Episode 29 – Google’s Take on Neuroinclusive Event Design – with Megan Henshall

Megan Henshall: People are marginalized or they're misunderstood. They'll explicitly state their needs and they still won't get met. And that's unfortunate. But a lot of what they're asking for is agency and flexibility.

You're listening to episode 29 of the Happy Space podcast. Today, we're exploring Google's thinking about neuro-inclusive event design with their strategic lead for global events, Megan Henshall.

Welcome to the Happy Space Podcast, where productivity meets inclusivity, and everyone gets things done. Hello, I'm Clare Kumar, highly sensitive executive coach, speaker, and your host. Studies show that diversity leads to better business outcomes, so doesn't it make sense to invite everyone's richest contribution?

Yet, too many people are invited to burn out or opt-out, and we are squandering talent. On this show, we'll explore a two-part solution. Part one, cultivating sustainable performance, the individual design of work and life to preserve our energy so we can keep contributing. And two, designing inclusive performance.

The design of spaces, cultures, products, and services, which invite the richest participation. I hope you enjoy these conversations and find inspiration and encouragement, for everyone deserves a Happy Space.

Have you ever wanted to attend an event so badly, been so excited for it, yet then when you get there, the sensory overwhelm is astounding and you either have to leave, or you end up so depleted by the end of it, you almost wonder why you went. This has happened to me numerous times and keeps on happening. So when I stumbled upon Google's The NEU Project about neuro-inclusive event design, I was immediately intrigued. Then I discovered a beautifully thought-through, publicly available, highly detailed document to help leaders design neuro-inclusive events. I'm putting a link to this in the show notes because I believe everyone needs to have a look at this.

I really knew I wanted to amplify this work, which is why today I'm so excited to bring you a conversation with Google's Strategic Lead of Global Events Solutions, Megan Henshall. Megan partners across Google to understand how events drive business, build communities, and promote cultural continuity, informing strategy for a global team of amazing event professionals. She leads an internal-external innovation effort called Google Experience Institute, which focuses on the futures of human-centered multimodal experience design.

Tune in and you'll hear why Megan brought herself to do this important work, how she got here, why it matters so much, the difference it makes to people and to business, and her simple advice for leaders who want to make a difference with their own teams. She'll also let you in on the three futures she spent 60% of her time thinking about it. This is one of my most exciting conversations, and I do hope you enjoyed it. Drop a line and let us know if you do.

Megan, I'm so happy to be chatting with you today. And I wonder if we could start by you sharing with me what brought you to this really rich work you're doing with Google.

Megan Henshall: Well, we'll start with I guess the least exciting aspect of the journey, which was research. We were doing back in 2020 post sort of pandemic pivot with my entire global team. We started a really broad research study and a lot of the data led us in this direction toward focusing on deeply human-centered design principles. And along the data journey, the universe was like, we're going to create some synchronicity in your life, and I developed a personal connection through my son. So a lot of the work we were doing was around better understanding how we were maybe leaving some people out or designing ourselves out of some of these experiences and spaces that we were developing and creating and enabling. and so I got really curious about different neurocognitive functioning and how we weren't really designing for invisible disability, things that we couldn't see. And then my son got diagnosed with autism like smack dab in the middle of this exploration. So Otis, who's five, took us on a personal journey to just sort of enlighten ourselves on how to hold space for him and better advocate for him. And it was like a neon sign from the universe, honestly, that this was my purpose and I needed to bring what I was learning through advocating for my beautiful child into my work in order to hold space for all of these people that we were seeing reflected in this research and data. So yeah, that's how the journey began.

Clare Kumar: I love it. And being a little bit of a data nerd, I can say that is an interesting place to start. And then you move right into this human connection. And I've seen that with many leaders. Thinking of Keith Isaac, whose daughter has autism. And his work with TD Bank to bring different hiring processes completely into the bank so that we're not excluding people from entering in the workforce and participating. And your work at Google… maybe would you like to describe for listeners the scope of what that is?

Megan Henshall: Yeah, happy to. so I lead strategy for the global event solutions team at Google. And there are lots of events teams at Google. It's a very complex ecosystem, but our team is responsible for all of the event venues that we build across our global campus portfolio. And we have about 700 of those. They range from learning and development spaces all the way up to multi-venue event centers. And then I also am responsible for, you know, sort of strategic vision for the operations teams and how we program those spaces and how we operate them. So I'd like to say I spend about 40% of my time in the present, sort of anchored to current issues and, you know, talking across the product areas in business to understand what we can do with events to drive strategic outcomes today, and then 60% of my time in 2030 and beyond sort of looking at emergent trends, adapted behaviors of audiences and consumers. What do we need to be thinking about to proactively prepare for the future? And a lot of what I just talked about, the research, the incubation work is a big part of that forge-facing effort.

Clare Kumar: And interesting because I think the conversation has been advanced so much in the past few years, maybe partly pandemic induced with so much remote work and so many people more in touch with what they need to be successful. Do you think that has any part to play in how quickly we're moving in this way?

Megan Henshall: Yeah, I mean, I say it all the time that the pandemic was a collective awakening in a lot of ways, and I think it showed us the things that maybe we were just sort of blindly doing pre-pandemic that didn't work for many of us. It's absolutely had a huge impact on the events industry. but I think everyone had a moment where they were like, we can't go back to that or I don't want to go back to that in the same way. And so we've seen a lot of really interesting adaptations and what people will tolerate and what they expect from us as designers, whether that be environmental designers or people that program space and, you know, or community manager, whatever it may be. I think expectations have shifted. There's more of an attunement now because we were still in quiet for two and a half years for the most part. And it's hard not to recognize or realize or acknowledge what you need and who you are in that long sustained period of still in quiet.

Clare Kumar: Absolutely. As a highly sensitive person, I have to say I've kind of fell in love with COVID quiet as they called it, you know, a little less hustle bustle, a little less rushing around. And I think, and I'm wondering if you've noticed this at all in your research, that people evolved to be a little more sensitive because of that quiet. Did you notice anything shifting in the way people were aware, this attunement you were talking about?

Megan Henshall: Yeah. well, as another highly sensitive person, I often say that sensitivity is my superpower. I do think people got more in tune with what may be triggering for them, or what feels harmful or what is overwhelming them during the pandemic. But I think a lot of it is just the systems and constructs that we're forced to operate within went away for a hot minute. And it felt really hard to go back to that once we returned to the office and reemerged to business travel and all of these things math gathering, right? It was hard to ignore the things that are challenging about that because we had been removed from it for such a long time. I do have some friends in the neuroscience and art space who have a theory that people becoming more sensitive or higher rates of sensory processing challenges or sensitivity or neurodivergence for that matter, is evolutionary. If we were never built, our internal software was never intended to do all of this. We weren't supposed to be attacked every morning when we opened our phone with 700 million apps and all of this information that we're never built to operate this way, this fast. Our body is evolving to help us mitigate some of that and navigate some of that in different and new ways and I think that's a really interesting theory. I would love someone to study that.

Clare Kumar: It's interesting actually because I interviewed Andre Sólo who came out with a book with his co-author in February and it's the latest take on sensitivity and their research, so they look at the evolution and say that, yes, it's an evolutionary strength. And then Theo Smith, who's an ADHD advocate out of the UK talks about the fish underwater who developed they, they developed out their ability to see because they didn't need their sight and they developed other senses. And so with this absolute belief that biodiversity is the concept that diversity in biology is beneficial for us, and it's the same for neurodiversity, which segues into my next question for you is, when we talked earlier, you talked about wanting to demystify neurodivergence and neurodiversity. And I wonder if you could share with listeners now your definitions of what that means and how important it is.

Megan Henshall: I lean into the ways I've heard it most commonly described by neurodivergent people. We've been hosting conversations and focus groups for the last year and a half in order to inform the new project work that we've been doing. But neurodivergence really is just cognitive functioning apart from what is considered typical. I sort of refute this idea that there is a typical or a normal but there are expectations and there are social norms. And I think neurodivergence is when it is challenging to adhere to those social norms, even if they're broken, that is sort of considered, you know, neurodivergence, it's a different way of intaking information, sensory processing but there is no right or wrong. And the idea that, that there is a right way to think or a right way to socialize or right way to exist in any space cognitively is culturally constructed fiction, fake news. It's not true. These are all things that, you know, folks have shared with us through trying to explain their own lived experience. And so that's my perception.

Clare Kumar: Yeah. I love that. It's, it's a simple way to explain it, but the point that there may be no normal. So what is typical is something that we've fabricated and it's evolved, you know, in large part out of a, if we're going to use words, patriarchal, capitalistic structure, and quite masculine energy.

And so we have a competitive, more is better, hustle culture world, which is exhausting to many who would be neurodivergent from that social norm, or successful in that social norm.

Megan Henshall: I mean, it's colonization. Like, if we want to, if we want to attach a word to it, it's 100% colonization. People who, over time, they thought they were thinking the right way or they were aligned with the right way to be professional or social or you know, whatever.

They made these rules up, and the rest of us have been following them for a really long time. I'm excited that they're such a vocal, absolutely motivated, engaged movement behind this now to dismantle that, because I think a lot of us who are neurotypical people are walking around unhappy and, you know, disengaged and disenfranchised too because things have gotten too rigorous and they're not really working for anyone.

Clare Kumar: It's exhausting. and a lot of contracts, I mean, we see it in the level of burnout in society, right? My personal experience was being designed out of work in 2007, 2008. And I didn't have the language around high sensitivity at that time. I didn't have the words to say, getting to my job and the commute with young children in the daycare in the opposite direction, for example, was simply too exhausting.

I was tired by the time I started my job. And then to be in an office with, you know, far from windows and no natural light. And it was an unhealthy environment on many levels. But I didn't have language and now I've got to the point where I say, don't look for a diagnosis. Never mind the labels, because diagnosis in a lot of society is a privilege too because it comes at a price tag and access to healthcare, which is also a privilege in many places.

I'm concerned about how people connect to this. This concept of neurodivergence and how people self-advocate, do you have any thoughts on what you've been hearing in your focus groups and research on how people speak up about this?

Megan Henshall: I mean, it's not easy. A lot of our neurodivergent consultants who have been self-advocating for a while run up against barriers and red boxes all the time.

It's like any other social justice movement, right? Where people are marginalized or they're misunderstood, they'll explicitly state their needs and they still won't get met and that's unfortunate. but a lot of what they're asking for is agency and flexibility. If the commute makes my day infinitely harder, let's remove the commute.

If this environmental design is triggering for me from a sensory perspective, let me choose where to sit and how to modify a space that works for me for focus time or collaboration or whatever it might be. If events are hard for me to attend because I can't be in crowded environments, let me attend virtually.

So much of this is about curated choice to allow people to say of the options here, that's what works best for me. I'm going to follow that path. But right now it's binary, it's A or B. You choose either you come into the office five days a week or you go work somewhere else.

And we're missing out on not only the opportunity to do the right thing and hold space for 25% of the global population who are diagnosed neurodivergent or with some sort of chronic mental health condition, right, which a lot of these sort of experiences are highly intersectional and overlap in many ways.

But we're missing out on that talent, on that brilliance, on that, you know, completely out-of-the-box thinking. It's really unfortunate because all it takes is flexibility, listening, and asking. It's like pretty low-hanging fruit.

Clare Kumar: This is one of the points I try to make too when I'm talking with leaders is that I think leaders are scared that it's going to be a big expensive endeavor and difficult to do.

And if we give an inch, what are we going to, give a mile kind of thing. There's leadership fear around it. Do you have any words of wisdom that you would say to the leaders who are listening that are like, Oh, I don't want to touch this because it's just going to open up, everybody's going to want to do everything differently and I can't handle the complexity of it?

Megan Henshall: Yeah, no, it is overwhelming. And I get that. And you know, some of these focus groups I've walked away and like needed to take a breath because, you know, there's like one saying, if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person, like the same interventions and accommodations and support mechanisms are not going to work for even three people with the same neurodivergence or condition.

So it does feel very overwhelming. It's like, what is something unilaterally that we could do? But, and I think so much of the problem is like we've gotten to a place where we don't trust each other and we assume ill intent, like, if I make choice available and I become more flexible, I'm going to get taken advantage of that is not the truth.

That is often not the case. You have to stay in the best intent. If I open up the ability to choose and be more flexible and be less rigid and have less binary policies around things, people are going to help me make good choices for them. And it's such a kindness and it's such a courtesy and I've seen it happen.

You know, we planned an event back in February in New York with our Experience Institute community. And it was all about curating choice and providing people agency. And I heard so many objections in that planning process. And what if nobody shows up? It was one of those things where you show up when you want, you leave when you want.

You come and engage in whatever you want. It was a museum concept. So people could come, there was no like group meal time. We had food pop-ups throughout. People could eat when they felt like it, they could eat what they wanted. It was all about choice. And it was like sort of a radical way to design a corporate event.

Everyone showed up and everyone stayed. We actually did kick people out at the end. If you assume best intent and you're going, you're creating something from a place of love and hold space for people and their needs, amazing things will happen. I understand it's scary. We were terrified.

We're going to waste a lot of food and a lot of money, but I think we have to try. I think we have to try. 

Clare Kumar: Who says create from a place of love in the corporate world, besides maybe Marcus Buckingham, who talks about love and work, right? 

Megan Henshall: There's a guy who's responsible for the health and performance team, and he says he's the chief officer of love at Google, and his work is all around, like, well-being and providing, anyway, shout out to Newton Chang. He would actually be a wonderful person for you to speak to as well, he's a phenomenal human.

Clare Kumar: Well, that's sort of the invitation to operate from this place of really active compassion, right? And designing with care for each other. And I would say design for well-being and performance flows, right? And so this is evidence of that. You tried something new and took some rigidity, you took the rigidity out, you put this flexibility in and people were able to participate and get as much as they can.

I don't know how many events you've ever attended where it's 9 to 5 and then 7 to 11 or something. And it's exhausting. Every conference that I've been to, almost every one I ended up getting sick because it was just too much. So allowing people to identify and respect their rhythms and take care of, I call it taking care of the human animal because we kind of forget we're animals in this whole process.

I love that. That event sounds fantastic. So you mentioned a couple of things. You've talked about The NEU Project and I'd love you to expand on that because that's actually what I found first and I found this incredible document that I want to definitely link to in the show notes, which talks about neuro-inclusive event design.

And so much thought and rigor in that. And so anybody who's listening and creating an event now, there is a menu of options and things to consider that you're going to want to design in. Tell me about that. And then also the Experience Institute. 

Megan Henshall: Yeah, so I'll start with Experience Institute because that's what the new project was born out of.

And Experience Institute is what emerged, evolved from that research project I mentioned at the top of the conversation. So we were really trying to understand how were people adapting. What was changing from an appetite's perspective and an expectation's perspective as a result of the pandemic, because we knew that would directly influence and form, help us design in the right ways once we return to office, which we thought was going to be two months, right? And it was two and a half years. But that's how XI started. We were like, Oh, this is, one, really interesting. We should be doing this always.

And we sort of organically invited some friends in to help us with that research. And next thing you know, we have this cohort that grew into a community of about 30, which is when we formalized XI in 2021. Now we have over 300 people around the globe from lots of other companies as well. Even CorpTech, even competitors of Google are involved in the effort.

And agencies, we have classical musicians, we have researchers and academics. we have colleges and universities. We have LARPers. We have just so many cool people from all different sports of you know, human experience disciplines. And they've sort of set as a community, we democratically set out what our priorities were going to be, and this inclusion effort was one of them. So the new project got formalized out of basically a voting process amongst this community that it was something that needed to happen. And so we put down some other priorities for the year and pushed and launched the new project last October. And as soon as we launched it, we knew we wanted to make it externally available.

So it was sort of initially set out to be a Google resource for this community. And then we were like, heck, we need to make it available to everyone. And we luckily got approval to do that. But it really is one, to make people understand why this is important to factor in why neuro-inclusion needs to be a main ingredient in your experience design recipe, because there are a lot of people that are coming to events who are suffering in silence or not coming at all. There's a statistic from an organization called Event Well, and 85% of the neurodivergent people that they interviewed have not attended an event because they thought it would be triggering or overwhelming for them, but that's sad. They have every right to be there, you know?

Clare Kumar: Well, yeah, I, I think I relayed in our earlier conversation how last summer I drove 14 hours to go to, it's the NSA, the speaking convention in Nashville. And it was at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel, which if you're looking for a bustling environment is amazing. the real hotel is kind of connected with a large atrium.

But if you're someone who's overwhelmed by noise, I mean, I had to shout at the clerk at the guest to sign in. And I said to her, how do you do this? She goes, Oh my gosh. I gave her a card for the podcast. She's like, Oh my gosh, I need this. But I had to leave. I still, we stayed one night, we tried three different rooms and we could not find a quiet, I call it pocket of peace. Anywhere you could go to just have something, I call it neurological safety, where the sensory, the nervous system can actually feel relaxed. And I think Ellie, who you see if you're watching YouTube now, you're seeing Ellie. It's here again for the podcast. He's my sensitive cat. And then clearly my desk is his neurologically safe space. It's like ridiculous. This is what I deal with.

He's like, my belly's here for you. And I don't edit Ellie out because I think, you know, this is. This is part of real life. This is part of what keeps my life, my COVID cat, saving me. I'm telling you, but I, so I think there's this, there needs to be this embracing of that whole human and options and flexibility are a way to do that in any kind of corporate engagement and space where we're asking people to come in and be and share with us.

Megan Henshall: Preach, yes, I couldn’t agree with you more. There's this incredible book and I'm totally blanking on the author, but it's called Belonging and it's written by a social psychologist. It is one of the most well-researched, amazing books I have read in the last five years. It's so good. But he talks about the social science theory of fundamental attribution error.

Fundamental attribution error is when we assign success or failure, ability to thrive, or sort of an inability to thrive to who a person is. Yes. who they are, their person, right? Yeah. Which is so inaccurate. We're fundamentally attributing success or failure, ability to thrive or inability to thrive to who they are when it's actually very contextual and situationally based.

We cannot regulate. If you have a sensory processing difference or if you are neurodivergent, you can't control your ability to regulate just with your being. You have to have the right environment. You have to have the right support. And especially when those things are competing with your ability to regulate, it is impossible.

Sabotaging it. Yeah. So I, like, I loved when I read that, I feel like, you know, when you read something that resonates with you so deeply, like you get like the chills, that was one of those moments. And I think about that all the time. We're assigning problems to human beings when so often the problem is the system, the construct, the environment, the context, the situation/ That is dictating oftentimes people's ability to flourish. And so let's fix the things about those elements that are broken. 

Clare Kumar: Exactly. I liken it to, you know, if somebody is going to say, okay, I'm going to go in that environment and I'm going to do my best to succeed, you're paying a tax the whole time because the amount of regulation and trying to focus, and sometimes it might be possible, but how exhausted are you at the end of it?

And sometimes it might not be possible. So, yeah, it is on us to create more inclusive spaces and create those options. Beforehand, we talked as well a little bit about three futures. And so you've said 60% of your time is your eye way ahead on where we're going. That is so fascinating to me, and I'm sure it is to listeners right now too.

Would you like to give us a little bit of what you're thinking about, what you're keeping an eye on that we need to be thinking about as it comes towards us?

Megan Henshall: I'll try to give you the Cliff's notes, cause this is something I can talk about all day, but we've sort of identified three features that we are really excited to be a part of if we can drive toward them in the right ways.

And the first is democratization of experience. And this is all about choice and flexibility and autonomy and giving people agency to mitigate their own risks and choose their own paths and make meaning for themselves. We as designers, I think a lot of times have to like, we want to force our meaning down people's threats.

We don't have to do that. Trust people to make their own meaning inside of your thoughtful curated design. So that's one. and a lot of that has to do with inclusion and belonging, right? Then the other feature the second feature is moving away from traditional return on investment.

Metrics and conversations and narratives to more humanistic ways of talking about why we do what we do and what good looks like. And so we've been testing out a number of frameworks for a while, like return on emotion. How we make people feel with our designs is more important to executive leadership who are making the decisions and funding the things and how can we show that emotion drives behavior and emotion drives loyalty because we know it does.

It's just putting forth a framework that proves that. And so we're working on it. and then the third feature is experiential alchemy. And so a lot of times we talk about ourselves in the XI community, like alchemists who back in the day, we're seeing as a bunch of quacks, right? Coots quacks, but they were determined to use what they knew and what they had available to them to transmute something ordinary into something amazing and extraordinary and precious.

And so we talk a lot about combining. Our different disciplines in the design world to, you know, create a better experience, more resonant experience for human beings, bring people together, solve some of these problems. Cause what better way to fix what is broken with culture and society than bringing together humans who are like-minded and care and are passionate and can figure it out together.

We talk a lot about, you know, creating experiences that can support humanity during a really complicated, hard time to be human. Yeah. and we think that's more precious than turning stuff into gold. That's our purpose with this work. So those are the three features and I would love to see them become reality.

Clare Kumar: Me too. It's it sounds like a dream job for a creative thinker, a sensitive person to tap into. Congratulations on landing this role and bringing your brilliance to it. I've been thrilled to discover what you're about and very happy to share with listeners and leaders here too. The NEU Project in particular, that document that I saw, I think this is a place… where would you invite leaders to go to keep up with what you're doing and, and keep an ear to the ground on Google, which is definitely at the forefront and in this work. How would you say people should keep up with what you're exploring? 

Megan Henshall: Yeah, so tricky question because I'm still very much advocating for an external website, which has not gotten approved, but I'm often sharing work on my personal LinkedIn as are many of our partners.

So you can always find, you know, good stuff there. We're also going to be bringing a lot of I mentioned that event back in February. We're re-imagining that and bringing a lot of it out of Google space and into a trade show for environment in October via a partnership with IMEX, and so that's an event and experience industry association trade show.

And so 30,000 people, we’re bringing this to them because we had to keep our internal event pretty small and we didn't get to invite in enough people. So we're going to sort of bring it out and continue to test with lots more people in October in Las Vegas. So stay tuned to IMEX if you want more information about that. And we'll be sharing out a lot of the work and what we learn through those channels as well.

Clare Kumar: We'll put a link in the show notes to that so people can click right there and find it. I'm so excited about this. This might be my reason to have a first trip to Vegas because honestly, it's completely terrified me because I don't see a pocket of peace there at all of like, if that's...

Megan Henshall: We're creating one. We'll have a new project resilience room off the trade show floor because there's, there's real acknowledgment that those are chaotic, hard to be in environments. So we're going to have support staff and we'll have a resilience room available to any of the participants.

Clare Kumar: That's amazing. I'm just going to finish with this story. I went to, you know, you will know the collision tech conference probably that's in Toronto, right? I tried to go, I tried to go and it's designed, it's a cacophony in there and no divided space. It's the big speaking floor right beside another area with a panel of five speakers and just, and then the fire alarm went off. I lasted half an hour in there and then I actually blew through the barricaded exits because I had to get out of there because I couldn't take it. And I tried and I knew there were these great conversations happening. I couldn't do it.

So yeah, we need these small rooms, but we also need care for every, every speaking venue shouldn't be interrupted by the speaking venue beside it. It's like I went to a movie, I went to see the Barbie movie a couple of weeks ago in a VIP Cineplex stadium. And in the movie, I could hear the rumbling from the other theater, which was probably doing some motion shaking, sensory everything, experience.

And I thought, we need a whole lot of insulation. We're going to pull off complex events. Which is maybe another, another level. So options, but within that, how do you actually make every experience something? And well, we went to the Pink Floyd exhibit recently and the Pink Floyd exhibit was excellent because you had a lot of visuals, very well put together.

And your headphones picked up, you had to be very close to the sensor and you would pick up the sound from that. Go to Cleveland Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I nearly died in that place. Because there was no division of sound from one to the other. It was a mishmash of everything and Such great music, but when it's put together like that, I'm out and I wanted to love it.

So I think this work in particular is at the forefront of how experience have to be built going forward. so I want to, I want to thank you. I want to offer you up if there's anything else you'd like to add. I just finished with my whole, you know, overwhelmed experiences, but if there's a leader listening right now, your invitation to them for what they can do with their team and their world, what would that be?

Megan Henshall: Yeah. I mean, listen, it's as simple as that. Ask the questions. Are your needs being met? If they're not being met, how could I support? What are they? And how could I support? One of the coolest experiences in the journey of developing The NEU Project is I actually had someone on my team at the time who was, her words, profoundly dyslexic.

And I don't think up until us starting this work, she felt super comfortable identifying challenges and needs in her workday or with projects. And it opened up this whole dialogue. Between us. And I love her dearly, man, I just can't imagine my life without her. she's made me a better mom. I'm not going to cry, but just having the conversation, not even about her, having the conversation about how we wanted to do better around understanding your diversity and promoting your inclusion in the ways that we could control.

Every time I take this work somewhere, someone comes up to me and says, my child was recently diagnosed, or I was recently late diagnosed at 43. And I don't know how to advocate for myself. Talking about it, not even the context of your teen can open those conversations and open up that dialogue. And it means so much. and just create such a sense of belonging and safety. I think it's as simple as having the conversation. 

Clare Kumar: That's a great place to start. Isn't it? Absolutely. I totally agree with you. Megan, thank you for every ounce of insight and wisdom and all of your work to help us navigate this. I am just so excited for what you and your team are doing. Thank you so much. 

Megan Henshall: Thank you. One of the best parts about this work is it's led me to so many people like you who are spreading kindness and happiness in the world. So thank you for having me and I can't wait to meet you in person. 

Clare Kumar: We're going to make that happen. Thanks so much, Megan.

Thank you so much for listening. You can find all of the Happy Space podcast episodes Over at HappySpacePod. com. I love learning what resonates with you. So please leave a comment about this episode over social media, or even better, post a review wherever you tune in. And if you have an idea for a topic to explore or an inclusive action to celebrate, I would love to know more about it. It might even appear in an upcoming episode or an issue of the Happy Space newsletter. Please help me spread the word about people doing great things. After all, doesn't everyone deserve a Happy Space?