Speaker 1: He is pet Life Radio. Let's talk pets.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Animal Rights on pet Life Radio. This's your host,
Tim Link, and I'm so glad you're joining us today.
We have a real great show, really intriguing. We get
New York Times best selling author Michael hankson coming on
and Mayne Michael from his best selling book Thunderdog. His
latest books called Live Like a Guide Dog. So we're
going to pick his brain a little bit, tell us
a little bit about what the book's about, how he
learned great things from dogs like we always do. And
then obviously we'll talk to him about his writing writing styles.
So everybody, Hank Tight welcome back to write for this
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Speaker 1: Let's Talk pets on Petlife Radio dot com.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to animal Rights on pet Life Radio. Join
this now is New York Times bestselling author Michael Hankson. Michael,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Thank you good to be here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're excited to have you on the show. Definitely
excited about the Uh, what I call is sort of
the Thunderdog Part two, what you've learned from all of this,
but the new book, Live Like a Guide Dog. So
tell us a little bit about the book and how
it came about, and then we'll talk about the lessons learned.
Speaker 5: I love to collaborate, and so when we wrote Thunderdog originally,
and actually it kind of got started because a woman
called me named Susie Florey who wanted to do an
interview with me, and she was writing a book about
various things with dogs. Anyway, I told the story to
her and she said, no, I want to help you
write a book, and so Thunderdog was the result. And
then when we did Live like a Guide Dog, which
came out last August. Carrie why at Kent, who was
a friend of Susie's, collaborated with me on it, and
Carrie described it very well. She said, Thunderdog really is
what happened at the World Trade Center for me and
for those who don't know, I worked in the World
Trade Center and escape with my fifth guide dog, Roselle,
on September eleventh, two thousand and one, which is what
Thunderdog is about. So Carrie said, Thunderdog is all about
what happened. Live Like a Guide Dog is why what
happened to me happened. I thought that was an interesting
way to describe it, and so Live Like a Guide
Dog is really a book that I started to write
because I knew at the beginning of the pandemic there
are going to be a lot of fearful people, and
we had a lot of things going on with government
and all that was foamating fear all over the place.
So I wanted to write a book to teach people
some of the things that I had put into practice
on September eleventh, and I had realized I had never
taught people. So I wanted to do is to teach
people how to learn to control fear, because in reality,
we fear so many things, most of which over which
we have no control, or we just go crazy worrying
about things that make no sense to worry about. So
I wanted to have an opportunity to teach people how
to control fear. And that's what Lived Like a Guide
Dog from my perspective, is all about. Because on September eleventh,
I had known what to do in the case of
an emergency because I learned it by consulting with the
port authority, police, the security people, the fire people, and
so on. And on September eleventh, when everything went down
as it were for me, a mindset kicked in and
so I was able to focus. Roselle helped with that
by giving me something to praise and encourage her to
keep doing what she was doing, which was working very well.
But the bottom line is that I learned that in reality,
we all could do that, and so Live like a
Guy Dog is all about trying to teach people to
learn to control fear not be afraid of everything that
goes on in the world.
Speaker 2: Very nice, and I love the concept and I love
the approach on it as well, because you know, I
always find, at least in my opinion, there's two. I
hate to categorize two types of people, but I will
for this purpose. One is the one that lives in
constant fear, fear what will happen or could happen, and
usually more fearful when things are going well, waiting for
the other shoe to drop. And then the other is
sort of the one that goes through life oblivious, without
a plan, without a strategy, without what if something were
to happen, not to worry about it, but what you
do in those situations. And I think that you did
a great job in the book Live like a Guide Dog,
sort of broaching both of those right.
Speaker 5: The fact of the matter is that over ninety percent
of the things that we worry about are things over
which we have absolutely no control. Well, what if this happens?
What am I going to do? We worry about that
so much that we become fearful of all of it.
And we're really taught from a young age how to
be more afraid than how to learn to control fear.
Speaker 4: But in reality we can learn to and I.
Speaker 5: Think you put it very well, deal with the what
if stuff, all that stuff that comes along but we
don't have to worry about it. We don't have to
worry about the things over which we don't have control.
We had no control over the World Trade Center happening,
the events of September eleventh occurring. What we all, each
and every one of us have, however, is total control
over how we decide to deal with it. And that's
the part that we need to deal with. And you know,
we can worry from now until the end of time
about what it's going to happen the next time there's
a terrorist attack. Well, you don't worry about those things.
You can be aware, as you pointed out, and you
can learn what to do when there's an emergency, and
you can put a lot of things into practice. But
the most important thing is to learn how to control
fear and not let it, as I would put it,
blind you or overwhelm you.
Speaker 2: Very good, Yeah, absolutely, And I love one that the
comments that was made in the book about this whole
being afraid actually can be a positive thing.
Speaker 5: Well, and the reality is there's nothing wrong with fear
if you will what the problem isn't fear, The problem
is how you deal with it. And you're right, the
reality is that we can learn to control fear and
use it as a very powerful tool to help us
stay focused and do the things that we need to do.
And that's what we should use fear to help us do.
But not to make us paralyzed, not to make us
totally incapable of dealing with making this dec because all
we are is afraid of everything.
Speaker 4: Love it.
Speaker 2: I love it. And as the old saying goes, you know,
what you put out there is what you get. So
if you put fear out there, you're going to get
fear back.
Speaker 4: So you've got to.
Speaker 2: Know how to deal with it when it occurs. And
then but don't worry about it. Put out positive energy,
positive thoughts, and you're going to get that back in return.
Speaker 5: There's a group of people. There's a concept called business continuity.
Business continuity, and the people who deal with it are
those people whose job it is to, if, you will,
what if something happens in business? In other words, they
plan for different emergencies, and they call themselves the what
if people, And as they point out, nobody pays any
attention to them until there's an emergency, and of course
then they're in serious demand. But they would tell you
that what they do is they plan, but they don't fear,
and they put things in place. They put procedures in
place so that if something happens in a particular business,
it will continue to run. But they don't live in fear.
They instead live in creativity and they live to make
plans to make sure that things go well.
Speaker 4: There's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 4: I like that. I like that.
Speaker 2: One of the things when I was reading through the
book and reading the highlights, I was trying to get
a fill for how many of these things you know,
sort of the steps and the guides and the things
that you put together in the book, how many of
those did you or percentage wise did you know ahead
of time by being prepared and like you said, having
all the talking to the poort authority, getting everything in
place for if something did happen, which you did, compared
to what you learned afterwards after it did happen, did
you feel a higher percentage afterwards you realized you didn't
have as much under the plan as you thought you did.
Or is it did they sort of go hand in hand.
Speaker 4: All they start to go hand in hand.
Speaker 5: I knew most all the things that I talked about,
and live like a guide dog ahead of time, but
you know, you always learn more, and I learned some
interesting concepts. For example, this doesn't directly relate to fear,
but it sort of does. I began speaking, and I
like to record every talk that I give so I
can go back and listen to it. And for the
longest time I said I do that because I'm my
own worst critic, and nobody's going to criticize me any
heavier or harder than I am. And only over the
last year actually, in thinking about it, as we wrote
Live like a guide Dog, that I realize that's the
wrong thing to say, because that's just promoting fear. In reality,
I learned that no one can teach me anything. They
can provide me with information, but I'm the only one
who can truly teach me and accept it and move forward.
And so I've changed my philosophy. And rather than saying
I'm my own worst critic, I say I want to
hear all this because I'm my own best teacher. It's
a much more positive approach. It's a less fearful approach,
and it's also truer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very good. I like it. I like it. I
like that approach. When putting together the book, did you
use mostly a reference back to Thunderdog and then extend
it from there or was it a whole new structure
for you is putting everything on paper as far as
the steps and things to do.
Speaker 4: It was really a whole new structure.
Speaker 5: We didn't really refer back to Thunderdog a lot for
a lot of reasons. It was a completely different book.
It was intended to do different things, and so we
really worked with the idea that every chapter was named
with the name of one of my guide dogs, and
the question is what lessons did I learn from that
dog that helped enrich and deal with my life, and
starting with Squire and going through all of of the
guy dogs and Fantasia, my wife's service dog as well.
That's exactly what we did. So it really is totally
different than Thunderdog. It totally compliments Thunderdog, however, and so
when people say, well, which should I read first or
which book should I get? If I'm only going to
get one, and I try to just get people to understand, no,
get both. You want to sell them, but that's but
the reality is they're different, and you can't you can't
really do it that way. They're really totally different from
each other in so many respects.
Speaker 2: Right, and also the lessons learned. That's that's the nice thing,
you know, how you put each chapter. You sort of
gave each of the guide Dog service dogs a platform
and you put it together saying, okay, here's why I
learned from each one of them. And each one was
unique and different. They had some things that I'm sure
they characteristics and traits and things that each had but
and jobs to do. But each one had their own
take and brought a different philosophy. I'll say to you.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, they all have different personalities and so yeah, that's
exactly what happened, and so each one was different.
Speaker 4: I love it.
Speaker 2: Learn from all your dogs one at a time and
apply them to life, and you're going to be in
pretty good shape when you say.
Speaker 5: And the reality is learn from them. The fact is
dogs like humans, you know, unless they're really taught horribly
not to. But the reality dogs want us to set
the rules. Dogs look up to us, and it's our
job to set the rules. We don't have to do
it by beating up on dogs in any way, shape
or format. It's not a good thing to do. But
what is important to be able to do is to
have a process to train the dogs. And you know,
one of the things I learned when I was living
in Northern California I learned from the Marine Humane Society
is that in reality, when they have people go through
a dog training or an animal training course, the creature
that gets most of the training is the human, not
the dog or the animal, because they're the ones that
really need to learn what to do. And the fact
of the matter is that working with now a guide dogs,
I've learned that they really want me to set the
rules and they want me to be consistent, and they're
much happier when I do that, and there's a whole
lot less stress. Guiding is a very stressful thing, and
my job is to keep that stress as minimal as
possible by doing things like a lot of praising of
the dog, a lot of encouraging of the dog, and
so on. As we're doing what we do, and if
we get lost, I have to work not to get
stressed out, because getting stressed out is only going to
cause the dog to feel stressed that they don't need
to feel. So it is a synergistic relationship. But I'm
the one that has to set the tone. And that's
just as true with families and pets. You know, people
need to really integrate their dogs more into their lives.
If they would, it'd be a whole lot better world.
Speaker 2: I heard that. All right, We're going to take a
quick commercial break. We'll come back and container conversation with
a New York Times bestselling author, Michael hankson and talk
to Micha a little bit about writing in general. So
everybody hang tight. You're listening to Animal Rights on pet
Life Radio. Hi, this is Tim Blink, animal communicator and
pet expert and host of Animal Rights on Pet Life Radio.
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Speaker 1: Let's talk past, Let's done pet at about Life Radio,
Headline Radio atline radio dot com.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to animal rights on pet Life Radio. Tenure
our conversation with New York Times bestselling author Michael Hankson
and his lady's book Liveloe Like a Guide Dog. Now,
when Michael, when everybody picks up a copy of the
book and the copy of Thunderdog, gotta have both, what
do you hope people gain from it? What was there
a centralized goal that you had when writing the book
and then afterwards did it hit that or did it shift?
And do you hope there's a main theme that they're
getting from it.
Speaker 5: A couple if we combine the two books together, I
want people to learn a lot more about blindness and
blind people and understand that the reality is that eyesight
is not the only game in town and that sighted people,
or as I refer to all y'all light dependent people,
have just as much a disability as blind people do.
Your disability is that you don't do well in the dark.
If the power goes out, you scramble around looking for
a smartphone or a flashlight or a candle or something,
because you don't function in the dark very well. You
could learn to, but you don't. And the fact of
the matter is that that is your disability. You have
as much a disability as I do. But the fact
also is disability isn't the lack of ability. People say, well,
of course it is, because it starts with dis and
my response is, well, if that's the case, then what
is discrete? Is it a lack of crete? What is
discern Is it a lack of cern? What is disciple?
Is it a lack of eyepul You know, the bottom
line is that dis is not relevant, and disability is
not relevant. We all have some sort of disability. We
all have gifts. And one of the things I want
both books to accomplish is to teach people that we
all have gifts and don't think that just because you
have a gift that somebody else doesn't have that that
makes you better than they are, because they probably have
gifts that you don't have. I doubt there are too
many people listening to the show who understands anything about well,
not only the laws of physics, but things like confluent
hypergeometric equations. You know, there you go figure that one out.
The bottom line is that we all have things that
we can do, and so I want both books together
to show people that in reality, blindness isn't the problem.
It's our views about blindness and our stitudes about eyesight
or lack of it that are the problems. But in
addition to that, I wanted Thunderdog really to go into
some detail about me growing up and things that I knew,
but also again that any of us could at any
time suddenly find ourselves in a situation that we didn't expect.
Are we prepared to deal with it? And then I
live like a guide dog. I teach us how to
become more prepared, how to do things like take time
at the end of every day to think about what
happened today, what worked, what didn't work. I won't use
failure because I think that's a negative and appropriate term
when you don't do something the way you expected to go,
or it doesn't go the way you expect it to go.
It's not a failure learning experience. And the question is
are you going to take the time at the end
of the day to figure out what didn't work, why
didn't it work, what was I afraid of? What could
I have done differently? And even the things that really
do go well, why did it go well? What could
I have done to even make it better? Then again,
go back and analyze how you feel from a fear standpoint,
because you've got to learn not to be afraid of
things and to use fear is a powerful tool to
keep you focused and motivated and so live like a
guide dog. Is intent is to do that, but also
to continue the education about blindness.
Speaker 4: Nice, I like it.
Speaker 2: I like it well writing the book or writing both books?
Will just say how are you as a writer? What
is your structure? Are you X number like two thousand
words a day type structure? Or you a story boarder?
Or you get up at five am every day or
like me, wait till the deadline hits and do it
the day before.
Speaker 4: I don't wait till the day before.
Speaker 5: I do feel urgencies to get things done. But I
also don't have a specific structure. So when Carrie whyat
Kent and I were writing Live like a Guide Dog,
we met every Friday on Zoom for an hour. In
between we would send emails back and forth. We strategized
she would write things, I would write things. We generally
came up with a combination of what all we both
wrote to make it work. I think I have a
good editing sense, so I played editor a lot, but
I was as much a writer as Carrie was, and
that was the case with Thunderdog as well. One of
the things when it was sent to Thomas Nelson for
their editor to review, he said, my big problem with
this book is that every chapter has something that happened
in the World Trade Center, and then you go back
and talk about your life, but you leave me that is,
there's no transition to go from one event to the
other and then back again. And that's a problem. And
I realized it as soon as he said it. I
understood what he was saying, and I said, I will
take this weekend. I will create transitions for all the
chapters and then we'll send it back. Well I did.
He loved what we did. When I was able to accomplish.
And then when the book was getting ready to be published.
There's a magazine for publishers and libraries and so on
called Kirkus and Kirkus. Actually, when they reviewed Thunderdog said
one of the things that they liked the best were
the transitions, because no one got lost and we were
guided right through everything in the book, so it was perfect.
Speaker 2: I love it. I love it and guided through it.
That makes perfect sense, So yeah, I love that.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 2: I'm always curious with writers. I asked that question every episode,
because there's no right or wrong reason to it. There's
no super strategy or secret sauce to writing and put
together a great book. I just think you have to
capture the reader and try to get your message out
there and hopefully they enjoyed it well.
Speaker 5: And I spent a lot of time thinking about it.
What is somebody going to be interested in? I've got
a lot of experience and observing people and been in
sales most of my adult life and things like that,
so I have good senses in those regards. But I
also think that writing it. I spend a lot more
time writing it in my head than I do putting
anything down on paper. Or in my keyboard, So I
write when it seems like it's the right time to
write something, and that's what we do. And it worked
out very.
Speaker 2: Well, absolutely absolutely well. Mike, Where can people find out
more about you? All the great things you've got going on,
and any events or anything happening.
Speaker 5: Well, So after September eleventh, I started getting phone calls
asking me to be to come and talk to their
organizations about lessons to learn from September eleventh and other
things that I thought people should know about. And we
got enough calls that my wife and I decided by
the beginning of two thousand and two that's selling life
in philosophy was a whole lot more rewarding and satisfying
than selling computer hardware and for me managing a computer
hardware sales team. So I became a public speaker and
I've been doing it ever since. So I'm always looking
for speaking opportunities literally around the world. And if people
want to learn more about me and all of that,
they can go to Michael hinkson dot com. That's m
I C H A E L HI N G s
O N dot com. There's a page with a lot
of speaking topics suggestions, but I work with people because
I customize every talk that I give.
Speaker 4: But people can go there.
Speaker 5: They can contact me through the website or they can
just email me at speaker at Michael hinkson dot com.
I mentioned earlier we do a podcast called Unstoppable Mindset
where inclusion, diversity, and the unexpected meat and it's wordered
that way very deliberately because most of the so called
diversity experts never talk about disabilities. And my position is
you are inclusive or you're not. There's no middle ground,
so it's like Yoda yoa, there's no try do or
do not anyway. So inclusion, diversity and the unexpected is
anything that doesn't have anything to do with inclusion or diversity,
which is both things. We're always looking for people to
come on the podcast. It's a conversation. We talk about
things that they want to talk about. So if anybody
would love to be a guest, we're always looking for guests,
and you can email me again at speaker at Michael
hinkson dot com or go to Michael hinkson dot com
slash podcast. But love to meet folks. We always looking
for speaking engagements and I hope people will find opportunities
and bring us in. Like I said, I customize every
talk and I work with people to make sure that
we deliver the messages that they need us to deliver,
which is my goal.
Speaker 2: There, you go, great, Well, we'll make sure we get
that posted Michael hinkson dot com and you guys can
check all that out. See if Michael can come and
speak and share his wisdom with you. More importantly, the
wisdom of all his guide dogs. That's the most important
thing we need.
Speaker 5: And when I go somewhere, Alimo comes along. And when
we're done speaking, we usually sell books. And what I
do because there's a hard and fast rule dog and harness.
Do not touch, interact with, or talk to the dog
because the harness is the signal that the dog is working.
A few people have ignored that and they get in
trouble for it. But when we're selling books, I always
take the harness off attached Alamo to a table leg
and he's the best book salesperson in the world and
people love to pet him and he'll take that all
day long.
Speaker 4: So it's great.
Speaker 2: So it's a win win. It is all right. Well,
everybody keep track of what's going on at Michael hinkson
dot com. Pick up copies of both Thunderdog and the
latest Live Like a Guide Dog and Learn lessons.
Speaker 5: We also have a book for youth called Running with
rosel that was published in late twenty thirteen, and it's
kind of more about me growing up and Roselle growing
up and how we met, so it's not nearly as
much about the World Trade Center. But it is also
available through Amazon, so Running with Roselle is out there
as well.
Speaker 2: Nice, nice, all right, Well, everybody pick up copies of
those books, Live and Learn from Michael as well as
all his wonderful guide dogs for sure, and catch hopefully
Michael at your event or an event somewhere close to you.
And more importantly, you get to spend some time with Alamo.
That's the big win, absolutely So well, thank you for
coming on the show, Michael. I appreciate it, and we'll
look forward to chatting with you again sometime real soon.
Speaker 4: Thank you my pleasure anytime. Why well, we're coming in.
Speaker 2: The show today. I want to thank everyone for listening
to Animal Rights on pet Life Radio. I want to
thank the producers and sponsors for making this show possible.
Speaker 5: If you have any.
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and who knows, you may be the next guest on
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