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The Agile Within
Providing agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections.
The Agile Within
Why I Choose to be a Human-Centric Coach with Vadim Arefiev
Vadim Arefiev, a senior Agile coach and founder of the Success Charge Academy, shares his inspiring transition from a full-stack Java developer to a human-centric coach.
With insights from a pivotal encounter with Agile legends Gene Gendel and Jeff Sutherland, Vadim discusses the profound fulfillment found in helping others unlock their potential. Through personal stories and experiences, Vadim highlights the importance of resilience and the power of personal narratives in overcoming adversity.
Discover the art of building trust and enabling change within teams, as we draw parallels between sports coaching and software development. Vadim explains the "flip it" technique that transformed a resistant team member into a collaborator and the value of servant leadership in recognizing individual strengths and aspirations.
This episode also introduces the concept of positive intelligence, offering strategies like square breathing and gratitude routines to reshape thought patterns and foster resilience. Vadim's expertise provides a roadmap for maintaining a positive attitude amidst rapid technological changes, emphasizing the authentic empowerment that comes from choosing a positive perspective.
Connect with Vadim on LinkedIn:
linkedin.com/in/va3
Check out Vadim's Success Charge Academy:
http://successcharge.com/
Read about Vadim's ministry for the homeless in Brooklyn:
https://www.homelessny.org/
Follow us on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-agile-within
Welcome to the Agile Within. I am your host, mark Metz. My mission for this podcast is to provide Agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections. My guests and I will share real-life stories from our Agile journeys, triumphs, blunders and everything in between, as well as the lessons that we have learned. So get pumped, get rocking. The Agile Within starts now.
Speaker 1:Before we dive into today's episode, I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, impact Agility. Impact Agility specializes in training and coaching through scrumorg and proconbonorg, empowering teams with cutting-edge tools and techniques. Their classes are designed to deliver actionable insights, whether you're a scrum master, agile coach, delivery manager or organizational leader. Whether you're a scrum master, agile coach, delivery manager or organizational leader, at the helm is president and founder Matt Domenici, who has guided over 50 organizations toward professional agility. With his hands-on experience, matt helps teams and organizations take ownership of their processes and outcomes, unlocking their full potential To explore free learning resources, check out their training schedule or book a free consultation. Visit impactagilityco Once again. That's impactagilityco. Well, hey there everybody, I hope you're having an absolutely fantastic day. I have a friend who is coming on as a guest today and his name is Vadim R5. Vadim, welcome to the show, buddy, hey hello everybody.
Speaker 2:I'm happy to be here, mark. It's always a pleasure to see you, but it's the first time for me. Amazingly enough, first time in your great postcard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm ready to roll.
Speaker 1:So Vadim I consider a friend. I also consider him a mentor, so I've been through some of his training courses before and he's an absolutely awesome teacher and a mentor, so it's a big privilege to have him on the show. A little bit about Vadim he is a senior Agile coach, an Agile advocate, and he's the founder of the Success Charge Academy, but also, if that wasn't enough, he is also a coach for the homeless and we're going to hear more about that in the podcast. So Vadim has over 17 years of experience as an Agile coach and a trainer. He has multiple certifications and credentials in Agile, scrum, less and Safe, and those enable him to provide effective and engaging coaching, mentoring and training to various roles and levels in organizations, and his mission is to help teams and individuals to achieve their full potential and deliver value to their customers. All right, vadim, you hail from the city of Brooklyn in New York. So if I were coming to Brooklyn for a day and had never been there before, what's one thing that Vadim says that I could not miss doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have a little crazy answer to this question, right, I think if you will, mark, travel through New York City and I can catch you and I can say that, hey, you know all about this, famous things of Brooklyn, you know Coney Island attraction and amusement park and Brooklyn Bridge and all of this, that's not that interesting.
Speaker 2:But what would be interesting and fascinating, if you will stop by in Sanjongi Foundation for the homeless which I'm running, and people can say that, hey, coach, you must be crazy, it sounds dangerous and all of the criminals inside. But, guys, you will be really amazed. You will get in, you will be invited to drink tea or you know former homeless folks, they can offer you an awesome dinner, like restaurant level dinner which they're making themselves, right, and they can start sharing stories. And these stories really, it's not just fascinating, it's really heartbreaking stories, right, how people end up on the street of New York and then the most amazing is how they climb up and they keep climbing up with our help and with God's help. That is my part of my life, I would say.
Speaker 1:Vadim, you're such an inspiration. Thank you for sharing that, and if I do find myself in Brooklyn, I will absolutely look you up and we'll stop by 100%, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Mark. We would need you as a coach for sober life of my homeless folks.
Speaker 1:Well, the title for today's show is why I Chose to Be a Human-Centric Coach. So, fadim, I'm curious what exactly is this human-centric coach that you speak of?
Speaker 2:For me it's probably not just a reason of being a coach, but probably a reason of being myself, right, it's a central of my self-identity, I would say. I was coding, creating different programs as a full-stack Java developer for years and I always felt that I'm not serving my mission in life. Yes, I can create cool programs and, you know, I was very nicely compensated, thank God for this. But every day I was getting into work felt that, you know, I'm occupying space of somebody else. It's not me, right I? You know, for me, just to sit down in front of computer and look at my own program, I mean, when something starts working and I felt, you know, mini creator, that's great, great feeling. But I was always about helping other people, right, and I think this is my real purpose in life.
Speaker 2:And when, many, many moons ago, I met Gene Gandel first and he introduced me to Jeff Sutherland, that was, you know, changing of my life to a degree. Right, I became his student and it was funny how exactly we met. You know, I came to his training and he says that well, you have a little accent here, by the way, are you Russian? I said yes. He said, oh, wonderful, I was in the US Navy and I was killing Russians in Vietnam and I said, professor, we are going to be friends From this moment on. Dr Jeff became my beloved professor. He gave me a lot. You know what was the most interesting, the most important you know, behind this? Agile principles, agile manifest, 12 principles, all of this right.
Speaker 2:All of a sudden I saw that we can serve a human being, not just. You know to have business requirement and some kind of contract style, a relationship between me as a developer and my upper management and my product, which was a big mystery for me. All of a sudden I found that, hey, it's so natural and it's all about how to be servant leader. For me, ideal picture of servant leader is an illustration to gospel right Jesus Christ standing and washing feet of his disciple. And all of a sudden I saw this in this agility, inside of the heart and mindset of guys like Jim Gendel and Professor Jeff Sousel.
Speaker 2:And that was it. And I said, hey, you know, I don't need to be a director. I was already a director of a little little corner of New York Mercantile Exchange. They gave me power of fighting hiring. I didn't enjoy it at all, but when I was able to serve my developers and then my beloved client. All of a sudden, the picture changed completely upside down. As I said, I immediately found that this is my purpose in life. Life, right, I need to come and help other folks to stop being just a machine of you know, producing kind of somebody who can be easily exchanged with chat DPT nowadays, right, but to creative human being and I'm ready to spend my life serving this human being.
Speaker 1:This is probably why I'm a human-centric coach, so I identify very strongly with that as well and have a lot of the same belief systems. You and I have talked about that outside of the podcast. I want to get into this and I want to know. Vadim, so you've worked at some very, very large organizations. That's right, and I'm sure when you walk into engaging with like one of these huge global banks, that you probably hear terms like it's all about process, process, process, and they're bringing you in to be the process guy to whip everybody into shape that we have to install this process Maybe talk to us about you don't start with process, you start with people, and maybe we can ease into. I want to know some times where you've had to work and maybe you butted heads with somebody who did tell you no, it's not about the people, it's about the process.
Speaker 2:Well, all the time, all the time, all the time, mark. Even recently, you know, I had an interview with this gentleman and you know I started training my mindset. You know my internal environment, right, how do I think what is my most valuable things and less valuable? And all of a sudden, this fellow, he said stop, coach, you're lying to me. I said hold on a minute, what do you mean? He said you cannot be human-centric when you're running PI planning. Let's say, I said, why not? And you know his argument was really.
Speaker 2:You know, for me it was like wow, even if this guy is going to give me an offer, I'm not going to work for this guy. It's practically opposite of what I think and what I believe. Right, he was a big advocate for like process-centric. That's the way to go, right. But you know, for me, if we all became process-centric, if we all say that PI it's like in the book, well, let's open up Safebook and it's step number one, step number two, three, then human being is disappearing from this picture, right, and what is happening Then? We will be focusing on planning. Hold on a minute, you know, even like idea of PI planning is all about alignment. One human being, let's say a big executive with a set of other human beings who are working for this big fellow, how to align and as soon as you're talking about alignment, you're talking about communication and collaboration one set of humans with another set of humans. So we are talking about human centricity is so important. Again, it's super important also to find a good balance. So if let's say I will come back to any big enterprise, any big financial institution of United States, right. And if I will say that for me, human centricity is let's focus on ICF-based coaching, what we call it right, international Coaching Federation says that there is no consulting, only art of powerful questions. You know, we need balance. Sometimes we need to be consultants. We need to say that guys, guys, hold on a minute, let's focus. We need to deliver tomorrow, right. If you don't deliver, I love you. You know I am human-centric, but we are going to lose job, right, because upper management will be super unhappy and client another super important human he's going to be unhappy. So it's all falling apart. So, guys, let's focus. What would be the easiest and the happiest? That's the key word the happiest way to deliver this product.
Speaker 2:You know, in human centricity, I found the key element is how to engage my team, enlighten them, engage them. You know I was running experiments in one of these big companies I don't want to say name yeah, yeah, we launched trains and we said that, okay, pi planning. We're all excited about PI planning. I don't think my developers were excited. So they all came because both said that you have to participate. Right, and it was first virtual, 100% virtual PI planning. Because of pandemic. We were running it virtually and for the sake of experiment.
Speaker 2:When we said that, oh, we are done with day one, guys, let's go home, let's enjoy all you know, do whatever you know, you can turn off your camera. And then I can see that 25% of the audience, they didn't even notice that we finished day one. You know I, I started time boxing. You know measuring how many people didn't know that something changed in the room For half an hour? They didn't even close the session. So they turn off cameras, they mute mics and they enjoy their life.
Speaker 2:So companies keep paying a lot of money for this huge event. Majority of them didn't care and 25% is like obnoxiously ignore this event. So I said this is not human centricity. I need to do something to invite them all. Then it will be real PI planning, then it will be real alignment and everything. We decided to have a break every 15 minutes and run some kind of questionnaire quiz, some kind of funny game and making sure that everybody can answer. Everybody's involved. It's a big deal. How to train my team to turn on cameras, especially if we are dealing with classical introverts?
Speaker 2:And there are a lot of talented programmers, data science folks, qa engineers 100% introverts. They don't feel comfortable to turn on camera Again. This is my human centricity. I love them and I need to coach them to bring them in in a nice way.
Speaker 1:This sounds a little cliche, but there really is an art to it. As an effective coach, I feel like you have to be able to find how to light the fire in your team members. This is a company and the company makes money, and if the company makes money, then we have jobs. So everybody can't just do whatever they want to do. But one of the lessons that I learned very early on, way before I even became an agile coach and a scrum master, vadim, was when I coached my son when he was younger and we were playing recreational league, basketball and like in middle school and you had some kids and I remember distinctly there was one of the taller kids that was picked for our team. I put him in a position of center and a center is one that stays near the basket, gets rebounds, block shots, and they really stay close to the basket and I could tell that he just wasn't really happy about playing in the game. I took him aside and I said hey, you know what's what's it. You don't really seem like you're. You're having a lot of fun. He was like well, coach, I like to shoot the ball, so I don't like to be inside and I like to guard other players that play outside. So I said, okay, I tell you what. We really need somebody to play inside. But what we're going to do is there's certain times that we're going to let you play a guard where you can shoot the ball, because I did notice he did have a skill for shooting the ball. But there's going to be times where I'm going to need you to do what's best for the team and you're going to have to play center for us and you're going to have to rebound.
Speaker 1:And what a difference that made to this young man's perspective. Because now he understood, he came to life and he came to me like coach. What do you need me to do? Because he understood. And that taught me that you really do have to have those conversations with your team. And how do you light them up? How do they understand how you can make them better? But then how can they help the team to be best?
Speaker 1:And it correlates the same in software teams. You have some team members that they just want to work on the front end, some team members that they really could care less about working in JavaScript and all the JavaScript frameworks. They just want to do back-end development or middle tier. There are some that just want to work on new technologies. They don't want to work on old technologies. So how do you really dig in and get to know these people on the team, find out what their passions are, but then don't let them just run wild, because again, we do have a mission to meet and to be able to come together as a team. And what are your thoughts on that, vadim?
Speaker 2:You know I love your example of enlightening a young man, young player. This is awesome. So what I would like to do with my teammates, right, I would like to introduce myself and start building bridge of trust. I remember I was working for one company, right, and I was able to build this good bridge of trust with. I remember I was working for one company, right, and I was able to build this good breach of trust with everyone except one player.
Speaker 2:He was very, very senior and I didn't figure out what exactly he wants, right, I was knocking his door, scheduling 101, and on 101, his regular style is yes, yes, coach, yes, no, no, yes, yes, yes, yes, no. So he closed the door of collaboration and it was very difficult for me to like penetrate it and to find some kind of little, little window of opportunity right to squeeze in right, and, sure enough, he started feeling that, hey, you know, this coach is not helping us. And he started running around right and talk to every single other person and complaining right, saying that why do we need this coach and all of this scrum stuff? It doesn't work. Can you see, guys, it doesn't work. And I was able to see like negative effect. So I brought him in and I said hey, hello, let's do one thing Today. You're going to be a scrum master. No, no, no, no, no, not me, Hold on a minute. No, that's not it. I said hold on. You know, you have your own idea of what would be the best for the team. You don't want to share it with me, that's okay. You know, b is scrum master.
Speaker 2:And now, all of a sudden, he realized that whatever he did, it's actually a killer for the team. It's not helpful, but it's. In fact it works like a real, you know, killing and murdering the team dynamics, right. And then he said that, oh, all right, so, guys, let's probably change idea. Let's go to a different angle, to a different direction. From somebody who was fighting with me, he became a big fan and I realized that, you know, whatever I did on 101 didn't work. But whatever I did, with one offer that be a team coach, scrum Master yourself all of a sudden this is flip it technique, right, that's what we call in coaching, flip it. You know, he realized the value of what Scrum Master will do, or team coach will do, right, and he starts thinking differently, right.
Speaker 2:So it's very hard to to explain how to find a key to every single soul. There is no one size fits all, there is no one easy recipe. You know, guys, I'm going to give you, you know, medicine. It's going to work across and you're going to be healed. You know, we all know that it doesn't work like this, even in the fairy tale. It's amazing that each human being is so different. It's the entire universe inside of one man, right? And if we treat this person as a huge value by himself or herself, right. If they feel it, then it makes a difference.
Speaker 2:I remember I was coaching one team, also in big financial institution, and I scheduled one-on-one and my day was very packed, so I didn't have a lot of free time and all of a sudden I'm talking to this scrum master. It was a young lady and I said in two seconds I said, lady, you know what? There is no point to talk about dynamic of your team, to open up my coaching agreement. You know I love to have visual agreement with a little Kanban for our 101, right, and what exactly we are doing and all of this data for team dynamics. I said we are not going to even see this today because I can feel that you, young lady. You need a lot of help, right, because I feel that you are depressed. How can you enlighten your team if you are depressed yourself? Right, can I help you? Can I offer myself, not as an agile coach, as a life coach, and I started offering her positive intelligence. I graduated from this positive intelligence school, right, I love this technique.
Speaker 2:And all of a sudden, this lady waked up After this one hour. She said hour. She said, oh, my life is different now. Now I can come to my team and I can be a different scrum master. All together. That was the most valuable for this scrum master, not talking about regular, super important, but regular stuff. I think it's. It's it's important to understand that we all are servant leaders, servant first and then leading somewhere. Like you know, number 16 in my priority right, my mindset, my time, whatever needs to be done, right To support them, to help them to find individual problems, and you know dreams of achievement, right, and I can support them on this. That makes a difference. You know from my humble opinion.
Speaker 1:That's a great story, and it reminds me of another story that you and I were talking about, where you were coming into an engagement and you were going to be working with an individual and they were quite skeptical and basically told you that he didn't want you around. Do you remember?
Speaker 2:that story? Exactly, yes, it was also in one big financial institution. I was an agile advocate, Interesting role. That was the first and so far last time when a bank hired me as an advocate, because it was difficult for technical leaders and business leaders to understand what exactly is this lace right Office of excellence, you know, trying to get in and, like Marines, occupy the space and move them forward. So they get scared and they start hiring guys like me, you know. Be my advocate, explain to me what is going on, protect me from these enemies, right? And I decided that, hey, as always, I need to build my rapport with every single major player. So I called one manager at a time, right, and I'm calling this fellow and introduce myself Hello, you know I'm an Agile advocate. He said, sorry, I don't want to talk to you. I said what Excuse me? You know we need to work together. He said, no, we don't have to work together. I don't want to talk to you. You know I'm very busy and I don't need any Agile advocate. I said, okay, great.
Speaker 1:How about if Boy, you talk about not even getting a?
Speaker 2:chance. Yes, absolutely, just get out of here. Right, that's it. I said that, hey, I can be your Agile Samurai. Behind your back he said hold on a minute, I'm doing Agile for 15 years, he said, and I don't need any Agile Samurai. I said, wonderful, hello, you're doing it for 15 years, you're an agile samurai and I'm an agile samurai. So two samurais, it's an army. And he started laughing and said okay, you win, get in for 101. And that's how I started penetrating this wall. But again, if a person is fixed with his mindset that much he definitely doesn't want to even hear about anything, right, then there is a root problem. You know, it's a fixed mindset, what we call it right, root problem of understanding. And before this gentleman, this particular gentleman saw a little value of all, all agile activities. You know, he wasn't active at all, but seeing value can change attitude.
Speaker 1:So there's an aspect of coaching, of actually practicing what you preach. I've had very large helpings of humble pie served to me where I recognized that while I was advocating for change, I wasn't open to change myself. Make sure that you practice what you preach, because you're not going to get very far if people see that you yourself are not open to listening, and I would also share that. I try to be open about my failures, what I try to learn from them, and show that I'm not defined by my failures. I mean very rarely do you come across some failure that you occur at work that you're not going to be able to recover from. Sometimes it is I'm not going to say those don't exist, but more times than not our minds go to a dark place and try to make it bigger than it is. And so if we take the attitude of, well, I'm going to try something and try to learn from it, maybe I should try doing smaller experiments instead of doing big agendas to be able to learn from them.
Speaker 2:This is so true, mark, so true. One of the key elements we all coaches right, need to coach our coaches, our audience, our beloved partners, right is that pain by itself is an incredible tool. You know, let's say we wouldn't have any pain, we wouldn't be able to feel any pain. What will happen? By accident, we'll put our hand on a stove and we will just burn it down, right, because we have this awesome ability to feel pain. We will immediately learn and get out of this hot spot. Amazing technique which can be conveyed in coaching, right, is hey, appreciate this sensitivity of pain, but do not hold your hand on the stove. So you get this experience, get out, and then you know what is happening with our mindset. We keep our hand on the stove all the time, years by years, and this feeling of pain is killing us internally.
Speaker 2:So I love this concept of positive intelligence. You know famous coach Chisod, you know he says that. You know we have this trains you know he called it trains inside of our mindset and each train travels again and again in the same railroad and makes this railroad very deep. So it's very difficult for a train to change direction. So you know, something happened, something bad, bam, and all of a sudden, the train goes the same way and we feel depressed, we feel in, dis-powered instead of in-powered. Right, what we can do easily, like I'm saying to all my coaches, right, you can practice one element from positive intelligence just square breathing. Just square breathing. It takes a few seconds, pam, you know four seconds to inhale. Four seconds, stop the breathing, four, a second exhale and stop again for four seconds and then inhale again, pam, pam, pam, few cycles and all of a sudden, the strain pam, stop Now.
Speaker 2:Second step you need to turn it to positive thinking instead of negative. And the easiest way start saying some kind of gratitude. We call it gratitude routine. Another minute or two minutes, right. Just say that you are thankful to God or to universe, whatever you feel comfortable with, right and for what? For material things, for non-materials, for this current of blessing you have, and even for something that you called negative.
Speaker 2:If somebody attacks you on the street, if you lost something important, you lost your job. Start saying thank you for all of this because you get your awesome experience and you became stronger. And then you made one step towards universe or your God, right, and all of a sudden you feel differently. You feel that, hey, I learned my lesson, you know, I know that this stuff is hard. I'm not going to get very close to it, but I'm not burning my hand on this stuff anymore. Right, I appreciate experience and I go forward. And the same way we can explain to all development teams, right, that, guys, it's okay to fail in a little format. Get your experience, do not get depressed because you failed and be much more focused on your next step up. Right?
Speaker 1:And that's how you can do it right.
Speaker 2:It's constant experiments in a little format. It's called fail fast. As we all know, in agility, fail fast. Another great example I joined a few meetups with coaches from US Marines troops. I was fascinated to find out that Marines in the United States right now they have agile coaches and scrum masters. I was like, wow, that's totally crazy. Why do you need such structure? Why do you need agility for? Tell me more. And they said imagine how it used to be.
Speaker 2:Right, there is a military order, we go this way and that right, you know there is a military order, we go this way and that's it. And if there is a setup of enemies, they're waiting for our troops. Order was done and everybody is going to be killed. Instead, one person can find out what is happening. So it's a running experiment, right, and saying that guys do not go this way, let's go around and pivot and pivot again, and that's how this set of experiments we can get to the goal much faster and with less people to be killed. That's a lesson learned and I get excited about it. I was like, wow, it works, even in military.
Speaker 1:I'll be honest with you, vadim. I struggled with that for a long time and I heard the constant advice of give yourself some positive reinforcement, look at it as an opportunity to learn. I didn't internalize that For some reason. It just didn't work for me and it seemed corny and I just felt like I wasn't being truthful myself and I don't know what exactly triggered it. The turning point for me was to acknowledge okay, I can react one of two ways. I can focus on the negative aspects and stay there, or I can focus on the positive.
Speaker 1:The control is mine. I get to choose how I want to react to it. That's what is in control to me. How I want to react to it. That's what is in control to me, right, even if I did something that failed and I'm like, yeah, but you know it failed because the software didn't work, this technology, these people but what I could control was how I reacted to it and what I did with that decision. And I don't know what lightning bolt that was with me. But ever since that point, it really has been more authentic to me to have that attitude. Just to stop and ask myself that question, mark, you've got two options. You can focus on the negative and stay in self-loathing and pity, or you can focus on the positive side of it. It's my decision to make, I'm in control, so all for that is free advice. I don't know if it helps anybody else, but yeah, I really struggle with that because I just felt like it wasn't authentic.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. And think about how quickly our life is changing, especially with AIs right now. I mean, speed of change is just getting faster and faster and faster. It's like spinning, like a rocket right Going forward. So you better learn fast. Exactly, you better learn fast and you better stay totally positive on your little failures, because without little failures nobody can survive. Nowadays it's what we call VUCA war right.
Speaker 2:It's volatile, you don't know what's going to happen next, and you should feel that, hey, I'm getting experience, wonderful, wonderful. Let's focus on positive, as you just said. You know, let's be in thankful mood, in thankful note, in whatever is happening. Right, thank you for experience. Let me go forward. Right, let me analyze it. Thank you for experience, let me go forward, let me analyze it.
Speaker 2:And I think, as coaches, more and more, we need to understand human mindset. We need to bring this positive intelligence message to our teammates, because life became so stressful without this technique, it's hard to survive. It's that easy, right? And in fact, if we start preaching and spending, not like 100% of your time as a scrum master, but certain percentage, right, will be enough to start changing dynamic of your teammates towards positivity and happiness. And that's it. You know, I think as soon as we add this drop of happiness to your team dynamics, all of a sudden your productivity, your effectiveness is getting up. It's so correlated. I mean I can't believe this. You know, in my life, in my experiences, you know, I can see it's proven again and again, I can find countless examples. That's how it works.
Speaker 1:I think that's an incredible way for us to end our discussion here. Vadim, If our listeners out there want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's very easy. Everybody can go to successchargecom, my little academy, and there is a big button. You know schedule one-on-one book appointment. It's totally free. You know I love to share. You don't have to sign in for something in my school. No, you know, I'm dedicating one hour of my time to help you. Anybody who is scheduling, who is calling me in, and I will be more than happy to talk to you, to share what I have and to learn from you as well.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. We'll be sure and put a link to that in the show notes to make it easy for our listeners out there. And what about your homeless ministry that you have? Tell us about how we could get connected to that if we want to.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. It's also very, very easy. Nowadays it's all through websites, homelessnyorg, and you can see many stories, little videos, how we are feeding the homeless, how we are trying to coach them and bring them out of this horrible, horrible environment, horrible style of life. Right, it's not easy at all, but even when you can see that one person is climbing up, climbing up and that's, you know, it costs like life right.
Speaker 2:All values in your life will be not even equal to this. And we have a lot of people who are standing in their own feet, getting married, coming back to society as good members of society, and they're helping others right. That's great. I'm looking at them and you can't even recognize that this person was lying down in the subway or under a bridge right. All of a sudden, you know you can see intelligence, educated and ready to share and ready to support others, human beings. That's a real transformation, amazing transformation from one creature to a real human being. That's why we are doing it.
Speaker 1:Well, Vadim, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for your ministry and for serving those that are homeless in the New York area and in Brooklyn. Let's have you back on the show, my friend. It's been a pleasure, Absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 2:I will be more than happy to come back and all audience, you know, all folks who are listening. Thank you for spending this time to be with me and with this amazing host of the show, Mark, and I hope I will see you around. All the best.
Speaker 1:All right, that brings it in to another episode of the Agile Within. We'll see everybody later. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Agile Within. If you haven't already, please join our LinkedIn page to stay in touch. Just search for the Agile Within and please spread the word with your friends and colleagues Until next time. This has been your host, Mark Metz.
