This Girl KAM with Hensley Evans

Hensley has been a partner at ZS Associates now for 10 years, offering strategic direction and insight to many of the world’s top healthcare, pharmaceutical, and biotech companies. Last year, Hensley took on the additional task of co-authoring a book called Reinventing Patient Centricity, bringing Patient-led Business Models to Life.
The book explores opportunities for pharma to adopt true patient-led business models, taking readers through the patient experience, and identifying tactical examples for pharma around where, when, and how to bring in the patient and the business benefits of doing so. If you would like to purchase the book you can do so here.

Liv: Hi there, Hensley. Welcome to this girl KAM!

Hensley: Hi Olivia.

Liv: It’s lovely to see you. I know we’ve got loads to talk about. So, we will get straight in. But before we do, I’d like you just to tell us a little bit about yourself and your personal and professional story to date, if you can, before we get into some of these other meaty topics, we’ve got to discuss.

Hensley: Yeah. So, I thought I would start with where I am now, and then I can work a little bit back to how I got here. So, I’m currently a partner principal at ZS Associates which is a consultancy focusing on healthcare.

And quite a lot of our work is in the pharmaceutical, med tech and biotech space. I’ve been at ZS for 10 years. Before that, I was in the agency space doing work with large healthcare and pharmaceutical brands, helping them to launch direct-to-consumer consumer education campaigns as well as healthcare professional campaigns.

And so I’ve been in the healthcare space for a long time and the patient aspect of healthcare is a real passion of mine. Last year I published, with a co-author, a book on patient-centricity called Reinventing Patient-Centricity.

I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us to do a better job of delivering really good patient-centred care to patients. So that’s a little bit about me. 

Liv: Thank you. So go on. So tell me about your book and first of all, tell me about what made you want to write the book in the first place, and where that motivation came from?

Hensley: Sure. So like many of my ideas, it came to me one morning while I was running and I was listening to the TED Talks podcast. If your listeners aren’t familiar with it I highly recommend, they publish excerpts of various TED talks on different topics, and they were interviewing a woman who had written a book. And I remember thinking it would be cool to take all of the research that we’ve done over the years that set us on different aspects of patient centricity, patient insights, strategy, engaging directly with patients, et cetera, and find all of the threads that weave those different topics together and put it into a book.

So I got back from my run and I shot off an email to, I don’t know, half a dozen of my colleagues and said, tell me if I’m crazy. I have this idea, but sometimes when I’m running, I have these ideas that, may not be all that realistic! But I got a very enthusiastic reception from almost everyone that I wrote to saying, what a great idea and how can I help.

So, that was the genesis of the process to write the book. And many of those folks that I reached out to originally wound up being co-authors of chapters. And so, I guess maybe they felt like because they encouraged me, they were somehow duty-bound, to help. (Laughs)

Liv: So what was the journey like writing the book then? Tell me, did you learn more as you were writing it and how did you feel after it was written?

Hensley: For sure. There’s the whole process associated with writing a book, which I had zero knowledge of ahead of time. I thought it would be fairly simple. I thought you would take your good ideas, you would write them down on paper. Someone with a good editorial mind would help you make that writing better, and then you would publish it. But there are a lot more steps than that. One of the cool things about writing the book was it allowed us to collaborate with several other folks in the industry patients clients people in pharma and in other healthcare provider organisations where we interviewed them and tried to incorporate their stories and their experiences into the book.

And so that was a cool part of it. That whole research aspect. We had done a lot of primary research doing that interview and qualitative research as a way to integrate patient stories and case studies and examples into our book. It also, of course, creates a lot of complications from a publication standpoint because then you have to make sure that you get all of the permissions in place to use those stories. People’s experiences. But I think, one of the cool things, that we did do when we had a complete manuscript together was that we had several advisors review the manuscript, and a couple of those advisors were patients that we had worked with in the course of researching the book. And, one of the things I wanted to avoid was writing a book about patient centricity and not having a patient perspective on the book itself. So often we create initiatives that are intended to help people cope with some medical conditions and we don’t ask them what they want or we don’t run it by them before we go ahead and launch whatever our genius initiative idea is. It’s all from a place of great intent, but often, it misses the mark and we’re surprised when it misses the mark. But, if we didn’t ask what people wanted or needed it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that it might not have landed the way we wanted it to.

Liv: Yes that makes sense.  One of the things I found interesting that I wanted to put your brains about is, the concept of beyond the pill as opposed to with the pill. 

This was one of the things I saw in the Pharmaphorum guide around the book, saying that’s where pharma had been getting it wrong or is possibly still getting it wrong in terms of what we’re still focusing on. 

Tell me a little bit more about that.

Hensley: Yeah. So I think again,  best of intentions I think a lot of organisations look at the patient journey with something, particularly like oncology where it is a Complicated and emotional journey that the patients go through as they experience symptoms, get a diagnosis that they’re, we’re probably praying not to get.

And then have to manage through a long, and sometimes very unpleasant treatment. Pathway with uncertain, results and they think, oh, I want to help patients along the way of this journey, and I’m going to create some solutions or services that help them at different points.

And, that’s broadly referred to as beyond the pill. Yeah, I’ve created some treatment. It may not be a pill, it may be an injection or an infusion or something else, but, just broadly speaking, I want to provide that medicine. That’s going to help. But then I’m going to provide these other services that, that I think are going to help.

And I think what more and more patients are telling us is that From a pharmaceutical manufacturer, what they’re primarily interested in receiving is assistance around the pill. So maybe it’s about how I get access to this medicine? How do I ensure that I can afford it? How do I get started on this medicine?

What should I expect from my treatment, how do I know if it’s working? What might I do if I’m experiencing side effects? How do I know when I should call my doctor, et cetera, et cetera.  And that, if you can get that first, getting the medicine, starting on the medicine, staying on the medicine, and then getting to the best possible outcome of that medicine, that’s the place where manufacturers have to engage with the patient and what patients are expecting. Who better than the person who makes this medication would know how to help me get access to it? When you start going further away from that treatment to other parts of the care pathway, you have to think carefully about where pharma will be a welcome provider of information.

A lot of organisations might want to help a patient at the diagnosis stage when they’re thinking about their different treatment options. Well, maybe from a patient perspective, it’s not credible. Even if the manufacturer’s being very agnostic about what the treatment options are from a patient’s perspective.

The patient’s are like, well, I’m not certain I believe that this manufacturer of a specific medication is going to be a good and reliable source of information about all of my different treatment options. Are they going to tell me everything about all of my options?? And in that case, the patient will likely prefer an advocacy organisation or a provider or a trusted pharmacist. Someone more independent to provide that information. And that doesn’t mean that pharma couldn’t partner with one of those organisations to help provide that information to patients. But it may mean that, and I think it’s very different in different therapeutic categories, so, it may be different in psoriasis than it is in oncology, for example. But, I think you have to think about where it’s appropriate for the manufacturer to engage directly with the patient with information and support. And where it may be better received to partner with others in the broader healthcare ecosystem.

Liv: It’s fascinating. It’s just that concept of that credibility piece for the pharmaceutical organisation isn’t it. 

Hensley:  Well, credibility is a challenge for pharma all the way around.

 Gallup publishes a rating of consumer trust in organisations. And, pharma always ranks at the bottom of the list along with things like tobacco and oil and gas companies.  Then you see companies like Coca-Cola that rank up near the top and you think, well, really practically speaking pharmaceutical companies have done way more to help people and advance their health and life expectancies than some of the other companies that are near the top of the list. But (laughing) that’s another issue.

Liv: So on that note then, Hensley, what was it that made you initially want to work within the healthcare industry? Was it something you always wanted to do?

You did maths and economics, didn’t you at university? 

Hensley: Yeah so I studied math and economics as an undergrad. And I initially worked in consulting, just doing broad strategy consulting. When I got engaged in healthcare, one of the things that interested me in healthcare was that it was a very multifaceted problem to solve. I worked in the agency world as I mentioned, and we had clients including Pizza Hut and M&Ms and Diet Coke, and these products are fun to market. And easy to sell. Because you just need to convince a person who would like to buy a Diet Coke and then they can go into any number of places and purchase one.

It’s not complicated. It’s not super expensive. There are no access limitations. So you know, those marketing campaigns are very straightforward. It’s really about demand generation.

But when you move into the healthcare space, you have the structural fact of intermediaries. There’s a physician, there’s a pharmacist, there are other people involved in the decision, but then there’s also the question of finding, the appropriate people, to talk to. So, People aren’t always able to determine whether or not a specific medication might be an appropriate medication for them, even if they know their diagnosis.

If you take a fairly prevalent disease like diabetes. It’s gonna have to be a decision made with the patient and the physician together about what the appropriate diabetes treatment is for a particular patient. So, the process of educating individuals about their choices and then helping them work their way through the steps they have to take to get to the best possible outcome is quite complex.

I found, with that maths and economics background, I found that complexity to be intriguing, that you had to make all these things happen at the same time to get. The best possible outcome for a person.

Liv: So, that was obviously what led you into it and what fascinated you. What is it that’s kept you in healthcare over the years? What is it that continues to engage you the most, do you think?

Hensley: Well, so one of the reasons that I was excited to move to Europe five years ago, was, when I joined ZS, I joined in New York and I had worked in the US healthcare space for a long time, and I was intrigued by the opportunity to learn about different healthcare systems.

And I’m fascinated by the fact that depending on where do you live, and this is true even within individual countries. Within individual markets, depending on where you live your experience of the same healthcare condition will be vastly different. And that has to do with your socioeconomic circumstances, the geographic access to care that you have based on where you live and based on who you’re employed by, the skills and capabilities that are available within that geography, whether you’d have to travel, etc. Even, the treatments that are approved in specific markets, and how you go about getting access to those treatments. And in some markets, you have to go first to your GP and get a referral and approval to go to a specialist to seek care,  in other markets you can just self-refer and go directly to a specialist. In some markets, you can choose to self-pay if you want a different course of treatment than the course of treatment that might be covered by the nationalised healthcare organisation and others you don’t have that choice. So, it’s really interesting to see the differences.

And one of the things, that I am still intrigued by in healthcare is our medical care is getting better and better. And yet, the disparities in outcomes for patients between those that have good access to care, that have the socioeconomic means to be able to take advantage of all of these medical advances, that disparity between these haves and have nots from a healthcare perspective is continuing to grow.

And I think we saw it during Covid. When certain demographics suffered much more severe consequences of Covid than others. And initially, we weren’t sure why. And so, I would love to be able to use some of the work that I’m doing in healthcare to bring some of these incredible scientific advances, that we’re seeing in medical research and science to a broader group of patients so that more people can get to the best outcome possible for them given their situation. So, I think there’s so much to be done like healthcare in many markets is so broken. And so even though we have this great science and we have these great capabilities, many people don’t get the benefit of that. Which I think is a shame.

Liv: You went to Africa earlier this year, didn’t you?

Hensley: Yes. I’ve been on the board of an organisation called AMREF Health Africa, which is an NPO headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. Amref works with women and children’s health programs in Eastern and Southern Sub-Saharan Africa.

Every other year I try to go to Africa to meet with some of the staff that are there on the ground working with programs, and then also visit some of the program sites. Because, as an international board member, my primary role is to help fundraise.

And it’s much easier to raise money for things that you’ve seen and experienced for yourself. So, I was in Rwanda and Ethiopia. So, in Rwanda, we were at a major conference, the Africa Health Initiative conference. And got to hear about a lot of different health initiatives that are being, in many cases sponsored by many pharmaceutical manufacturers as well as folks like the World Bank and U S A I D, the U A I D and then was able to go visit several projects in several different towns in Ethiopia.

And I think one of the amazing things about going to countries like Ethiopia, or I’ve been to Tanzania, to Kenya, to South Africa to visit projects as well in the past, is that you see how much difference some very basic healthcare can make in people’s lives just basic preventative healthcare. Basic access to care.

One of the things Amref does focus on Particularly is maternal health, and helping improve the prenatal care for women has such a long-term impact on the economy. By helping women give birth to healthy babies and helping those babies stay healthy through just basic things like malaria prevention, HIV, AIDS prevention, basic clean water, education can do a tremendous amount to improve health overall. And I think what’s interesting now is that we’re starting to see, in Africa, the expansion of the prevalence of non-communicable diseases as unfortunately, we export some of our lifestyle, to the rest of the world.

You see increasing rates of diabetes, obesity heart disease, etc. So we’re starting to see the need for broader preventative care in those dimensions as well.

Liv: How did you get involved with AMREF to start with? How did that come about?

Hensley: Well, I’ll make a long story long and then you can shorten it if you want, later in, in post-production!

But about 15 years ago, I was part of an executive coaching program and one of the interesting things that my coach suggested I do when we were talking about career aspirations and what I wanted to accomplish in my career, she said, “Okay, I’m going to give you a funny assignment and I just want you to do it. Don’t think too much about it. I don’t wish you any ill will” she said, “but I want you to go home tonight and write your obituary. Imagine that you’ve been very unfortunately struck by a bus or something on your way home from work, and someone who loves you very much, your mother, your husband, your best friend, whoever is writing your obituary. What are all the nicest things that they would say about what you’ve accomplished in your life so far?”

So I dutifully went home and did this slightly morbid exercise. And then, I think I was meeting with her every two weeks. The next time I met with her, she said, “Okay, now we’re going to do a slightly different version of the same exercise, which imagines that you live to you’re 95, but you’ve enjoyed great, good health up until your final moments. You’ve died surrounded by your family and friends. Now rewrite your obituary. What would it say 50 years from now?”

And so, I went and did that. And then the real exercise was comparing the two and saying, so what’s different? What do you see on that obituary when you’re 95 versus the one that you write when you’re 45?

And one of the big things, that I thought was missing, from my 45-year-old obituary was that I hadn’t done anything to give back to the community around me. I was so busy focusing on my career and my young family and all of those things. And I said I do wanna get more involved in some mechanisms where I can give back.

And so, I started volunteering for a local organisation a land trust that was very involved in building trails near my home. But then about six months later, there was this opportunity to sponsor organisations for some pro bono work, for my agency, and one of my client friends at Pfizer was working with AMREF and she suggested that they could use some help. So, we brought them in over the weekend. We helped them develop a new social media marketing plan to help expand their donor base in the US, and after that weekend they asked if I would be part of their communications team, which I did for about a year and a half.

At that time they asked me to join their board. So, it was partly chance, that my friend Christine was involved and suggested this pro bono opportunity. But also I had identified getting more involved with non-profit organisations as something that I wanted to, put into my life.

And I think what’s interesting is a lot of people have asked me about getting involved in, non-profit boards and how to go about it. And it’s almost like the minute you decide that it’s something that you want to do and start looking into non-profit organisations? They all need help.

So I enjoy working with AMREF because it’s the intersection of a lot of things that are important to me. When I was in my undergrad I wrote an honours thesis on the African economy in Kenya. And so I had been to Kenya twice as a young child and loved it there.

And so when I had an opportunity to pick a country to focus on with my honour’s thesis, I picked Kenya. There’s great data, which is another reason why I picked it. But at any rate, I felt like it combined women and children. Of course, I am a woman, I have a daughter. So, the idea of combining all these different things in an organisation.

That I could help was attractive to me. 

Liv: That exercise, the obituary exercise is a fantastic idea, isn’t it? What a great thing to do. One of my questions for you, which was going to come later, but it ties in with this,  is around the advice that you’d give to women, those in particular wanting to propel their career, and I think you’ve highlighted some important moments of reflection, that need to take place before you can make such decisions.

Hensley: Yeah, I mean, I think there are a couple of pieces of advice I would give to people who are mid-career as opposed to just getting started. 

So in my organisation in the US, we are a privately held company and we are a partnership.

For a lot of people they set their sights on becoming partners And that’s their career goal. And so they’re working towards that for the first 10, 12 years of their career. But the interesting thing is it’s only the first 10 or 12 or maybe 15 years of your career, and then suddenly you’re a partner, and you’ve still got 20 years of your career ahead of you.

When I was in my late thirties, I found myself president of this agency that I was working for at the time called Heart Hanks.

And I thought, well, here I am. I’m 35, I’m the president of this agency. Well, now what?? Like now what’s the next step? And I think it’s worthwhile thinking about how you want to see your career evolve, beyond just getting to a certain level. What are the things that interest you? What are the things you want to learn how to do? Do you love it? Do you love them? The operational aspect of running a business, or do you hate that? Do you just want to do the visionary strategy work? Do you love the people leadership part, mentoring and coaching others? Or would you rather roll up your sleeves and do the work?

There’s some real choices that you can make that help determine which direction you want to go. And I think it’s often easy to be like, oh, I want that job because it’s the next ladder up on the rung. But then you get there and you find out, oh, you know what? Being the president of a P&L means that I have to do all sorts of things around forecasting and budgeting and headcount planning, and well, I can do those things, but they’re not my favourite thing to do. I’d much rather be working directly with, organisations trying to solve their thorny strategic problems.

You can tell I’m talking from my perspective.

So, I think it’s, thinking about what are the things that bring you joy. What are the moments in your day-to-day work life that you love to do versus the things that you do because you have to do them?

Try to index towards things that give you more opportunities to do those things that bring you joy. Because I think there’s there’s an upward path regardless of which direction you choose. It’s just gonna look, it’s gonna look a little different.

I loved that obituary exercise because it got me thinking also about, the things I love to do.  And that’s now opened up for me roles on for-profit boards. Which is a great opportunity for me to develop a broader professional network. Develop some higher level skills around board membership and what it means to be a good board member and contributing board member. So, yeah, it led to a lot of things that I wasn’t anticipating when I originally said, “Hey, I wanna get involved in some nonprofit work.”

Liv: That’s helpful. So, I know you mentioned your daughter earlier. I know again from our initial chat that you are a passionate advocate, for DEI in general. I wanted to chat with you more about gender equity. Let’s talk about where you think we are with that and perhaps some of your observations.

Hensley: Yeah. I mean, I think we are making progress all the time. I find that when I tell stories about my early career and some of the experiences I had when I was just out of university I went to a large consulting firm in the late 1980s and they still had a dress code for women that prohibited women from wearing pants to, to the office because that was not considered appropriate professional attire. We had to wear a skirt suit or a dress. And I mean, it was just given to you with your orientation. I try to imagine what would happen if if you said that now. So, the changes in the professional workplace regarding gender it, they’re enormous.

Even when I joined ZS 10 years ago I was asked to lead the Women’s Leadership Initiative and early on we decided we wanted to set a target. For women’s representation within the organisation. And we rolled out a North Star and a strategic approach to women at ZS that we at that time had called 50-50.

Because we thought, hey, women should be represented equally at every level of the organisation. And we thought that was quite progressive and a bold vision. But then of course in the past few years, we’ve walked away from 50-50 because it’s not inclusive of individuals that don’t identify as either male or female. So, thinking about how even in the 10 years that I’ve been at ZS, we’ve evolved our thinking about gender and equity and what that means, and what it means to be inclusive and representative.

It’s funny because my daughter just started at a new school. She is trying boarding school this year for the first time and is enjoying it. She’s quite a good football player,  I don’t know if all your listeners are in Europe, if they’re in the US that means soccer! But she’s quite a good football player. And because the practice times didn’t sync up very well with her schedule she was invited to practice with the boys’ team. I think it was after like the second practice that she did with the under-16 boys. She called me up and she said, “Well Mom, I’m sorry to report that sexism is alive and well!”

And I said, “Oh I’m sorry to hear that. What makes you say that? I mean, I’m not surprised to hear that, but what makes you say it?”

She said, “Well, none of the boys want to pass the ball to me and be the one that passed to me if I score a goal. And the coach who was trying to be inclusive when he wanted to round us up and bring us in, he said, okay, come on guys…and girl!” She said, “It’s still pretty apparent that the boys don’t want me playing on their team.”

And I said, “Well, no…” I said, “In some ways, we’ve made a lot of progress because you are playing on the boys’ team. They have included you. On the other hand, it doesn’t feel welcoming and you don’t feel like you belong.” Which is core to any equity. And I said, “I’m not super surprised about that, but I am sorry to hear that. I’m glad the coach is trying to make you feel included, but you know, maybe he needs to think of a different way to do it.”

But at any rate, I find it interesting that she said that because I do hear it. Some of the younger women that join our organisation don’t see it as a problem in their lives, they don’t see gender discrimination as a real issue. And I think, well, great if you’ve never experienced it, but I don’t take that to, indicate that it doesn’t exist, that gender bias doesn’t still exist in our societies. But I do think we’re making some progress. Slow as it may be.

Liv: Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head there. Everyone experiences it differently, don’t they? But there’s a way to go.

What key changes do you think the healthcare industry needs to make over the next five years or so?

Hensley: So one of the things that we’ve been talking to folks about for the past year and a half or two is the idea of a real pivot in business model from a product-centred mindset and economic driver, that says, the way I measure success in my organisation is based on share or the volume of sales, and the number of prescriptions. That’s very product focused and there’s been a bit of a shift to a more customer-focused mindset, what’s the positive perception?

I think we now need to move to a patient outcome-focused mindset and business model. Because I think as slow as it has been, we are gradually seeing a movement towards value-based healthcare and payers, whether they be national governments or individual insurance companies, depending on the market, payers are starting to try to put in place contracts that are incentivised based on outcomes, not based on the volume of processes or the volume of prescriptions written, etc. And the minute that reaches a tipping point and more and more of the reimbursement in the healthcare system is based on outcomes as opposed to based on volume, it’s going to become critical for organisations to know what levers they pull to drive better outcomes.

This goes back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of around the pill or beyond the pill. So, if I knew that certain interventions, in addition to my molecules are going to result in a better outcome for a patient with fibromyalgia… Maybe one of those interventions is setting them up with weekly physical therapy that has nothing to do with the pill. It’s a complimentary therapy, but maybe that’s going to get them the best possible outcome in combination with medication. If I knew that, then I would figure out a way to encourage patients who were taking my medicine to also do that complimentary therapy because then I would get reimbursed at a higher rate from payers because patients that were on my therapy would be also doing this complementary therapy and they would get a better outcome. But I think most organisations now, while they are doing lots of things around and beyond the pill, if you ask them how those activities are impacting patient outcomes, they won’t be able to tell you.

They might be able to tell you how those activities are impacting their volume of sales. Does that get them a better outcome for their patients though? Well, we don’t know.That’s not the endpoint that they’re looking at. So I think it’s going to be critical for organisations to, even if they don’t change their business model off the bat, start measuring the patient outcome impact of their activities. So that they will know.

And honestly, if you knew that doing thing A and thing B both resulted in the same ROI and the same financial return to your company, but you knew that thing B was better for patient outcomes than thing A. You would do thing B.. There’s no reason you wouldn’t, and maybe if you knew that thing B was a tiny bit less profitable but a lot better for patients, you might still do thing B, if you’re seeing that, the overwhelming trend is towards value-based medicine.

So I think, step one is to know. And I think that’s something that organisations are going to have to do now. Some are starting to measure that because they see the writing on the wall and think it’ll be good to know. But I think eventually organisations are going to have to do that.

I think the other thing that’s super interesting, and this is partly because I went to the TED conference in Vancouver earlier this year in April.

There is so much conversation about artificial intelligence and, everybody’s obsessed with Chat GPT writing new Drake songs or making art that looks like, it was painted by Michelangelo, but has your dog in it. (laughs)  But I think the impact it’s going to have on healthcare is going to be tremendous.

One, of the things that they were talking about at the TED conference was the concept of AI assistance that might help students, for example, study. That if you had, an ai study tutor it could tailor lessons to the abilities and needs of a particular person.

But imagine, navigating this complicated healthcare system, for example, going back to the oncology patient. It’s difficult, it’s emotional, it’s hard to figure out who’s saying what, when. I think the likelihood that in the next five years, we’ll have some  AI-assisted healthcare support is very high.

Because it will be a cost-effective and scalable way to provide support that’s tailored to individuals. Now, will that need to be vetted and supported by physician, yes. Definitely across the board. But I think that’s gonna change the game and organisations are gonna have to think about how is, the acceleration of digital and technology, including AI gonna change what their role should be.

How can I help make sure that those technologies are serving my customers and my patients well in the future? There are some real mental shifts that organisations are gonna have to make because of those external drivers. 

Liv:  I wish we had more time to delve further into that topic as it’s a really meaty one isn’t it! But yes I completely agree with you about the mindset shift.

I cannot let you go without asking you the same question that I ask everybody. So, have you seen the movie Sliding Doors? 

Hensley: No?

Liv: Okay, so it’s an old one, Gwyneth Paltrow. Essentially what it boils down to is one day in her life she was off going to get on the train to go to work, and she missed the train she ended up going back home and she caught her husband cheating on her when she went back home. The film then plays out what would’ve happened if she’d just got on the train and ended up staying with her husband versus what happened when she caught him and the fallout from that.

That was her real pivotal moment. The sliding door on the train the day she missed it was her pivotal moment. So, the question I always like to get into is whether you have any moments in your life that you would consider your sliding doors moment or pivotal point that perhaps sent you in this direction and you wonder if you’d ever have gone in a different one?

Hensley: Gosh. When I picture life, I picture the short branches of a tree. That, that every big life choice you make, sends you one direction or another. I think there’s been a couple of pivotal moments for me. I mean, one was having my daughter.

I had Kaya when I was 41 years old, and we decided we wanted to have a child late in the game. And she changed my outlook on many things including how I wanted to model what being a working woman and mom looked like. That’s not always easy.

 When she was about three years old, I was doing a lot of travel for work that year, and I was home and I said, “what do you wanna be for Halloween this year?” She said “I’m gonna be an aeroplane.” And I said “You wanna be an aeroplane? Why? Why do you wanna be an aeroplane?”

And she says,” Well, that way when you go away, I’ll be able to fly with you.”

And I’m like, oh gosh. Knife to the heart! But at the same time, I thought,  I don’t wanna play into it, I used to get questions from people that say like,”Oh, I don’t know how you travel so much for work when you have a young daughter. Don’t you miss her?”  Well, of course, I miss her. But I think, do you ask that question to, Stanley, who’s sitting next to you in the cubicle, who also travels a lot? I don’t think you do. Stanley has a young kid too. But nobody worries about poor Stanley missing his daughter or vice versa.

And so I thought, what I need to do is figure out a way to be wholly present for her when I am home. And spend a lot of time with her when I can, and emphasize to her that, mommy loves her job. And that has had the effect of making me make sure that I like what I’m doing because I am making trade-offs.

If I don’t enjoy what I’m doing for work, Then I shouldn’t be doing that instead of, spending time with my family. So I think, her being part of my life and my world has had a mindset shift. And then I think moving to Europe was another huge decision for us.

We, we came here five years ago planning to stay for two or three and we are now hoping to be granted permanent residency in Switzerland. So, we’ll see how that goes. Fingers crossed.  But I think that’s a big, that’s a big life shift too, just in terms of, what the possibilities look like for the future. Yeah. So those are a couple of my sliding door moments.

Liv: Thank you. I’m gonna have to let you go aren’t I! I knew I was going to run out of time with you!

Hensley: I appreciate you working to fit this into my schedule!

Liv: It’s such a pleasure. Thank you for taking the time to come on.

Hensley: Thanks Liv