107: REBROADCAST- Hank Fortener, on Crafting a Talk

Hey everybody, and welcome to This Moved Me, a podcast about creating talks that move the world. With me, your host, Sally Koering Zimney. Together with some fabulous guests, we will have a casual conversation about the art of public speaking because a good talk can move the world and it'll be fun. Yeah, I would think making alien cows meaningful. That's not a small task. I love your giggle. Wow. Oh my gosh, so waiting for everybody to figure out the alphabet. Hey everybody and welcome to This Moved Me. Today on the show, I'm so thrilled to have with me Hank Fortner. Now Hank was recommended to me by a friend who has been in the audience as Hank has spoken many times and said to me, you have got to have Hank on the show. He's an amazing speaker. He's so powerful, so thoughtful and insightful. And you know what? All of that proved to be true in my conversation with him. I was so thrilled that he joined me here on This Moved Me because Hank is a pastor at Mosaic Church in LA, which is a really kind of innovative concept of church, and it's very speaker-based. And so Hank has done a ton of speaking and brings so much thoughtfulness and intentionality, creativity, innovation into his talks and really sees it as an art. He really takes a lot of pride in the creation of his talks. And so I was so inspired by this conversation. I was thrilled to have it and I cannot wait to share it with you. Here it is. And here he is, Hank Fortner. I'm so brave. So Hank, obviously you are a pastor. At Mosaic. Now tell me a little bit about Mosaic out there in LA.

Yeah, so Mosaic is a— we're a church on the corner of Hollywood and La Brea, and a lot of people call us a positivity center, a spiritual center, if they don't have language like church, because what you experience when you come is maybe very different than what a person experienced growing up in a faith community or in a religious space. And what we strive to do is create a space that is the most possibly relevant environment for the people of our city, for the people of Los Angeles. We're on the corner of Hollywood and La Brea, so we have tons of foot traffic and a lot of actors and dancers and teachers and models and nurses, and you just have so many different diverse groups of people. Everybody thinks a church in Hollywood is probably all actors, but it is just— it's just densely— we have people from about 50 different nationalities., who represent, uh, our community. Uh, we have people from all ages, from 80 and 90-year-old women all the way down to 2-month-old and 1-year-old babies. And, uh, it's just a beautiful, a beautiful creative community here in Los Angeles.

Awesome. Yeah, my friend Erica just raves about it. I think it's been a really important place for her.

So awesome. I'm so glad.

Yeah. So for you, as a pastor, and of course this podcast is about speaking and how we connect with people and how we inspire and move them and change them through our words. Tell me a little bit about your journey to becoming somebody who, that's a huge part of what you do.

Yeah. You know, I, I actually didn't, uh, set out in my mind, um, to be a speaker, to be a communicator. It wasn't something I wanted to do. Communicating and talking was actually hard for me as a teenager. As a junior high kid, I remember sitting in a room and praying that God would give me a personality because I couldn't talk to girls. And I would just be like, "God, I will make a deal with you." I don't even have faith language in my life, but I knew that there was a God and I knew that he could make things happen and I needed to say words. The idea of being a communicator, a preacher, or a person who spoke publicly, or a president, or— was so in a different universe. I wanted to do something where I didn't have to interact with a lot of people. I wanted to do something that I could work with my hands. I loved being outside. And when I turned— I think I was about 16 years old or 17 years old. One of the guys who was my mentor invited me to come and share a story about my family. I have a very unique family. My parents have fostered over 36 kids for a 7-year period.

Wow.

It was an unbelievable way for me to grow up. From the time I was 7 to the time I was 14, we had 36 different foster kids in our home. And then my parents went on to adopt, so we've adopted 8 kids from 6 different countries. So I have a very unique and verbose family. And one of the guys was one of my mentors. He was a pastor of a really small church. He just said, hey, would you come and speak about your family? Uh, 10 minutes, and then, you know, the rest of the gathering will continue. And I was like, sure. And I like practiced and stressed and freaked out, and I was like, I'm talking in front of people. And I finished that 10 minutes, and I got off stage, and I was just like I need to do that again. All of my jokes landed. It was like a miracle of everything, of timing, of everything. I was embarrassed of what I wore, but I could fix that too so easily. And I just thought, this was awesome. And for that church, it was like a church of about 500 people, I think. It was the number one requested at the time. It was a tape, was just my 10 minutes that I talked about my family. I felt that as external feedback to go, it wasn't just that it felt good, but I'm actually getting feedback and echolocating the fact that people, there's a listening for the words I have. I think sometimes as communicators you can feel good about something and it didn't land, or you can feel terrible about something and it did. I think those two kind of matched and the rest is history. That was about 14 years ago and I've been speaking and communicating to large crowds ever since.

Describe yourself as a speaker for us. You know, everybody kind of has their own thing and their own, um, you know, what I like to call a pearl button. Like, what is the thing that makes you you? And, and there's so many different styles. When I think of, particularly if I think of, uh, you know, pastors speaking, there's a really wide range and really specific styles. Uh, what's your Pearl Button, or what makes you, you know, what's your approach and your style as a speaker and as a pastor?

Yeah, that's great. You know, for me, I, I have sort of, um, I have two things. I have an archetype by which I try to touch each, um, arena, and it's kind of a, kind of a list of those which I can talk about in a second. But I think for me, when I approach communication, I want to make sure that a person is, uh, never bored. And never leaves the same. So whether I'm doing a toast at a Christmas party— I throw a lot of parties and birthday parties and events, and whenever I do, I always reserve time for myself to speak. Because when you're new as a communicator, you have to create spaces to talk. No one gives them to you at first, and you can't rely on the world or the universe to say, "Hey, you want to be a speaker? Let's let you do that." You've got to do things like throw a party and then say, "I'm going to talk for 5 minutes." And you've got to do that. So I've been doing that for years and learning different ways. But for me, my prerequisites is I want to be funny. I want you to have so much fun when I talk, and I want that to be the reputation I get. I want to change your mind about something. I want you to walk away having changed your mind about something that you walked in with, that you came to, whether you thought Christmas parties were boring or whether you thought that— in my case, I do a lot of things with our adoption foundation with my family— or whether you thought that family was something that's just expected the world has. Or I want to change your mind about you, or change your mind about the world you live in. And then I think the third thing is I want to find a way to tell you things you never knew that are relevant to your life. So not just random, hey, I'm a professor and here's some random information. But if you hear me speak at Mosaic, or if you've ever heard me talk anywhere, You'll know that my goal is to deliver relevant information to your life that you may never have found or discovered or known about, or the information that's been right in front of you. Those are the 3 challenges that I have. I want to inspire you with new information and new way of seeing things, and I want to make sure you have a blast while it's happening. For me as a communicator, I have a layout that I actually write down, and whenever I help people with communication, I always write these down. The archetypes I have are, there's prophets, priests, and kings. And whenever you're communicating, you want to communicate in those three elements. A prophet is a person who's speaking very directly and very intensely. Here's what you need to do. Here are the next steps for you. This would be like the close for a salesperson, a person who just says, here's where we need to go and here's the offer for you. And a person who's speaking very directly to the people. A priest would be a person who is, here's where I can help you with your life. I can walk you through this day by day. I can help you understand how this can help you with your life. A priest is a person who's explaining empathy for the life situation that the listener has. I know we're all overwhelmed. I know that's a very priestly phrase, something that I can easily access. Again, you're pulling me towards your content by being a priest, and then you're pushing me towards your content by being a prophet, saying this is your next step. And then there's the king model. A king model is a person who's casting a wide vision of what the world should look like and what we should all be. So when I get up to speak, I can talk about things like the Ukraine and Syria and how discouraging those things are for us. I don't have like a prophet thing of what a person should do with Ukraine and Syria and how heinous it is that there's millions of people displaced. I don't even have a priestly thing, I can't even relate to that because no one in the room is being displaced, but I can speak from the king's standpoint of going, this is not as the world should be, and we should live in a world where this is not the case. And what I've done is I've just settled for them these issues that are unsettled and helped them realize, yes, this is not as the world should be and we can all agree to that. And then as action items come up, where the Red Cross or UNICEF or the UN Foundation coming forward with solutions. We're all on board with that, but that's where you kind of step into that big vision of the way we want our worlds to look like. So that's my prophet, priest, and king reference. Then the other 3 categories, which sometimes I'll explain it, sometimes I won't, but I'll give you the bonus one. There's a, there's a knight, there's a jester, and there's the peasant. So if you just think about it, and I used to read a lot of fantasy literature when I was a kid, so that's where a lot of this comes from, but a knight is a person who's angry. A knight is a person who's going to war against something. A knight is an activist. A knight is a person who, when they get up to communicate, you know, "Ooh, here it comes." Maybe you've been to churches like that, maybe you've even heard salespeople like that, or bosses who get up and they just go, "We gotta turn this around," and they start kind of screaming. And you can be any of these archetypes for a moment of time in a talk. But if I'm only speaking as a knight the whole time, I'm going to exhaust you, and before long you're going to think I'm going to have a heart attack because I'm so angry. If I'm only a prophet, I just feel like you're pushy and you're exhausting and I get worn out. If you're only a priest, I start to wonder if you want to be my friend or if you're going to take me somewhere with your communication. If you're only a king, I'm just kind of going, do you live in the real world, man? I know that Syria and Ukraine are bad, but I'm in Los Angeles and I got to pay rent. Like Does that make sense? Totally. So you want to make sure that you're angling there. And then the other one for the knight and the jester is the jester is just having fun. You want to have something silly and hilarious and unexpected in every time I communicate. So I had my Christmas party. I hired a Santa and we had everybody and people had kids and there was maybe 100 people there and everyone's hanging out and during the middle of my toast I told Santa, I just want you to walk in. And it was like the most magical thing for every kid in that room.

Aww.

But that's the jester in me. I just go, I want to have a moment where I'm serious, a moment where I paint a picture, a moment where I'm passionate or I feel like a knight and I'm moving us towards something. But I also want a moment where you just have a ton of fun. And then I think the last thing is a peasant, a person who's— the peasant factor is where you're just talking about things like the weather. To remind me when you communicate that you live in the same world I do, that it's just stupid that, that the Patriots can deflate their footballs. Isn't that crazy? Like, tell me about— talk to me about something that just doesn't matter to my daily life, but it's just very pedestrian conversation that reminds me that you read the same newspaper I do and you read Twitter. I'll make an Instagram joke, something that gives a person a sense that when you're communicating to them, and this is true for a spiritual teacher, it's true for salespeople, it's true sometimes when I hear politicians. It's why Obama will reference the Jersey Shore at the White House Correspondents' Dinner because he's going, "I may be the president and I may be inaccessible," but he's humanizing his distance. I think for CEOs, I think for anyone in an authority figure, the more pedestrian things that they can lead off with the more peasant-type words they can describe, like oil changes and things that normal people go through, right? The more people go all the way up the archetypes, all the way to being a king, when you're describing the world you want to live in.

Mm, this is fantastic, Hank. I love the way you have created these archetypes, and I'm curious if you, as you're developing your sermon every week. Do you call it a sermon?

I call it talk. I mean, sermon is good. Sometimes if it doesn't deserve the title sermon, then I don't give it. I call it a talk. I start with a talk, and if it gets to sermon, then all the better.

Okay, okay. So whether you're giving a talk or a sermon, as you're thinking about that and developing your format for it, do you have sort of like, okay, I'm going to start with the peasant and then I'm going to move into the priest, and then do you sort of have an order that ideally you try and move through as you're bringing people to this, the King moment?

Not necessarily. It's not as linear. I just try to make sure— sometimes I'll look at a talk and I'll go, man, there's just no priest here. It's all pushy and it's all— or I'll go, man, there's no fire. There's no knight. What am I trying to— like, even if I'm selling something or if you have listeners who are here and they sell software, It's like if I'm not going to war against a problem they have, then I'm probably not gonna be a compelling salesperson. If for me as a pastor, if I'm not going to war against something that's wrong with my city or something that's wrong with our families or something, if I'm not trying to move them towards health passionately, then I might have wasted half an hour of their time. So it doesn't need to be the whole time of yelling and shouting and talking about the problem, But there needs to be a moment where I want a listener to have a sense that I'm going to solve a problem they have. So when I begin a talk, I always begin— and I say always, so it's probably 95% of the time— I begin with a question. Everybody, as they come into your space or as you step into a room that they're in, they have so many things pulling at them. We live in the most distracted culture in human history. So I ask a question because it's only through questions that we can access a part of a person's soul or a part of a person's brain or their emotion. I'll ask questions. So if I know I'm taking a person wherever I'm going at the end, I want to ask that question in the beginning. I always remind people whenever I'm working with communicators that your conclusion is always hidden inside your introduction. And if it's not, you need to fix your introduction. Because you always want to begin where you're going to eventually take me. I'm going to journey with you for these 5 minutes you get to sell me something, or these 30 minutes you get to preach, or these 20 minutes that you're teaching, or these 6 minutes. Like we mentioned, there's communication in every single person's role. And so if you're a doctor and you walk into a patient's room and you have 6 minutes to communicate, I wanna know that those 6 minutes are not just gonna be you just verbally vomiting information. I wanna make sure that you took me someplace, and to add emotional texture to that is a craft and a skill, and so I always begin with a question. For a doctor, they could begin with a question like, "You're probably wondering what's next. Have you thought that?" And of course they have. And then you can kinda take it, now I want, doctor, I need you to finish with what's next. As a pastor, sometimes I'll begin and go, "Have you ever searched for God?" in your life. Because I don't want to add information on top of people's distractions or stresses or thoughts like that. I want to pull their attention towards something that I know can help them and serve them in their life.

So Hank, I've been thinking a lot about— because this is all, I think, really thoughtful and really interesting, but as a As a pastor, you face a different sort of timeline than most people do as they're developing a talk, right? Because a lot of speakers I work with, you develop one or two talks and you evolve them and work them and they grow and they change and you grow and change with it. And there's this really amazing, um, back and forth that happens between the content and the person and they push and change each other. And I'm curious, what your process is for somebody who— you give a talk, it lives once, and then you've got to get ready for the next one.

Yes, it's like creating a masterpiece and then you set it on a shelf and go, "I've got to create another one, I've got to create another one." It's overwhelming at times, and I think there's a lot of reasons. If you speak with pastors, if you know pastors, there's a lot of burnout in this area. And probably the number one question— Mosaic has a large audience globally. Our founding pastor, Erwin, is a very prolific and well-known speaker and writer, and so our visibility just garners a lot of attention. And probably the number one question people ask me who are also pastors will say, how do you prepare? Can you talk to me about preparation? Because getting up there and doing it starts to be— probably pastors above all other professions. You just have the added advantage of you're gonna do more hours communicating. If Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours proves true, you'll be an expert talker in front of people within a few years of being a pastor just because it's the constant expectation is this guy's gonna say something, right? But it doesn't mean that you'll be an expert crafter of messages or crafter of communication. That requires its own 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. So there's a, a need to be aware of the timeline. As a pastor, I'm aware that I'm— that there are 52 Sundays. I'm— if I'm going to speak 20 of those and then maybe 20 other messages, I have 40 openings. So what I do when I prepare is I never prepare one day at a time. I always look at a 3-month, 6-month window and take ideas and start to fill those out in the long run. I have a story that is a doozy. I haven't even shared it yet. I won't even tell you what it is. You can watch a live on Mosaic and hear it this Wednesday or this Sunday. But I have that story and I go, I'm not going to use— a lot of times with early communicators, you go, okay, I have to give my best talk of my life for this first time I get to speak or this other time I get to speak. Then you don't realize that you have like 52 other best times you ever have to speak waiting for you. So you budget it out, you budget out stories that you have, you budget out insights that you have, you budget things out so that you can build a better rhythm. So every Monday you aren't going, oh my gosh, I have to speak in 6 days.

Right.

That's just too exhausting. So that's what I've become really disciplined at is the preparation, because without preparation it's just too stressful.

For sure. And so preparation is one thing, and then the other thing, and you kind of alluded to this, is how do you master the content?

Yes.

You know, because the content is constantly changing. So what do you— I mean, I'm guessing there's, there are pieces, and perhaps these archetypes help you in, in a huge way, like transfer from talk to talk so that you're not really starting over every time.

Yeah, I think it happens two ways for me. For me, I have to be in a constant stage of digesting information, but I can't digest information that's in its final product. I have to digest raw materials, so I don't listen to sermons ever. I don't listen to podcasted sermons. I actually don't find it helpful to listen to a person who does the thing I'm doing. Whenever somebody goes, "Wow, that sounded like this other pastor in Chicago," I go, "I wouldn't know, because I don't listen to any of them," and I do that on purpose. Because when you have to speak and when you have to be a communicator, you can learn from the style of a person, but I never want to catch myself looking at something or listening to something in its final form, because what it does is it shortchanges my creative process. And what I mean by that is you start with an idea, right? Before you actually get to communicate it, you start with this really fun, raw idea that's like this— you almost don't even want to say it out loud or it'll ruin it because it's so real in your mind. You learn how to take that and distill that down to what does the person who doesn't have this idea, but I'm going to give it to them, how can I give it to them in a way that is relevant to their life that they want it so bad?, and they go, "Thank you so much for giving me that idea." If I listen to sermons, or if I listen to finished product communication too much, I lose that craft. I lose the discipline and the muscle flex of going, "Okay, I'm gonna start with an idea I have, and I'm gonna move it to something that's present and real." So I consume a lot of raw materials. I consume a lot of classic literature. I consume a lot of of a lot of books in different sectors. I consume a lot of podcasts around neuroscience. I consume things that, that would be surprising for me to listen to for what I communicate. I want to take all those things because I want to make sure I'm filling my brain with things that are— all I wanted to do is spark ideas. I don't want to use the information or the examples, although sometimes I do. I just want to keep my brain the most fertile place. So as I'm coming up with ideas, There's actually a guy who actually got caught for plagiarism and he wrote a book about creativity, ironically, and he got caught for plagiarism, so his book was taken off the shelves. I had to order it from England. But what he talked about is he cited this study that was actually true, that your subconscious does more work than your conscious when it comes to ideas and idea generation. So what happens is you can think and go, "Okay, I got to talk about Sunday." And what you think you're doing is you think you're actually just going to access your mind and go, what thoughts do I have? What do I care about? When really what you have to do is create space where you can access your subconscious and go, uh, what is it that I want to speak about? What is my soul wanting to talk about? What do people need? What am I experiencing? But the way that you keep that fertile is best by filling your subconscious with tons of things. So I watch documentaries and read books and listen to podcasts. But you want to, you want to, you want to avoid the finished product because it will shortchange you.

I so appreciate what you're saying. And what's funny is my husband right now is in the middle of doing some research about the connection between creativity and productivity. And he's talking about that exact thing, that the process of creating something new, there's a space required, um, that is the, the time for incubation. And that's exactly what you're talking about, where you are accessing a different part of your brain. And it's— you can't try and do it. You have to just— you have to make space in your life for things to incubate. And then, then the aha comes, then the illumination comes. But you have to incubate first. And you can't just be like, okay, what? You know, I'm going to sit down now and I'm going to— I'm going to make an idea and I'm going to do it. You have to create this breathing space in your life. And I love this, what you're talking about with the raw materials, because if you really are going to say something new, if you are going to, you know, add your commentary on something that illuminates something new for the audience, you can't ingest somebody else's version of that. Otherwise, it's not new, right?

Exactly, exactly. And I find stand-up comedians are the worst. Don't listen to stand-up comedians. You can listen to them for the quality of of how they communicate and how they hold a moment, but their content will be dangerous for your brain because it's too good, right? It's too good. You— you— in order to create your own, you have to force yourself to tell 65 bad jokes before the good one comes, and you go, oh, I see what it is. But if you cheat and quote a comedian, you'll never learn how to be funny. Yeah, just like if you cheat and you listen to a lot of the finished pieces You'll never grow in that way out of how to— how do I generate, how do I create. So if for anybody, whatever, whatever space you're in or whatever craft that you communicate for or whatever sector you're in, I have a note on my phone, notes and piles of notes on my phone. The minute you have an idea, write it down. Take a picture of a magazine you looked at, take a picture of the COVID or a picture of an idea or something. Collect these things because What you know is you can have an unbelievable idea and then you walk away and get busy and you forgot it.

Mm-hmm.

And I think the greatest communicators are the ones that are able to see the extraordinary and see the insightful in some of the most mundane things. And that's, uh, part of what we're doing at Mosaic. For instance, I, uh, had this idea that I wanted to create a way that people could take high thought spiritual ideas, huge concepts, kingly concepts, and make them a part of your daily life. Very priestly type things, make them a part of your daily life. So I'm doing a series right now at Mosaic about the days of the week. So last Sunday I spoke about Monday. What does Monday mean? Why is it called Monday? And what does it represent in the rhythm of our culture? And why did in Old English and Roman and Norse mythology they create these days? And so I've gone through, and this week I'm going to speak about Wednesday. I spoke last week about Tuesday, and I just want people to know you're living Today is Thursday, so we're living a Thursday as we record this podcast, and almost no one I speak to know why it's called Thursday or what Thursday represented to the Old English world, or to why the Romans and the Greeks agreed that there would be a day dedicated to the god Thor and what, what that represented to our world. And that's right in front of all of us. And so the things I get excited about are finding ways where you go What are the spiritual realities of the fact that you live something that was considered sacred for hundreds of years, and now we call it Thursday and don't even realize what we're saying? We don't even realize that we're describing an Old Norse god, Thor. It's Thor's Day, a day dedicated to, to, um, Chris Hemsworth.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Chris had no idea, but every Thursday is all about him.

And I didn't even— they didn't even reference it in the movie. And I'm like, how do you not know? I bet they don't even know. I bet they don't. Yeah. And so that's what I think is any— for any communicator, no matter what you're in, is constantly paying attention to you as you observe the world and listen and go, why? Ask those kinds of questions. Because when you can ask questions like that, you can start to see things and people as when you communicate, they trust you 'cause they trust you to be in a place and see things that they missed. And I think that's why people then will rely on you as a person who notices and a person who sees.

Mm-hmm. Hank, I, I'm loving everything that you're saying and I'm so glad I'm recording it because I think it's gonna be so helpful for people and these really important reminders about how we can surround ourselves with the depth and the richness that we can bring to our talk. So I really appreciate it.

Okay.

We've got a few minutes left and I want to get to our This Moved Me moment.

For me, and it wasn't too terribly recently, but the birth of my daughter Cora was, and not even to sound cliché about when my baby was born and that kind of thing, but the birth of my daughter Cora was very traumatic. We had a moment where we weren't sure if mom and baby were both gonna be okay, and it was sitting in the tension of that moment that was the most, um, painful and stressful and isolating moment I've ever experienced. But the moment that— because when my daughter was born, she was on a magnesium drip for about 36 hours, and if you're familiar with magnesium, it just depresses all of your functions. Because my wife was preeclamptic. So when she came out, we laid her down and she didn't take a breath for about 26 minutes. And I just hovered over her body and I just spoke to her and sang to her and prayed over her. And the "this moved me" moment for me that is probably the most powerful "this moved me" that I can remember in my life was the moment I watched her take the biggest, deepest breath and watch those little lungs just spread out. And I was leaning over and singing Happy Birthday to her. While my wife was pregnant, I would sing Happy Birthday every morning and every night into her belly so that she knew my voice and that she knew what was going on. And to watch her take a deep breath and then with very little mobility turn her head towards me, uh, The doctor put his hand on my shoulder and said, "I've never seen that before." Mm. It was just unbelievable. And she's just such a precious gift and such a precious baby. So in terms of a "this moved me," that moved me so much. I did something I hadn't done really ever before, and I wrote a spoken word piece about Cora's birth and about that moment. We shared it on YouTube and Vimeo, and that piece has been performed in like I want to say 5 countries. You can find it on Google. It's called Cora's First Breath. And it is— it's been so fun to watch how I think just with our whole conversation and really with your— this movie, your podcast, Sally, and what the work you've been doing is, is great moments of inspiration can create great moments of communication. And it moves and touches people and can take a moment that otherwise would have been forgotten. And would have been lost or only kept with me and my wife and our doctors, but instead it's been shared around the world.

Thank you so much for sharing that with me. I feel honored that you did, and I'm going to— I'll find the video of it and I'll include it in the show notes so that people can see it for themselves. It sounds beautiful. I can't wait to watch it.

Awesome.

So for me, mine is not nearly that dramatic or of significance, but I recently discovered Ira Glass's storytelling series on YouTube. And Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, and he just has such a unique storytelling approach. And he breaks down kind of the process of how they put together stories and their criteria for what makes a great story. And there's something he said that actually really resonates with something you were talking about, Hank. And he was talking about these two building blocks of story being one— at one piece, the anecdote, right? The talking it through step by step. I got up, I walked downstairs, it was really strangely quiet. It's the storytelling part of it, right? And he said, you know, there— and this resonated with me— there is drama built in by just telling what happened step by step, and it brings people into that moment with you. And then the other piece being the reflection side of it. So as I'm thinking about you and all your different archetypes and, and that piece of what is my take on this, how— what is the illumination that I want to bring to people? What's the commentary? Whatever word you want to use for it. He calls it reflection. And and finding the new in the ordinary and bringing that lesson to life. And it was just really, it's really well done and so thoughtful, and it's really kind of an inspiring series. There's 4 different parts to it, I think, 4, and they're short videos, so they're really easy to consume. And it didn't move me emotionally in the same way a lot of these stories are like yours where that are really like touching. Um, but this moved me because I thought, oh my gosh, it was just another way to think about a story and how we put it together. And it's really simple. And he was like, so many times people have the anecdote, but they don't have the reflection, or the reflection isn't actually new. You're not telling me anything new. And so it's worthless, or you've got a really amazing reflection, but the story doesn't do anything for me. The anecdote doesn't actually lead me anywhere. So it was kind of an insight moment and I thought, okay, this is so worth passing along and worth letting people know about. So there's mine.

That's really cool.

Mm-hmm, yeah. I'll also put that in the show notes so people can check it out. Great. Well, Hank, I have to run. There are 4th graders waiting for me. I gotta—

Great. Have a blast.

Oh my gosh, I will. And Hank, I'm really grateful for your time. This was such an insightful, thoughtful, provocative conversation. I really appreciate your point of view and what you're doing and your passion that you're bringing to this conversation.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, and I loved getting to be a part of it. Let me know when it's up and when it's out. You can come here.

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