Episode 23: When You Need to Change & Grow

(But it feels scary)

In this episode, let's talk about willingness—not just the kind that nods politely from the sidelines, but the kind that stands up, takes a deep breath, and walks straight into the unknown.

Dag Hammarskjöld wasn’t campaigning to become Secretary-General of the United Nations. In fact, his name wasn’t even in circulation—until it was. When the call came, he could’ve said no. But he agreed to the job. And with that, a man who cherished solitude, mountain air, and scholarly contemplation stepped onto the world stage during one of the most volatile eras in history.

Whether you're at a crossroads, navigating a personal pivot, or simply feeling the nudge that there’s more ahead for you, this conversation is an invitation. Not to force change—but to welcome it.

Link to the story I mention:

https://www.today.com/video/creators-of-fake-feel-good-social-media-posts-speak-out-244297797575

Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

 #DagHammarskjöld  #CourageToChange  #DecodingTheUnicorn  #WillingToGrow 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Change, comfort zone, AI-generated content, AI ethics, creative solutions, job market, HR outsourcing, technology adoption, personal growth, Dag Hammarskjöld, UN Secretary General, future of work, technophobia, adaptability, podcast episode.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 23 of decoding the unicorn the podcast. I appreciate you being here today. In this episode, I want to talk about trying something new and different, breaking out of that proverbial comfort zone and pushing yourself. We want change, but sometimes we don't. We want to grow and expand, but it's scary. We're walking into the unknown. It's like the old phrase, Better the devil you know than the devil you don't. But what if that isn't true? What if the devil you know is a devil you're really sick of, and you want to move forward in life, to try something different, to figure out if you have something more inside of you than what the world is seeing. It's certainly something that dag had to do in his life. And most people who value growth and expansion will have to grow and expand, and that can be scary and it can be painful. So how do we handle it? What can we do if this is of interest to you or it's hitting you at a point in your life where you feel like this is the day to tune in. Stay tuned.

What if the unicorn wasn't a myth? What if he walked among us and wore a bow tie, a diplomat, a seeker, a man of frost and fire, misunderstood by the world until now, decoding the unicorn isn't just a biography, it's a revelation. Discover the real Dag Hammarskjöld in Sara Causey's groundbreaking book, Decoding the Unicorn available on Amazon.com.

Before I sat down to record this episode, I saw a story on the news, kind of an expose type bit about how many of these feel good, huggy, lovey dovey. Type stories on social media that go viral are actually fake. They're AI generated fake pictures of fake people and fake backstories. And on NBC, they interviewed the creators. I think they have, like, I don't know, 2.5 million followers, something like that. And they have posts that go viral on the regular, and they're freaking fake. Wow. So their rejoinder to being called out by NBC was like, Hey, we put AI creators on the banner on our social media, we're not exactly hiding it. And the reporter was like, but are you being clear enough? Though? I'll drop a link to the story in the write up for this episode so you can check it out for yourself, and I would recommend that you do. So there was also a frightening statistic that by next year, 90% of online content will be aI generated. So now we start getting into AI ethics. And should there be a disclaimer? Because the creators kind of had this, well, it's all about what you want to believe if you want to believe this. Huggy, lovey, Dovey, wonderful, feel good, dopamine hit of a story like you can nobody's stopping you, even though the people are fake. And as a writer, there is part of me that's like, well, we love to read fictional stories. There are all kinds of beautiful, gorgeous novels that have stood the test of time, and they're fictitious, but they don't claim to be lovey, Dovey, huggy, kissy. Stories about real people, unless you put a disclaimer at the front to say this is historical fiction, you know, like some story, like Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Most people, I would think common sense is not common anymore. But most people, I would think, wouldn't go, oh, yeah, that's a true story, but it blurs the lines. And they were talking about different celebrities that had liked and engaged with these posts and thought that they were promoting something that was real, and it was just all AI generated robots made it up. Now, why am I talking about that in an episode about generating something new for yourself, shedding an old snake skin that doesn't fit anymore for a lot of people, that's going to be necessary as we move into whatever this new economy, whatever this new reality is, it's going to be a flat out necessity. I believe I've certainly seen it in my own life. I read Julia Cameron's book the artists way, and I can't recommend it highly enough, even if you're not an artist or a creative per se, you. You're going to need creative solutions in life and in business. So even if you're sitting here thinking, Yeah, but Sara, I'm not a painter, I'm not a sculptor, what would I get out of it? I promise you you will get something good out of it. I just think it's a phenomenal book. I've also recently been reading Ken Achilles book. Quit your day job. I'm about, I don't know, maybe a third of the way through it. And the book, I have noticed, really presupposes that the reader is in a day job. They're probably miserable, or they're bored and they want to do something else, whether that's becoming a screenwriter in Hollywood, becoming an actor, starting their own business. It's not necessarily all about doing something creative. It's just that you're in a day job, you don't like it. You want to get some kind of five to seven year plan to get the heck out of there and do something else. My situation is different, as is so often the case. You know, it's like, Dag was a really different kind of person. I'm a really different kind of person, and my story is different. Story is different. I didn't quit my day job. My day job quit me last year trying to get any kind of gigs or projects in HR and staffing was really difficult, and it was such a striking dichotomy, because in 2021 all of the FOMO and the Yolo that took place in the housing market also took place in the job market with the great resignation, and you had people that were desperate to find workers, and if a recruiter was even halfway good, you could make Really fantastic money in the business. However, it was like everything started to drop off. 2022 it started to drop. 2023 it dropped more. 2024 The drop was profound. It's like how a number of realtors have washed out of the real estate business. When you look at how the wind came out of that seller's market from 2021 and then you also have a variety of class action lawsuits and some changes to realtors commission things they can and can't say, etc. You've had some people that have washed out of that business. The same thing has happened with staffing and HR, the trend that I'm seeing, and I'm just giving it to you. From my perspective, on any of my podcasts, I always say the same thing, I don't give you advice, I don't tell you what to do. I opine for your entertainment only, and that's it. You have to be a responsible adult and make your own decisions. The trend that I'm seeing in HR, I really think that HR should go back to the old school term of the personnel department, because it's by and large not human anymore. It's just happening quietly. Companies are not going out on Front Street and telling you, hey, we're laying off a lot of humans and human resources, and we're outsourcing more and more to AI programs and bots, but that's what I've seen. 70 to 80% of these HR departments at certain companies are now run by artificial intelligence and bots. So calling it the human resources department is laughable, and what I'm saying ultimately is you have fewer jobs, fewer gigs to go around for people that are in that line of work, and the people who get displaced if they don't know where they're going next, if they don't know what else they would do, they tend to panic, and then they flood the freelancing markets, and that only makes it that much harder for a freelancer to find a gig. And I thought to myself, like, this is not life to me. This is not the way that I want to live. And it just so happened that I had been writing, decoding the unicorn, making this co creation with dag from July of last year onward, until it was published in January of this year. And it was just such a different experience for me. I was like, this, this is what I was meant to do. And at this point, it's like, I feel like something that cracked open, you know, maybe like a little duckling that hatched out of its shell and started to get feathers, lost all of its little downy and started to get feathers like I'm a writer, I'm an artist, I'm a playwright. I'm tinkering around with a screenplay, so after that, I'll be a screenwriter. I don't know how all of this happened. It's insane. It's like even looking back on it in hindsight, the podcaster David Bayer talks about how a lot of times with your success stories, you can't like engineer it while it's happening. You can only reverse engineer it by looking at it in hindsight. I don't even know at this point if I could do that. I'm not I'm not even sure everything has just happened so quickly that it's unreal to me.

And I'm saying this to. To to like be of good cheer, to be an encourager, because I think that a lot of people are going to need to make changes, because over the next five years or so work as we know it, will change, even just taking that story that I saw this morning about viral posts are created by robots, is fake pictures of fake people and fake stories. And people are like, Yay, this is great. And the media is like, Yeah, but wait a minute, it's all fake. You're clapping for people that don't exist. It's a fictional story. And then flashing up the statistic that by next year, 90% of what you see online is going to be aI generated anyway. We are careening into a different world, and work is absolutely going to be impacted by that. There's not a doubt in my mind, and I think being flexible, being nimble and being willing to change. Because What other choice do you have? You know, you can take a technophobic outlook on it and say, I'm just going to run for the hills. I'm going to go hide in a bunker. I'm not going to engage with technology anymore, and that's the end of it. I don't know in modernity how long you would last doing that, but okay, sure, I guess that's one option, to me, the better option would be to figure out how to embrace change. What can you do next if you've outgrown the snake skin that you are in, how do you shed that skin and move on to something different that could even be something better? I will tell you, I'm so much happier now. I'm so much more engaged. Time just goes. I don't clock watch. I don't feel like, oh god, I've got to do this, and then I've got to try to find some Mr. Or Miss impossible for a client. Try to find some candidate made out of unobtainium that doesn't exist in the Milky Way galaxy. I'm not doing that anymore, and it's really liberating. To be honest with you, the other day, I was folding laundry, and I had this dialog going so richly in my mind, I was like, when I get back to the desk, I need to start writing some of this down, because the dialog is just too good, and I want to make sure that it gets into the story that I'm writing. I just love it, you know, I'll have ideas for illustrations. I'll have ideas for you know, here's a great concept. I don't know what it is yet. I don't know if it's a screenplay, I don't know if it's a stage play. I don't know if it's a novel or a novella. Man, the other night, I was laughing so hard I'd come up with this crazy idea. I'm not ready to share it yet, but I'd come up with this crazy idea for something comedic, and it was just I laughed and laughed and laughed. It was so healing. It was so restorative to be able to do that. Now I want to think about DAG, because dag had his little cloister. He had his niche carved out in the Swedish government. He had a rapid rise, which is not surprising, considering that dag was amazingly talented, brilliantly smart, and he worked all the time. He was, in so many ways, singularly devoted to his work that was his life's purpose, in some respects. So he has this rise through the Swedish government. And there were editorials in Dagens Nyheter at different times, like, Well, Dag can't work every job in the Swedish government. And I'm like, well, well, don't be so sure. He was pretty freaking talented. And then he gets this call of, like, hey, you've been nominated for you and Secretary General. And everything changed. It was like that was his moment. That was the thing that cracked him open and caused him to be more than he ever had been before. He had to stretch new muscles and develop new skills, hone skills he already had, yes, but develop new ones too. He was on the world stage and was thrust into the limelight in a way that he never prepared for. But he did it. He handled it. And in writing, my next project, simply DAG, that's one of the things that I've been tackling, is you have this private, introvert man in a very public office, but also a very dangerous office, and I just don't think, as I've said before, that most people in today's world understand just how dangerous DAGs position was. But he did it. He had to reinvent himself and get way out of his comfort zone to be able to do that job, and in so doing, he redefined it. He completely redefined what it meant to actually be a UN Secretary General. It wasn't just a figurehead or a, well, this is kind of a bureaucrat on the world stage. It really meant something when dag was in the role you. Yeah, and I just, I have a lot of pride in that. I think it's a wonderful thing. Now you can translate that to your own life too, whether that is something creative or something completely different. Maybe you say, instead of being technophobic, how do I make this technology work with me instead of working against me. That's one of the things that I have chosen to do. Can I outsource some of the editing? Can I outsource some of the proofreading? What things can I do with technology that will make my desk run smoother instead of looking at it as the enemy, what can I do to harness the power of it? It's like the old cliche, the future is now. I really think it is. The future is here. These changes are here. It's not science fiction or fantasy anymore. It's on the doorstep, and we get to decide, is this something to be deathly afraid of, or is this something that we can use for the power of good? I really believe the technology itself is neutral. There was a rabbi that I interviewed for decoding the unicorn, and that's one of the things that he talks about with religion and with science, these things are in themselves neutral. It's about the application of them. Some scientists do bad things, but we don't say, well, we want to abolish science because some scientists do bad things. Some people use religion to do tremendous good in the world, to minister to other people and to help them to make sure they have food, water and shelter and to do something good for another human being, and then other people use religion for death and torture. I would say the same thing about technology. It really depends on who's using it and what they're using it for. Someone of a bad character is going to be using it for bad purposes, and someone of a good character is more likely to use it for good purposes. Now maybe that's a little bit reductive in black and white, but you get what I'm trying to say. I personally believe there has to be that willingness to change, that willingness to say, I'm not going to stay stuck, I'm not going to hide away in an office and try to pretend that the outside world doesn't exist or that change is not coming. The change is already here. Whether you embrace it or you run away from it totally up to you. I hope this episode has been helpful. I hope it's given you some good food for thought. If so, please share it and I will see you next time.

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