Adapting Your Way Forward with Hina Shahid

“There’s no formula [for] resilience. You just have to keep on trying and things work out. Sometimes they don’t go as planned, and sometimes not going as planned works out even better.” –Hina Shahid

Designer and design educator Hina Shahid shares her personal story of adaptation and resilience as a mom, design entrepreneur, fourth generation immigrant, and social justice advocate.

More About Hina:

Hina is a strategic designer, a design educator, and a design entrepreneur. She is passionate about designing alternative solutions to, and imagining new realities. In her 14 year career as a designer, strategist and researcher she helped businesses with design-led innovation, and wants to bring that expertise to the social enterprise space.

Highlights

• How viewing things in your life as experiments can make you more resilient
• How Hina adapted to the new stressors of the COVID-10 pandemic – and how it changed her relationship with her toddler
• Why Hina believes that working less makes her more productive 
• A counterintuitive perspective from design school that always makes Hina’s work better
• The surprising language hurdle Hina experienced when she immigrated from her native Pakistan to the US – even though she’s a fluent English speaker
• How Hina knows when she’s taken adapting to her environment too far and is out of alignment with who she is (and when being true to herself just wasn’t her first priority)
• The English language books Hina read growing up and how they gave her a window into American and British culture as a teenager (hint: they’re some of my favorite books too!)
• Hina’s definition of resilience (I LOVED this!)
• Why Hina advocates for pluralism instead of diversity and what that means to how we solve problems as a human race
• Hina’s very wise definition of self-care

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

The 1619 Project (New York Times)

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures by America Ferrera

Project Pluralist

Connect with Hina: Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Twitter

Thank You for Listening!

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