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Spirituality in the Workplace – a conversation with Kelle Sparta
0 Playsin 8 hours
Kelle Sparta is a Spiritual Coach and Transformational Shaman, author of The Over-Achiever’s Guide to Spiritual Awakening. and host of the Spirit Sherpa podcast.
Host Michael Millward explains at the start of this episode of the Abeceder podcast The Independent Minds, that he has no knowledge of spirituality but is approaching his conversation with Kelle with an open mind.
Using examples from her consulting experience Kelle explains how an understanding of spirituality can help businesses create more productive working environments and more constructive relations between colleagues and with customers.
Kelle explains how managers who want to create cultural change should alongside the systems and processes that drive culture, they should also investigate the spiritual energy of the proposed changes.
In their conversation Kelle also explains how spiritual assessments can impact the success of marketing activities, negotiations, and mergers and acquisitions.
You will leave this episode of The Independent Minds, like Michael eager to learn more.
More information about Kelle Sparta and Michael Millward is available at abeceder.
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Transcript
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr.
Introduction to Independent Minds Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
00:00:23
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I'm your host Michael Middleward, the Managing Director of Abbasida.
Who is Kelly Sparta?
00:00:28
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Today I'm going to be finding out about, well, spiritualism and the workplace from Kelly Sparta, who is a spiritual coach and transformational shaman from Spirit Guide School.
00:00:47
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As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr.
Promoting Zencastr
00:00:54
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Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform that makes every stage of the podcast production process, including editing and distribution, so easy.
00:01:05
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If you would like to try podcasting using Zencastr, use the link to zencastr.com that's in the description. There is a built-in discount. Now that I have told you how wonderful Zencastr is for making podcasts, we should make one.
00:01:20
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One that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading, and subscribing to. Very importantly, on the independent minds, we don't tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think.
00:01:34
Speaker
Let's find out about spiritualism in the workplace and say hello to Kelly. Hello, Kelly. Hi, Michael. It's great to be here. Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to this. This is something that is very new to me and I'm coming to it with a very open mind. So I'm eager to learn
Kelly's Spiritual Journey
00:01:50
Speaker
more about it. But how did you become a spiritual coach and a shaman? My mother saw me talking to ghosts in my crib. So this is more of who I am rather than just what I do.
00:02:03
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She was committed to me not shutting down my gifts because she had done that when she was a child. And so she raised me in the new age movement. I was doing self-hypnosis by the time I was 10. I was reading tarot cards by 12. And I started coaching and officially in the ninety s But i have high school yearbook signatures that read like client testimonials. It's just who I am.
00:02:28
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I'm an HR professional and very often we're helping clients with recruitment, people will talk about themselves and then the work that they do. And in many ways, what you look for is the person who can do the work because it's it's not something that is separate to them. It is something that is part of them. they They love it. It's their natural way of being.
00:02:50
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But you're the first person who I have met who's actually introduced themselves in that sort of way. Who knew, right? Yeah, it's all it's all new for me today.
00:03:02
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but But it's quite right. Your mother had the knowledge to recognize that you had gifts and raised you in a way that would enable you to utilize those gifts.
00:03:13
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You mentioned self-hypnosis. What is that? So if you've ever listened to a guided meditation on recording somewhere, it's a similar sort of thing. The idea is that you put yourself into a hypnotic state through a series of practices that you do And then in that hypnotic state, you explore your reality or you focus on a specific issue that you're trying to address or you ah work on unwinding a belief structure that's in your mind ah that is not serving you, things like that.
00:03:47
Speaker
It sounds like the sort of thing that an amateur should not really try. I don't know. I was doing it when I was 10 years old. So, you know, once you learn how to do it, it's not hard. Yeah, nobody listening to this, I think, should try it until they've spoken to somebody like you. not until you learn how.
00:04:03
Speaker
Yeah, learn how. Because like everything else, learn how to do it and then you can have a lot of benefits from it. But experimenting without knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. Or, you know, you could experiment and screw it up over and over again. Screw yourself up and then have to fix it. then That's also a valid path. It's called experimenting.
00:04:22
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But, yes that you know, it's easier if you learn how to do it. ah Yes. But this explains you the fact that you were doing these sorts of things when you were 10 explains why you're able to say on your website that you've got 50 years experience in growth and spiritual practices because you were starting right from the crib, so to speak, and also worked in business for 38 years at the moment. We're talking 2025 the moment.
00:04:46
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moment So you obviously have delved into this in quite a lot of detail.
How Can Spiritual Practices Impact Business?
00:04:52
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What does it actually mean in terms of ah a business context when you're saying that you're trans transformational shaman and spiritual coach? In a business context, it varies depending upon the person in the business.
00:05:06
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If you're in a smaller organization or a solopreneur, then the owner of the company is very much the energetic that leads the energy of the business.
00:05:17
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And so if you have personal blocks around receiving, around feeling important or valued or anything that is, ah you know, perfectionism or control issues, all of these things will percolate into your business in the term in the form of over ah delivering and undercharging or not, you know, having your employees run you instead of the other way around, or, you know, you end up in a position where you have clients all the time who are people who never were happy with anybody else. And you're like, I can make it better for you. You know, you end up with the terrible clients, right?
00:05:57
Speaker
And there's, there's all of that. If you are in a larger organization, then we deal with issues around company culture and the energy of that and how the energy of the C-suite impacts the, everything below it and how it all rolls downhill.
00:06:14
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And we work on leadership issues. And again, those same issues can come into play. a lot of the people I work with have, ah you know, imposter syndrome, right?
00:06:25
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And so imposter syndrome is, is, ah it's a variation of the not good enough. Right. And so, All of these things come into play.
00:06:36
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And we also work on the energy of the business itself in both cases. So if you take a look at the energy of the business, if it's all bound up, no big surprise, it's not going further. It's not expanding. It's not scaling. It's stuck at a revenue level, right?
00:06:51
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and Sometimes I'll look at a new marketing initiative that somebody's putting together and say, okay, what is going on with this? And how is that in relation to the brand? And I look at the energy of the business marketing initiative related to the brand and the marketing initiative related to the target market. And it's like, this isn't going to work or yeah this is going to be great.
00:07:11
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I've actually had somebody who was doing 30 energy startups at the same time he was doing ah an entire funding round to to start 30 companies. I sat down and I said, okay, I'm going to do a review of these before they even exist. And I'm going to say these 28 fine.
00:07:29
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These two are a problem. This one's going to have ah somebody who's going to be stealing from the company. And then this other one will actually literally explode. So you need to really watch the ah build on this one.
00:07:42
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You know, it it it depends, right? Like I had somebody who came to me and he was going to do a consulting for equity deal as a CMO of a ah company. And he came to me, he was going to relocate his whole family. And he said, what do you think?
00:07:56
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And I looked at it and I said, is this a family business? And he's like, yeah. And I said, okay. I said, you need to ask some more questions about the finances because there's a family member who has been embezzling money and this company is out of business and they don't even know it.
00:08:11
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And he said, what? And he did. He went back and he asked questions and sure enough, The uncle had stolen $60,000 from the company and the company was out of business within two weeks. Wow. Wow.
00:08:23
Speaker
There's lots of things there that got me thinking. When you talk about the smaller business and the, the sort the spirituality
Integrating Spirituality with Business Practices
00:08:33
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of the founder, the the leaders of the business, but doesn't matter whether it's small business or a big business.
00:08:39
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With my HR professionals hat on, I think like if I want to implement something and make it successful, then I have to have that top person on board. That's but simply what you're describing, isn't it?
00:08:52
Speaker
that Yeah. you know it's When you talk about it in terms of spirituality, then it's very easy to be cynical unless you've experienced it in some way. But actually, the spirituality is just a different aspect of things that we talk about as good business practice, good management practice, the best way to run an organization. It's just adding a new element of understanding of the organization and the people that run it to how you then contribute towards ensuring that that organization is a success.
00:09:27
Speaker
Yeah. There's all kinds of different practices that you can use in this sort of realm. I know of a man who was structural constellation facilitator, which is a practice from Germany. He was a a architect ah for a network art. He did the architecture for ah software, right? Right. His people would come to him and they would be like, we can't find this bug. We can't find this bug.
00:09:53
Speaker
And he would say, well, leave it with me and I'll, I'll figure it out. And he would go and do structural constellation work on it. And he would come back and say, this is where the bug is. And every time that's exactly where it was out of.
00:10:04
Speaker
millions of lines of code, he would be able to identify the module and the section of the module in which the problem was using structural constellation work. So yeah, it it can be used in a lot of ways.
00:10:15
Speaker
Yes, but it's looking at an issue from a different angle, applying different expertise to finding a solution and using what comes from that with other sources as well to find the best way to do something.
00:10:28
Speaker
Yeah. One of the coaches in my company was hired to create a ritual that would bring the two parts of an organization together because they were merging. So it was when ah China was going or when Hong Kong was going back to China.
00:10:45
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And so they had to merge these two very different cultures together. And so she was hired to come in and create that experience that helped to bind the teams together.
00:10:57
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And, you know, as a shaman, she was in a unique position to do so. She also actually did her PhD work in transformational dynamics. So, you know, she had the the chops for that and from a looking for looking at it sort of perspective. Yes.
00:11:12
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yeah Yeah. I'm someone who has worked in Hong Kong on a joint venture between a Chinese organization and an American organization. And the bringing together of those two cultures was the main challenge that we faced. that we and that is often yeah We ended up with The joint venture that had people from at least 30 different countries and trying to create a culture that was the right culture for that organization, but was also recognizable by the two ah joint venture partners as being connected to their organization as well was a huge challenge.
00:11:48
Speaker
We brought in a Feng Shui master to to help with us on that particular project. Well, and even if you're in a particular culture itself and your company culture is different than the local culture. So like I've been working with a a person who has a company in Africa and, you know, we're actively working together. i I'm not going to say exactly where, but. No, no, no.
00:12:11
Speaker
But you know the the local culture is very negative and very work as little as you can, get as much money as you can. It's very, very survival based mentalities.
00:12:21
Speaker
We've been working to shift the company culture to say, yeah, that's great. But here is how we are. And you buy into this culture when you come to work here and we pay you well for it.
00:12:32
Speaker
And if you don't want to participate, then you don't get to stay. So we've been shifting the company culture out of that dynamic because that dynamic was bogging down the structure of the organization. It wasn't making progress because people weren't working and they were at each other's throats and it was all very individual. You know, I'm going to get what I want and I don't care about the team.
00:12:54
Speaker
We've been shifting that culture through a variety of different pathways in concert with her HR person to be able to do that. And so it's been really, really successful.
00:13:05
Speaker
How do people find you? Are they people who are already interested in spirituality or are they people who are looking for a solution to a business issue and just trying to find the right options?
Who Are Kelly's Clients?
00:13:20
Speaker
Yeah. More often than not, I find business owners who are already into spirituality find me and they find me through my podcast most often. So my podcast is, is a combination of just a spiritual podcast and, and personal growth podcast.
00:13:36
Speaker
But I also do episodes around business and different aspects. um And so, you know, it's, it's a combination of things, but most often the business owners I work with are already in a spiritual bent. Yeah.
00:13:49
Speaker
So they've found you through the podcast mainly, which is called Spirit Sherpa. Yes. Great name. Thank you. The sort of activities that you're getting involved with are related to situations where conflict may be too strong a word, but it's misalignment seems to be the sort of issues that you're dealing with.
00:14:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it can be it can be a wide variety of things, right? I've worked with fashion designers. I've worked with college tutorials. I've worked with you know energy companies. I've worked with, I mean, just a wide variety of people, right? It's different for everybody. So sometimes it is conflict related. I had a ah printing company I worked with for a while. It was a family business and one of the brothers was disruptive to the entire family or to the entire staff dynamic.
00:14:39
Speaker
And we just set some energetics on the space and he just decided to work from home 90% of the time after that. And so there was no conflict. There was no, kind of you know, no kind of confrontation necessary.
00:14:55
Speaker
We just changed the dynamics in the physical space and he just wasn't in alignment with them anymore. And so he worked from home instead. So you change the person's behavior by changing the environment in which they exist. Yeah. Yeah. And you don't need to have that confrontational conversation with people necessarily either.
00:15:15
Speaker
Well, sometimes you do, but in this case, we didn't.
How Does Environment Affect Behavior?
00:15:18
Speaker
But yeah it is possible to change behavior by changing the environment. Yeah. Like I had a retail store back in 1999, and we did protections on the store. Now, it was in a it was in a not as great neighborhood, and there were a ton of kids wandering through. We had all kinds of teenagers wandering through, and lots of small items that could be stolen. Right.
00:15:40
Speaker
18 months after we opened, we did our first inventory and we had lost $12 worth of stock and we were fairly certain we had given that away. So it has very practical applications as well.
00:15:52
Speaker
If you can, you know, $12 worth of shrinkage in 18 months on a retail store, really? Yeah, that's unheard of Yes. I'm sort of sitting here thinking like that is unheard of.
00:16:04
Speaker
Lots of shopkeepers would be very eager to to find out more about that, I'm sure. The key point is that you create the environment which fosters the type of behavior that you want people to display. Yeah. Oh, it was so funny when we were building out that store too, because we put the protections up before we put anything in.
00:16:23
Speaker
And this lady walks in and she's like, what are you going to do in here? And we told her it was a spiritual shop and and healing center. And she was just like, oh, I'll never come in here. I'll never come in here. And she's just over and over again for like two or three minutes, walked through the whole space and just sat there and programmed herself to not come in.
00:16:39
Speaker
And I wasn't going to mess with it. I'm like, okay. Yeah. Can't please all the people all the time. Well, it was so funny because she walked by months later and our insurance agent who knew everybody in town would happen to be in the store at the time.
00:16:53
Speaker
And I said, what's the deal with her? He said, Oh, don't let her enter your shop. She's the local kleptomaniac. She'll steal everything. And so, yeah, the protections were working before the stock was even in the store. When you say the protections, what sort of things are involved in that? Well, so it depends on where you are. And in that particular store we had created, so it's called a ward, right? It's a, an energetic protection that has intentions associated with it. And so we had created a space that had a balance of masculine and feminine energies, and it had highly protective energy built into the space itself. Like, so lightning struck oaks are known to be very protective,
00:17:32
Speaker
in spiritual practice. And so we actually had a center pillar that was ugly. And we actually had built a ah lightning struck oak around that pillar that we sculpted out of chicken wire and paper mache and painted to look like an oak so much so that people would stop on the street, go across the street and look up to see if the top of the tree was coming out of the building. It was really good.
00:17:56
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And that was the protection for that space. So, you know, it just depends on the space, you can do it with it being completely invisible. And it's just a matter of putting protections on the doors and and ensure that the the environment is set for what you want it to be set for.
Creating Intentional Workspaces
00:18:13
Speaker
It can reduce conflict in workplaces by setting an intentional container and and intentional space within the workspace. And that can be done partially through feng shui. If you want to do that, it can also just be done energetically. ah The feng shui does help with the energetics, but it's not required.
00:18:31
Speaker
So like a Walmart could do this if it wanted to. It's just a matter of knowing how the energetics work and being able to structure them and ground them and and fuel them and so on. i mean, I'm listening to you ah and thinking about what I've been told by architects who tell me that the way in which the average office building was designed, when the designers thought about who would be in that office building, they thought about people who were male and of a certain age, ah wearing certain types of clothes and designed things.
00:19:05
Speaker
everything about the buildings to make them as friendly and as comfortable as possible for that man wearing those clothes at this time of the year and all those sorts things, which is one of the reasons why air conditioning will not be a problem for a man, but will make a woman feel very cold because as the air conditioning has been designed for a male worker, not a female worker.
00:19:30
Speaker
ye And yet what you're saying is that, correct me if I'm wrong, but what I think you're saying is that we can create much more productive type of environments and foster behaviors that we want people to exhibit by thinking more, not about design,
00:19:50
Speaker
not just the aesthetics, so to speak. We'll do paint that wall blue. We'll paint that one a lighter shade of blue or the type of furniture that we put in, but actually understanding the spiritual aspect of the space and then working with the space to create an environment which is welcoming and, like said, promotes the sorts of behaviors that we want people to exhibit, whether that is the way in which they work, the way in which they interact with each other,
00:20:19
Speaker
the way in which they do things by themselves, we can influence that yes by creating um specific types of space. There's also, so for instance, my husband worked in a retirement plan. He worked for a retirement company ah that did retirement planning for people. And during COVID, when everybody was out of work and panicking and they were broke and they were all digging into their retirement funds to be able to live, ah you know, it was a miserable job that he had answering the phones.
00:20:52
Speaker
And so we put protections on his phone line. to keep all that negative, desperate ah energy away from him. And so that's something that you can do for your entire call center.
00:21:05
Speaker
If as a business owner, you want to do that, that improves the mental health of your employees. It also improves their ability to work more hours because when they're not having to take mental health days, because they're just receiving everybody else's misery all the time. You know, that's something you do. And then you can also teach people because in in customer facing roles, more often than not, you end up with people who are empathic.
00:21:29
Speaker
They hold their energy differently than other people, and they are more impacted by other people's energies than the average person. If you teach them how to hold their energy differently, then they can be less impacted by the angst and upset of the world around them.
00:21:44
Speaker
This is all stuff that can be done in enlightened sort of environments where people are willing to look at this aspect of it. The more you talk about it, the more interested i become.
00:21:55
Speaker
And I'm sure there'll be lots of other people who are also of feeling, yeah, I'm getting more and more interested as well. How can people find out more where, you we've mentioned that you have a podcast, Spirit Sherpa.
00:22:10
Speaker
What are the sources of information have you got that people can access? So, you know, the best thing to do if you're a business owner and you want to specifically talk about your business, I have not put my book out on this yet. I keep meaning to write it and I just bought another business myself.
00:22:24
Speaker
So like I'm like, oh, okay. You're bit busy then. Let me go get that transition before I can do my book again. If you want to find out more, the best way to do that is to just set up a discovery call with me. And you can do that on my website at Kelly sparta.com. It's K E L L E sparta.com.
00:22:43
Speaker
Like the Greek city state. yeah there's The discovery call button is at the very top on the left side of the menu. You can't miss it. So just set up a call and we can talk about your needs and what's going on for you because everybody's situation is different and everybody's needs are different.
00:22:59
Speaker
What I would say to the solopreneur is very different than what I would say to the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, right? And so the best way to do that is to have the conversation. Yeah, but what we're saying, I suppose, and what has intrigued me is that come to this with an open mind, as I have done, and understand that there is spiritual energy around everything.
00:23:22
Speaker
And that if you understand how to use that energy, you can create spaces that foster specific types of behaviors because of you aligning the various different aspects of the spirituality And then in the same way as you can foster different types of behaviors, you can also contribute towards the elimination of the issues like with the call center and helping people to manage the relationships they have with people.
Why Hire Spiritual Experts?
00:23:53
Speaker
telephoning into the call center you can use the spirituality to make it easier for your people in those types of customer facing roles to provide a higher level of service to those customers and also manage all of the stresses that go with that more effectively for the individual employees Yeah. And you don't have to learn how to do it yourself. No.
00:24:18
Speaker
You can just hire me and my team to do it for you. That's another option. So I do teach people how to do it themselves if they want to learn how. But a lot of my lot of my higher ah level clients are just like, yeah, just do it for me. don't that That's not what I do. And I'm like, yeah, no problem. Love it.
00:24:34
Speaker
um and I wouldn't necessarily want to do it myself. But before I commissioned you to do anything, I would certainly want to make sure that I really And I mean, really understood all the different aspects of it and what it is that I am asking you to do, why I'm asking you to do it and how it's going to be done. And what my role as a manager is in managing that whole process and people's interactions with the the new type of environment or the new process that we're doing.
00:25:08
Speaker
Yeah. And i I always make sure it's done in an ethical fashion. So I'm not doing things to people. I can change in physical environment spaces. ah But like the guy who went home, I didn't do anything to him personally.
00:25:21
Speaker
ah just changed the the environment of the space and I made sure that the person who was giving me permission to do that had the right to do that. yeah Right. So I'm always working in an ethical fashion in that regard.
00:25:32
Speaker
People can have me come in and read people for negotiations. That's done regularly. So that's another thing i could absolutely do. But it just depends on the person as to what they need. That's a whole nother episode.
Spiritual Insights in Business Negotiation
00:25:48
Speaker
But it is almost like what you've just said is that if an organization is going to, for example, they're putting themselves up for sale or they're looking to buy another organization or managing a big deal, the sort of work that you do can lead to a greater understanding of the person who's going to be sitting on the other side of the table. Absolutely.
00:26:12
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Right. We'll come back to that one in the future. But for today, Kelly, it has been fascinating. And I have really enjoyed listening to you and learning more about being a spiritual coach and a transformational shaman and the work that you do. Thank you very much.
00:26:29
Speaker
Thank you for having me. This has been awesome. Thank you. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Kelly Sparta, who is a spiritual coach and transformational shaman.
Episode Conclusion
00:26:47
Speaker
You can find out more about both of us at abbasida.co.uk or at Kelly's website, kellysparta.com. There are links in the description along with a link to Kelly's podcast, Spirit Sherpa.
00:27:00
Speaker
If you're listening to the independent minds on your smartphone in the United Kingdom, you may like to know that 3.0 has the UK's fastest 5G network with unlimited data. So listening on 3.0 means you can wave goodbye to buffering.
00:27:14
Speaker
There's a link in the description that will take you to more information about business and personal telecom solutions from 3.0 and the special offers available when you quote my referral code. It's going to well worth reading that description.
00:27:27
Speaker
I'm sure you will have enjoyed listening to this episode of The Independent Minds as much as Kelly and I have enjoyed making it. So please give it a like and download it so that you can listen anytime, anywhere.
00:27:41
Speaker
And to make sure you don't miss out on that next episode of The Independent Minds, which will feature Kelly, please subscribe. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abysseed is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think.
00:27:57
Speaker
Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening, and goodbye.