"I had let my world get too small. All my connections were through my job. And so I was like, 'I don't want to do that again, and I also don't want to get my validation all through my job.'"
Listen now:
Jessica Bozsan is a content strategist and marketer based in Kentucky, with a career spanning communications, personal finance, and consumer brands, including 15 years at a Kroger subsidiary. After an unexpected firing cracked her world open, she started a newsletter, landed consulting work, and wrote a book. That book, Close Enough, introduces the Kindly Framework - a step-by-step approach to making empathy explicit in business. She's now turning it into an app.
📚 What You'll Learn
Why getting fired can be a catalyst and the one practical move that helped Jess rebuild her confidence and career faster than she expected.
The difference between tacit and explicit knowledge and why making empathy explicit is one of the most important things we can do right now as AI takes over the processy stuff.
The Kindly Framework: a five-step approach any brand, solopreneur, or team can use to treat their customer like a real person, not a data point.
✍️ Some Takeaways
When your world gets too small, a crisis can force you to rebuild it better.
Jess had spent 15 years at one company, and when she was let go, she realised almost all of her connections ran through that job. Instead of turning inward, she reached out, and that outreach led to a book recommendation, consulting gigs, a newsletter, and eventually Generalist World. Her reframe: a network isn't just a career tool, it's a safety web. The time to build it is before you need it. And the goal isn't contacts, it's cheerleaders who actively want to see you win.
Empathy is a skill, not a personality trait, and most organisations are letting it go invisible.
Jess draws a sharp distinction between tacit knowledge (things you just know, absorbed through years of doing) and explicit knowledge (written down, teachable, shareable). Her argument: empathy has always lived in the tacit - baked into instinct and good management. But as AI gets trained on our outputs without our context, that understanding becomes invisible and unexamined. The answer isn't to resist AI. It's to write the human stuff down before it disappears into the model.
The Kindly Framework: five steps to stop treating your customer like a demographic.
Know your customer intimately (think: character in a novel, not a zip code).
Imagine their pain points (jobs-to-be-done meets solutions journalism).
Name the next (what's the one step you can own right now?).
Dream their future (play the long game - Jess uses the homeowner journey as an example: you might need to hold someone's hand for a decade before they're ready to buy).
L-Y stands for laughter, y'all, and it's maybe the most underused tool in brand building. Oatly, Liquid Death, Duolingo: humour isn't the icing, it's the whole cake.
Posting, journaling, frameworks - it's all the same muscle.
Jess committed to posting on LinkedIn every workday for all of March. At the start it was a slog. By the end, she was faster, less precious about it, and genuinely surprised by the IRL ripple effect - people pinging her at work, stopping her to say they'd read her newsletter. The throughline across everything she talks about - content, empathy, journaling, building frameworks is that the practice is the point. You don't figure it out first and then start. You start, and the figuring out happens in the doing.
Links
Where to find Jessica Bozsan
Where to find Milly
Website: http://www.millytamati.com/
Generalist World Resources
🙏 Special thanks to our podcast producer James McKinven! (get in touch for all your podcast needs, he’s really great!)
