This is a transcript of Erica Mills Barnhart’s interview with Hanson Hosein on the Marketing for Good podcast. You can listen to the episode here and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts. Enjoy!

SUMMARY KEY WORDS: stories, people, technology, world, misinformation, independence, thought, engage, question, trust, motivated, communities

Erica Mills Barnhart  00:53

Hanson is Co-Director of the Communication Leadership Master’s Program at the University of Washington and the President of HRH Media Group, LLC, a media production and communications strategy firm that has worked with organizations such as REI, Microsoft Tableau Software and the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. He’s a pioneer of multimedia storytelling as an Emmy and overseas Press Club award winning journalist for NBC News, a solo TV war correspondent with MSNBC and CBC and a documentary film director whose work has been streamed and broadcast worldwide. While at UW, Hanson has also been recognized as Seattle’s most influential as he engages publicly with the region’s leaders on camera and onstage. He has a law degree from McGill University and the University of Paris and a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University.

Hanson Hosein  05:32

Isn’t it great when you can write your own story, Erica?

Erica Mills Barnhart  05:36

Totally, well, so what I came across, so I went back and I read the article about you when you won Seattle Magazine’s Most Influential Award, and you said I love Seattle because I feel like I have the freedom and independence to tell my own narrative. And I thought that was so interesting. So before we dive in, you know, we could talk about and I hope we will talk about misinformation, global insecurity, emergent tech and what all that has to do with marketing. But first, your journey has been so fascinating and rich. Will you share a bit about where you came from and how you landed here today?

Hanson Hosein  06:14

Yeah, I think the reason I said that, and that was all the way back in 2010 to Seattle Magazine is that, you know, I’ve lived around the world as that bio seems to hint at and I’ve managed to see some of the world’s best and worst things as a war correspondent and somebody who’s lived in Paris in New York and Montreal, etc. And what appeals to me about Seattle is that it has both an incredible independent streak in terms of cooperatives or media, but it also has this amazing creativity in it. I just found that at the point that in my life that I landed in Seattle and married to a Seattle native and our kids are fifth generation Pacific Northwesterners, that it just really jives very well with what I was looking for at the time and still am, that creativity and that independence. You know, somebody, I grew up, I was born in England. I grew up in Canada. I went to law school in Canada and in France and I went to journalism school in New York. And I was always sort of driven to, to find things that were true to me as opposed to pursue a career. And so, so having done law and then go into journalism, my first job out of graduate school, even before I was graduated, was at NBC News working for Tom Brokaw who was the anchor at the time in New York, and then threatening to quit unless they gave me an endorsement.

Erica Mills Barnhart  07:27

Yeah, I love that part of your story. So Hanson, you took a stand at this point in your career, and you said, I will not work for you anymore unless you send me to, and where was that place? And why was that so important to you?

Hanson Hosein  11:54

You know, I always felt like I had to be challenged and be in a state of learning and I think I was 26 or 27 at the time, and I felt like I’d done everything I wanted to do. I’d been in New York now for almost four years. And yeah, it’s great to work at the top of the mountain, which is NBC Nightly News. But I really wanted to see the world and I was young enough and sort of immodest enough to believe that that could happen. And so when I threatened to quit, I expected them to send me to London where I was born, and I spoke French and I knew Europe. And I think it was maybe part of my hubris to decide to punish me and say, hey, have you thought about Israel, and not punishment, because Israel is not necessarily a bad place to go, but my last name is Hosein and it would be very odd for me operating as an American journalists in the Jewish state of Israel with that baggage behind me. So I asked to check it out. They sent me there for a month. I absolutely loved it. I got along with both sides, and there I was.

Erica Mills Barnhart  12:48

Yeah. And then share how long we were there and then where did you go from there?

12:53

Well, I was in Israel for three and a half years, and that’s when I this time I threatened to quit and quit at the end of that night, got the Emmy Award, the Overseas Press Club award for my work in Kosovo during the war there. And during that time, I’d been really learning that there was a different way to tell stories using digital technology. Blogging was just it wasn’t it hadn’t been invented yet. But we were able to start seeing the possibilities with digital technology and NBC just wasn’t interested. I asked, could I just spend a year roaming around the world on the cheap telling these stories? And they said no. And so I quit fairly unceremoniously. And I was picked and I was offered jobs by in Canada by both the national broadcasters and even then I asked, can I learn how to shoot net in mind stories and that’s what happened.

Erica Mills Barnhart  13:36

And so you went and work for CBC at that point?

Hanson Hosein  13:39

Yeah, I took the job at CBC. Basically, CBC said, hey, we’d like to have you as a national reporter, either Montreal or Toronto, and then send you to Paris to be the international corespondent there. And I said, what else do you have? They suddenly have these entry level positions in rural Canada, where we’ll teach how to shoot and edit your own stories, and you’re a one man office, essentially. I said, I chose the sunniest place I could find which is Kelowna, British Columbia, and as close to Seattle for my wife as well, and once there and learned how to shoot and edit, I stunk. I was terrible for the first six months. But I learned and I learned by embarrassing myself on national television in Canada, and I got good enough at it. And as I was really settling into it, all of a sudden out of the blue one day, NBC News in New York calls and says, hey, war is coming in Iraq, do you want to come back and work for us because the Pentagon is embedding journalists, but they can only do one or two people and since you seem to know how to shoot and edit your own stories, which they didn’t want to teach me how do that. So I asked CBC, hey, can I take a sabbatical since you have a partnership with NBC? They said, no, I said, okay, I quit. So I was out sort of on this role of learning how to quit. So I see a trend. But I haven’t quit in years. I’ve been at this University for 13 years now.

Erica Mills Barnhart  14:50

Yeah, I get that. I will say, I’ll tell you a very brief story that has always stuck with me. So out of undergraduate so I would have been paralegal and under a lot of undergrad for immigration and refugee lawyers mainly. And then I’m a really fast typer because my dad, I had to do translation for him. So I actually went to typing school when I was like 12 or 13. So I graduated and I was working for this, it was just a horrible, it’s like a translation service and they place people I don’t know, it was it was a mess. And the owner really liked three martini lunches. So so that made things super exciting. And let’s just say we didn’t see eye to eye at one point she was she was trying  to pump us up and she said, so, you know, we really, you know, I need everybody hustling, she went on and I said, you know, it’s tough to get really motivated when the owner of the business is going to three martini lunches and playing hearts all afternoon. Needless to say, she did not love this comment.

Hanson Hosein  15:50

So funny. I didn’t realize that was your background. I have some of that myself. I when I was in law school in Montreal, I actually did an intern for a refugee lawyer in Canada. I did a lot of that work representing people both in French and English. And that was really the extent of my legal career, but it was very gratifying.

Erica Mills Barnhart  16:05

Yeah, I mean, it’s such important work. And I always assumed I would be a lawyer everybody else did, because I like words and you know, have a little argumentative streak. But yeah, but I ended up working for lawyers and realized that that probably wasn’t my calling. But in this moment where this I was, it was clear I was about to get fired, or I was going to quit or something was we were going to part ways and I rung my dad with the time was down with his dad, my grandpa in Santa Cruz, who had you know, he had had his own electric company and they wired UC Santa Cruz campus, among other things, but entrepreneur, my dad’s an entrepreneur/academic, and so I’m lamenting this to my dad who I always call I’m having, you know, career stuff. And I hear my grandpa who was very cantankerous always and especially later in life, and he said, give me the phone, give me the phone, he said. So my maiden name is Adams. He gets on the phone says, Erica, you’re an Adams you’re smart. Quit. Then he gives the phone back to dad. And I was like, I don’t know what just happened. I was like, I don’t either, but I think probably you should take this advice. And I said oh, okay.

Hanson Hosein  17:07

Yeah. Sometimes there’s virtue in quitting as long as you know what you’re doing.

Erica Mills Barnhart  17:09

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that that’s a beautiful message. It’s like it’s not, you know, when you when you close the door another door is gonna open whether or not you closed it or somebody else but so I just love that you’re so transparent about like, and then I quit and then I quit. And then I quit.

Hanson Hosein  17:22

I actually gave a TED talk about a TEDx why I dropped the mic, right? Because I think you don’t quit just out of a fit of rage right now. And for me, quitting is about remaining as true to my inner narrative as possible, which is sort of saying, Okay, this story feels like it’s done. And for me to stick around is like doing six more Star Wars sequels, which is just, you know, belaboring the point and making it worse and worse. So, what’s it going to take for me to reboot the story, even though the beginning of any story is always painful, because you have to start from nothing, but I find that that’s, that’s the creative constraint that most motivates me to do cool interesting stuff.

Erica Mills Barnhart  18:00

Also, I think a lot of people struggle because when you when you close your chapter ends you grieve it. I mean that’s human nature.

Hanson Hosein  18:07

And sometimes that grieving period can actually take a long time,

Erica Mills Barnhart  18:10

a really long time. And it is nonlinear, which for those of us who are both creative yet hyper logical the non linearity of it is just maddening. You know, I wrote on LinkedIn recently so as we’re recording this, we are both sheltered in place because of Coronavirus. And I was writing about how I think a lot of what we’re struggling with is grief. And then there’s been a lot written on that. And but we don’t see it that way. Or feel it that way. So I just think it’s important to note that grief is present in a lot of ways and we just don’t we only associate you know, like,

Hanson Hosein  18:45

you don’t really physically I don’t think you really know you’re in the depths of that grief until it’s over. So that’s probably why we don’t quite recognize it as that but you know, we’ve lost a lot of things and we don’t know what we’ve truly lost until it’s really done.

Erica Mills Barnhart  18:56

Yeah. So out from there. I want to segue into one of the things on that post that came up for folks was they were grieving a lack of what they perceive to be as, you know, information that they could rely on. So, you sort of noting that we seem to be experiencing an uptick in misinformation. So I’m hoping you will share some of the really exciting and important, pertinent relevant, so relevant now work that you’re doing at the Center an Informed Public. You just, I guess was that wasn’t even a week ago that you had the virtual summit surviving the Coronavirus info-demic.

Hanson Hosein  19:39

Yeah. And is kind of I mean, the the Center for the Informed Public was launched at the University of Washington just late last year. It was a very almost like an emergency request for proposals from the Knight Foundation, which is based in Miami and is focused on the future of journalism and they were looking to essentially create a new academic discipline around the impact of technology on democracy. The University of Washington has some of the best, the world’s best researchers on misinformation disinformation. So they are actually invited to, to apply for that grant. And then they invited me to support it because of my background in journalism and storytelling and everything else, which I did. And I saw my role as how do we actually engage the public if you want to have an informed public because these these guys are really good at actually doing the research. But can we do this in in a, in a way that we’re doing, as they’re researching, as we’re trying to inoculate the public, we need to run these trials. And to me, the trials are engaging the public. And so I push very hard to do these town halls as soon as possible and do it in a way that you could actually give agency and accountability to the audience’s that weren’t being that we’re trying to inform themselves. And yeah, it’s really important because we don’t trust anything anymore.

Erica Mills Barnhart  20:46

Yeah. Yeah. You said in the opening in your welcome to that summit, you said a lie can get halfway across the world before the truth can get its boots on.

Hanson Hosein  20:56

Yeah. I was quoting somebody on that.

Erica Mills Barnhart  20:58

You were quoting somebody. I love that and but it made me wonder what is it about misinformation and lies that are so much more viral than the truth?

Hanson Hosein  21:08

Well, there’s no doubt about it that we are addicted to misinformation, you got to look at information very much like food in misinformation is junk food. It’s got a high sugar content and high carbs. And it’s so easy to consume. And it’s actually fun and it hits our neural pathways in different ways. I mean, McDonald’s, for example, you know, used to try to do a salad menu because they thought that’s what everybody wanted based on the surveys. But in the end, that’s not what people go to McDonald’s for. So they don’t serve it salads anymore. It’s the same thing with information. Everybody says they want the truth. They want the facts. But you speak to the folks at Facebook as I have, and they will tell you that uniformly, the links that get the most attention are the ones that are patently false. That’s what people are attracted to.

Erica Mills Barnhart  21:48

That’s wackadoodle.

Hanson Hosein  21:51

Well, it’s easy. I mean, and this is when you have data driven easy information. The problem is right now, and this is the this is the transition the evolution that I’ve lived for the last 25 years as a journalist and as a communications person, is that as the multiplicity of information sources that just sort of exponentially exploded on us. We are, you know, we are not living in an information vacuum, we’re living in an age of overabundance of information we don’t know how to choose. And that’s the anxiety. And so we want simplicity, because otherwise we’re just overwhelmed.

Erica Mills Barnhart  22:22

So to say, I experienced this firsthand. And this is not a story that I’m proud of. But so my sister works at Stanford. She’s a geneticist by training, science writer, she’s wicked smart. And so the it was the Monday, the Monday that they announced shelter in place, I think earlier in the day, or maybe the day before. Anyway, immediately prior to this, this text exchange, which I will sharing about, I had a total I’m not like a super emotional person by nature. I’m not a crier by nature, and I had a total meltdown in the aisle at QFC, because I was so overwhelmed with everything, and I sort of had to leave cart and come home and try again. So I was not in my best mental state, let’s just say, and I get this text from a friend whose husband is a ER physician’s assistant in an ER. So I feel like this is a reputable source. And it’s you might have seen this it was basically this you know text from somebody saying, you know, we’re close to the CDC, this is going to get worse before it gets better. By the way, we probably knew about this and it probably comes from you know, cows bovine. Okay, so I sent this text to my family and my sister’s like basically I’ll paraphrase she was like, Oh, good, Lord Erica, get it together. She’s like, and I was like, but the but the flu the flu virus and that came from birds. And she was like, yeah, that’s that’s not this Erica, you gotta, no. You know, retrospect I’m like embarrassed that I fell prey to it. But in the moment, it felt very like that made sense to me in my amped up and anxious brain.

Hanson Hosein  23:56

Yeah, when you’re in a state of fear and anxiety, we’re more susceptible to these things. This is why we’re seeing this rise of demagogues as leaders around the world because they provide easy answers when everything else is so confusing. Yeah. And and they address the fear by actually perpetuating the fear. So that’s, that is the fundamental challenge we all face is that we have to get past the fear. We have to get past  disinformation, we have to sit and say, how are we going to collaborate at scale and trust each other again, to overcome these massive problems. And in a way, there’s almost a divine retribution to what the virus has brought to us because it’s been an equal punisher. And it’s basically saying, you shall not have sports, you shall not have entertainment, you should not leave your house, you shall not go to a bar, you shall stay home and think very hard about how you want to support your fellow human because you’re not going to get out of this otherwise.

Erica Mills Barnhart  24:46

Yeah, I mean, I see I see the take of it being the great equalizer. We and the data is also saying that it definitely is disproportionately impacting communities of color, and already marginalized communities. So I think we’re seeing it as an amplification of some of those trends. But your point still stands, which is, you know, we’re all feeling it and we’re all kind of being it’s it is a reckoning, for sure.

Hanson Hosein  25:09

We’re not going to get past it. Yeah, of course, the impact is felt disproportionately, but we don’t get past this unless we get to come together to figure it out. There’s no way.

Erica Mills Barnhart  25:18

Yeah, yeah. This is a little bit of a sidebar, but you just went through what a lot of folks are going through, which is you had envisioned those town halls being in person. And then you had to shift gears to being virtual. I just last week, I gave my first virtual keynote. And that was a really different experience thing giving it in person for sure. And but part of it was just a mind shift from like, I will not be in person. I’ll be online. I was just curious how that how you experienced that.

Hanson Hosein  25:44

Yeah, it you know, I think the challenge was that I didn’t have the visual and physical cues and that’s what I’m really good at totally energy and an audience and the speakers, right? But at the same time, I’d been thinking about this for a while even when we looked at the ideas of town halls last year, I said, there’s no way this could be 45 minutes of sage on the stage and then 15 minutes of random q&a where people with loud voices dominate. That’s just not useful. And so luckily, I found this new platform out of British Columbia called Thought Exchange that allowed us to actually really crowdsource the thoughts and questions of the audience in a way that they can vote things up. And then we would get that into the program. So when we design this, even before we have to go virtual, my thought has always been, we only hear from these experts for the first 10 or 15 minutes to frame their credibility and the question and then we go straight to Q&A. And I feel that that’s what really resonated, we had over 2000 people participated in this.

Erica Mills Barnhart  26:37

I know, congratulations!

Hanson Hosein  26:40

And, the participation was coming fast and furious, so I was getting my students were helping to curate those questions, but I felt it was highly participative despite the fact that nobody was in the room with me.

Erica Mills Barnhart  26:52

Yeah, that’s cool. It looked really incredible. What was the platform again?

Hanson Hosein  26:55

It’s called ThoughtExchange. It’s one word, thoughtexchange.com.

Erica Mills Barnhart  27:00

I’m originally from Vancouver, Canada. So I do confess the probably similar to you, anytime you hear about something good coming out of Canada, it makes me proud.

Hanson Hosein  27:07

Well, I grew up, I grew up in Canada, and this is actually out of Southern British Columbia. It’s southeastern British Columbia near Nelson, and, but they’re being funded largely by VC in Seattle. So that’s how I was connected to them in the first place.

Erica Mills Barnhart  27:19

Very cool. Yeah. I want to shift gears just just a titch. So, this podcast and its listeners, obviously, are interested in marketing for good and we’re coming at it from all different angles, as this conversation has already shown. So when I think about what does marketing mean, it to me is when there’s an exchange of information, ideas, goods, services, whatever, and that can happen one on one or at scale. And importantly, that exchange is mutually beneficial to all involved, right, so everybody should be made whole, but through that. So it’s easy, I think, to think about technology and how it can fuel misinformation at scale but something that I feel like we haven’t been focusing on as much in the past sort of four to six weeks because of Coronavirus is that the way in which technology can shape perceptions because a lot of marketing happens within frameworks that are very well established within our brains. And in the you know, they shaped perception. So, I would just love to hear your thoughts on how technology including emergent technology can help shape perception at scale.

Hanson Hosein  27:54

Oh, boy. That’s a tough one, because, you know, even as I helped pioneer this master’s program in digital media before anybody really understood what social media was, we recognize that technology should not be the tail wagging the dog. And that what we’ve pivoted on with a graduate program is very much that we’re essentially looking at human forces that are amplified by technology but you never start with technology as a solution or as the thing, it cannot be that. But there’s no doubt about it that as we move into the next chapter of technology, which is ambient technology, artificial intelligence, internet of things, that just profoundly disrupts everything where the technology is the driver. And it totally rewires, how we connect and engage with each other and with ourselves. And so, you know, this is going well beyond Facebook and Twitter and Social Media and everything else more into behavioral change, which, you know, marketing does deal with behavioral change has fundamentally been about telling stories, whether it’s been an advertising campaign or a film, right. It’s basically saying, Hey, I can envisage some kind of transition in my life’s journey, if I do this, or I buy this product, I vote for this person, and you tell that story and then it’s done. However, when you’re dealing with a data ocean, and then that data is being manipulated by an algorithm to incentivize people’s actions and it knows you better than you know yourself, then we have a different situation where behavioral change is no longer about telling stories and human incentivization. And it’s more about, well, we can actually get real time understanding of how you are moving and changing. And we’re going to incentivize you based on that data. So for example, if you have a smartwatch on and you go to your fridge and you’re about to take that thing out of the fridge and your calorie count goes up, and it’s going to affect your insurance premium and say, that will descend us disincentivize you from consuming that thing. And so suddenly, it’s the numbers in the algorithm that are determining what you do, as opposed to the stories that motivated you before and that is profound.

Erica Mills Barnhart  30:34

And at least to me, kind of wonderful and scary all at the same time.

Hanson Hosein  30:40

Well, if you look at it, even from the point of view of what we’re facing right now with the virus, you know, and they’re looking like, okay, we now know that we have to get back to work, we have to be able to survive, and somehow we have to put this virus behind us, but the only way we can do that, we have to know who’s sick, who’s had it, who hasn’t, and where they are and how do we quarantine them. All of a sudden, we have we have a solution. Let’s use our smartphones and artificial intelligence to track everybody and put them in their place and keep track of that. And that’s scary. Because that’s just not the applications where this all goes, right.

Erica Mills Barnhart  31:12

Yeah. Well, I think it’ll be really interesting to see. I mean, certainly something that’s happened because of quarantining children in place, and that’s, you know, Americans really pride themselves on independence. And you certainly saw that flare up in terms of people not wanting to give up their independence in service of the greater good. And I, you know, I’m just really interested to see what the legacy will be in many regards, but including in that regard.

Hanson Hosein  31:41

Yeah, no, that’s a really good point. You know, I have you and I both being relatively bi-national. One of the things I love most about America is that focus on independence, its pursuit of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, right? And Canada is built on peace, order and good government, which is very much the human welfare thing. But you know, if we continue to face these crises and if these technologies continue to really sort of herd us, according to our data does America and its constitutional origins and culture get rewired fundamentally? I believe that America was driven by a particular technology, the printing press, which allows for different voices and and independence to sort of shine through against the monolithic monarchies in Europe at the time. So the printing press shaped America for the last 250, 260 years. It’s not the printing press anymore. It’s not even the internet. It’s really artificial intelligence, and how does that make us think and do differently? Where does our freedom go?

Erica Mills Barnhart  32:37

Yeah, where does our freedom go? So we talked a little bit about grief. And then you were just saying that with algorithms, you know, that, in some ways is the demise of storytelling yet what we know is that our brains are wired for story. And so are we going to rewire our brains like our story’s gonna die? Hanson?

Hanson Hosein  32:57

It’s a good question because you know, who cares if our brain brains are wired for stories of if the algorithm is telling us what door we can go through and which one we can’t. And that’s what we’re getting to see in China where you get access to certain things based on their social credit system and you don’t get access and so it will stories matter if, if human incentivization and freewill don’t matter as much, because we are just locked off from those different services. I mean, that’s obviously we’re talking a few years down the line, but I believe the virus will precipitate asking those questions sooner than later. I hope that stories don’t go. I mean, they’re mildly entertaining, obviously. And we’re all bingeing on these these streaming platforms. And it may just be that, entertainment. But the story stories are really what, that’s what sets us apart from any other species. And if we don’t have that, because it also gives us our sense of identity. That goes away, then we’re really messed up as a species.

Erica Mills Barnhart  33:49

Yeah. I’ll just say that in anticipation of the new Top Gun coming out last night, my husband and I did watch the original Top Gun and I was sitting there thinking like, this is just good storytelling. I mean, there isn’t anything super remarkable about it but 34 years later, it’s still a good story. I know exactly how that story goes. And I was still like, I’m gonna watch this, you know, there’s nothing about it.

Hanson Hosein  34:13

But yet, but again, those are stories. I mean, those stories, at most, maybe might just be our bedtime stories. It’s no longer stories from marketing or anything else. Or at best, they just continue to tell give us our sense of selves and purpose and who we are.

Erica Mills Barnhart  34:27

Identity. Yeah, so you wrote a book storyteller, uprising trust and persuasion in the digital age.

Hanson Hosein  34:36

Totally outdated.

Erica Mills Barnhart  34:37

Okay, okay. And yet, in it, so you describe uprising as meaning people seizing control of communication by building ongoing, credible connections through story and digital technology. Would you still describe it in the same way?

Hanson Hosein  34:52

Well, yeah. Although I’m wondering, I think since then, that was all done right before the height of the apex of the goodness of this, which was the Arab Spring, when you saw populations essentially pushing back against monolithic structures, and this this, it was all inspired my Declaration of Independence against NBC. Like, I realized that I didn’t have to rely on this voice of God anymore to be able to reach people with stories that matter to me. So when I brought that ethos to the University of Washington, I said, you know, what every organization actually tell their own stories without having to rely on broadcasters. And so that actually happened Amazon and Starbucks, and all these companies now have internal newsrooms, and it’s come to be, so that’s great. And that was the independence and freedom I was looking for. But what it’s also happened is that it’s created A) a complete fragmentation of the information ecosystem. And B) because that fragmentation what we’re looking for is clarity. And so we’re willing to surrender all of our power to essentially the big five companies, as they call them. It’s and they’re, and it’s become this massive oligopoly of information technology, which is extremely dangerous. They have more power than states do.

Erica Mills Barnhart  35:58

Yeah, yeah, so you’ve heard me talk a little bit about my affection for the second law of thermodynamics. Do you remember this?

Hanson Hosein  36:06

Yes, I have heard you say something along those lines because your dad’s a physicist.

Erica Mills Barnhart  36:09

Yeah, well, you know, engineer, physicist, I don’t even know, it all blends together. But, you know, with the idea being that chaos is always increasing. And so, and chaos can be productive, right? It is disruptive, but sometimes it can be productive. My stance is from a marketing and communications perspective. Most of the time, clarity is going to serve you better than chaos. So the work is to bring clarity rather than perpetuate chaos. So chaos is always increasing, the second law of thermodynamics is universal law. So we can’t stop it. That whole like stop the chaos isn’t possible, but we can quell it. And I guess I’m curious in a time when it’s at least true to say how we relate to story shifting. What does that mean? And if algorithms are taking over, what does that mean? Like how can people think about bringing clarity.

Hanson Hosein  37:02

Yeah, because the the knee jerk reaction right now in terms of the chaos is to sort of say let’s throw whatever band aid is readily available to us, which means, oh, that algorithm from Facebook is going to quell hate speech and give me as much information as I need. Go for it. I won’t even look at what I’m surrendering. And and they’ve got more power because of that, that can’t be the solution. The other way of looking at it is, how can we actually come up with new narratives new meta narratives about who we are as communities as societies that service us that aren’t irrelevant. And you could say that what we’ve experienced in the last five or six years, in terms of the amount of disruption there has been to traditional institutions like government, and like media, is to say that the reason why we can attack those entities is because they were weakened because we don’t trust them anymore. And so what do we have to do to renegotiate our connection to each other social contract? Well, we have to rethink what our social infrastructure is going to be, how we connect. And to do that, we need new stories. And those stories could be new stories about nation states, communities, religions, those are all stories we tell ourselves to understand who we are, and how we can collaborate at scale. And so if we think about the role of the marketer or the storyteller, I can’t think of any more important charge at this time, then start imagining those news stories and understanding that it has to be relevant to the times and can’t be looking back 20 or 30 years, when we thought that that was the truth. It’s not the truth anymore. We have to take into account these new realities.

Erica Mills Barnhart  38:33

What do you think is still the truth? What truth will sustain-

Hanson Hosein  38:38

The truth is, the fundamental truth is that we cannot act by ourselves. We do not exist in a vacuum and the problems that we face, whether it’s as a country, a community or as a species are so massive, that if we cannot trust each other enough to figure that out together, then we are doomed and so even when I think about the conversation around diversity and inclusion, which gets rejected by certain people, because of just trying to do good for and and whatever else, I think if you don’t have all the brains at the table to try to figure these things out, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. And so what’s it going to take for us to say, you know what, here’s the new terms of engagement for us. And this is why we’re doing it. And this is what motivates us. And this is why it matters in the big picture. Let’s get together and do this. That’s what matters most.

Erica Mills Barnhart  39:31

Yeah, it feels like being very settled on values is more important than ever, like, we went through a time where you kind of always have them, but maybe we didn’t name them as much, you know, and that just feels so important to call out explicitly these days and not take them for granted so that you can, you know, build trust communities and connection in that way.

Hanson Hosein  39:54

Well, the challenge with values is that it becomes a very subjective thing and unless you can come up with a storyline that inspires people to adopt those values in common, then you’re in trouble. And so the other outcome I see happening, which sounds very science fiction, and I’m calling it I’m patenting this or copywriting, I’m calling it a future of platforms and enclaves, essentially, we’re moving away from this, these mass ways of coming together, whether it’s a nation state, or a corporation, or a church, even, to something that’s much more specific to both where we live geographically and what our values are, say around abortion, or gun rights. And, and, and the platforms that we choose to support us that we don’t necessarily need a state or country providing health care when Amazon does. And so all of a sudden, if you’re living in part of the Pacific Northwest, in this community, where you have certain values that matter to you as a community, and you don’t want to associate with anybody else that doesn’t have that values. And you don’t need a federal body to support you because you’ve got you’ve chosen Amazon or Facebook as your as your reputation system plus your service provider. Then you have a system of platforms and enclaves it’s like a 21st century feudalism. But we’re collaborating at scale within that platform or enclave.

Erica Mills Barnhart  41:05

Yeah, I mean, the at scale part makes me wonder on the other side of this, how much more fiercely we will crave human connection?

Hanson Hosein  41:15

Well, depends on how much connection we need, right? If you say, I’m just quite happy with my little village of 100 people, and we all agree X, Y, and Z, and we all agree that we don’t anybody who doesn’t agree with that X, Y, and Z. And we will connect either in person or we will use this particular platform to continue to talk to each other. And we have a rating system so that you can have reputation we’ll take you seriously that may be enough. And and those those technologies are so powerful, that the scale comes from that, doesn’t necessarily come from millions of people doing something it comes from 30 people all agreeing on something.

Erica Mills Barnhart  41:49

Yeah, you know, it strikes me and listening to you is how much we talk about needing to filter out information. You know, that we’re bombarded and we need to you know, kind of filter. And I believe that to be true. However, I think the downside of we’re all very good at reinforcing our own preconceived notions about the world and our opinions. And you know, our brains naturally are wired to go and just reinforce those opinions. And so what would you offer to listeners as a way to kind of balance that out? Like, definitely, you don’t want to overwhelm yourself more than you need to be overwhelmed, because that leads to anxiety. And that leads to reptile brain and that’s just not good. So what do you I mean, if you’re willing to say, how do you balance those things? You’re such a balanced thinker and observer.

Hanson Hosein  42:38

I actually don’t have that much optimism about it. I think it’s too hard to do. Because it actually requires a journalist mind which means you don’t accept the source at face value, you double source and you’re skeptical from the beginning and then you try to it’s a lot of work, right. That’s probably the work of a scientist as well. And I think that’s just too hard to do. And and this is one of the reasons why maybe the height of trust in the United States could have been in the 1950s and 60s when we trusted our media and political institutions. And there were certainly very few of them. They weren’t necessarily right. But at least they told us what to think and do and we generally agreed with it. And so I’m not, I am not confident that we’re going to get past this very easily. Because for us to sort of say, okay, I’m a Republican, I have to start making friends with Democrats, even though I don’t like them. That’s hard.

Erica Mills Barnhart  43:27

Yeah, it’s hard.

Hanson Hosein  43:27

And so my solution has been in jest until even last year when I was giving talks of my solution was the only thing that’s gonna solve this is an alien invasion because the alien is so it’s such an external threat, that we have to put aside our differences to come together. Otherwise, we’re not going to get past this. And in a way that has happened. The virus isn’t an alien invasion.

Erica Mills Barnhart  43:48

Yes, it is, in a lot of ways. Yeah. Okay, I remain more optimistic. I’m not a jaded journalist.

Hanson Hosein  44:01

I just see the facts right now, people are fragmented to the nth degree. And they’re looking at basically they’re saying, hey, Facebook and Twitter fixes for us, you know, give us sources that we wouldn’t normally want to see. And try to push us in front of us because we can’t do it on our own. I do not believe we can do it on our own for the most part. I don’t believe it because it’s too easy to engage in confirmation bias. Too easy.

Erica Mills Barnhart  44:25

Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s all there. Yeah. And I mean, even if you’re aware of it, it’s so hard not to do it. It’s definitely hard not to do it. So you are an award winning filmmaker and I’m just going to call you a video guru and though instantly you’re going to be like oh, I’m not but you know so much more about that medium and have thought about it so much more news just so much more. I’m just curious, let’s assume that that it doesn’t go away and that storytelling stays with us in some form or fashion what I notice is, you know a lot of listeners will be will work for nonprofits or foundations or B corps or you know, they are folks that are on a mission to make the world a better place for sure. And they have such rich stories to tell and yet it doesn’t feel like they’re told as often or in a way that may be as compelling. If you were in their shoes, what would you be doing to get your story told?

Hanson Hosein  45:18

Well, I would say that the bar is very high, in terms of, you have to really justify to yourself that it’s worth making that kind of investment of time and resources to use video.

Erica Mills Barnhart  45:29

Do you think the video has to be high production video to be effective?

Hanson Hosein  45:32

No, it just has to be a really phenomenal story. It has to be really compelling content and doesn’t I’m not saying it’s got to be like a really racy Game of Thrones thing. But it has to get us to pay attention and make us think differently than we normally would do. And there’s so much expected tropes right now in storytelling, and now you see it on Netflix and Amazon Prime now. They’ve got so they’re throwing so much money at these productions and the storytelling is generally mediocre. It’s very predictable, but they’re sort of expanding it over a series because they know people are addicted to it. And it’s terrible.

Erica Mills Barnhart  45:59

Well predictable also has solace. It’s comfort, right? That’s why I watched Top Gun last night.

Hanson Hosein  46:04

But, but if you think about it from the point of view, that’s what that’s what nonprofits are competing with, right? If somebody if a nonprofits putting out a video and somebody has a choice between that and watching the next Netflix thing, no matter how mediocre it is, they are going to choose Netflix because it’s like fast food again. And so even even when we were looking at doing this the summit the last week on the Coronavirus and info-demic, I knew that we had to think very differently, not in terms of how we marketed it, but also how we engage. And so I made it very clear to our experts, they were not going to get more than six minutes of speaking before we went to the Q&A and that I would keep it very fast pace. I knew that we wanted to keep people we wanted to hook them with as much actionable stuff as possible. And what we found is that the stuff that really resonated for us even as we were doing it and resonate with our audience with the stories that the speakers told not the research, but the anecdotes, right. And so I think that’s what you have to think about. First of all, what is it you what action you truly want your constituents or states to take, what is the, what is the astounding, surprising, amazing thing you can tell them that they don’t already know that’s going to make them want to stick around? And can you do it in a way that looks compelling enough not necessary from a production values point of view, but to show that you actually mean it, when you put it out there to do it, and I think it’s entirely possible. And I want to I actually want to rephrase my pessimism that you observed in the last answer is that whenever I tell stories, or communicate what I try not to do, yes, you can be provocative. But I also recognize that people increasingly find any communication they engage with, does it threaten their sense of identity?  Like even climate change, you start you start with that word climate change, you’ve automatically disenfranchise maybe 30% of America, because they, they believe that climate change forces them to not be a conservative anymore. And you don’t want to do that as much as you’d like them to embrace it. And so you have to think about what is there a different way for me to phrase this, that invites them into the tent, doesn’t attack who they think they are, and then gets us all to think and talk and engage differently.

Erica Mills Barnhart  48:01

Yeah, and I think you were making a point about like, what action do you really want people to take? You know, when I’m working with with clients, and when I teach, I’m always saying what, who, how? What, who, how? What, who, how?  Which means what is success really look like? Who’s your target audience or who needs to be involved? And then how are you going to engage with them? And so often we go right to the how, right and so-

Hanson Hosein  48:24

I think you might recall I responded very belligerently in your class.

Erica Mills Barnhart  48:28

I blocked that out.

Hanson Hosein  48:31

And I couldn’t I can’t stand the target audience message question. That’s very 20th century. I think if we’re competing-

Erica Mills Barnhart  48:39

But if you’re inviting people into a tent, don’t you need to be thinking through who you’re inviting into the tent?

Hanson Hosein  48:43

No, well, I think it’s maybe semantics to you. But I think you have to ask it very differently. Target audience makes it sound like I’m trying to hit them with something so they can buy something. I my my question, how-

Erica Mills Barnhart  48:54

Let’s say who wants to be involved?

Hanson Hosein  48:57

Yeah, exactly. No, no even better. Even better, how do I serve these people? What do they need most? What is what is their anxiety? What will what will make their lives better?

Erica Mills Barnhart  49:09

Okay, but Hanson if you go right to the how, I love that, let me just say I love your reframing like how can I be in service to these people? You still have to, I think, say who are these people?

Hanson Hosein  49:18

Yeah, of course but target audience and just ending with that question just tells me I want to sell them something.

Erica Mills Barnhart  49:22

We’re not ending. How was the ending, were you’re not paying attention? What does success look like? Who do we need to involve? How are we going to involve them?

Hanson Hosein  49:30

I know but I still don’t like the word target audience because it still is that is where most marketers-

Erica Mills Barnhart  49:36

I let it go. I let it go to who might want to be involved.

Hanson Hosein  49:39

Okay. But, but you have to understand that we are in the state of anxiety is not just with the virus, we’re in the state of my God, what is this world coming to you? We need to break that down somehow.

Erica Mills Barnhart  49:52

Yeah, dial it back.

Hanson Hosein  49:54

And not just like, oh, this is the mission statement of my nonprofit and we’re here to solve X, Y & Z and make the world a better place. I find platitude and boring. And and not useful. Yeah, well the other thing about at least nonprofit mission statements based on research, I’ve done this, that 50% of them are technically incomprehensible, really. So that’s a whole separate conversation. Okay, next time. Next time, we chat, we’ll talk about that. I want to make sure I respect your time. And I have three final questions. So one of the things that I figured out recently because you know, I’m always looking the etymology of words, is that motivation is about action, but inspiration, actually the root of it means to breathe in. And so you need enough breath to take action, you need enough inspiration to stay motivated. So will you share what continues to inspire you and also what keeps you motivated? Yeah, that’s beautiful. I think, it actually speaks to the information flow in these place as well as before you share before you intake anything, take a breath you know and calm your system. That’s that’s a nice way of saying it. What inspires me is exactly what I’ve been saying is that I, I’m trying to get past this immediate crisis, and think about what is what are the new structures we’re going to need as a species or society to collaborate? And can you start thinking about that now? And what are the stories that we have to tell to inspire people to build those things and getting past the things that we’ve hung on to for decades or hundreds of years is thinking that’s the truth. We have a new truth and we need to figure out ways to trust each other in different ways moving forward. That’s what inspires me most.

Erica Mills Barnhart  51:38

What keeps you motivated?

Hanson Hosein  51:41

What keeps me motivated is that I have I brought children into this world when things seem to be fairly good, and now they’re not. And so I would like to make sure that they’ve got something that they can hang on to that makes their lives better, and that then the people around me and that they find inspiration in that as well. They look to help each other out.

Erica Mills Barnhart  52:02

Yeah, I love that. Well, you 100% inspire me. And I, of course, think you’re amazing. I love your work. I love how you think so differently about things and invite others into thinking differently. If people want to find out more about you, where should they go?

Hanson Hosein  52:18

Oh, I make it very hard to find me. But just-

Erica Mills Barnhart  52:21

I know we share that in common by the way, we share that in common. But I will put everything in the show notes.

Hanson Hosein  52:25

If anybody really wants me they got to work hard to do it. hrhmedia.com is my website and they can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter and we can figure it out along the way.

Erica Mills Barnhart  52:33

I love how your tone of voice totally shifts. I don’t know you can just sort of do the thing and then you’ll like find me.

Hanson Hosein  52:39

I don’t actively seek business or people. I mean everything like jobs from NBC, the University of Washington, my clients, they tend to fall into my lap and that sounds very arrogant, but I feel like it’s almost like it has to be that organic thing. I cannot actively seek these things out because it doesn’t work out.

Erica Mills Barnhart  52:54

It doesn’t sound arrogant, Hanson. It sounds like you are somebody who is so true to who you are. You stay in your zone of genius. And people are attracted to you for that. And that’s a gift. It’s amazing.

Hanson Hosein  53:06

Well, thanks for being so charitable with these eccentricities.

Erica Mills Barnhart  53:09

It’s true. Well, at least it’s my it’s my version of what’s true about you. So, thank you for taking the time Hanson. I really do appreciate it.

Hanson Hosein  53:17

Erica, thanks for such provocative conversation.

Erica Mills Barnhart  53:19

Alright, take care

The post Ep 7: Hanson Hosein: Misinformation and the Staying Power of Stories appeared first on Claxon Communication.

This is a transcript of Erica Mills Barnhart’s interview with Megan McNally on the Marketing for Good podcast. You can listen to the episode here and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts. Enjoy!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, organization, feel, business, social media, women, story, marketing, storyteller, learn, true, conversation, leaders

Erica Mills Barnhart 

My guest today is Megan McNally. So officially Megan is a lawyer and strategic advisor to purpose driven people and organizations. She has spent more than two decades as an organizational leader, consultant, educator and public speaker, including Executive roles with the NPower Network, where we met, Washington State Bar Association Foundation and Pacific Science Center. In 2017, Megan founded the F Bomb Breakfast Club, a peer support community of over 3000 female founders and women business owners and was named one of the most influential people of 2018 by Seattle Magazine. Because she is such a badass, she has been featured in Geek Wire, the Puget Sound Business Journal, Seattle Lawyer and more. Megan, to me is the very best and kindest kind of rabble rouser and provocateur and really truly one of the most badass women I have ever had the privilege to meet. Megan I am downright delighted to welcome you to the show.

Megan McNally 

That is very generous and very kind of you Erica because of course I think of you as such a mentor and such a role model for me. So, this is a joy.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I feel like at some point this interview I might cry.

Megan McNally 

Well, it’s not a very worthwhile interview if there is not some crying at some point.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, yeah. How are things? How are you doing?

Megan McNally 

You know, I always think it’s important to put a time stamp on interviews right now. So, we are on day 47,386,000-

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Just approximately.

Megan McNally 

 At home in the middle of a global pandemic. And I feel like I am doing okay, I feel like I am, you know, I’m wrapped in a whole lot of privilege. So, I have, you know, feel like I am pretty well supported in the situation that I’m in. I’m locked in with my wife, who I love dearly and have discovered that we still really enjoy each other even after being locked in together, which is no small thing, how are you?

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I’ve started replying in the following way this hour, like in this moment. I’m great. I’m talking to you. That’s amazing. You know, few hours ago, maybe a totally different headspace. That’s the, that’s the ride right now. I think.

Megan McNally 

I think we’re all on a ride right now. And, and something that has really just become obvious for me is we’re all on a ride, but we’re not necessarily all having the same emotions at the same time and so you’re right in one hour, you can be filled with specific, enormous gratitude. And then, you know, somebody in your same social circle is experiencing deep grief in that in that moment and an hour later, it’s the opposite. There’s something universal but we’re also having our own unique experience right now.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I mean, that is one of the the most interesting things about it is that we are seeing some universals around humanity. I think we are seeing other things amplified, the darker sides of culture in society and being human. And also, it’s a moment of being hyper individualistic. And I just-

Megan McNally 

That individualism might be the death of us here in the US. And you know, there’s a flip, there’s a flip side to all of these things. But you know, I don’t want to jump ahead, because I actually don’t even know what you’re going to ask me. So, I don’t know that I am jumping ahead. But I have been thinking a whole lot about both the opportunities and the challenges of marketing and communicating with audiences right now when at any given moment there’s such a range of things that people are experiencing.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah so let’s go there. It’s always tough, like marketing is always a bit of a gamble. Like you can do all the research you want and if you have the resources, definitely do it. But a lot of marketing is like trial and error and all the rest of it, as you well know. And I feel like right now it’s like, sure, let’s try that. It could work, but you just have no idea the moment that somebody is in. And even for the most part, that’s always been the case. And one of the things that, you know, you and I have grappled with together and also talked about in various settings, is this funny thing where, you know, let’s use nonprofits as an example because lots of listeners work for nonprofits and they think about like sending out a newsletter, as if the person on the receiving end is constantly in donor mode. But of course, they will be receiving that while thinking deep thoughts about charity. I always say like, no they’re not, get real. They’re like in the middle, like think about receiving anything right now like anything physical. One, you’re like, oh my god, do I touch it? But two and this, I think it’s not super new, like you’re in the middle of your kitchen, you’re thinking like, what am I gonna make for dinner? They’re really not in donor mode, right, which means you got to bring the joy factor at a pretty high level or the disruption factor, or something and now it’s like, how do you make those guesses?

Megan McNally 

Yeah, well, first of all, just validate that. I’ll share with you that, you know, yesterday I got a solicitation in the mail from an organization that I love dearly. And it was so everything about the, the envelope, the message inside annoyed me to my bone that like I was like, I’m not going to give to you today. This is an organization I love. But there is some risk in in some of those gambles. I tend to think of we should preface all of this with I’m not a marketing expert. Marketing is a is a piece of and related to and a part of, you know, the work that I do, but I’m not I’m not a marketing expert by any means. But I tend to think of it as, as the 80/20 rule, as in normal times being good, right like 80% of the time you’re using known channels and then a that is familiar to your audience, and the messages that you’ve got evidence are going to resonate, right. So, like 80% of it is known, and you leave 20% for experimentation and innovation. And that’s in general, that’s a good rule of thumb for all kinds of things. Right now, I feel like it’s probably more like 60/40. Right? We should be a little bit more experimental in in what we’re doing.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

So, one I don’t want any listeners to be like, well, never mind, I’m throwing in the towel. I’m just gonna, I’m gonna wait it out. I’m gonna go dark and wait it out till we’re on the other side of all this like really, please, if you’re listening to this, do not have that be what you’re hearing. I hope that what folks will hear is yes, there are a lot of unknowns and and this risks sounding trite but, and it’s a really good time to try some stuff. Because you don’t know. You don’t know. And so, you know, why not try some stuff?

Megan McNally 

That’s actually true. And I should absolutely clarify. So, first of all, an organization whose mission I love who have supported for years, I’m going to continue supporting for years and I would never stop because of a bad fundraising appeal. Right? So yes, I don’t think people should stop doing what you’re doing. You’re like, I think the risk that people are going to turn away from you is actually quite low. In this case, it was more that it read like a campaign that had been designed long before what’s happening now. And so, it was so missed the moment that you know that as a fundraiser as a professional, somebody has been a professional fundraiser, I really felt it like, who did this get past?

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Well, practically speaking, so on the show we talk a lot about the external execution is predicated on like solid strategy and internal alignment, you know, like what you see, you know, what you receive is like the tip of the iceberg, but you need all that internal alignment and so I feel like part of what’s happening is people aren’t because we are on day 4790 gajillion of this is what it feels like. I think there were folks are like, yeah, I don’t have it me to tweak that. I realize it may sound tone deaf, but you know what, I’ll be able to check it off my to do list. And there’s some there’s something very legitimate in that, like you got it out the door. Okay.

Megan McNally 

Yeah, like we’re all doing okay.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

We’re just all doing our best. We’re all doing our best. So I think that’s happening. You talk a lot about failure, something I love about you. So I saw this quote from Arianna Huffington, she said ‘failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success’.

Megan McNally 

Yeah, I mean, there’s there is no success without failure.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I think we can think of no example. Will you talk a little bit about Diana TV and I was looking at your LinkedIn profile as I do to prepare and you, the little blurb under that for that time was ‘we made a passionate run at launching the first digital streaming network dedicated to women’s sports, we swung for the fences, missed by a mile and learned an awful lot’. I knew I was going to tear up at some point, it’s like already. So will you tell us about Dianna TV like what did it mean to swing for the fences? You know, how did you learn?

Megan McNally 

Yeah, so I am many things. Professionally, a Media Executive had never been one of them. I had never worked in sports professionally. But I am a passionate sports fan. There’s a whole lot of sports that I love. And the sports that I love the most are the hardest to find and watch. And I grew up being told that women’s sports in particular are not commercially viable. And I don’t believe that I don’t buy that. And I reached a point in my life a couple of years ago where I just honestly, Erica, I think you know, there’s times this just comes with age where I’m like, I’m just not buying what you’re selling anymore. There’s plenty of evidence there that women’s sports are commercially viable, doable. Others have tried it. And, and I just decided to take a big swing at it. So taking a big swing in this case meant I, you know, I’m a lawyer who worked for more than 20 years in the nonprofit sector worked in philanthropy, what did I know about sports, or media? But I decided to go for it anyway. And to try to build a streaming network that would be focused on women’s sports. And that, you know, there are lots of people who said, try small, maybe try to come up with an innovative Instagram channel and get a bunch of followers and I’m like, I’m not here to play small. I, you know, I have a big vision and I’m going to go for that big vision. And I did. And I and and I built a team of people around me who believed in that big vision too. And we gave it everything that we had. We weren’t successful. But it was, you know, I mean, what I say in my bio, it’s like, yeah, we, we swung hard, we missed a lot, meaning we fell flat. And everything that we learned in that process has proved to be useful in some way. I learned extraordinary things about myself, about myself as a leader, about myself as a person, people involved with the project learned all kinds of things that have helped now support the projects that they’re working on. So there were, you know, business success in that sense, how much we all learned from it. Still not easy to watch women’s professional sports as it is to watch men’s professional sports.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re to me when I think of you, your name comes in as synonymous with storytelling. And of course, you were, you are a two-time winner of the Moth Storytelling Competition. So that’s like officially, officially officially, you know proves that. But it’s true of how you did fundraising, how you did grant writing, I don’t know. I assume that’s how you do lawyering and strategizing and all the things you’re doing today. Have has that always did that come naturally to you? Have you always been kind of a storyteller? And, and I’m always curious if people who, at least I consider to be amazing storytellers think that that’s an inherent skill, you know, something that’s inherent to you or if it’s a learned skill?

Megan McNally 

I think it’s probably both. For me, I honestly think I inherited it from my grandmother. So my grandmother Marie Patricia O’Boyle McNally, we called her nanny, I had a very close relationship with my nanny, and she was the best storyteller ever. And I think that I inherited that from her and I didn’t know that I did. But I can tell you that as a kid, I exaggerated a lot and got a lot of joy exaggerating, you know. And, you know, at a young age, I think it was a thing where it’s like, there’s something about, I don’t know, if you’re telling a story, and people are really leaning into that story, and they’re curious and they’re compelled by what you’re talking about, like that connection. There’s something really heartwarming about that connection that I, I think I loved at an early age. But what’s funny is I think I was well into adulthood before I ever heard anybody talk about storytelling. Now it’s, you know, now it’s a buzzword everybody’s a storyteller. I think Facebook will even label you if you’re a visual storyteller or this kind of storyteller. It’s not something I set up, like a lot like fundraising. It’s not like I ever set out, like, I’m gonna be a storyteller. But I grew up in the presence of a really great storyteller. And, and I think, you know, some of it comes naturally from that experience. But I will say, as somebody who has taken the stage to tell a story, and has, you know, I’ve stood in front of some pretty big audiences telling stories. It’s, there is also a skill that you can learn. There’s an, you know, there’s an arc to a story. There’s important things to know about a story that you know, how you start it and the fact that you have to wrap it up at the end and the fact that there should be some kind of a crux that people really buy into in the middle, like, you know, like, I would say, just like fundraising, part art and part science and having an ability to blend those two, I think It’s pretty powerful.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Where do you see people blowing it with storytelling?

Megan McNally 

Number one, is the story is not your own.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Oh, that’s interesting.

Megan McNally 

Mm hmm. Yeah, I think there is no story more compelling than somebody’s personal story or a story from their personal perspective. So telling somebody else’s story, for me telling somebody else’s story is really risky and it’s, it’s much harder to do than telling a personal story. And this is important, of course, for organizations, when we’re when we’re always trying to tell stories that are illustrative of what we do. So how do you get into that really authentic space when you’re not telling your own story? And then the other thing I think, is that maybe sometimes this goes hand in hand with that it but is trying too hard. You know, like, not every story has to have this like grand drama and this, you know, poignant end and pithy things in the middle, like sometimes we just really, really overdo it when just a plain hold from the heart story, whether it’s comedy or a tragedy, you know, is often just, for me far more compelling.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, I mean, the word authenticity so overused right now, authentic storytelling. And for as much as they say in their tone of voice, like that’s a thing, that’s a thing. It’s a thing, if you want it to connect, I really think you have to go there. I think there’s a tension that is worth noting, where you have the person or people within the organization who are tasked with telling the good story, you know, whatever role that may be, and so off, they go to tell the good story. They sit in an organizational context. And that organization will have its own story it will have its own brand personality is your voice you know, how are you going to translate that, that your personal take or tone, and have that resonate at the organizational level, I think it can be tricky.

Megan McNally 

I think it can be really tricky. And that’s where it goes back to that being a mix of art and science because you can be a really great storyteller generally and it still takes some work to do that for the organization and in the you know, in a way that matches the organization’s brand, you know, merging you could do a whole season, Erica, on personal brand,

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Oh, yes.

Megan McNally 

Organizational brand and how they align and what happens when they don’t and what happens when somebody comes in and tries to bring too much personal brand, the organization brand or there’s a lot to explore.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Because this is new. I mean, if we index back to, you know, let’s just say 20 years ago, when you and I were, you know, doing some of this stuff NPower. Well, you know, you I think it was a time when sure, you know, that was an environment where you could show up, you know, and bring your full self. But we still have like a, there’s just a brighter personal professional. And now with, you know, the advent of social media, we all are so much more, I think forced to be one, like those lines are just very, very blurry and you know, that’s good and bad. We could have a whole conversation about that, but for sure people understand the idea of what personal brand is and different generations feel differently about how they can show up with that in different contexts and environments. Yeah, it’s messy.

Megan McNally 

Yeah, social media has been a game changer in a way that I think, only I don’t want this to sound pejorative, but I think that only people old enough not to have grown up in the time of social media can probably really sort of have that perspective of just how much of a game changer it is about that and the idea of personal brand, you know, I mean, yeah, 20 years ago, maybe we would talk about an executive profile. There was, you know, there might be an executive that I mean, an expectation that the Chief Executive of an organization or the President of a major board had to have a personal reputation that aligned with the organization. So it certainly wasn’t something where we talked about where like every level of the organization of who you are, when you leave the doors has something about, you know, the organization that there was definitely a different kind of line then, than there is now. Which is a double edged sword. It’s, I was just going to pull up some some interesting facts here for you. If you would indulge me for just a minute because the F Bomb Breakfast Club, our next meeting topic is about personal brand and how it relates to building a business. Just aside, if I could would you indulge me in just a quick sidebar.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Oh yeah go for it and tell listeners more about the F Bomb Breakfast Club.

Megan McNally 

Yeah, so the F Bomb Breakfast Club is a peer support community for women business owners and female founders. So we’re a group of over 3100 women, most of us are here in the Seattle area. But we have women actually in 11 different countries now, which is a whole lot of fun and a whole lot of US states. And we support each other. So this is not a top down model. It’s not an expert teaching everybody how to build a business. Instead, we’ve sort of set the table for women to come together and help each other learn through, learn how to build successful businesses and how to survive and hopefully be happy doing it which is no small, you know, no small task. We have among the things we do we have a monthly meeting. It used to be in person. Of course now it is virtual, but on the first f’ing Friday of every month at the A crack of dawn, is when we have our monthly meeting. And there’s different topic for each meeting. And our topic for the June meeting, like I said, is about personal brand and business. So what do you need to know as a founder these days? And so when we were getting ready for this meeting, these stats just really struck me because it doesn’t matter whether you’re in a for profit, business, social sector, business or government, I think this is true across the board. 82% of consumers are more likely to trust the brand, if its CEO is active on social media, right? And sales reps who use social media outperform their peers by 78%. That data is really compelling to me and that it’s not insignificant, that how you’re showing up in the world is impacting that organization or that business, that you are trying to grow in whatever role, you know, you’re in trying to trying to grow it.

Erica Mills Barnhart  

So one that’s fascinating, two where my mind goes with that is to like, okay, like you look at it, let’s let’s pick on Instagram here for a second. And, you know, so you scroll through your Instagram feed and we all know that a lot of those pictures are posed, and they’re filtered and all the rest of it. So, I guess I’m just left with this question is like, so how, how authentic to go back to that word, or true or real real do you need to be in your showing up on social media, like, what does that look like? And and if you’re so curated, and I feel like there is a push, particularly for women, founders, leaders, a push towards being a little more curated, at least physically, because of the social norms, to look a certain way and then you show up in person like how do you maintain fidelity between all of that?

Megan McNally 

Such great questions and your right sidebar that you know, there are stories that make the actual news like CNN ran a story about how interesting it is to see these male celebrities in quarantine and how cute it is that we can see their gray hair and their facial hair and their baggy t shirts. But we we have a very different expectation of women. Somehow right now women are still expected to be successful professionals, and homeschoolers and, and doing most of the housework and, and still dressing fashionable and having their hair done and makeup while they’re on video during the day, these very unrealistic gender expectations. But I think back to your question about you know, picking on Instagram that 87% of consumers say they trust a brand more if the CEO is on social media only gives you one data point. What I’m really interested in and would be really interested in exploring is, and what if they don’t like what they see there? Right? What happened when Lulu Lemon’s CEO, you know spoke publicly about how you know instead of it being a problem that Lululemon yoga pants turn out to be transparent, you know, his perception was women shouldn’t wear yoga pants. And you know what, what kind of damage to that do to the business and is that, can you repair that damage? What happens? What’s going to happen to Tesla if somebody doesn’t rain in and cut Elon Musk off social media here soon like what are the real, you know?

Erica Mills Barnhart 

With Elan Musk, I mean to use what was going on in my brain was if you can show up fully, truly who you are, and that happened that is representative of your of your company actually, there’s there’s a great efficiency in that because you’re like this who we are you either like it or not. And I, you know, I talk a lot borderline preach about the idea of just being radically authentic so that you can, like attract your true believers. Because, you know, if you try to mute whoever you are, and then people are like, oh, but I thought, you know, you just kind of end up pitching in the middle, which is, you know, you we all know, like, that’s just that’s not very compelling. And so then there’s some, you know, it just takes longer whereas if you’re like this is it, there is an efficiency to that. And, you know, if you want fans, you know, I’m thinking of I always think of Harley Davidson because they’re such an easy example. But Elon Musk, I would say like, I think that there are some folks who are like, he’s so well out there, but I kind of dig it. You know, like, he’s him. Like it or not, he’s him. And you don’t have to you don’t have to really wonder about it, I kind of appreciate it.

Megan McNally 

Yeah, I’m with you on the being radically real. You know, splitting the difference on anything never works. That was one of our tough lessons with Dianna sports TV, you can’t split the difference. But if I do it, there’s something to be said for being radically real. And there’s some risk. So you’re going to manage that risk. And there’s great examples of it. So when I think of, you know how important it is, when I think about this alignment between personal brand and organizational brand, I think the organizations that do it truly wrong, or if you know if there’s truly a wrong, it’s that like the PR department has tried to craft what looks like the personal social media account for the CEO. And you all know damn well, and this happens with politicians lot too, right, like and you know, just damn well it’s not them, that it’s not really them, or every message that comes out is promotional.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, yeah. You can feel it.

Megan McNally 

Yeah. You totally can.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

You want to know what I’m curious about? The CEO of T Mobile. Does he manage his own Twitter account?

Megan McNally 

I want to know who does and sidebar when the F Bomb Breakfast Club held its first meeting and Geek Wire wrote about it, John Legere, CEO of T Mobile, retweeted it and said, he wished that he could come because it sounded like a badass morning. And I responded on social media and said, sorry, you know, it’s women only but send donuts. And he did. He had his Executive Assistant, send us donuts to our second meeting. So I think he’s authentically, you know, I’ve I’ve met him we were we were finalists for Geek Wire Awards the same year, he won, I didn’t. But, you know, got a chance to meet and just chat with him briefly there and I, you know, I, I think real deal. I think you’re really seeing him he’s a little you know, really has a slow cooker on Sundays in his kitchen. And, and I will say he’s, you know he I think that’s a great example because like he has a brand and he’s out there and he’s on social media a lot and you get to see that he’s, you know, he’s a quirky he’s a quirky guy. That’s real. His passion for his company in the product and his the customers I think is very real. And yet he still doesn’t, you know, he doesn’t go so far out of lanes that it worrisome, like you don’t see him diving into political conversations, or, you know, or you know, conversations that are just like so outside of the scope of what you might be thinking about when you’re thinking about your telecommunications. And so I think that matters. There’s probably, you know, there’s probably I would bet, a really smart team around him who is saying, you can totally keep being you, just be mindful, just a couple guardrails. So let’s just pay attention.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Just don’t go that far to the-

Megan McNally 

Pay attention to those guardrail, which Elon Musk, it seems does not have, like, you know, things that might be in violation of I don’t know, SEC regulation, for example, you’d think would be a guardrail that somebody would put up for you, not to drive over. But-

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I do want to note that, it’s easier to be radically real. And I think that the more privilege you have, the more power you have, the more latitude you’re given on these things. So-

Megan McNally 

100% white men in particular, get so much license to be quirky, and there’s a risk in being quirky. We, another great conversation, we have had at an F Bomb meeting a couple of months ago was about the you might have seen this story, this amazing founder who had a product at Target unveiled at Target and Target advertised it during Black History Month in February, because she’s a Black American company founder and her product is a product that she said very specifically was inspired by her desire to serve black girls. And customers were outraged and they called it racist and they called Target racist for, you know, for hosting this product. I think there is I think there is risk privilege, you know, the more privilege we have, the more risk we’re allowed to take. And I think that’s something to be incredibly mindful of.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, definitely. I mean, the other thing is we think about social media, you know, FOMO is real. FOMO is real regardless and social media feeds that. And I just I think that that’s one of the downsides with marketing in general and social media in particular is that it really fomenting anxiety, which, you know, flow like a pandemic, already, like the baseline of anxiety is high, horrible for people’s mental health, etc, etc. And it you know, I’m just left with kind of like, okay, well short of like getting off social media entirely, so I’ve gone through times where I just have not been on Facebook at all, I just deleted all my social media apps off my phone, because it was just it was too tempting. And I could feel myself getting kind of sucked in not in a good way it wasn’t serving anything. And yet for all its downsides, it has upsides in terms of connecting with, you know, clients and audience and customers and donors and volunteers and all the rest of it. Have you seen any examples or do you have any thoughts about you know how to not, because part of Marketing for Good is that it needs to be good through and through. It needs to be good for the people doing it within your organization, it needs to be good for the people on the receiving end of it. I think we, you know, we have a responsibility in that way as people who do and can shape narrative. So have you’ve seen anybody doing that well or mindfully?

Megan McNally 

Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a lot of people actually doing it well. Ruchika Tulshyan is one person who I follow religiously on social media. So if you don’t know Ruchika, She is the author of The Diversity Advantage, which was published before the wave of diversity books, you know, that we now see that she was really early and leading the conversation, particularly in the business world. She was a journalist, turned author who really found a voice with the business community and with executive business leaders around diversity. And so she now is, you know, she’s an author, she’s a speaker, she’s a consultant, a communications consultant, with organizations. And she’s somebody who if you pay attention to her on social media, she number one chooses her channel. Right? So, like know what audience you’re speaking to and where they are. In truth, for my business life, my business world, my clients aren’t on Instagram. You know, that’s not where the audience that I need to speak to is from a business perspective. So why am I so if I’m on Instagram, it’s because I’m posting pictures of my cats, the run that I went on, or the food that I ate, that’s it.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

That’s your triad?

Megan McNally 

And it’s my friends and family who care, nobody else. Yeah, um, but you know, so she chooses her channel. So you will see her show up on LinkedIn and Twitter, and how she shows up is in the conversations that are relevant to the things that she does professionally. So if there is a conversation happening online or in the news that has to do with the role of diversity in business, and why it matters for a business in order to be successful for a business to thrive, why diversity matters if there’s a new story or conversation happening around it, she is in that conversation, it’s very rare that you see tweets or messages from her that are like, buy my book, here’s my latest article, listen to my thing, read my thing. And like that happens, but how she’s showing up is present in conversations that matter. And so I think you know, to me that’s one great example. Another one is Amy Nelson of The Riveter. So, you know, Amy is the founder of the Riveter, which is a women focus co-working space and community. And Amy is, you know, not only female founder and CEO of a company that’s raised a lot of VC money, which is venture capital money, which is hard to do as a woman. She’s also the mom of four young daughters, that she had in seccessive order. And so she, if there’s-

Erica Mills Barnhart 

 That’s 100% more little people than I have and that’s, I can only keep up with two.

Megan McNally 

Now imagine being locked in with them all during a pandemic, because they’re all under four, I think, one, two, three and four or something like that. Yeah, yeah. And so Amy is also very intentional about where she is on social media. She is on Instagram. Her audience really is a millennial and Gen Z woman and their, Instagram is their place. So she’s brilliant at how she uses Instagram stories, for example. She never talks about the Riveter, that’s not the point. She talks about what it’s like to be a working mom about what it’s like to be a you know, a mom trying to build a company and raise money for a company while she’s still breastfeeding one and her oldest one is about to have the first day of child care and the things that she’s talking about are so real and relatable and you will see her in her Instagram stories you might see her on her treadmill trying to get her workout in at 4:30 in the morning, because it’s only time to do it. Or her sitting on the floor of a bathroom pumping milk before she goes into pitch, you know, to an investor. And so it’s just a great example of like, know your audience know where they are, and then be in the conversations that are relevant to those people like be in that relevant conversation.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Sorry, I interrupted you. I’m sorry.

Megan McNally 

You’re good. I was done.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

There’s an undercurrent to this that I think is important to call out, which is a lot of folks, myself included at times, although now I’m getting older and so don’t worry about it quite as much. But it did happen when I launched this podcast is, is a latent fear or act of fear of rejection.

Megan McNally 

Oh, yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

And I feel like, you know, we talked about fear of missing out, FOMO right? So that’s one thing. But I really feel, and you know, when I work with organizations, I see this so much where they’re, like, everywhere. And so I mean, a standard piece of advice I give is like, y’all got to give up a couple of those channels, because you just you can’t do well, and it doesn’t make sense. Like, it just it doesn’t really make sense. And, and, you know, trying to try to figure out where you’re going to be and being okay with it and going all in is brave.

Megan McNally 

Yeah, we need bravery.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

We need brave and, and by the way, though, that’s all well and good. I would say nonprofits in particular. I mean, there’s a lot of lip service pay to like go for it and be brave, and then there, they are penalized oftentimes, if it doesn’t work out, like yay, if it does, but really penalized if it doesn’t. And and I see that with, you know, women owned businesses and some, you know, definitely so it’s like, boy, being brave these days is, it’s hard. It’s awe inspiring. I mean, it’s really, for folks who really do it in the way that you’re talking about. It is awe inspiring. We need as much of that as possible.

Megan McNally 

Yeah, we really do. And I want to go back to this story of the Target company that I was telling you about. The company is called Honeypot. And so it was brave, of, of the founder, first of all, to launch her idea into the world and build her company. Like that takes bravery in and of itself. And then it takes bravery to tell the true story of what your inspiration is and who you care about serving that takes bravery. And immediately the, you know, the first immediate wave of backlash was really harmful, right where all these Target customers, boycotted Target and called it racist and all this kind of stuff. But what beautifully happened right after that, is that primarily women and led by black women came in beside that and said, Oh, no, we see her, we’re going to lift her up. And they, her product sold out off the shelves of Target in a very short amount of time after that. And so I do still feel like even though there’s risk, I do still think that there’s reward on the other side of it. And I think bravery ends up being rewarded. Yeah, I mean, it just it does. And, you know, back to your point about, you know, there’s this balance that we have to find between these two extremes. I think, you know, maybe at NPower we used to call it, you got to find the good enough bucket, right, like-

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Oh the good enough bucket, I still refer to the good enough bucket, I do.

Megan McNally 

I use it all the time, right like on one end of the spectrum, there’s perfect you’re never going to have the perfect marketing plan, the perfect strategy, the I feel the, like you’re not going to get perfect. And on the other end of the spectrum is going out scattershot with no real intention or strategy and throwing too many things at the wall all at once to see what sticks, somewhere in between, there is a thoughtful approach that is not just one person’s idea. Right? It’s been grounded in some way or validated in some way by a handful of people at least who understand the brand and the audience that you’re you know, you’re trying to reach and, and then and then there’s some and then intentionally choosing like what what channels make sense for that? What are natural channels for communicating? And then some bravery.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Bravery and like grieving. And there’s a little bit of grief if you’re going to be true to this and you’re gonna be like, we can manage two channels, which I would say in general. Well, there’s not that many organizations that can rock a whole bunch of them. We think that we can but really, that’s pretty tough. So then you have to like make room for okay, we’re going to grieve a little bit because we we’re not going to be on Facebook or we’re not going to be on whatever. Right and that’s healthy. Like, I love magic paper. Do you work with magic paper?

Megan McNally 

No, what is that?

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Oh, magic paper is so great. Okay. It’s like the poof paper. So you you can people use it different ways. I like to think of it and I’ve used it lots of different ways. But okay, the basic premise of magic paper is you light it on fire and it instantly evaporates. It literally goes poof, yeah. So I have used it to write down things that I want to let go of, you know, that aren’t serving me anymore. And then also wishes like you know, things that I am hoping for or things that I’m letting go up.

Megan McNally 

I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I did this on New Years. I didn’t know there was magic paper for it, it probably takes a lot less time than trying to get a piece of paper lit and burning in the rain.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

And when I can get clients to to be game enough to do it, it’s so cathartic, right? It’s so cathartic because it like I just like you just give it up to the universe, you know, give it up.Or you know, whatever, the Universe or God or the Divine, you know, like whoever it is for you. I have no commentary on that. I’m good with all of it. But you’re letting it, you’re giving it up.

Megan McNally 

Yeah, whatever, whatever it is, whatever that higher power is to you. You mentioned, you brought up failure earlier, mentioned how I love to talk about failure. A really important part of failure is is this grief and letting it go. If you ever tried to build something that you truly believed in, whether it was campaign for a product or an organization or a movement and you really believed in it and you and you gave it your all you gave it your best, and it doesn’t work. It is human to go through a period of grieving it. There’s a loss because you you saw it and it was real to you. Right? If you’re, if you’ve ever tried to write that like perfect fundraising letter and you were convinced this was the thing that was gonna bring back your donor who skip the past year you know that it’s it and you send it out and it falls flat. You go through a grief because you saw in your mind, people getting it, opening it reconnecting and running inside to go online and give like you saw it all and it’s not gonna happen and you go through a period of grieving it. And I think you have to you have to let yourself grieve it. Then you have to let it go. One part is natural, the grieving it is natural that comes and letting it go I think it’s a skill. That’s, that’s a thing that we have that leaders of organizations, I think have to practice, you know, we have to help.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

And encourage organizationally, that you have to lead by by example on this.

Megan McNally 

You demonstrate it, you lead by example, you make intentional space for it, you make space to celebrate it, you know, to make it a thing but, but I think the idea of this magic paper I think, is just, you know, beautiful because like, the idea was great and it is time to let it go, and I’m okay to let it go.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

And in Western cultures, we don’t have great we don’t have a great culture of grief, or we, you know, we don’t have great ways of dealing with it. You know, we don’t have ritual around it in the way that they do and a lot of other parts of the world so I think it’s particularly tough.

Megan McNally 

Yeah, I am such a fan of organizations who have really learned to create ritual around mourning, grieving, celebrating failure, and then really dissecting failures as well. Like there’s, you know, there’s some organizations I think do that so well. Not enough organizations, I think have really figured out how important that is not just for people’s mental health, but because I think Peter is the one who first said this and I love the idea that like, you know, things grow from compost, good grows from compost. So if there’s not compost, like, like, there’s a benefit to the organization, because even better ideas are going to come forward.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

And if you’re in these roles of, I mean, I think this is true of any but since I, you know, since the shows about marketing, if you’re trying stuff, you have to anticipate that, like, it’s not all gonna work. I mean, again, to be transparent about the podcast, like we tried all sorts of stuff. And it’s so frustrating when it doesn’t work. And so, you know, we just have to work hard to be like, well, alright, just learning and it’s a marathon, not a sprint. That’s another piece of marketing is everything feels like you know, it’s a sprint, we’re gonna be fantastic and, you know, oh, the heavens will part by next Tuesday. Probably not.

Megan McNally 

Probably one of my hardest things for me to learn as a professional, I am 50 now, and I think will be another 50 years before I’ve really mastered this is separating urgent from important.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Amen to that.

Megan McNally 

And I think in the social sector, in the nonprofit sector, we have a particularly hard time with it, because the stakes are so high and are so high for what we’re doing. And so I think it can cause us to put these sometimes just impossible expectations on ourselves that everything is going to be so good. It’s going to be the thing that changes world that saves the children, like, and so it feels so urgent all the time. And, and that isn’t sustainable.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah. And I really, if you’re listening, I really hope that you’ll hear this that it’s coming from a place of goodness, there’s this pairing of like the issues that folks in social sector and social impact organizations are working on and they are urgent and important, both. And so just separating that out and and mission driven people are purpose driven people, whichever you prefer care so deeply about the work. Like there’s just a depth of commitment to it and when you pair those two things, it gets really crunchy. It’s the only word I can think of, it gets crunchy and hard. And by the way, that’s not it’s not sustainable. It’s not sustainable for staff. So again, looking at you leaders and managers who are listening to this, or maybe this is an episode you share. If you’re listening and you really wish your leader or manager would do more of this, of course now I’ve said it out loud so it’d be a little bit uncomfortable, but is to create this environment where it’s like, we don’t have to do all the everything. Right? Definitely not like today or even this week or even this month, like, you got to give it a little breathe a little breathing room.

Megan McNally 

Yeah. And and I just want to echo how important it is that that message has to come from the top. If leaders can’t separate urgent from important, how on earth can the teams of people that they’re developing to be the next leaders, how on earth are they going to learn and be able to do that? I think it’s really, really incumbent on leaders. Otherwise, it’s really difficult for a team ever to be able to really know how to, you know, prioritize.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, I mean, this is not exactly the same thing but whenever I do sort of leadership coaching, one of the questions I asked is do you send emails on the weekend and I will say one of the most standard responses I get is, you know where I’m going with this,  is they’ll say well yeah yeah yeah, but I do, but I tell my staff that I don’t expect them to. And inevitably, I just sort of look at them for bit and I’m like, yeah no, like, and that’s just not the way I get, I get that they probably really mean that. But that’s super confusing to folks. And, you know, inevitably they’re gonna you know, if your boss emails you at 8am on Saturday, you’re not gonna be like, I’ll get you on Monday, super busy, you know? Yeah, that’s, oh, that takes somebody who is very sure of themselves and their place in the world and all the rest of it to do that most of us will be like, Ah, you know, even if you wait a day, it’s like, okay, I can’t take it anymore. That modeling  of that behavior is tough and actually there are you know, I have, I also get that I have clients who work a lot on the weekends, it’s really productive time for them. There is that feature in Outlook, I mean, any email system you’re using where you can send it, you can have it at 8am or 9am, or whatever on Monday. You can do all the everything and just send it, you know, schedule to send a Monday, if that’s gonna be part of your culture. And by the way, if you’re creating a culture where folks are expected to work on the weekends, well, okay, you know, people need to recharge. So I can’t really say I’m super behind that, but at least be transparent. Because that’s kind.

Megan McNally 

Yeah, I’m with you. And I think, you know, part of this is that context always matters. Always. So if you’re talking about conversations between executives, between people who our power peers in the organization, over the weekend, that might be one thing, right? It might that that’s, that’s part of the trade off. You want to be an executive in this organization here’s what you need to know this is true at the Bar Association, here’s what you need to know. You’re on 24/7, there is no time off, right? Like you can take time off but you have to be available, your time off if you’re at an executive level, that’s an expectation. That is different than how you’re communicating with people who are, you know, if you’re in a hierarchical organization, you have people who are subordinate to you in power, then it is extremely important that you don’t do things like say, I’m going to send you a message at night but don’t feel compelled until tomorrow, just like you mentioned, I actually think that’s abusive. And it took me a long time to learn this. But it’s abusive because you are setting somebody up for a situation in which they cannot win, they respond to you right away there can be, you know, consequences for that. I told you not to respond until morning. Why are you responding right away? This person is a brown noser, right? Or if you actually follow the instructions and don’t respond till the morning, then, you know, then you have just as much risk of Oh, yeah, they really just see this as a job. And in the nonprofit sector I think that’s especially true. We have this judgment about people who put up you know, boundaries between personal and professional life we think mission driven work, you should be breathing this 365 days a year, like all the time, do you not really is this just a job to you as if it’s horrible, something to be just, it’s so, so important. And so I couldn’t agree with you more it really is the culture of the organization or even more than culture, if it happens to be the work of the organization is such that communication is going to happen all the time. I have friends who work in global organizations and so anytime, you know, your your clients on the other side of the globe, it is their business to enter communicating with you and so there can be a real blurring. Or if it’s the nature of the work that you do if you’re in I don’t know health, health care and you know, in in some way that could you know, demand that stuff happens.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, we’ll take calls from clients because they need immediate attention. Yeah. Yeah.

Megan McNally 

See, make that stuff known. Be clear about those expectations, talk about those expectations so that people can come into it in a way that, you know, like fully come into it, knowing that that’s what they’re coming into. But you can’t change the game on people. I will say I feel I know far too many organizational leaders who have found all of the right language to talk about the importance of self care, and I value your personal time and I want you to be a whole person and so I never expect these things. But then the behavior doesn’t doesn’t match that and that is just a recipe for I like I said, I think it’s abuse.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Definitely a recipe for burnout, mass confusion, burnout. Yeah. I feel like where I want to go next, I know that we need to wrap this up. Where I want to go next step but the difference between like self compassion and self care. We’re just going to have to table it for another conversation. But I, it’s so important. They’re not the same thing. You can self care yourself all day and if you don’t have self compassion, you’re just kind of painting your toenails. Which isn’t bad, per se. Anyway, I think that that those are used synonymously and that they’re quite different and that matters for leadership and for sustaining in the work. Okay, I feel like we’ve covered off on a lot of a lot of topics and like some of them, maybe maybe doesn’t feel uplifting folks are like, Oh my gosh, so I end every interview, I think I warned you, I don’t know, by asking guests, what inspires you and what motivates you because inspiration, the root of the word means to breathe in and motivation is about action. So we need both. We need the breath to take action. So.

Megan McNally 

What a great question. No, I don’t think he told me that in advance. So you are really going to get off the cuff. But I would say first I’m, I am sorry if people listen to this and I brought them down, that certainly is not my intent. For me, the first thing I think of when I think inspiration is right now young adults coming into their, their professional life. I am so inspired by the generations coming after me.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I feel like I so agree with that. I I’m thinking of all my students right now and oh my god, they’re, they’re amazing.

Megan McNally 

Yeah, I kind of miss teaching lately. I’ve really been missing teaching because of that, because of how much I learn from people who are, who are, you know, sort of just coming into their career or the, you know, the early stages of their career. I think we have so much to learn from them. I feel like you know, I think of Gen Z, I think of the folks coming through college now in grad school, very, you know, maybe in their first job or first job or two They’ve just been forged in fire. You know, if we think of the last two decades and kind of the life experiences that people have been through and their perspective on the world and their innovative ideas, and they just seem so less, sort of boxed in, then I feel like my generation and the generations before me were and so I’m constantly inspired and watching them and learning from them. And so anytime that I’m feeling worried down or crappy, there’s a handful of young, you know, professionals that I pay attention to what they’re doing. I look at what they’re saying, I listen. You know, I listen to them. I follow them because it gives me a whole lot of hope.I think your other question was about motivation. Right? What motivates me? Hmm. If I were to be brutally honest, Erica, what motivates me is the fact that even my pajama pants are tight right now. Here’s what I mean-

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I am so intrigued by where you’re going with this, Megan.

Megan McNally 

As you said, there’s a difference between self care and self compassion. So I, you know, the beginning of this pandemic work from home for for my wife and I, it started back in January, not in March when the rest of you started experiencing it. We were, you know, on the other side of the globe, when we started experiencing the impacts of what would soon become a pandemic. So we’ve been into this for quite a few months now. But when we first all kind of got locked down at home, I gave myself permission to do whatever I needed to to cope to get through. In those early days, I was very worried about my parents who are elderly and live on the other side of the continent. I was worried about whether my wife was going to lose her job about whether people we love we’re going to get sick, we you know, there are people in our in our in our life, who were really kind of in the line of fire, if you will, and I was really stressed, and I’m somebody who I really like to be active, and I try to eat healthy, and I tend to have a lot of rules for myself and I did a marathon, and I had, you know, at the very beginning of this, I was about to run a marathon, scheduled March 7. And I gave myself permission to let go of rules. Like forget it, like I’m not going to have kale for lunch, I want a brownie. And so I would go downstairs and bake sheet of brownies and eat a whole bunch of brownies and be okay with it. I let myself just be okay with it, that’s what I needed to do. And then we started worrying about the restaurants in our neighborhood and the cafes that we really love the places we go regularly like they know our name when we walked through the door. And we started getting like lots of takeout and getting these sandwiches and tubs of ice cream from my favorite place down the street. I just gave myself permission to do all of that. And I feel great about that. And then I hit the point where I’m like, well that is interesting because all of my, like, stretchy pants are suddenly tight, like how did that happen? Because it became just a reminder of like, it’s okay to give yourself permission to do what you need to do but then ultimately, you got to come back to what’s really important to you for the long haul, and kind of come back to what are you know, what are those guidelines for your life? So for me, it was like, my, my shrinking pajama pants was like, this reminder of like, yeah, I think at one point, you know, at a certain point here, I am happier when I’m eating pretty well, and I’m running a lot and I’m not doing those things. So there’s, it’s, it’s kind of a reminder, like, I’m gonna pay more attention to that. I’m going to be more mindful now. So my tight pajama pants are my motivation.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/makemysize/?hl=enI was going to mention this woman before but I’m gonna mention her now which is Katie Sturino and she’s a fashion influencer. She is what is referred to as plus size which I am not happy about that term and nor is she by the way. Oh my gosh her Instagram is sheer genius so she does a lot of the like, here’s a celebrity wearing a look and here’s me rocking that look and by the way I got it for a lot less and here’s how it looks you know when you’re not a size zero or two and then and then she started doing so if you look for #MakeMySize. I could honestly spend all day on this. So she has just this talk about being your true self radically you and so sweet in the whole doing of it. She shows she goes to you know, just ordinary stores and then she tries on their biggest size, which is usually a 12ish. Actually the name of her blog, I think it’s 12ish or something like that. Anyway, so she tries it on and she’s takes pictures of herself trying these things on and she’s a size 18 or something so a lot of it she’s like look I can’t even get my, you know my arm doesn’t even fit into the leg hole but she has this way of doing it that isn’t like defensive. There’s no malice. There’s just nothing negative about it. It’s just like I love your clothes. I would love to wear your clothes. Thank you. And so not surprisingly she has this massive following I think if I was to channel my inner Katie right now, if I may, she would be like, maybe you just need different pajama bottoms. You know, like, I don’t know.

Megan McNally 

 I would love to check her out.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

We will put it all in the show notes too for folks because man she is so much goodness. She was so much goodness. I love her. I have to say just like for so many years, you’ve inspired and motivated me like, and I can’t even talk about how many different ways and, and all of it. So to have time with you, it’s been a while and this is really, really, really been a treat. Thank you.

Megan McNally 

Well, the feeling is quite mutual. And I’m very excited for your podcast, which is a huge success. And it’s going to continue to be a huge success.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I hope so I mean, my deep hope is that people will start thinking like it’s genuine. The whole thing is to think differently about marketing so you can do marketing differently. And that’s not just a little thingy-dingy that I wrote, which I feel like we are in a time were sure we want to get back to normal and we get to we get to say what’s going to be normal and marketing can be a force for good and it can really mess up a bunch of stuff and it can mess up the people doing it. And so, you know, I hope people listen and they they have a little mind shift and who knows where we’ll go. But thank you. Listeners, if you, I don’t know, want to continue the conversation, I do, as you can tell like literally and have on occasion talk to Megan McNally all day. If you would like to keep the conversation going hop on over to the Marketing for Good Facebook group and we will continue the conversation there. Do good, be well and we will see you next time.

The post Ep 12: Megan McNally: The Good Enough Bucket appeared first on Claxon Communication.

This is a transcript of Erica Mills Barnhart’s interview with Lisa Cron on the Marketing for Good podcast. You can listen to the episode here and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts. Enjoy!

SUMMARY KEY WORDS

story, emotion, people, organization, words, facts, marketing, world, feel, meaning, hear, brain, persuade, listeners, thinking, rational

Erica Mills Barnhart  00:04

Marketing can be an incredible force for good, it can inspire and motivate and make our world more just, equitable and inclusive. But too often marketing perpetuates the status quo for a select few, rather than disrupting it for the greater good of all. This show looks to change that. Join me, your host, Eric Mills Barnhart as we usher in a new era of marketing, an era of marketing for good. Hello, listener, thank you for being here with me today. This episode features Lisa Cron, and I have to say, you’ll hear me say it in the episode, but I had a fangirl moment. I’m not gonna lie, I have followed Lisa’s work for a long time and really appreciate her ability to make storytelling really practical and grounded in neuroscience and biology and move it out of the space of you should tell a story once upon a time to like, there’s a reason that stories work based on how we are hardwired. She does a beautiful job of explaining why data doesn’t work, especially if you lead with data, I don’t know. Where my mind went, as I was thinking about my conversation with Lisa after is, we just got sold a story that PowerPoints and charts and numbers and all the rest of it, it is what we’re going to like help people understand it connected on the rest of it. And then I literally got this image of cave people trying to make some sort of strategic decision about where to move on the tundra. I don’t know what kinds of strategic decisions they were making, to be quite honest, but I’m sure that they did. And it wasn’t like they didn’t pause. They weren’t like, hey, well, you know, I whipped up this PowerPoint presentation, check out my bars and graphs. I bet it’s just not how we’re wired in the hardware that we’re working with in our brain. Isn’t that different? It has evolved a bit over the past couple millennia, but not that much. So I don’t know, once you really get comfy with, like the context of our brains, how far and yet how not far at all they have come. I think story takes on different meaning. And it makes sense in a business context in ways that are in particularly important right now, as we emerge from COVID into whatever this new era is going to be. So with this image of cave people busting out PowerPoint presentations, I want to welcome you to my conversation with Lisa Cron. Welcome to this episode of the Marketing for Good podcast. Today I have with me Lisa Cron, who just very graciously told me how to pronounce her name properly. So thank you, Lisa. Lisa is the author of Wired for Story, Story Genius and Story or Die, her latest book. Her TEDx talk Wired for Story opened Furman University’s 2014 TEDx conference. And Lisa now is a story coach, author and speaker. Prior to that, however, she spent a decade in publishing and has been a literary agent, television producer and story analyst for Hollywood Studios. Since 2006, she has been an instructor in the UCLA extension writers program. And she has been on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts MFA program in visual narrative in New York City. In her work as a private coach, Lisa works with writers, nonprofits, educators, and other organizations helping them master the unparalleled power of story. If you are intrigued, and this will be in the show notes, to learn more about Lisa, you can find her at wiredforstory.com. Thank you, Lisa, so much for joining me today.

Lisa Cron  04:01

It’s my utter pleasure. I’m so happy to be here.

Erica Mills Barnhart  04:04

I am having a fangirl moment, I have to say because I have loved, loved, loved your work since I read Wired for Story.

Lisa Cron  04:11

Thank you.

Erica Mills Barnhart  04:11

I don’t know how many years ago that was. But it-

Lisa Cron  04:15

It came out in 2012.

Erica Mills Barnhart  04:17

Okay, yeah. Well, and by the way, then you’ve been busy. I mean, that’s a lot of words you’ve put out into the world.

Lisa Cron  04:26

I know. I look at it sometimes, I’m sort of stunned. Yeah. So it’s kind of like yeah, that is a lot.

Erica Mills Barnhart  04:32

Well, what I fell in love with and has remained true in my mind- Oh, let’s just say so I’m listening to Story or Die. I’m listening, I’m out walking, you know, in the evenings, and I realized that I was walking and being like, Yes, exactly, that’s exactly right. And I’m like, Oh, my gosh, Erica, you were like you’re talking out loud. I was talking out loud. Because I was so the seriously agreeing with so many points. So I’m trying to keep that in check, you know a little bit more. But through your book, I was not able to because it’s so spot on. And that’s always what I’ve loved about you is your ability to make story matter, in really concrete ways.

Lisa Cron  05:13

Yeah, thank you.

Erica Mills Barnhart  05:15

I mean, you have, honestly, you have so much wisdom to offer listeners of this podcast. So I was trying to get strategic about how we could like glean the gold in a finite period of time. And where I want to go, is to work through a set of what I’m calling cron-isms, which is a quote from you. But I want to start by asking you to talk about that and just before we came on air, we a little bit started dipping into this, so I’m super intrigued by your response about your views on the connection between story and marketing, and especially, you know, marketing for good, meaning marketing that makes the world a better place. What do you see is the connection, there’s overlap, which is why I’m asking and so I just love to hear you talk about that to open things up?

Lisa Cron  06:04

Okay, well, here’s the thing, story really is the only way to convince anybody of anything. So when you’re marketing, whether you’re marketing for good the only way to actually do that is through story. And I think that, that is one of the things that throws people off, when even just hearing something like that, is our conception of story. In other words, when we hear the word story, we think, tell me a story, or I’m going to watch a movie or I’m going to read a novel, we think of story as entertainment. And that’s not what story is, that’s not what we’re talking about when we talk about story. Story is something that is literally wired into our brains. It’s part of our brain architecture, we think in story. And we think in narrative, and the reason that we are so pulled into stories, talking about, again, whether you’re watching a movie, or reading a novel, or listening to somebody talk about something that happened to them last week, or a pitch or reading a mission statement, is we are all wired to look for the exact same thing, which is how is that going to help me get through the night? How does that relate to me? Because we think in story, think of it this way, there’s nothing that we ever think about whether it’s a big idea or abstract concept, or, or any sort of a generalization. We don’t really think about those things. Because it’s something that we literally, as humans made up, there is no general, there is no abstract, when we get any sort of effect, or any sort of anything that someone’s telling us that’s hoping it will change our behavior. What our brain does is we spin that fact in the narrative. So we can see how that fact will affect us boots on the ground in our lives, given our agenda, we think is it going to help us? Or is it going to hurt us? Is it gonna get us closer to what we want? Or is it going to get us further away? So that in other words, we think in story, and that means that when you’re trying to convince anyone of anything, again, good or bad, you have to really figure out what their story is, or their their target group, what their narrative is, and then come up with a story that speaks story to story. But the point is, is that we think in story, the reason that we love stories, so much. I mean, the irony is is the reason we don’t really understand the power of story. It is because we love them so much. And we tend you know, to think of story as something that’s, that’s exhilary, you come home after a, you know, a hard day of work doing real things in the real world. And, you know, what do you do? You turn on the TV. I mean, of course this is back in the day when we did go out. But now it’s like when we come out of our office and you know, we put on the hat of now I’m home and I’m relaxing you know, you pick up a novel, you start watching a movie because you want to, you know, lose yourself in the world of make believe. So it’s very easy to think of story as something that is wonderful. But again, it’s optional, you know, so if we didn’t have stories, our lives would be far drabber. But we would have survived just fine, and that just couldn’t be further from the truth. Story was more crucial to our evolution than our beloved and much touted opposable thumbs. Because all opposable thumbs do is let us hang on. Its story that tells us what to hang on to and I think the biggest problem that we have is twofold. You know, when we’re trying to embrace story now, and as I’m sure all of you have seen out there, there is a big movement to you know, story and when you’re selling something, do you know the story and do you know people’s story and how to create story? The problem is, again, that we think of story as soft science, we think of story as auxilary. I’m going to give some of the facts, they’re going to understand those facts, and then if they don’t quite get the facts because they’re not being rational and logical, we can, you know, doll it up with a story so that they maybe feel something and, and that’s sort of the secondary thing to do. And the truth is, one of the biggest lies we’ve told, and there are many, is that we make sense of things through facts and logic. We aren’t wired to, we absolutely don’t we make sense of things based on how that rational analysis that logic makes us feel.

Erica Mills Barnhart  10:29

So this is like Jill Bolte Taylor, who said, “although many of us think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel biologically we are feeling creatures that think”, on which you, I’m just gonna quote you now Lisa, say “we make every decision based on emotion because emotion telegraph’s meaning. If we couldn’t feel emotion, we couldn’t make a single rational decision”. That’s so interesting. That’s not a metaphor, that’s biology. So I’m gonna repeat that last. But if we couldn’t feel emotion, we couldn’t make a single rational decision. Say more about that. That’s so different than I think many of us think about things.

Lisa Cron  11:04

It’s 100% true. Do you mind if I give you an example? Let me give you the example. And this comes from, there’s a really amazing neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio. And he teaches at USC, has written several books. And he frequently writes about a patient he had a man by the name of Elliot and Elliot was one of these really successful guys. He had a great job. He had a great family. He was like one of those people, you’d call the pillar of his community. Unfortunately, he also had a brain tumor. Now it was benign, and surgeons were able to remove all of it. But to do that, they had to take some of his prefrontal cortex. And after that, like he recovered, I mean, he’s physically halen hardy, but he wasn’t himself anymore. And he had lost his job, he lost his family, he lost all his money to con-men, he was he was living at home with his parents, and the government was about to cut off his disability checks because they thought this guy’s a malingerer. And so the family brought him to Damasio, and they said, like, you know, what’s going on here? Like, did the operation just somehow unleashes latent laziness? Or is there something else going on? And Demasio ran a long battery of tests, and what he discovered was Elliot had lost the ability to feel and process emotion. Now, keep in mind that he still tested in the 97th percentile in intelligence. And he could enumerate every possible solution to any problem that you could pitch at him. He just couldn’t pick one, he’d like go into his office and go, should I do that thing my boss seems to really want me to do, or would it be better to re-alphabetize my file folders again, today? If I do that, should I use the blue pen or the black pen? I mean, this really got me, lunch he’d go from restaurant to restaurant looking at menus, but he never went in, because he didn’t know what he felt like eating. I mean, think about that. Like if you’ve never felt anything about anything, this notion that logic and data is what’s going to tell us what to do. I mean, think about your own life, like picture your own beloved. And now imagine that your beloved, has been away for a month, and you’ve really missed them. And now they’re finally back and they’re walking through the door and you look at them, and you don’t feel anything. How would you even know they were your beloved? Would you look at the data? I mean, it really comes back to how we feel. And for my feeling, the takeaway always is emotion isn’t the monkey wrench in the system. Emotion is the system. Emotion is a survival mechanism. Without emotion, we wouldn’t be here, it is telegraphed.

Erica Mills Barnhart  13:44

Because it is through emotion that we create sense.

Lisa Cron  13:48

Well, yeah, exactly. An emotion is literally telegraphed meaning so that once we know something, and it gets relegated to our cognitive unconscious, which is where we make most of the decisions we make. I mean, we make they say, what, 35,000 decisions a day. And of those, we’re only like, consciously aware of 70 of them, right?

Erica Mills Barnhart  14:09

We had Leslie Zane on to talk about the role of subconscious and marketing.

Lisa Cron  14:15

So I like calling it cognitive unconscious. Because just because subconscious has such a ephemoral way of thinking of it. And cognitive unconscious is not ephemeral. It is literally, once we know something, the way that we’re wired. I mean, what I’m fond of saying is, sadly, we’re wired to live in a world we don’t live in anymore. So that we’re wired to live in a world that once we’re born, we are we’re looking for what we have what’s called an affinity for pattern necessity, which is a great example of why you never want to- This is why you should never use like $25 words like it’s called an avidity for patternicity. And what that means in plain English, which is always best, is that we’re constantly looking for patterns. If this than that, from the moment we are born. If I cry real loud, that nice person will come in and give me milk. Got it. Once we found a familiar pattern that we can trust, it gets relegated to our cognitive unconscious. The problem is that the wiring that we have was really set in place about 100,000 years ago, back when our brain had that last big growth spurt and we were told at that time, this is what I’m sure most people were told, certainly what I learned was that that was because that was when we got the ability to, you know, think rationally, think logically, critical thinking. And that’s true, that did happen then. But what evolutionary biologists will tell us now is, is that wasn’t why we had that change. The reason why was because at that point, you know, if we were going to do what, for better or worse, we’ve since done, which is, you know, take over the world, we needed to do that thing that we’ve been told to do since kindergarten, which is we needed to learn to work well with others. And at that point, our need to belong to a group became as biologically hardwired is is our need for food, air and water. In other words, we’re all people who need people when someone goes, I don’t need anybody. I’m a lone wolf. I just want to say, well you are aware that wolves travel in packs aren’t you? And if you look it up, a lone wolf in the wolf community is a wolf that has done something so egregious that they’ve been ostracized and are left to die. But so the point is, is back when we had that big growth spurt, the world was really much simpler. In other words, nothing changed, right, for aeons. So once you learn something, once you saw a pattern, it was gonna be that way forever. And once you learn something about your fellow compatriots, I mean, what’s the number, there’s a number, it’s called Dunbar’s number, which is 150, from Robin Dunbar has an evolutionary biologist at Oxford. And he basically postulates that from back in the day up until now, given the way our brains are wired, that we can really pretty much keep track of about up to 150 people, that’s about it. Beyond that, it gets very fuzzy, we can’t really do it. And that’s because back then, that was it. I mean, our, our groups, the tribes that we lived in, it wasn’t 150 self selecting people the way it would be now, it was 150 people. That’s it. So that once you learn something about the way the group worked, or about someone or about the world, it made sense that your brain wouldn’t code it as if it was permanent, as if that is just the way that things are. And so the problem now is, is that the world that we take in and the world that we see when we’re young, because that is when we’re trying to figure out how the world works. I mean, you may have heard of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, right? Maslow, the American psychologist, and he says, okay, there’s a pyramid of needs. Top is, you know, the pinnacle is like connection and sense of purpose is the bottom

Erica Mills Barnhart  18:09

Self actualization.

Lisa Cron  18:11

Right? The first thing we need, the very bottom, he says, food, water, shelter, and he’s wrong, because that is not the first thing we need. The first thing we need is somebody who cares enough about us to give us those things.

Erica Mills Barnhart  18:21

Well, there’s been more evolution of Maslow’s hierarchy, which is to say he, I think it’s around definition, right? Because what he put on the bottom rung was safety. But he defined that as physical safety. The evolution of it is to say, and I think this is what you’re saying, which is, it’s not just physical safety, it’s actually psychological safety as well as physical safety.

Lisa Cron  18:42

Well, yes.

Erica Mills Barnhart  18:44

Because we’ve evolved. The world has evolved.

Lisa Cron  18:48

No, not just that. I mean, this goes back to the 100,000 years ago, social safety and psychological safety means I know what to do in order to stay alive, which means that what stories are about more than anything isn’t about physical safety. Stories are about social safety. That’s what we need, we need to figure out how to survive in the social world. That’s what I meant by, we need to have someone who cares enough about us to keep us physically safe. And that means that when we’re young, we’re trying to figure out okay, what do I need, not to make it sound totally transactional, but, we’re trying to figure out what our parents what do I need to do to keep them loving me, so they’ll keep giving me food and shelter? And the thing is, when we’re young, we don’t think what do my parents need, but you know what other parents and other cultures need different things, other cultures need different things, other religions need different things. We just think this is how it is to be human. So we are encoding that and we are encoding that as that is the way the world is as opposed to that is the way my world is, right? I want to pause you there, because this is a really important thing.  I could go on and on and on.

Erica Mills Barnhart  20:07

Yes, I know. Then I want to bring it back to, you mentioned, you have to sort of, you didn’t say quite like this, but map story to story. And, you know, they’re just, I guess, say a bit more about that. Because one of the things, one of the ways in which story can be powerful, and also goes astray, in turn in a marketing context is that with marketing, you are trying to, and I want to come back to this idea of maybe persuading, but I think it’s worth discussing whether or not that’s really the point or if it’s about connection, but you are trying to use story strategically, to try to, you know, let’s stick with connection or persuade or something of an oftentimes, like if we don’t do the work around target audience and personas and understanding who’s on the receiving end of the story. So therefore, what they will hear, then you can miss the mark. Is that what you’re talking about when you’re saying story for story?

Lisa Cron  21:06

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Which is you need to know, your target audiences, what is their self narrative? How are they making sense of things? What matters to them? It’s not so much what they do, it’s why they’re doing it. That’s what you’re looking for. Because what you’re looking for, I mean, if you have a call to action, something that you want people to do, whether it’s buy my product, or support my cause, or, and it wouldn’t just be support my cause, it would be the very specific thing you’d want them to do is very specific, you know, boots on the ground, actual actionable call to action. But what you’re looking for is, here’s what I want them to do, why aren’t they doing it now as far as they’re concerned? In their opinion, not in your opinion. I mean, the biggest problem we have is, you know, what, in their brilliant book, Chip and Dan Heath talked about the curse of knowledge. Once we know something, we think everybody else knows it too.

Erica Mills Barnhart  22:06

It’s really hard for us to remind ourselves, I do this, I am terrible about being mindful of having the curse of knowledge. I just like roll on through. I’ve talked to my students about all the time, I am a terrible offender.

Lisa Cron  22:18

We all are. But the thing is, and I think one of the things I always try to diffuse in everything I write is that it’s not our fault. We’re not doing it on purpose. It’s not a weakness. It’s that literally that is how we’re wired. We are not wired to see the world as it is, we’re wired to see the world as we are because what I just said a minute ago, when we take the world in as children, as babies trying to figure out how things work. We think that what we’re responding to, is the world as opposed to our world. So once we learn something, it becomes encoded. And it goes into what we’ve started to talk about before, which is our cognitive unconscious, as a permanent fact. And so that becomes what I like to call the lens through which we view everything and through which we’re reading that meaning into things. And again, the way that meaning is telegraphed to us, is through emotion. I mean, we don’t make decisions based on our rational analysis of the situation, we make decisions based on how the rational analysis makes us feel. That’s the way that it works. There’s so many ways in which our brain thinks it’s helping us and it’s not.

Erica Mills Barnhart  23:33

Not helpful, sometimes. I have to say that out loud to my brain. Thank you, thank you for what you’re trying to do for me. It’s not serving me. So knock it off. But I see what you’re doing there. And I see you are trying to be helpful. And I want to underscore this for listeners, which is in this is another quote from you, you say “facts do not convince us of anything, because it’s not how we’re wired to take in information, not because we’re stubborn, self centered, or egotistical, but because we are wired for story”.

Lisa Cron  24:05

Yes.

Erica Mills Barnhart  24:05

Yeah. Because you know, if you look at the larger context in which we’re having this conversation, you know, it’s pretty easy to go to, well, that person’s being egotistical or self centered, or we can tell ourselves all these things, and just sort of like creating that space in between that to remind ourselves that, you know, we’re fitting, we’re fitting facts into a frame and that frame was decided many, many moons ago for each of us. But also heartening, I think, correct me if I’m wrong, is that our brains, you know, have something called neuroplasticity. So in fact, we can evolve but that does require some amount of awareness.

Lisa Cron  24:46

And that brings us back to story though, because the two ways that we I mean, the three ways we can involve obviously, if you really know there’s a problem and you put a lot of thought and work and therapy into it, absolutely. But The two ways that are just accessible always to everyone: One is through experience, if experience has taught you one thing and now, another experience can certainly disabuse you of that, that is possible. But if we always needed experience to disabuse us of things that we believe a lot of us wouldn’t have survived. The other way is through story. Because what story does is story really is the world’s first virtual reality. Story really is, I mean, minus that Kiki Visor, and they’ve done you know, fMRI studies that show when you’re lost in a story, the same areas of your brain light up that would light up if you’re doing what a protagonist is doing, you literally are there. I mean, that’s when people talk about about, oh, it’s just mindless entertainment, I always want to say to people, you’re being affected by stories every minute of every day, whether you know it or not. And usually, you don’t, because there’s no such thing as mindless entertainment, we are always affected by every story we hear. I like to redefine mindless entertainment to stories come into our gut, because they make us feel something all life is emotion based. If you couldn’t feel emotion, you can make a single rational decision. In a story, if it is not emotion based, we are not feeling something, we’re not paying attention. And so story comes into our gut, we feel it, it changes our beliefs, and then we see the world differently and we act differently. But often, some of those changes don’t go through our conscious brain. So it pays to maybe stop and think about it a little, especially if the story has you fired up about something that you wouldn’t have thought would have fired you up before, if it goes against something that you really deeply believed before.

Erica Mills Barnhart  26:50

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, because marketing, we think about mainly an organizational context. So to take us there for a minute, this idea of beliefs, and I love this, this reframe that you offered of a cognitive unconscious, you know, beliefs are kind of hard to tap into, I think you have to be kind of elevated, or I don’t know what to get there. And to have the wherewithal to say, like, why is this affecting me so much positive or negative? Like, what is that? And does that connect to a belief I hold? And then and this is why, you know, so I work with organizations, you know, I teach at the University of Washington, but I also, you know, my other hat is, is as a consultant, and, and, you know, work increasingly exclusively on what I refer to as identity statements. So mission, vision, values and purpose. And those values are so important to like, extract, and it’s not, you know, when I say to, when I, when I’m talking to organizations, it’s like, you’re not gonna like, like, you’re not making it up. Values are something that are learned. I mean, it’s for if you’re a new organization, you know, that’s the time to articulate what you want them to be like, what do you want to build into the DNA? But for existing organizations, it’s already there. And I think so much of, you know, story is a way to unearth those sources, you know, it’s a, it’s a way of extracting them. And once you have that nugget, it is so clarifying in terms of what’s the story of this organization? And how are we going to use that to then connect with other people that would also care about what we care about, right? I mean, I work with social impact organizations. So that’s always such a big piece of it is and that’s I want to circle back to and hear you talk more about whether or not again in an organizational context, that the highest use of story is around persuasion, or is it around connection because of my framework, I really am thinking about marketing and storytelling and these as tools to help organizations connect with their believers. So other people who care about it, as opposed to trying to persuade, but I refer to thanks to Guy Kawasaki as atheists. So if you have believers, agnostics, atheists, believers believe what you believe, agnostics might believe, but you know, you have to chat longer to see where you’re gonna land. But atheists don’t believe what you believe. Like they have a different, a different set of beliefs. And oftentimes, we try to convert atheists because like our minds, it creates cognitive dissonance and we can’t believe that somebody else doesn’t believe what we believe. So, you know, you use the word persuasion a lot, and I’m just genuinely curious if, if that’s how you think of story?

Lisa Cron  29:28

Not at all. No.

Erica Mills Barnhart  29:29

Mainly persuasion or connection or something else?

Lisa Cron  29:32

Okay. Okay. No, I mean, when I say persuade, I just mean, I mean it in the most basic sense, meaning, if you’re trying to change someone’s mind about something, if you’re trying to get them to do something they’re not already doing. You’re trying to persuade, that’s how I use the word persuasion. Just how can I get you to do something that I think would benefit either you or the planet, that you’re not already doing.

Erica Mills Barnhart  29:57

So something that maybe doesn’t, I’m in this space of like, social marketing, so something that benefits the greater good as opposed to maybe or not exclusively, but you as an individual. I always go to toothpaste, because it’s such a handy example. Although I just learned from my parents that the tube of toothpaste may be going away as we get away from single use, and there’s like toothpaste pellets or something. Anyway, I digress. Point being though, when you need toothpaste, whether it’s pellets or tube, it’s a must have item. Whereas oftentimes, and you know, I think about this in the context of public policy, we’re asking folks to do things that they kind of know are the better thing to do, but there isn’t much in it for them personally.

Lisa Cron  30:41

Right? And I just literally mean persuade in the simplest, simplest form, meaning, I want you to do something you’re not already doing. That’s it. But to answer your question, the point of story is to find connection. 100%. That’s the point of any mission statement. That’s the point of any, whether it’s advertising or whether it’s a fundraising letter, or whatever it would be whatever form you’re talking about. It is connection. If we can’t connect, that’s what I when I said story to story. That’s what where is the place where they connect? Where is the place where what you’re offering, can give a benefit to the person who you want, whose behavior in one way or another you want to change, give them a benefit, something that they themselves would see as a benefit, not what you’ve decided is a benefit?

Erica Mills Barnhart  31:29

Yes, right. Right. Right.

Lisa Cron  31:31

That’s a big problem that people have, I think this is a benefit. So of course, everybody else does. And it’s like, not really.

Erica Mills Barnhart  31:37

And adding insult to injury, once you have the curse of knowledge, you tend to think more about the features as opposed to the benefits?

Lisa Cron  31:44

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I know, when you’re trying to convince anyone of anything, or in whatever words you want to use market or connect, the last thing you want to do is try to prove something to somebody, this is better. This is why I’m smarter. This is why this is how great my product is, this is how great what I’m doing is. I saw that I remember reading once, it was a pitch that was from a museum. And it was something like, if you donate to us, we’re gonna have the number one Art Museum on the entire East Coast,

Erica Mills Barnhart  32:15

Oh, this is okay, I just have, vission statements that are self reflective, meaning we you know, we are organization awesome. And our vision is to be the most awesome version of organization awesome. There’s nothing wrong with that intention. But that’s not a vision that anybody outside of the organization is going to care about. And then I get very, talk about fired up, I get very fired up because oftentimes these identity statements will be created when an organization is doing, like strategic planning or rebranding or whatever. And so, you know, they’re getting helped by folks who can kind of get them to a good enough point, but they’re optimized for an internal audience. And then they’re like, well, it’s the mission, vision, values, you know, so it’s supposed to work externally. But exactly to your point, like, it needs to be optimized for an external audience, you can’t just plunk them on your website and expect them to resonate, which is I really, and then you end up with two sets. So then you’re managing two identities. That’s very expensive and unadvised. But it’s actually you know, it, I’ve seen it more often. But that that additional work of like, okay, internally, that makes sense to us, how can we translate these in a way that it still fires us up internally and guides us but also will help us telegraph, to use your word, to folks outside of the organization, your clients, donors, volunteers, and other. I means like such a good recruitment tool, I was just talking to a colleague of mine who works for the Canadian government. And she was lamenting that the you know, for as values driven as they’re meant to be, they really don’t put their values out there as a way to attract talent. And then, you know, your talent ends up being this like, overlooked marketing asset. So anyway, that’s why I get so worked up about that mission, vision, values and purpose because they’re so underutilized. And each one of them, they’re a story together, about who you are, and what you stand for, as an organization. And then individually, you know, it’s like little mini stories, each of them. I’m guessing there are listeners who are thinking like that is all well and good for people who are like natural storytellers, or good writers. And I just, I want to quote directly from your homepage, because this was so beautiful. And just hear you say a bit more about it, which is you say “the story is what creates beautiful writing, not the other way around.”

Lisa Cron  34:34

Yes. Yeah. I mean, that’s something that I say to writers all the time, which is it’s not about words, it’s funny, I’m just doing consulting with a company, and, one of the women who, you know, they’re trying to sort of rebrand and she wrote me and she said, you know, full disclosure, you know, I’m not good at word smithing. And it’s like, I wish that she was right. In front of me, I could say, Do you know how much the word wordsmithing makes my teeth hurt? You know, because it’s not about the words, it’s about what you’re trying to convey. And the truth is really almost always the simplest, most conversational, most downhome, most open and honest words are what grabs people. The notion of being a writer is wrong. As I say to writers, I say this, probably six times a day, which is everything you’ve been taught about writing and story is wrong. It’s just wrong. It does not have to do with being a good writer, because we think being a good writer has to do with words. And then somehow we get tangled up in finding the right words. And it’s like, the right words for what? It’s what you’re trying to say, and what you offer. And like I say, the simplest humblest words are always the best. Words by themselves are nothing. I mean, what’s a word? A word is a sound, you know, when you speak it, you know, lines on the page, it’s, you know, your hands moving in sign language, it’s empty, words are empty. They’re an empty vehicle. They are for meaning, what are you trying to say? What matters to you? And the scary part, I think, is that in order to get to that place, you have to be vulnerable.

Erica Mills Barnhart  36:22

That’s funny. That’s where I actually wanted to. Well, our second to last question. I wanted to come back to this. So we had Maria Ross on the show to talk about how empathy can give you an edge in business. Like it’s not just a woowoo thing. But you say empathy is the key to understanding and vulnerability is the key to communicating.

Lisa Cron  36:40

100%. I mean, that’s if I could just say something, and I might go far afield with this. But if we have the time, I really want to hit on that the notion of empathy, and emotion, and story versus being rational and logical and using data. Do we have a few minutes for that?

Erica Mills Barnhart  37:00

Yeah, go for it.

Lisa Cron  37:01

Okay, here’s the thing, we have been sold a bill of goods, the notion, the cornerstone of Western thought, which I think comes from Plato, which is this notion of that what we are supposed to do, the most the highest good, that the best in terms of being human is to be rational, and logical, and look at things objectively. And that is what we need to strive for. And that is what how we should make all of our decisions. And the opposite. The nemesis of being rational and logical, is emotion. And emotions goal is to make a habit to make a bad decision, because it’s, it’s gonna knock the logic apart. And so we need to be very careful of emotion and thinking about emotion, we must keep it at bay in order to make any sort of a decision. And biologically, that is 100% not true.

Erica Mills Barnhart  37:57

So you are just humbly begging to differ with Plato.

Lisa Cron  38:00

100%.

Erica Mills Barnhart  38:01

Okay, good. I mean, I just wanted us to be clear about what was happening.

Lisa Cron  38:06

He was as wrong as Aristotle was when Aristotle said plot first character second, talk about that if you want to. But the point is, yeah, he was really wrong, he was wrong. And I think the reason that we so embrace the we’ve got to think of things, factually, we’ve got to think of things rationally and logically and “unemotionally”, meaning there’s no meaning to it. It’s just some, not only an objective fact. But as if all the meaning within the fact is also somehow imbued in the fact is objective as well. And as we were just talking about, that just simply isn’t true. It just isn’t simply how we are wired to make sense of things. And if we could, we could never make a single rational decision. The opposite is true. That notion of facts as being hard science and stories being a soft science is wrong. It’s just literally 100% wrong. It is the notion of these facts, and you know, and objective data to make decisions is a myth. We don’t and we can’t, and we shouldn’t, because it wouldn’t work.

Erica Mills Barnhart  39:06

Yeah. And if folks are interested in this, I would definitely encourage you to go listen to that episode with Leslie Zane because she talks more about, you know, the cognitive unconscious, as you say, Lisa, and she, you know, like, it’s a little startling, I think, because we have been fed this bill of goods, as you say, around like, rational and logical and all of these things. And then you’re like, Oh, my God, I am only aware of even like, 5% of what’s going on.

Lisa Cron  39:34

Yes.

Erica Mills Barnhart  39:34

So all of this stuff happens under the surface is a little scary. It’s unsettling.

Lisa Cron  39:43

But that’s why I mean, if you want to look at it, I think that’s why we have been sold this bill of goods that it’s about being rational and logical because it makes us feel what we most want to feel which is in control and emotion does the opposite. The goal of emotion is to yank us out of feeling control and to go look over there, that really matters, you better pay attention to that now. And it’s scary. And I think that we’ve been sold, the bill of goods that we’ve been sold, interestingly, you know, really has to do with so much of the, the social construct of what is rational, what is logical? And what emotion is, and I think it’s very gendered, um, to be quite frank with you.

Erica Mills Barnhart  40:30

Yeah, I actually, I’m really glad that you went there. It’s gendered. And also, I was going to, you know, I just always want to point out the ways in which language has been used as a tool of oppression. And you know, that, who are the ones saying, what is logical versus what is, you know, those darn emotions that are getting in the way? It’s really important to call out.

Lisa Cron  40:51

Yeah, I think that I mean, I mean, to say it bluntly, I think that what keeps us trapped, what keeps us so trapped, is fear, which is heightened by those social norms, which are different for each gender. I think it’s fear of emotion if you’re male, and it’s fear of what the patriarchy will do to you if you express emotion, if you’re female. And I think that’s what keeps us trapped in that false belief.

Erica Mills Barnhart  41:15

Thank you for saying that so bluntly, Lisa.

Lisa Cron  41:17

Yeah, I mean, I think that that is 100% what’s true, and it’s, I think it’s why, you know, we think of story as something soft, and something, yes, we read kids stories for bed and if you need some emotion, if you can’t make up your mind, just by the facts, all right, you know, we’ll humor you and give you a story. And it just literally doesn’t work that way. It’s just, it’s not how we’re making any decision ever. I mean, I think it’s funny, I think that the panultimate fear, and I think this is like panhuman, or panultimate fear is of emotion. But the thing we’re most afraid of, is being emotionless, you know, like, you see those movies or tv hopefully never happened to you, or, you know, the person’s walking down the alleyway, and someone’s coming at them. And they go, and their face was expressionless, they had dead eyes, you know, and that’s terrifying. Emotion drives everything. Emotion drives memory, the reasons we have memories. The reason they say that, you know, that anything learned in a story is 22 times more memorable is because all story is emotion based and emotion is what causes us to remember things.

Erica Mills Barnhart  42:34

I want to say this one more time, because I’m hoping that something listeners will really hear and kind of like, inspire I mean, if people are listening, they’re like, okay, stories, we can do this thing, like they’re not, you know, soft, as you say, like, this is based on biology and science and okay, go get them. Like 22 times more effective.

Lisa Cron  42:54

Yes.

Erica Mills Barnhart  42:55

To tell story. That’s good math.

Lisa Cron  42:58

Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart  42:58

Right. Like, just from a sheer like business bottom line perspective that’s good math. Right? Because think about it, if you know what matters to your audience, and you’ve got some facts, and again, this is what story does, it takes, you know, those dry facts, abstract concepts, and spins them into something very, very, very specific boots on the ground, which makes it accessible to that one system by which we make every decision we ever make, which is our emotion, because we come to every story, really up to think about in your own life is like in your own life, you are the protagonist, and everything that you see everything that you do every other person that you know, no matter how much you love them is a supporting player and you take in everything and you think, how is this going to affect me, given my agenda? As I said in the beginning, is it going to help me? Or is it going to hurt me?  And again, not because you’re a jerk. This is just how we’re hardwired. That is what makes you human.

Lisa Cron  43:57

But it doesn’t. Because when I say is it gonna help me or hurt me? I don’t mean like, is this going to give me the most money? Is this gonna make me the most popular? It’s is this going to make me feel like, to use a very hackneyed phrase at the momen, my most authentic self, and a person’s most authentic self can often be I’ve, you know, I joined the Peace Corps. You know, I mean, I don’t like the term altruism, because it sounds like we would do things for absolutely no return. And we never do that. I like the term, which I made up, and I have no idea and I don’t like it because this other word carries baggage, but selfish altruism, because what it means is, is when we’re out there, you know, giving everything up to be for the Peace Corps, we feel good about ourselves, because we’re doing something that in our world, in our worldview, matters. And we’re always looking for that. Is this going to make me feel good about myself? Is this going to make the people in my group in my community feel good about me?

Erica Mills Barnhart  44:51

And will I look good to the people in my group?

Lisa Cron  44:53

Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart  44:54

Yeah. I’m telling myself right now is that you’re amazing. I feel privileged that you have played us have been a supporting character in this thing called my life. Like I told listeners at the beginning, like, I mean, it’s just the gift you have given the world through, not wordsmithing, but literally through your words and your ability to help us understand how, like, you know, story is just absolutely everywhere. But also like the real, practical reasons to embrace story, and to come to feel like less of a jerk about the facts and figures and whether they do or don’t work. I just so appreciate it. Oh, and listeners, though, I mean, another thing that you that, like I really want to underscore, as Lisa has been mentioning again, and again is like in an organizational context, right? So if you’re using story, to drive sales, or get more donors or whatever, you do have to do that to get that story to story connection. So if you’re curious about a bit more about that, go back and listen to Episode Five about who are your true believers. Okay. So Lisa, I asked every guest, this question, just so we can get a sense of them and you is about what motivates you and what inspires you. So inspiration, that animologically is to take breath in, and motivation is about action, what motivates and inspires you to keep telling and talking about stories?

Lisa Cron  46:20

Um, well, I, to be 150% honest, I want to take the patriarchy down. And I think this is the only way to do it. And I think we’ve been sold a bill of goods, I think that when you look at the history of the world, I read a statement recently or a statistic saying that, you know, growing up and going through, you know, the K through 12, that’s something like only 17% of, of the people who we learned from, you know, in textbooks, etc, are female. I think that, that we’ve really been sold a bill of goods in terms of this notion of what’s rational and logical and what we should do, and what emotion is, and I really want to flip that because at the end of the day, I think that so much has been vilified. That is what’s human and that is actually what’s good about us. And I would just really love to flip that script. Because I feel like to be really honest, you’re asking me a really personal question, and I’m being vulnerable right now, which I think is the key thing is if I look at my own life, and I think about how different things would have been, had I not been pushed into a very gendered, you know, the gendered role meaning not just meaning, this is the definition of what it means to be female, which I think is 100% qrong, I think that what they tell you, it means to be male, and what it means to be female is 100% wrong, I don’t think any of that behavior, the words, masculine and feminine, make my skin crawl. Because I think that they are societal constructs. I think that we are all the same, and we are all human. And I want to see that I personally don’t identify with either gender, I never will know what to say when people have like, what are your pronouns? I feel like for me, it’s like it’s complicated, which is, I don’t identify with either one because I think they’re social constructs. I don’t think either one are true to tell you the truth.

Erica Mills Barnhart  48:13

So do you prefer they them pronouns?

Lisa Cron  48:15

No, I don’t, no. Not at all. No, because I don’t think that’s accurate, either. I don’t, because first of all, it’s grammatically confusing. And second of all, for me, they them sounds like you’re going to take masculine and feminine, and put them together. And I don’t think either one are true. So I think we’re just wrong. I think we’re wrong about what we think of when we’ve come up with this is what male is, and this is what female is, I just think it’s wrong. And I think that because I probably shouldn’t say, I think because men are so terrified of women, that you know, that women end up are allowed to feel and to be much more human than men are allowed to be. And I think that’s sad. I think it’s sad for men. You can cut all this out.

Erica Mills Barnhart  49:02

No, I’m not gonna cut it out. No, no, gosh no. That would go against my values. You know, you, are entitled to your opinions, and you should not be edited that should not be edited out at all. That is your truth.

Lisa Cron  49:18

It is my truth.

Erica Mills Barnhart  49:19

Not for me to say either way.

Lisa Cron  49:22

I think we’re all human. And I think that empathy is the key. And I don’t think its woowoo, I think empathy is the key. And I think that we’re terrified of it. And I think that empathy is the only way to ever connect with anybody else.

Erica Mills Barnhart  49:42

Yeah, Lisa, thank you for being that vulnerable. I really do appreciate it. And I know listeners will, whether or not they agree or disagree is beside the point. You have modeled what it can look like to create connection when you’re vulnerable. And I really, really appreciate that in addition to the vast array of golden nuggets that you have offered, I just thank you so much and I truly hope listeners will check out all your books, Story or Die is Lisa’s latest and greatest and you can find that on wiredforstory.com. Yeah, keep telling your story. All the stories of you Lisa. Keep telling your stories but also listeners, do good, be well and listeners I will see you next time. Thanks for listening to the marketing for good podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast please rate subscribe, review and share on Apple, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like more information about Claxon University, how to make more impact in and for your organization or hiring me to speak or coach, go to claxon-communication.com or reach out at info@claxon-communication.com. Again, thanks for listening, and thanks for making our world a better place.

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