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Hanson HoseinHanson Hosein was my first guest on this podcast, and now he’s also guest 131.
Hanson is a natural leader with a fascinating background that includes frontline wartime reporting, innovative multimedia storytelling, and executive leadership in academia.
His current work articulates his leadership approach in a declaration entitled “A Wind Rose Can Make Sense of Forces Beyond Our Control: Sixteen Tenets and 10,000 Words for Real-Time Leadership.”
We talked about:
- his transition into a new kind of leadership role
- his “Wind Rose” project
- the paradoxical strength that you can find when you make yourself powerless and vulnerable
- how our first encounter in a sea kayaking class is the perfect metaphor for our current situation, far out at sea and floundering in uncertainty
- his process for discovering and stating the 16 elements in his declaration
- the importance of creating “your own internal constitution” in uncertain times like these
- why you need to develop leadership “muscle memory”
- how and why to “look at the point on the horizon rather than what’s in front of us”
- the importance and power of “sacred stories”
- what leaders see in his declaration that can help them rediscover and codify their “why”
- why you “have to listen very intently to your constituents and to the signals out there before you act”
- how throwing technology at problems like scaling social interaction can backfire
- how his declaration is like Machiavelli’s The Prince
- why everyone should have their own internal narrative mission statement
Hanson’s bio
Hanson Hosein is a trusted convener and education leader. He is the President of HRH Media Group LLC, a creative strategy firm and co-founded the Communication Leadership graduate program at the University of Washington. Hanson is presently supporting a new generation of “real-time” leaders through his Wind Rose Studio method: www.hansonhosein.com
Connect with Hanson online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 131. Five and a half years ago, I had been thinking about starting a content strategy podcast. As that idea was percolating, I saw Hanson Hosein present at a Creative Mornings event in Seattle. When he asked “does the world need any more stories?” [11:50 in the video] something clicked. I asked him to be my first guest. And now here we are, 130 episodes later. Hanson is still inspiring me, now with his “Wind Rose” framework, a declaration that sets out leadership principles for our turbulent times.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey everyone, welcome to episode number 131 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. This is a really special episode. This is the fifth anniversary of the podcast, and I brought back my very first guest, Hanson Hosein. Hanson is the president of HRH Media Group. He does a lot of consulting and interesting work around storytelling and leadership. Well, welcome Hanson. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Hanson:
Well, it’s great to see you again, Larry, and hear from you and it’s an honor to come back five years later. I’ve noticed that all those numbers one, 131, and five are prime numbers so I’m going to consider this Larry and Hanson Prime. So great to see you. A lot has changed in the five years since we last spoke. I’ve left my main role at the University of Washington where I led the communication leadership graduate program for many years and I’ve taken that to the streets. I’m thinking very differently about leadership now and engaging leaders in my community and elsewhere in this country about how to lead differently in a time of great anxiety and chaos where you have to really think about things in what I call real time. I used to be a journalist in breaking news and we’re very much in breaking news right now, as you know.
Larry:
Yeah, well and you are, I got to say, uniquely qualified to provide leadership advice because you’ve been through some stuff. You were a genuine war reporter, you’ve done that. You led a leadership program that focused on digital media at the University of Washington for more than 10 years, right?
Hanson:
Yeah, it was 15 years and we were there very early. 2007, the iPhone and Facebook was just making itself available to the masses, and we were trying to make sense of that for ourselves and for leaders as well. Nobody really understood what was going on.
Larry:
You’ve been making sense of change, and even chaos, for quite some time and that is culminated in this brilliant declaration that you’ve written. I can’t love this more. It’s called … just tell us about the Wind Rose.
Hanson:
For the last few years I’ve been thinking that if you are going to try to make sense of change for your stakeholders, you need to tell them what you stand for and those principles and values need to align with what matters most to them. It’s an exercise I went through for the graduate program I led, I created a declaration for them and then I realized, “you know what? I better do one for myself as I make this transition.” I really thought hard about what matters most to me as a leader and even when I engage on stage or on camera, what are those things that are core to who I am and how I go about it and can I extrapolate that for leadership? What came out of that was this declaration, which I call A Wind Rose Can Make Sense of Forces Beyond Our Control.
Hanson:
It’s exactly 10,000 words and I just put it on my website, and if anybody wants to engage with me, it’s really this is the essence of who I am right now and if you align with some of those things and let’s talk, let’s do business. If you don’t, that’s okay too. It’s that thing that I put out there that represents what I think where the world is going and the leaders that we need. I mean, if I think what’s really most driving me now is that I have a 12 year old and a 14 year old kid and I don’t believe that we’ve got the leadership out there right now that’s going to support them when they’re adults, and so I’m looking to create that cohort right now.
Larry:
Nice. Everything you just said about your mission is super-clear and it’s driven by those values and the principles that you mentioned. I think you make 16 points in the declaration. I don’t know if we can go through all those, but maybe summarize your approach to that, how those unfolded and – were they responses to dynamics you saw in the world that needed better leadership around them or – tell me a little bit about that.
Hanson:
Yeah, what I recognize is that why were people coming to me over these last 15 years for advice or education or counseling about how to do things? What I recognize is that I’m what you call power adjacent. I have no power, but I can have conversations with those who do have power because I put myself on the periphery. It’s something I’ve been doing all my life, my professional life as a journalist and as an educator. It’s like you’ve got to be on the edges. You can’t be at the center because when the edges, you see what’s coming before other people do. Because I don’t have a vested interest necessarily in maintaining power, I can see what might or may not hold water.
Hanson:
Even the first tenet of my declaration is be powerless, which is very counterintuitive when you’re trying to lead and you’re trying to really make sense of something that’s really chaotic. But if you’re powerless, you find yourself being much more objective about the forces that are coming your way. I think that’s really what’s served me so well over the years is that you’ve really got to be vulnerable in these situations. It’s also what I do when I have conversations on stage or I’m engaging live with somebody. It’s not about me. It’s about really the forces that are around us and how do we make sense of that?
Larry:
You’re reminding me of the interim thing. Hanson and I first met in a kayaking class, a sea kayaking class, in Lake Union. We were both floundering around trying to figure out how to get back into a sea kayak. But many years after that you did a talk for Creative Mornings in Seattle and what you were just talking … you played a guitar to open it up. Anyhow, I want to talk a little bit because I think it relates to what you were just saying about that being powerless and being focused on the people you’re with, that that’s what made that … and that was a brilliant Creative Mornings. It inspired me to start this podcast because I’d been thinking about maybe doing something and I thought, “Ooh, I got to do this podcast and I got to get this guy on it.”
Hanson:
Well, I love that you remember our first encounter for that kayaking class because I think that is the perfect metaphor and that’s when I think about how I want to expand on this declaration and rather than writing a nonfiction book, your typical business health help stuff, I’ve been thinking about a fictional counterpart to it and it probably involves being on the water because I think that’s very symbolic for where we are right now. We as a society are out in the middle of the sea. We’re in these sort of non-propulsive craft and we’re at the mercy of the elements. The worst part is that we are so far out we can’t see behind us and we certainly can’t see the shore ahead of us and that puts us at a state of near panic and we’re floundering. So really the most important thing for a leader, if you think about even being in that kayak, is to try to figure out our direction for us to paddle as one and to at least have a sense of what matters most to us.
Hanson:
So no matter what comes, we’re able to communicate clearly and there’s trust and credibility so that we can collaborate. That’s very much where I see ourselves at right now and that Creative Mornings talk that I gave was meant to indicate that as well that some really crazy crap was coming our way and that we had to think very differently about how to make sense of it and how to lead differently. Of course, that crap has come. It’s the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, it’s really terrible leadership in the western world that has led us to this moment. I think we had to do this differently and the kayaking thing is a perfect, perfect metaphor.
Larry:
I think any leader, they probably feel that, what you just described and you give very concrete … but that’s what I love about the declaration is that it takes each of these … each of the 16 points you make in there would just resonate 100% with anybody who’s paying any attention in the world these days and gives you a handle to get your head around it. Can you maybe talk about …. was that the organizing scheme for the declaration or how did that unfold?
Hanson:
The 16 points were really very … I mean, whenever anybody comes to me for advice, especially when my students used to come to me and more senior people like you for example, come to say, “You know what? I’m thinking about making a career transition. I have these really powerful thoughts about the world that I want to be part of. What should I do?” My usual methodology is I say, “You know what? The best thing for you to do right now is pretend you’re writing a book and give me the first 10 chapter titles. That’s it. The first 10 chapter titles that really align with that big idea that you want to put out there.” What I realized is that those 10 chapter titles can also represent a manifesto or a declaration. It could be a very simple through line of what matters most to you.
Hanson:
When I began to apply that same medicine to myself as I was making my own professional transition, it was very easy for her to come up with those 16 points because I thought about, “Well, what is the greatest value I presently bring to the world? What do people come to me most for?” It usually is, as this sort of makes sense of crazy things happening, engage with us on stage, do an interview. So essentially I took what I did, when I interview a CEO or when I give a speech and I distilled it down to these 16 basic elements of how I engage as a representative of the audience or people who are listening to this elsewhere so that when I do these things, it’s actually a form of leadership. If you actually look at those 16 principles, you can either look at it as leadership or you can look at it, “Well, that’s how Hanson actually moderates a conversation. That’s actually quite similar.”
Larry:
You’re making me think as you talk about this, you couldn’t have known this because my last podcast guest, which is going to air a week or so before this one, of the things that Yael Ben-David, this content designer in Israel said, was that … we were talking about book writing and the common thing among the imposter-syndrome-afflicted content world is like, “Who am I to write a book? I don’t have anything to say.” Her point is like, “Who are you to not write a book, dammit? You got to share your brilliance and your things.” As you’re talking, I’m thinking, “We should all take what you’ve done, reflect on our principles, really clarify and articulate our values, sit down, figure out our unique contribution to the world, and write our own declaration.” Was that part of your hope?
Hanson:
That’s exactly right. I wanted to show that it is possible. In fact, I taught a class my last time in the University of Washington teaching. I actually asked every student to write that kind of declaration for an organization that was meaningful to them. Even tonight, I’m going to be giving a guest lecture at my old program and they’re going to be looking at creating their own declaration because I think ultimately … here’s the deal, is that things are moving now so fast. We are in this period of accelerated change, which was the point that I made at that Creative Mornings talk so many years ago, that when there’s that much change, people don’t know where they stand. It’s very easy to sort of panic and make really bad decisions.
Hanson:
But if you can create your own internal constitution where you know what matters to you, no matter what comes at you that is so unscripted, you can say, “Okay, what do I stand for quickly? Oh, okay, this is what matters to me,” and you can apply it to that. When I engage with leaders now, one of the first things I try them to do is to start jotting down their own internal declarations so they’ve got that backbone, and it’s a narrative backbone. It really is. As conflict arises, as tension arises, which all stories have, how are you going to respond? Will you be the hero or will you let these forces just flatten you?
Larry:
Yeah, as you say that, it’s like … I think that kind of gets it gut instinct. I think a lot of people, you just know when something’s wrong and you’re not going to do it or you’re going the wrong direction or something and you maybe can’t articulate it. It seems like one of the main benefits of this approach you’ve taken is that you can articulate it. You can say, “Well no, this that doesn’t align with this principle, or that just completely goes contrary to this value I hold.” This seems like a really powerful framework, I guess.
Hanson:
I think the important thing is that because things are coming at us so fast and furious, you need to be able to almost … It’s kind of like being in the military or when I was a journalist in war zones, if you need to get something really fast, you need to know exactly where your equipment is. You need to make sure your batteries are charged. You need to know almost like that muscle memory to capture it. It’s the same thing as a leader right now. If you do not have the muscle memory about the decisions you need to make and how you’re supposed to express that to your stakeholders in a way that is meaningful and calming and trustworthy to them, you’re going to be seen as floundering and you’re going to lose it and you’re going to lose it on behalf of those people as well. You’ve got to know where you stand, you got to know what matters most of those people, and you’ve got to navigate accordingly. You know what it’s like to panic in a kayak.
Larry:
Yeah. When you say muscle memory, one thing that jumped out at me anyway, is that, I don’t know, three or four or five places in the declaration you talk about the physical aspect of this. It’s not all just brain stuff. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Hanson:
Again, it comes come back to being … even like I’m talking to you right now or when I’m on stage or when I’m interviewing somebody like Jeff Bezos or something like that, there’s a physicality to it. Ultimately when you’re engaging or leading, you are trying to aggregate energy and then spread it out to the people who are maybe in the audience, maybe they’re part of the people who follow you, but they need to feel that energy too. You are their representative. If that energy is … it doesn’t have to necessarily be positive, but you need to know you’re making that really powerful connection. There’s a strong physicality to it, and it’s how I engage. Even when I’m speaking to you right now, even though this is pure audio, we’re actually looking at each other through Zoom cameras and you can see that there’s a lot of stuff coming from me physically.
Larry:
Absolutely. That’s a big part of your point, I think, in this is the importance of the human connection in all of this stuff. I can’t remember, but it seems like that that’s the point throughout the declaration is that this is all about people and helping people align around whatever it is. Am I getting that right?
Hanson:
Yeah. I mean, it’s fundamentally about human connection. I think that’s where the ultimate challenge right now is that we’ve been given so many opportunities, especially by technology, to tell our own stories, but also to sort create our own tribes and associate our identities with that that it’s created a lot of fragmentation. I believe that a lot of this comes out of fear and it comes from that accelerated change. When things are changing so quickly and you can’t see the shore and you and the world that you know has gone away and it means you don’t know how your kids are going to earn a living or you don’t know how you’re going to earn a living, you start to panic and you look for any solace in fraternity or sorority where you have like-minded people and this is what has led to such incredible polarization, especially in our country.
Hanson:
So the idea of making a more meaningful human connection, that we actually look at the point on the horizon rather than what’s our concern in front of us. I don’t engage right now in the politics of today, I’m really very much thinking about what is the social infrastructure we need to create for 5, 10, 15 years from now? We’re going to need new institutions, we’re going to need new stories, we’re going to need new narratives. We may even need new religions to really give us a sense of meaning around the world that we’re creating in because of artificial intelligence, because of robots, because we’re going to be engaging with each other differently. Ultimately it comes down to what stories you want to tell ourselves so that we can trust each other again and collaborate at scale to build that new world, and that’s where I am intently focused right now.
Larry:
That storytelling, one of the things you talk about in there, you just reminded me of, is the sacred stories and their utility in a person’s worldview and how they comport themselves, but also the fact that it doesn’t matter if the story is true or not, it matters if someone believes it. But maybe that is just a general introductory point to the connection between narrative and storytelling and this declaration.
Hanson:
Yeah, I mean, the sacred story to me is what’s fundamental. I mean, the fact that your previous guest was from Israel is quite … I mean, I spent four years living there and that’s where I really understood that’s the nexus point of three remarkably sacred stories that have changed the world for better and for worse. You got Islam and Christianity and Judaism, of course, that all focus there. To me, that’s really powerful. I love this notion of sacred story. America is a sacred story. The question I have is whether all of these sacred stories will continue to hold the same bond for us as they have in the past. My concern is that they won’t and so what I would like to see is us to develop those new sacred stories. One of the sacred stories that I’m working very closely with right now is the one from Selma, Alabama where in 1965, these people decided to fight for their right to vote by crossing that bridge and heading to the state capital and meeting some great resistance.
Hanson:
That story is so powerful that it continues to resonate 60 years later, and I’m being going back to Selma and people from Seattle go to Selma because they are so drawn to that incredible story of overcoming. It’s biblical in its way. Some of that story isn’t necessarily true either. That doesn’t tell the whole thing, but we love how it makes us feel. What I’m interested in is of understanding those sacred stories and either renewing them, refreshing them, or coming up with new ones so that we can feel good about ourselves again, for the challenges that are coming that we have yet to prepare ourselves for.
Larry:
In that thought and exploration, can you define what these sacred stories … what makes them unique, what makes them stand out?
Hanson:
That’s what I’m working on right now. I’m actually working on a three part series with the local NPR station here, KUOW, around sacred stories and it’s called On This Sacred Day. The idea is that it’s a story that so compels us to stand up and do something to create some kind of change that may put us actually in physical, mortal peril because we need to make it happen and we actually do make that change. What happens, it’s so powerful that it becomes codified, whether it’s codified in history or codified in how we behave after that. On top of that, it’s so powerful that people continue to align with it, even though that they weren’t an active participant in that story because they see it as who they are, it’s so representative of us. Selma, Alabama, whether or not you were there, you feel like that’s part of the American story you say, “Yeah, that was the best of America and that represents the best of our democratic experiment in the story. Isn’t it great that we did that?”
Hanson:
We feel really good about it. Meanwhile, democracy, whether you’re on the right or the left in this current time, feels very much in peril and so you ask yourselves, “Well, how successful were we with that particular story?” So that’s what I find really interesting. Or you can even look at the story of Israel and the Jews and it’s amazing that over thousands of years that these people who have been scattered around the world still use that story to galvanize them and keep them together and collaborate, that they have this code that no matter how much oppression they face, they were able to keep them going. I always found that really inspiring. To me, that is one of the most ultimate sacred stories.
Larry:
There’s two things about that in the modern world that you’ve articulated – this insane pace of change that we’re dealing with and just everything changing all the time. How well do sacred stories endure in that world, but maybe more to the point, how do you craft new sacred stories that are appropriate for that world?
Hanson:
You’re right, because some sacred stories do come and go. I mean, the Egyptians no longer prey to whatever, Ra or whatever else. Sometimes they just lose traction or relevance over time. I mean, there’s no guarantee, for example, that the United States of America as we know and love it now will exist 50 years from now because things are changing so quickly, partly because of technology, that we may find it more meaningful to come together as a society in more communitarian ways, that we can still achieve the scale of what an America used to do, but in very different ways. Sacred stories come and go, but some of us hold on for dear life to them. Judaism, Hinduism, they all have really powerful back-stories to them and they still motivate people to connect to them and it gives people a sense of comfort and trust and so they say, “Oh, that’s a story you adhere to? I do too. Let’s stick together.”
Hanson:
I’ve mentioned this as a metaphor, it’s like if you got a Seattle Seahawk sweatshirt and you’re walking down the downtown Beijing one day and you see somebody else wearing that same sweatshirt coming your way, you suddenly don’t feel so alone and you’re actually more likely to have a conversation with that stranger because you’re speaking the same code or you’ve got that same language going on there.
Larry:
I’m a St. Louis Cardinals fan, and if you wear a Cardinals cap anywhere in the world and you see another Cardinal fan, it’s a weird little tribe, I’ll admit, but, no, totally. As you’re talking about this, understanding these stories and crafting these stories, and you’re doing consulting, you’re talking mostly with community leaders like the folks in Selma, but also CEOs of big companies. What’s the common enablement stuff that you’re doing? How do you help people be better at this stuff?
Hanson:
The way think I’ve noticed, and it’s happened only in the last year, is I put this declaration out there. I actually premiered this declaration at Microsoft. They have a public affairs university and they interviewed me saying, “Oh, this is really interesting. We’d like to share this with our communicators.” But I think what it is what I’ve noticed, a lot of leaders have come to me, they’re looking for backup. They know that the world as they’ve known it for decades is going away. They know that what’s coming, there are no textbook answers. They actually may have a sense of what they need to do to meet that new future, but they’re looking for somebody who can help them not only craft it for themselves, but put it out there to their stakeholders in a meaningful way so that they can move as one.
Hanson:
For a number of organizations, what they’ve done is they come to me and said, “Hey, we need to reexamine what our why is. Existentially, what are we to become and how do we lead?” My approach to that has been very much to say, Okay, I need to understand what your current story is right now.” I actually almost embed myself within these organizations, speak to their stakeholders, speak to the leaders, and see what’s really galvanizing them, and then try to actually codify that in some kind of internal declaration or story for them so that they can then put that out as leaders to their stakeholders and say, “Okay, this is what we were before, this is what’s happening now. This is what’s going to happen in the future and this is how we have to be thinking strategically differently about that and here’s who we are from a storytelling point of view.” That’s what I do.
Larry:
That’s great. One of the ongoing interesting observations in the content world these days is that you can lead from anywhere and what you just described seems scalable all up and down, whether you’re a CEO or the new kid who’s running the social media program.
Hanson:
Absolutely. It starts with profound listening, which I just said … I should have not interrupted you because I’m not proving the point, but I think if there’s anything that’s really a common denominator to my declaration is that you have to listen very intently to your constituents and to the signals out there before you act, before you speak because there’s a lot of wisdom in that. If you don’t do that, you’re bound to make a really severe mistake.
Larry:
That contrasts, interestingly, with one of the main dynamics in the tech business world these days of move fast, break things, learn quickly. You would argue for maybe a little more patient, listen-ey approach.
Hanson:
Yeah, I mean, listening and I think the fundamental … we’re seeing the great implosion right now in tech and their fundamental focus has always been to scale and that scale is what’s broken things. Facebook said, “You know what? We can create a new communications platform for everybody, but we’ll have zero accountability over what people do with it until it’s too late.” Twitter’s doing the same thing, but scale requires you to have that accountability and so my attitude is not to scale, is to start small, make sure it works, to build that trust and credibility, to have the profound story. If you are going to scale, you got to remain accountable and give agency to your stakeholders for every step of the way. It’s more expensive, it’s slower, it’s harder, but that’s what keeps us together. Otherwise you break things like democracies.
Larry:
Yeah, little stuff like that. One thing you were just saying, I have to work this in just because I am a nerd about this stuff, the rise of decoupled architectures in the tech world. I was talking with a friend at work about this this morning and one of the points he made was that it’s like there’s all this technical decoupling, but it’s mostly about people, that there are ways of operating, and it’s mostly about having standards and contracts and agreements between each other about your own little independent thing and how it interacts with the other things. It sounds like in terms of …. because you want to keep it small, I’m sure you’d love your ideas to scale. Does this make sense? Can you stitch this together for me?
Hanson:
Yeah, and I think I do what you’re saying. I mean, first of all, on the tech side, what concerns me most, and I don’t want to get too on the news because I know you want to make this podcast evergreen, but it’s not surprising to me that as Elon Musk started to hollow out Twitter, the first things he got rid of were the ethics and the inclusion and the accessibility and the disability because that’s expensive and that requires a ton load of human attention. My greatest concern that as we try to clean this whole mess up and because we’re looking at scale, massive scale, that we’re just going to throw technology at it. Let’s just throw more AI, more algorithms. Those technologies have zero accountability to us and we have no agency over it. China’s a very good example of what that can look like if you let it go too far.
Hanson:
We will lose everything if we make that happen and so that’s why I’m so concerned about scale and also taking humanity out of that with. If you go slower and you have that human element, that’s really important. For my own ideas, I recognize that I scale to a certain extent, but I also make it hard to find me. I think I believe in the serendipity and the organic-ness of some of what I do, and so on January 1st of this year, the declaration was out there and I had zero engagements at that time in terms of what was going to happen. By the end of this year, all these things came to me. So I sort of believe in putting things out there and see what happens.
Hanson:
Ultimately, scale, I did with the graduate program, I’m doing with podcasts right now, and with these organizations. I would eventually like to have some kind of global thing, but at the same time I’m worried about losing control of it because when you do, I think it’s less meaningful. I didn’t answer your question very well because I think scale’s a double edged sword and it concerns me that if I hit that scale, I may not necessarily be as meaningful and helpful as I would like to be because you lose control of it.
Larry:
No, but I guess maybe one of the generic benefits of story stuff is that good stories spread and that if you just keep operating the way you’re operating, the story will get out there.
Hanson:
That’s a really good way of putting it, Larry. Thank you. This is why I like talking to you because I think your perspective is so helpful. So yeah, I would say within my declaration, it’s not about creating a graduate program around it. Actually, what I think I might do, my next step with it, is to create a fictional counterpart story to it. I actually consider my declaration like Machiavelli’s The Prince, and I’m thinking, “Well, wouldn’t it be great if it had the little prince that’s counterpart, this wonderful little fable that backs it up?” Maybe that’s the thing that scales it. It may be something that kids and teenagers want to read and maybe they think differently about leadership at the high school level, and that’s a wonderful way to scale things. That’s the way I’m thinking. I’m not looking about, “Well, I’m going to build them Facebook or Twitter or have a university program.” I’m wondering, “Well, can I get people through a fictional construct to think differently about leadership?”
Larry:
I love that. That’s great. Hanson, I can’t believe it. We’re coming up close to time and I could literally talk to you forever. But before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything that hasn’t come up yet or that you just want to make sure we share with the folks before we stop?
Hanson:
Well, I think you’ve really drawn a lot out of me in terms of news that they can use in terms of thinking about how they can apply these techniques to themselves. Ultimately, I think everybody, especially professionals, should have their own internal narrative mission statement. You’re speaking particularly the content strategists who really focus on content and storytelling, and I think especially now with so much uncertainty professionally in terms of where things are headed, what jobs are going to be there, I think we should really have a very strong sense of self and who we are, the journey that we’ve had, the journey that we’d like to have, what’s consistent, what is our value to the world how does the world see us? And no matter what happens in terms of changes to technology or changes to jobs, what is the meaningfulness that we can bring?
Hanson:
What’s the impact that we can bring and how does that align most with our soul and our sense of self? I know that sounds very woo-woo, but I would love for folks to really understand that about themselves because I think that’s going to be the armor and the energy and the propulsion they’ll need to get through these next few years, which I can guarantee you, as I said during my Creative Mornings conversation, it’s going to be even worse. We’re going through so much turbulence right now, and you want to be able to fly, at least keep aloft or stay in your kayak. So to have that narrative backbone or that narrative mission statement would be very helpful.
Larry:
I appreciate that so much. I’m super happy I get to share this with folks. Hey, one last thing. I know you try is keep a low profile, but to the folks who want to follow you online or get in touch.
Hanson:
The easiest way to find me, I mean, LinkedIn. I mean, believe it or not, there’s only one Hanson Hosein in the world. That’s a strange confluence of first and last name so you cannot help but find me on Google or search engines, but hansonhosein.com or on LinkedIn, that’s usually where I hang out. One way or the other, you can find a way to connect with me that way.
Larry:
Well, it’s always fun to connect with you and thanks for helping me celebrate my fifth podcast birthday.
Hanson:
Well, Larry, I was so honored to be there for the first one and so honored to be there for the 131st one. I’m glad that I’m still relevant to somebody like you who continues to lead with such great content, so thank you so much for inviting me.
Larry:
Thanks so much.
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