary concern here is to out, definitely to our clients who use AAC, but it really is relevant much more generally than that. I think coming to, you know, underline this is also really thinking about whether all this phonetic activity and all these, you know, repetition that we do so frequently with our kids, with all of that really helps us to achieve the goal of getting the kids interested in communicating with us and developing their skill. So doing less often times is more. I want, I just want to put it out there for you to think about because I think it's a very important part of our reflection when it comes to evaluating what we actually contributed to our children's ability to communicate at the end of each year. Mini-making obviously is a very important part, not only to bring people together and create closeness, but it's a vitally important part to encourage me, to entice me to actually get back and talk to you again. If I don't enjoy my interaction with you, there's nothing meaningful that happens, there's nothing unique between us. Why would I want to go back and talk to you again? And I think we forget that even with kids, if there is nothing special happening with you and your interaction with a student, then how can we blame them for not really wanting to enter that relationship or that coming for therapy for that angle? So I'm going to talk about what is meaning-making. I'm going to talk about how is meaning-making different from a traditional way of thinking about communication, institutions, teaching here in therapy, and then I'm going to talk about the two important concepts of engagement and participation. Okay, so what is meaning-making? Meaning-making is an approach to intervention that focuses on making sense, okay, on the sense that we make an interaction between us, rather than the structure or the modes of communication that we use. So we really focus on what happens in between us. And a big part of that is uniqueness because we talk about new, nuanced meaning. It basically means it's not a radically new meaning, but it's something that developed between us that's got nuances that's new and therefore makes it special for me to have spoken to you or to interact with you. And then obviously at the bottom of this all is just the quality, the connection, the quality of our interaction and being together with each other. Okay, so to demonstrate this to you, what is new, nuanced meaning? I want you to look at this picture. And okay, so this is a lizard. You get it in South Africa. It is what we call a look-up on, but in America you talk about rock monitors. It's up to six feet long. It is not that it's silly dangerous, but it's got a vicious tail. And it normally lives in trees. It's basically mostly sort of would lie on branches, tea branches, tree branches. So you wouldn't be able to see them. Now, when I show you this picture and I talk to you about this and you walk out of the room, you're probably going to say, okay, well, what's this woman? I mean, like, okay, so fine that was a look-up on or rock monitor, but there's nothing special about it. So you'll probably forget about it the moment you leave the room. However, when I talk to you and I say to you that I recently was in South Africa and I shared three nights in a room with a look-up on like that, then you're going to go, wow, and you're going to start looking at that picture again. And you're going to say, wow, look at that town. What happened? Why would this woman stay for three nights with a look-up on or a rock monitor in a room? You know, does she actually have something to prove or what? So the truth of that story is I only did because I wasn't aware that I was doing it. And in fact, I heard during the night that there was quite a significant noise in my room, but I was so jiggled and I was so sort of set on my cousin telling me that now there's nothing that can get into this house, which I was sleeping on the top floor. There's nothing that can enter this house. And as you might think, I was perfectly willing to be persuaded that that probably is just squirms or something. But I will say it was a very pronounced noise. And so the next morning I went down and I said, oh, you know, like, there was this unbelievable noise in my room last night. And she was saying it's impossible because we cleared all, we stuck all the holes, you know, there's no way that animals could come in. So the second night, same thing, third night, same thing, but I was so jiggled that I actually did turn around and sleep. So once I arrived home, that's when my cousin told me and said, hey, but guess what? When you left, we cleaned it, you know, we had to clean the house and this is what we discovered. And this was in fact, you know, the noise that you heard for three nights in the room. Now, after I told you, I shared that with you, you know, you are much more likely when you walk out of the door and you see a little one, or you see somebody else to say, sure, come look here to show and share what I've in fact shared with you, even though you initially didn't relate to it at all, because it's not something you know. And that is, you know, the core concept of meaning making. It's about shared experience with another. That does not necessarily add a lot of new information and knowledge, but it shares a personal engagement experience because now when you look at that rock monitor, you start thinking what would it be like six feet long to sleep with something like like new room for three nights, not being near that it is there. So meaning making is about experience, the experience that you have with someone of being close to another. And it's about learning to show interest because now for the first time you're starting to look like, oh, look at that tongue. Gosh, oh, you know. And it's also the experience of the power of actually other people listening to you. So it's not just the matter of me listening to you. It's also you listening to me. And for kids, an incredibly important experiential event, because that's how friendships get created. So next time when I see you, you will most probably remember about this. They hate to do it again or whatever. And that's important because that's an impetus to draw us together to start sort of a conversation again. And so it's not just about instruction. I can instruct you about what is a visit and what is a look-up on and how it and it's how big it is. And those are sort of relevant information, but it does not really entice, you know, entice one to actually engage in interaction about it. And this really is the difference between, you know, meaning-making and interaction. Communication is about meaning. It's about shared meaning. And it's about creating that meaning between us in a situation where it didn't previously exist. So this is what we're after. You know, you've got your AAC user, the communication partner, and in the middle is meaning-making. And meaning-making is about not able, only the ability to communicate, sort of using speech, speech output device gestures, but also about engagement. And this is what was the level of personal involvement that you and I shared when we actually interacted with each other. So I'm going to show you this video of a grandfather and his grandchild. I want you to listen very carefully. It's a very short video. And I want you to think about what do you think are the main features, most important features of this interaction between this grandfather and his grandchild. Now, I also need to point out that it's taken in a natural situation at home. So there's lots of distractions similar to a classroom context. That's a normal household context with lots of competing ways. In spite of the context, though, I think for me what's most striking here is the social closeness between the father, the granddad, and his granddaughter. And the fact that they're able to have shared attention within a context is actually quite demanding and very distracting. And I think for me, that's incredibly encouraging because that's how kids learn. Very seldom do we find ourselves in quiet spaces where you can sort of focus on each other, much more likely that we need to create the interest to actually draw each other together in order to start communicating. But it's the focus interest that I think really is of great importance here is just the way in which the granddad talks to his grandchild and the little one looking away but actually being incredibly interested in what the grandfather had to say. So there's joint attention and there's triadic attention because it's between the book and the grandfather and the granddad. So it's not just this kind of interaction. It's really talking about what is in the immediate environment. The other thing I think that's really quite clear here is the slow pace of the interaction to give time to see each other. Quite a bit of time here is taken by the grandfather to actually look at his granddaughter to watch what she's doing. And a lot of watching is done also from the granddaughter in terms of watching the granddad. And for meaning making these are probably some of the most pivotal pointers for us is how keen are we to observe each other in the interaction. The final observation I want to make here is one of playfulness. The grandfather was reading this book and he was saying okay who is this? She was obviously not going to respond. I don't think she knew perhaps she didn't. But then he started throwing out ideas is this really the fish and this was not really the fish. And she responded oh yes and he went with it because there was this playfulness that was between the two of them that is very typical of meaning making. The openness of hmm what are you saying here? I know it's not really the fish but say hey yes for us it's really the fish because that is the uniqueness in the how the uniqueness in the action actually is allowed to develop. Something that did not exist before. I think sometimes we are so set on what is accurate and what isn't that we must out on but does it really matter in this interaction? Because in order to allow for the development of meaning there has to be openness in order to allow for the development of new nuance meaning. So meaning making is not just a cognitive theory. I think that's a very important point to remember. It's not about understanding. It's you cannot equate meaning making with cognitive understanding because it also includes a very important component of emotional resonance. That means the ability to just zoom in and be with someone where they are at not where you think they should be. And this is particularly important you know in all communications but particularly with IAC users because it's so easy to just impose your own position on a student who cannot speak that the art is really not to do that in order to get to know the individual in order to interest him in what you have to offer so that you can really expand visibility to communicate in a meaningful way. So this is just a meme that I thought actually that struck me that I want to see if I can get to it. Okay so that's Freud saying I draw the people feel a fool before understanding it and I think it's true for a lot of interactions when you enter interaction with a kid before you actually start interacting with a student if we can ask ourselves what does the start feel like before actually so sorry I need to get this back up. Okay so meaning making what is it? Meaning making is about sense making. It's about understanding the self and other in an interaction and as I said it's not just perspective taking you know with theory of mind with children with autism etc we become very oriented towards perspective taking taking the role of the other and quite honestly we know it's important we know that it's important for empathetic interactions but it's not all it is empathy is a lot more than that and being able to develop meaning certainly is a lot more than perspective taking. It's about an intersubjective process that involves emotional resonance effective congruence between people so that in fact it ties us together to develop something that would be unique between us. So when I talk about meaning making I'm talking about engagement but part of engagement is a very important part is not only perspective taking because it's also the personal involvement which happens the intersubjective nature of that interaction. So why is meaning making important? It's the basis of our relationship with others stability to not just share messages but construct messages together and to build something in between as that didn't exist before. The need for this in our schools is tremendous you know there's a lot of quite a few reports that came out very recently looking at the social emotional benchmarks of students and where we should focus on really looking at the isolation of children that leads to depression and all you know the different kind of behavioral issues that we have so I really think it's a really critical issue for us to look at is how do we go about facilitating meaning making and interactions between peers and it starts with making sure that we give kids the kind of experience of what meaning making really is about and it starts with our interactions with these students our interaction with the parents so that we can move towards an experiential approach rather than do this do this do this do this which is an instructive type of approach communication is not about instruction it's about experiencing being with people. Okay so there's also this you know couple of articles recently on well-being and I'm going to read this to you because I'm probably pretty touching it was about what I'm rolling through the communication professor that said victory students basically the second paragraph here pay close attention to the habits that you form because before you know it you could have organized yourself in a way that doesn't allow for the kinds of friends that you really would like to have and you really talk there about the time that you take to invest in the quality of the attention that you are prepared to invest in people so three concepts of AIC focused meaning making is then really the issue of participation engagement the fact that there needs to be personal engagement for meaning to develop otherwise you can share you can exchange you can share exchange you can you can share information but you do not develop meaning in a way that something happens between you and the third concept here that's very important is the creative interaction between participation and engagement because it's not a 50-50 you know um engagement of participation is a synthesis is a way sometimes a person can participate a lot and not communicate at all like they could talk a lot sometimes somebody can talk very little but can make some very significant non-verbal cues to keep meaning development is actually quite a high level in fact you sometimes find this in um situations with um adults that lose they like modern year on disease um ALS where people lose their ability but they still sort of really intrude with each other that they can develop quite quite a significant level of meaning between them even though you know the participation of one person could be quite limited okay so participation is something we're very familiar with it's the ability to exchange messages to share with another um and that obviously requires an expressive ability making sure that the individual has a means to communicate has a switch generating device but as I talked earlier to Kathy um it really is the beginning of it it's not it's the beginning of the process of actually getting somebody to engage in communication the real challenge is how to engage the speech generating device and helping the person develop authentic communication with other people participation very often manifests in us you know in our interaction with students is the ability to do with others and to reach goals to participate in our goals for the classroom in teaching literacy and you know all these trials that we do with students that's participation it's based on stimulant response we want to get to learn certain things and understand me well I do think there's a place for that I think what I what we becoming increasingly concerned with is that we do this 80 90 percent of the day of this child's day at school and the child actually gets very little exposure to what really matters for the rest of his life and really impact his learning quite significantly and that his ability or his or her ability to really engage in meaningful interaction with other people engagement then is the ability to be attentive to and respecting of others in interaction it's interesting others it's the ability to take perspective and its emotional resonance the ability to sort of just zoom in and be with that person to to get an idea of where that person is at today and sometimes you know you can enter classroom and immediately get some sense of what's going on in the classroom I think that's incredibly important the same we do when you actually start interacting with one of your students it is this intersubjective component that enables communication partners to listen to each other and really develop meaning between them so as I said before it's this creative synthesis between engagement participation that is really what is important and this is how we think about it so you have participation on the one sort of access and engagement on the other and then we can look at students who are very high participation but really engagement those are the few talkers people who kids who can regard to take a lot of information but actually having great difficulty actually engaging with it at all you also have low participation low engagement where students would be very passive and really not do anything they're not interested but they also don't participate and on the other side you would have high participation high engagement with the students not necessarily talking all the time but he participates in a very appropriate way because he's engaged and he's able to sort of with a high level of engagement participate so his participation in that context is optimal I think what's important here is that frequency of participation is not what this is about it's part of it but the most important thing is also to look at the appropriacy of the interaction of the participation that the person actually displays and then we have low participation high engagement this is a situation where AC users could be because they might not have the ability to participate but they might be although that's not often the case very high engagement somebody like Martin Pistorius might have sort of been in this category when he actually came out of the coal mine started to be actually very aware of what happens you know around him so this is really how we look at it from an assessment point of view and then the issue obviously and and just helping us to understand where on the spectrum can we start sort of placing this job or this person in terms of meaning making so we have engagement participation and in the in the middle there the development of no one's meaning how do the participation the participation of this individual and he's able to do her ability to engage work together to actually sort of entice the development of meaning making between people okay so when you're asking me about no one's meaning i'm saying that's what's unique in an interaction and that doesn't mean to say that in every interaction that you have with somebody you're going to talk about elizabeth or you know anything that extreme no it can be something very short and very sort of common but it's just a different nuance to it you interact with somebody and they put a spin on something that make you smile and that's the beginning of it because that's something that didn't exist when you walked in before and in very impoverished version of that is me coming in saying hello how are you oh i'm fine thank you tonight's day is it's very i mean like the ritual type of interactions that has that's devoid of any personal um of any level of engagement really so this is just to show you that there is depth to this approach because the idea really is that you have different levels of meaning and that these levels are not just cognitive although obviously the cognitive place a significant role but there's a very significant awareness of the level of emotional resonance and being with an individual and it becomes increasing a very important win with young kids like for example the video you saw where the children don't necessarily have the ability to express themselves and we find the same also with aac users okay so the first level is formalistic meaning where everything is formalistic it's the rituals we're very good it's very it is possible to go through a day's work at school really never moving beyond formalistic level one and two the downside of that is you get home incredibly tired because nothing really might seems to you i mean there was never nothing really that to you during the day so level two is literal meaning as we be here now focused um we have exchanges but the exchanges are basically information sharing mostly nothing really anymore you know much more depth in terms of personal involvement level three level four start with extended meaning where you can see these also a more definite understanding on emotive level when in fact these resonance they look at each other uh and then also they are able to to take that understanding that they get from the attention and bring it into the interaction so that the meaning that is developed is actually quite unique and you know engaging for both people and the last level four is versatile meaning which is a very deep level of meaning that could be um reached regardless it's not easy to but you can reach that level of interpersonal meaning when you even though you don't have a lot of expressibility and this very important because for me the basis of looking at the different levels of meaning is to sensitize us to the fact that the ability to not speak or to not express yourself in any whatever the reason might be should be an impetus for us to delve into engagement with that individual in order to sort of really get a reliable uh impression of what that person can do and this really is what the field of AAC is all about so you can mean you can live you can measure the level of meaning making um i'm not going to go into any level of detail on this some of it's in my book those of you are interested are welcome to contact me but this i think is a topic for another day um and there's a scale uh meaning making scale will we start looking at how do you really uh describe participation and engagement in order to plot it on that you know to plot it and get some better idea of how we're progressing but finally i just wanted to talk a little bit about what does this add what does a meaning making approach add to existing intervention efforts you know first of all it's a move away from focus on strategies uh it's not just about strategies we have to know about strategies but really what is important is how do we infuse the strategies that we use into into the existing sort of um experience of meaning making the problem with and not doing it that way is that we use strategies we teach skills we come back we teach them again every time when there's a break there's no carry over this very little sustainability and i think we really need to understand that if we keep on imposing structures in the teaching way on people it really does not encourage them to become to personally get involved and actually use what we're teaching so meaning making is a start a little bit from a different angle it starts with personal involvement and how do i draw that in to start sort of showing interest it's a focus on interface in the subjective process of meaning making some other awareness which we haven't spoken about it's critical importance of observation and listening to the other being present to the other you know they need to be an openness to each other in order to allow for that growth like that grandfather did you know that it wasn't the response that he wanted or that he thought was accurate but you know he was able to take that response from the little one and build on it to expand this experience of togetherness which is so important for that kid to actually experience because that is what's going to bring the little grandmother back to the grandfather the fact that she had fun with him and as i said the the importance of effective the effective dimension it's not just about cognition okay so there's a couple of references i mean basically the references that are used but you're welcome to go on to my website there there might be some more stuff there that might be of interest to those who really related to what i have to say so thank you very much this lovely talking to you oh erna um thank you i um i i can't help but oh there's so many things i but i i can't help to bring it to an experience that i had today when someone was saying how do i help this child who clearly can understand but who doesn't want to use the system and i think the whole emphasis has been on shall i put it this way the accents on the wrong syllable instead of being open to what the child wants to say to be listening to all of the beautiful things that you've said today we have been so intent on um output output as opposed to outcomes and an outcome which could be truly coming into um engagement and coming to a place of meaning making with children who may or may not have devices is i think the the essence of our work and i am so grateful for your talk today to start us off um this this term and this year and um i also can't help but think um and i i'm i'm cautious here because one of the things that came to me is if we could use if we could put your levels in our ipps instead of some of the ways that we think about measuring outcomes um what a potential what potential difference we would have for children and actually and something that you said is really important i think to the level of um so that we wouldn't come home exhausted because we haven't engaged in meaning making with our our students we have been doing something else that is not giving us more energy yeah yeah so um yes i i'm so glad i'm so glad that i asked you to see and you know what the kind of things that you're saying about your experience today is incredibly important i wasn't a class the other day we were starting with an you know including a little one in a classroom and i was struck by charlotte's autism and he is non-verbal but he was interested you know and he wasn't going to tell the teacher that because now he's busy here doing his thing but she was talking and every so often i saw him looking and i was elated because i thought he isn't exactly the right class so afterwards when i was talking to the teacher she was saying to me doesn't want to participate he doesn't this he shouldn't be he looks bad and i said hey hey you know let's relook this i know how do we miss this even right um just to sort of exactly you know accentuate what you're saying our prejudice in only wanting to see one way of his participation you know and it's such a pity because we kill it we kill it there it is i think that's exactly it we kill it we make it into work we make it into something that is the antithesis of what we want it to be um and and i certainly meaning make i wrote writing notes meaning making kids with autism i've had the opportunity to observe in some classrooms lately where kids um had autism and you know they had all these devices but not that was not what was hooking them but they this one child came up to the teacher and did something that i couldn't i i wasn't in their relationship well enough to see what happened or to understand but the next thing you know the teacher was getting something to rub on this child's back that's meaning making that but you know um that's not going to hit on anyone's checklist now although although when the child if the child responded from that with a very challenging b8 or sort of response that would have made it it would have made it yeah honestly goodness that darn kid just didn't react strongly enough yes um anyway so there's just been so many instances in my brain as i have heard you talk today of the critical importance of us um finding out who these children are and taking the taking the time and the and it's it's i i to talk about your idea of either draining or or seek it's not it's not work to do that it doesn't take energy to do that it actually gives you up when you can can do it i think so i'm talking a lot i want to open it up now are there any other folks that have comments or questions or thoughts for urna and the last couple of minutes you can say them on on live or you can put them in the chat well it's also the end of the day one understands that people are tired yeah um oh so so from wendy so here we go um i love the meaning making our system i think our that our system makes it so the focus is on output yes absolutely and and i think i mean for me um this approach this thinking hat dare i say has the opportunity to revolutionize the way we come into being with um our our children students people who communicate in in a multitude of different ways and maybe i'm a little bit more attuned because i too have a grandson and i love you know but but this is it who um there's a lovely quote by michael um williams who talks about his grandfather putting him on his knee and trying to figure out who is this child and i think that's the essence of what you've tried to say let's who is this child and how can i get to know this child rather than get this child to perform for me which is another thing that one of my lovely um not so unopinionated aac uh user says i'm not a trained monkey yeah all right so there's more things coming in um we need to oh we need to make insurance companies in the us and the administrators get on board it's about the money and the numbers i love that so but you know it's also about the challenge here is to develop measuring strategies for what is not observable and i think that that's possible i think we should just pick up the challenge you know um small baby steps we can't start you know but i think i think we're moving in that direction because i think the frustration that we've had for instance with us we have to cure autism and the recent tendency you know the recent realization that i've seen in the literature that people start realizing we you know it's it's not about curing autism it's actually how to sort of help individuals to cope with it you know that we need to start doing yeah i love it for sure again baby steps for sure and i really i'm i'm i really am thinking it's it's interesting i'm doing a workshop on friday and i wanted to go and redo it but i'm thinking how can we yes gather the information that we well and i don't even know that we typically gather but i love your levels and how can we think about being intentional about thinking about that and should that kind of intentional um that should we not attend actively and um in a in a real way to that kind of data as well as the kind of data that we we typically do so you've given me much to think about and i knew you would and i hope everyone else feels the same so so here's another comment coming in focus on performance at all cost is anxiety provoking for everyone involved not just the student yeah and i think that this approach has got a very different message for professionals too because it it allows you to also be gentle on yourself as a professional and it's critical because that's what you're imposing on the people you work with right so by starting at home and realizing you know that personal engagement is what life is about and what living really is about you know um and actually investing in being able to record it better and sort of um measure the kind of things we feel should be measured i think it's for the tool i totally totally totally agree well thank you ever so much for this wonderful talk too as i say launch us for the this year um i did hear um maybe that this was beginning of a conversation so i may well take you up on that we may invite you back um and and i think one of the things that would be lovely for people in Alberta and and is to take your book and do a do a little book study i mean i think that would be a a lovely thing to do and that'd be great and you know if i can have a couple of ideas and questions coming in before the time i would be very very open to that that would be wonderful that would be wonderful um i think we will we shall we shall um return and continue with this type of thinking and with this um focus on meaning making and um i hope to hear from you that you you know i'll start a book club that'd be great let's do it and um and we'll invite Erna back to continue the dialogue with us so again thank you ever so much and again coming in from the the chat thank you so much very motivating and inspiring and i couldn't agree more so thank you thank you okay so good night everyone if there's other things that you want to say this is your uh chance and uh if not um i look forward to hearing from those of you who want to do the book club and we will um see you in October and for this evening go out and have a lovely a lovely evening and Erna again thank you so very much thank you good night