Trust, Foresight, and Canadian Leadership: Reading the Convergences Reshaping Our Careers

Hi, I'm Nola Simon. I'm the host of the Hope and Possibilities podcast. Today I want to talk about Canada and careers in Canada, and how that actually relates to futurism. Fundamentally, when we talk about Canada and the current geopolitical situation with tariffs and the relationship that is breaking down in real time between Canada and the United States, what's happening is really what I've observed since 2016, when I tried to start getting myself out of working for the American division of a US company.

I actually started working for that division in 2003, and what I found was that when I was hired, I was hired under the premise that we could pass as Americans. Our address was Buffalo, and I ended up having conversations with people about the traffic in Buffalo and the snow, and all these things that allowed me to have conversations with the presumption that Americans wouldn't even notice that I was Canadian.

And I did that for 16 and a half years. Then I moved into the Canadian division, but it took me three years to actually move into the Canadian division, even within my own company. So I started taking steps to separate myself from the American work because of what I noticed in the States.

I always had three very strict rules for how to engage productively with Americans: I didn't talk about gun control, I didn't talk about healthcare, and I didn't talk about employment law — and maternity leave in particular — unless there was no way around it.

I did take two year-long maternity leaves while I worked for that company, so obviously I had to have some conversations about why that happened. But what I noticed in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected the first time, was that his first action was to start undoing Obamacare. During Obamacare, the calls that I used to get about medical bankruptcy really significantly dropped.

I used to get calls from clients who'd take their children to a vet because that way they could afford to buy antibiotics. I'm not kidding. And it got worse from there. The stories I heard over the years about medical issues were heart-wrenching, right? And once Obamacare was essentially taken apart, those calls started up again.

And I was like, "I can't do this. I literally can't do this." I don't fundamentally believe in this way of living, and if I stay, how complicit am I? Because I'm really fundamentally facilitating how that economy behaves, how they treat their own citizens. I was facilitating that even though I was working for a Canadian company based in Canada and had never left — my work allowed that culture and that economy to thrive.

So I made the decision that I wanted to get out, but it took me a long time to figure out how to tell my story. It was as if I had moved to Boston, even though I had never left the country, because my experience working for that American division was so alien in the Canadian job market. You wouldn't think it would be, because essentially it's the same skills.

But I was working in US products, US law, US wealth management, and it's all particular to how the US economy works, how retirement works, and how the banking system works. You would think it would translate well, but it didn't. I literally ended up having to move into sales, because that was the story I could tell that made the most sense in Canada.

Not to mention it was the position that was based where I was, and it was 100% remote, because I had an accident and I didn't want to commute anymore. Little did I know that sales is actually more in person than you would think a remote job would be. Anyway, that's a whole different story. But I wanted to talk about that career change, because essentially what's happening with the US market is something I've noticed for 10 years.

I eventually did move into the Canadian division, then I got laid off, and I've started my own company since then. A lot of what I've learned is how to market, how to attract customers, and how to tell stories in a way that encompasses all my experiences. And one of the things I've noticed is that I tend to be 10 years in advance, because I look at these trends and these scenarios, and I run the possibilities.

That's the value I think I can bring in this current environment. If we're looking at Canadian experience and how we're telling our stories about how we're going to be competitive in the global market, what skills and abilities and stories do we need to be telling that help us reinvent how we see ourselves?

Because that's really important. A lot of times we see ourselves through the lens of how Americans see us, and we position that for the world. That's about trust, it's about self-trust, and it's about understanding what sovereignty really means and making choices to present ourselves and support each other in a way Canadians have never really had to do before. For example, this week I'm attending a podcast summit. I had become aware of Jan Ditchfield online, and she runs a podcast called Small Town...

I'd have to check the exact name of the podcast — I'll put it in the show notes. I actually approached her to see if I could appear on her podcast, because obviously I live in a small town. Her podcast is designed for places with under 10,000 people, so my small town was not small enough for her podcast.

But I thought she was interesting, so I started following her. She's running this summit that includes all of these Canadian creators who have podcasts and who work in podcasting. That's interesting to me because I did a few episodes with Amanda Cupido, and she actually launched her thought leadership podcast in Keswick, my small town.

The Canadian podcasting business has huge possibilities, but it's a very different landscape from the American one. This summit was really designed to advance Canadians, support Canadians, and help us learn what works here to appear on charts and really be competitive.

I attended one session Jan offered on podcast SEO. No word of a lie, my podcast is already in the top 10% in the world. There are probably about 4 million podcasts in the world, and not all of them are active. So when I say I'm in the top 10%, that means I'm somewhere in the 400,000 range. I'm not a top 20 podcaster by any means.

So saying you're in the top 10% of global podcasts sounds a lot more impressive than it actually is — it's a huge, massive number. But just by making some tweaks based on her observations of how the Canadian market works, my podcast shot up 85,000 places in the global rankings. That's insane.

That's amazing. And I didn't do anything significantly different. My podcast is already pretty well optimized in terms of keywords and how I write show notes, and I've always made sure to do the basics. But just by changing a few things and following her observations, I was able to change that.

This is where I think we have some learning available to us in how we share information and how we support each other as Canadians in the career market. Because with our experience, our expertise, our education, we've been conditioned in lots of ways to believe that Canadian experience isn't necessarily competitive on the global stage, right?

If you've got a degree from York University and you talk to an American about it, they'll ask if it's New York University. Then you have to explain that it's actually York University in Canada. They might have heard of U of T, but they really haven't heard of anywhere else, and the whole conversation dies — because on a global stage, York University, although it's a really great university and ranks pretty high in global standings, isn't recognized very well.

So how do you stand up for your own experience when the conversations you have are oriented towards the institutions that have been around for 200, 300 years, that are fully funded, get huge amounts of alumni money, can afford to have that global recognition, and are never struggling to attract new students?

It's how we talk about ourselves — our storytelling, our narratives about what makes us successful, and our narratives about what success looks like in Canada. A lot of times our narratives in Canada are related to working for the government or working for the big banks. What is a good employer in Canada? And how does that change given the instability we're seeing in the economy? Then you throw in AI, and whatever could possibly happen with the relationship with the EU.

What does it look like if Canadians can go and live and work in the EU, and likewise have EU citizens come here? Especially when Canada has never been all that kind to immigrants or to recognizing immigrant experience from outside Canada. We're two-faced that way, right?

If you talk to immigrants and look at the experience immigrants have had once they've come to Canada and need to essentially reinvent themselves, not having Canadian experience has always been a barrier. And I experienced that even though I never left Canada.

I was just working for the US division of a Canadian global company. So this is what I find very fascinating: how we write this future. What changes in terms of trust? What changes in terms of scenarios? What changes in terms of accepted experience and expertise, and how we value what people already know — when we also know that the skills we need for the future of work are constantly changing?

Today is the most stable environment we're going to see for probably the next 20 to 50 years, right? Change is going to be continuous. It's going to be constant. It's going to be more about reinvention than it's ever going to be about stability again. So what skills do we really need to build to be able to thrive in that environment?

The ability to handle ambiguity, the ability to handle uncertainty, the ability to reshape our narratives and examine our own biases. None of our institutions are really built to encourage us to do that, and AI is really going to emphasize what's already gone before. I explore AI — I have a whole Living Lab series of podcasts dedicated to my exploration of AI.

That's something you might want to check out if you're looking for how to engage with my podcast. I'll link it in the show notes. There are about five or six episodes you can listen to that I've done in the past, either solo or with guests, that follow my investigation into what AI is.

From my perspective, based on what I've been doing for the last few years, AI is focused on the past. Although it might shape the future, I find it hard to apply in the work I'm doing right now as a futurist, because it doesn't build out scenarios, it doesn't build out trends, it doesn't notice, it doesn't look at the nuance. It doesn't see how people are feeling. It can't feel what people are feeling. And it's always behind. It's always based on how it's trained and how it's created. It's never in the moment. It's always a collection of what we know from the past. And to use it to extrapolate and look at what the future is — I find it very limited.

I was exploring using it for writing, but with the way AI writing has been perceived recently — the changes around Pangram, and the general vibe towards any kind of influencer using AI to sell anything — it's something I'm staying away from, to be honest.

So that's a fascinating thing for me too. AI may shape the future of work, but I don't know that, as it exists right now, it has great abilities to help us look at what even the next year to 18 months is going to look like for the future of work. I think we're living through it. I think we have to learn how we're trusting ourselves, our own observations, and our own skills as they exist, to be able to build that stepping path and figure out how this is going to work for anybody who works for a corporation, anybody who works for a government, anybody who works in small business and nonprofits, anybody who's self-employed, and all combinations of that.

The world of work — I see it becoming combined, right? You might work for yourself, but your clients tend to be organizations. So how does your work fit into organizations at a team level? Say you're a freelance marketer and you're assigned to work with a specific team. The manager who signed you is now managing a team that consists of full-time staff, but also freelancers and consultants.

What does that look like in terms of belonging, mattering, how you interact, what the norms are, what the behaviour is like? It's fascinating to me. So this is my next project for a while: looking at all these questions. If we assume that Canada is going to become less dependent on the relationship we've had with the United States, what does that change for the future of work?

I'm going to essentially build a whole Living Lab series based on those skills and abilities and leadership. How do we lead this? It's fascinating to me, and I think there's an opportunity. I'm not aware of anybody else who's really talking about this sort of thing. There are people talking about the politics of it all.

There are people talking about the economics of it all. But how does that work in terms of what the future is? How do we plan for it? How do we educate people? How do we adapt the narratives? Because your work and your life are really combined, and the people you live with have opinions on how this is affecting your work.

It affects how they live. All of that factors into how you're weaving a career, how you're adapting to the moment and the changes, and how you're building that out into a path — or, as Lynda Gratton has said, a 100-year life that's woven together with all the threads we bring into how we live and work.

So this is my project for the next little bit. I'm announcing that now. I hope that's interesting to you, and I'm really excited to hear your comments about this. I think this could be a conversation we need to have in all areas of the country. One thing I'd like to end on: in Canada, we see this as something that affects us deeply.

I'm going to say this with love, as somebody who worked with Americans and knows many smart, wonderful people there: Americans think about Canada and Canadians a lot less than Canada and Canadians think about the US, right? On a day-to-day basis, we're much more aware of them than they are of us.

We have to adjust how much of our attention goes south, and we have to become, I think, a little more self-centred than we have been in the past. That's my initial observation, and it's based on working with an American division for 16 and a half years and moving myself away from US culture for the last 10.

I've been boycotting before it was a thing. But again, it was more because I knew I wanted to live in Canada, I knew I wanted to work in Canada with Canadians, and none of that has changed. Even though I do perceive that the value of my work is relevant globally, I'm here, and I'm committed to Canada.

It's the basis of who I am, and I think I need to be really clear on that, because I don't know that I've owned it enough. Even though I feel like I've told the story, I feel like I haven't told it enough. So this is my opportunity to really double down on that identity. And again, I'm hoping it's hopeful, positive, full of possibility.

I found this wonderful quote from Nigella Lawson, from the Great British Bake Off or something like that. Her quote was, "I'm full of cake and hope." And I think we should be full of cake and hope, because why not? I think that could be so fun. Anyway, thank you for listening. I'd love to know your thoughts.

Please follow along. In the show notes, I'll link the name of Jan's podcast and the summit if you want to attend. And I'll also put in the AI Living Lab sessions if you're looking for another set of podcast episodes from me to engage with. All right. Thanks.