#189: The Perils Of Virtual Communication And The Future Of The Speaking Business With Dr. Nick Morgan

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your Conscious Pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I am sitting in my podcast seat today. This is the seat for a lot of things these days, but this particular task in the day is actually Something I really look forward to deriving so much pleasure out of the conversations that I'm having with people that I've known for years or followed for years, you know, friends and colleagues and even some people that I've never met before, especially those conversations have been really breathtaking. And I feel like I'm on my growth edge when I'm speaking to somebody new. And there's so much that I want to learn, questions that I have. Hopefully you guys are getting tremendous value out of these conversations for yourself. I'm trying to sort of intuit. what it is that I'd want to know and assume that if you're following this, if you're subscribed to the show, that these are things you want to know as well. Today's guest is no exception to what I've just said out there. He is somebody that has been doing some pretty amazing things in the world and helping people for a number of years. I've been following him sort of over the last year or so and reached out to see if he had an interest in engaging in a conversation about what's going on in the world right now. And I think he's a sort of uniquely situated to provide some perspective there. And I'm just in great anticipation and feeling quite grateful that I'm gonna have Dr. Nick Morgan with us. He is one of America's top communication speakers, theorists, and coaches. A passionate teacher, he is committed to helping people find clarity in their thinking and ideas and then delivering them with panache. I've interviewed a lot of people I have not until this moment had anybody that has part of their introduction the use of that word panache. So I'm already very, very happy about that. Great word. He has been commissioned by Fortune 50 companies to write for many CEOs and presidents. He's coached people to give congressional testimony, to appear in the media, and to deliver unforgettable TED Talks, something that is really near and dear to my own heart. And he himself has spoken, led conferences, moderated panels at venues around the world. During the last election cycle, in fact, he provided expert commentary on the presidential debates for CNN. His latest book, Can You Hear Me? On the Perils of Virtual Communication, published by Harvard in 2018, is definitely a topic that we're going to have on the agenda today given what's going on in the world. Welcome to the show, Nick. It's a pleasure to have you with us.

Adam, it's a great pleasure to be with you. This is a cool connection and not just because of where we are both in the Massachusetts area.

You and I just chatting before we hit the play button on this thing, are you in Massachusetts at this moment?

Yeah, I'm in just outside of Boston, so I'm very envious of you and your vacation isle.

Oh no, I found out, right?

I won't specify the place because I don't want you to—

No, no, I'm on— it's cool. Martha's Vineyard. Good luck finding me. We're in the woods. But tucked away nicely, quietly.

How's that witness protection program working out? Is that going well?

The jig is up for me now. I mean, seriously, go look for a bald guy with a beard on this island. You know, you got a few to choose from. I'll just put it that way. So it's really ironic. This will have nothing to do with our conversation, except it has everything to do with everything. Only 20 minutes ago, I was on a Zoom call with an old college buddy. So my wife, Randi, and I, we met at UMass Amherst back in— I don't want to say the year. I'll just say we're going to be married next week, 31 years. So it's longer than that ago. And this guy, Joe, we were housemates. We were all, you know, so tight back in the day. He was at our wedding. We haven't seen him, haven't spoken to him in probably 30 years or something like this. A long, long time. And he's going through a pivot of his own right now. And what he had reached out because through his just stuff that's happening in his career life, found the book Pivot and then went and did some more looking and found a TED Talk and some other things. And he goes, I know that guy. He had a lot more hair back then, but I know that guy. So just, you know, only moments ago, just reconnecting with an old Massachusetts buddy who still lives in the Great state. So no accidents. Nick, I'd love for folks to know a little bit more about you. And I read this very cool bio. I mean, this is greatly, just wonderfully written bio. You know, I'm normally scribbling things out on people's bios. They're awful, but this is great. And what I'd love is for you to share one thing that's not a part of that bio that you'd like for people to know about at the outset.

Sure. So it all started with a phone call. I was at the University of Virginia. I was teaching the literature of death and Victorian lit. It's a toss-up as to which it was harder to get the students excited about. And I got this phone call from a friend of mine who had become the State Secretary of Education in Virginia. And he said, Nick, the previous speechwriter has just had a nervous breakdown and had to quit. How would you like to replace him on short notice? The governor needs a speechwriter. And I said yes, just because I had a PhD in rhetoric and I was fascinated with public speaking and I had taught it occasionally, but I hadn't had any practical in-the-trenches experience like that. What I should have asked was, why did the previous speechwriter have a nervous breakdown? That was kind of the obvious question that I failed to ask until later. It turned out it was from overwork. I wrote 5 speeches a day for the remaining 2 years of the governor's term, 7 days a week. And I only had one day off and that was Christmas Day, which happens to be my birthday. And I'd announced to everybody in advance that I was taking the day off, whether they liked it or not. Don't call me on Christmas. I said, I'm going to be in the bosom of my family having homemade wine that my father-in-law prepares. It's not that great, but it's wine. And it was Christmas. So naturally the phone rings 1 o'clock on Christmas Day. It's the chief of staff, and he says, Nick, get your butt down here. We decided to work on the speech after all. The governor was bored on Christmas, too much food, and so he wants to get to work. I said, I can't. This is my day off. He said, no, it's not. This is a workday now. And I played my trump card. I said, I've had 2 glasses of homemade wine. Who knows what the alcohol content is? I can't be driving out there. It'll cause an incident. The local paper will pick it up. A DUI from a governor's aide, that would be disastrous. He says, don't worry. I'll send the state police to pick you up. So 20 minutes later, 2 state police cars with the lights flashing show up at my door. To this day, my dear friends down in Richmond are convinced I was arrested on Christmas Day and there's nothing I can say. I think they just liked the story. They don't want to hear any explanation. So that's how it started. That's how I got into the speech writing and coaching business. I worked for a couple of big consulting firms in the '90s and then started my own company, Public Words, in '97. So that's a long history.

It all began by getting arrested on your birthday.

Exactly. Now, who can claim that?

I think we validated that whole story at this point. Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. It's funny, I said in the sort of intro that I came to know of you by reading your blog on publicwords.com, and there'll be in the show notes more information about that, but just really impressed with the approach that you were taking to the business. What was it that inspired you to start? You said 1997 is when that began for you? Yeah. Blogging was a pretty new thing at that time, I would say.

I didn't start the blog until 2006, but that was still early days for the blog. I've been blogging essentially forever. Yeah. And we switched from one provider to another at one point. Don't ever try to move. We had over 1,500 blog posts and what a nightmare that was. But all the broken links, you name it. But in '97, the internet was just starting to take off and I'd been doing some work coaching an IT company of researchers and they were speaking and they were rock stars. Who knew that IT people would be rock stars? And they're not necessarily the world's greatest speakers. They're really smart. They're engineers, but it's not their normal thing to do. So they needed a coach and that's how I got started and created enough of a network that I could do my own thing, start my own business and never looked back.

Yeah. This is a pretty interesting time. for the book that you last wrote, I think, to be out there. Let's talk about what the perils of virtual communication are, because right now that's pretty much the main form of communication. Obviously, if you're an investor in Zoom stock, you would have been doing pretty well at this point. We were using Zoom about 7 years ago, I think 6, 7 years ago with our company, and then started to tell people about it, how much just easier it was than some of the other platforms. But What are some of the big perils right now of virtual communication as you see it?

Well, the biggest thing, the first thing that everybody has to understand is that what we humans care about way more than we care about specific words when we're communicating is we care about each other's intent. So I want to know, are you a trustworthy guy? What do you mean to me? Are you going to be good to me or bad to me? And if I work with you, then I want to know, can I trust you? Are you going to be on my side when I propose something? Are you going to work against me? These are kind of essential fundamental questions about intent. That's what we care about. Face-to-face, you can easily and quickly and unconsciously get a read on the other person's intent. You can tell whether you think this person's a straight-up person or not, and whether they mean you well or not. In the virtual world, that's incredibly hard to get. So all that information, all that feedback that you normally get about the other person's intent is just instantly cut out. Now you get a little bit of it, and we can talk about the ways in which you get both good and deceptive information on video conferencing and certainly on audio conferences. Text-based communications, of course, are the worst. Uh, but all 3 of those virtual means of communication are fraught with danger for reading of intent. We think we're getting the intent 90% of the time. That's what the research shows. We're actually only correct about 50% of the time. So there's this big gap in intent and accurate understanding of intent. And how do we fill that gap? We fill it with negativity. Now, That sounds like we're bad people. We're not. There's a good reason for that. There's a good reason to fill that gap with negativity, and that's survival. If I assume the worst, then I'm not going to be caught by surprise. Imagine early hominid ancestor walking through the jungle. If you assume that every shadow is a tiger, you're going to be the one who survives. So you may be a little anxious, but we humans therefore have evolved to be an anxious species. So when you don't give us information, When I don't know what your intent is, I'm going to fill it with negative assumptions. So it's understanding how difficult it is to get intent across in the virtual world, and then understanding the negativity of bias toward that intent. And you've got the virtual world communicating the virtual world summed up very, very precisely.

Nick, that is fascinating to me. It seems as though what I'm hearing you say is that when we can't determine someone's intent, There's this uncertainty. And we know as human creatures, we don't like uncertainty very much. We don't like the unknown. And when—

Exactly.

With the unknown, we sort of make up stories. And a lot of those stories are kind of fear-based stories. And it's interesting too, because let's say we're in a typical Zoom meeting, which is something that people are just so familiar with now, or maybe it's using a different platform. But, but in any event that you're in this virtual training space, And you're wanting to be able to be effective in your communication. Are you saying that what's happening there is that the communication itself is less effective because you can't see a person's body language? You can't get sort of the cues that would otherwise clue you in to the person's true intent? Is that something that's happening?

Yeah, that's absolutely part of what's going on, on a video conferencing system like Zoom. The person is visible but small. So it's just a little harder to read that body language in the same intuitive, easy way that our unconscious minds read each other's body language when we're together, when we're face-to-face. But there are a couple of other subtleties that go on in video conferencing in general world that add to the difficulty. And those are less obvious. So the first one is there is, despite the best efforts of the engineers who created video conferencing, There's a slight lag between the image and the sound. And they've got it down to the place, thanks to bandwidth and thanks to clever engineering, to where you're not consciously aware of it, but unconsciously you pick it up as a slight lag. So it looks like the other person you're talking to is having a constant series of little strokes and can't talk back. And so you assume that the other person is less competent than they are. I was gonna say something ruder, but let's keep it polite.

Oh, feel free. Yeah. So we love that kind of dirty talk.

So the other person assumes you're an idiot most of the time. And that kind of dumbing down response is one of the things that makes it difficult. Another one, and this one gets a little geeky, but it's important for your listeners and viewers to understand. And that is we have this 6th sense called proprioception and they don't teach it in school. They should. They don't. Beyond the 5 senses, the 6th sense is how we keep track of where we are in space. So this is the sense that allows you not to bump into things even when your vision is not 100%. And by the way, it goes 24/7. So when you're asleep, if you sleep with a partner, you don't roll over and whack your partner in the face. If you ever wondered why that was the case, it's not because you're a genius. It's because you've got this 6th sense called proprioception. Keeps track of where you are in space and where the people around you are in space. Now, why is that important in the virtual world? Because when you see an image that's about an arm's length away on a computer screen, your proprioception sense says, whoa, that person's close. I should take action. I should prepare for somebody coming into my intimate space. And the question is immediately asked by your unconscious mind, friend or foe?

Hmm.

All right. But what happens is because the picture is too small for somebody who's theoretically 2.5, 3 feet away, your proprioception sense can't figure that out. And so it gets confused. And what it does is it responds with stress, fight, flight, or freeze, as we call it, the adrenaline response. And so you get this low-level adrenaline response, this low-level adrenaline enhancement while you're on video conferencing. That makes it harder for you to evaluate the other person, to read their body language, even to participate intelligently in the conversation. And that's, by the way, why we get what everybody calls Zoom fatigue these days, because by the end of several of these sessions with your slightly elevated heart rate, slightly elevated stress response, adrenaline going through your system, low levels, you're wiped out.

I think it's a very simple explanation for something that That I think many people are kind of confused about. Why is it that they're so fatigued from Zoom? And it's that cortisol or that adrenaline that's sort of coursing this low-level anxiety that we're kind of living with. And it's interesting too, I just found this out. You've explained it to me now, so I understand why it is, but we were playing music. We were trying to get together with a group of people and just play guitar and sing together, but it was always just a little off. And we're like, you know, why can't you keep up? Always thought somebody else was lagging behind, you know? It's like, I know I'm playing in time, I'm having a great time, but what are you doing? You know, now it explains that. So this is what we're dealing with now. And I'm not judging it. I think it's actually brilliant that we have the technology to be able to connect the way we can, as imperfectly, I guess, as we can. But is there something that we can do? Let's say like you're going to put on an event or a workshop for some part of your office, let's say.

Mm-hmm.

And you're aware that these things are issues. What can you do? Is there anything that can be done about this other than just to make people aware of it? And is making people aware of it at the start when you're setting a context, let's say, does that in fact alleviate some of the fight and flight response and some of the, hey, you're— look at this idiot, can't even, you know, those judgments?

So unfortunately, the telling people intellectually about the emotional difficulties that we have with Zoom doesn't help much. And the reason for that is your unconscious mind responds before the conscious mind does. It's a couple of milliseconds. ahead of it. And so before you can stop yourself and go, really, that other person I know is very competent and very nice, your unconscious mind has already thought idiot and it's too late. And I would just remind viewers who have ever gotten the email from a boss or from a colleague, we've got to talk. I'll just ask you, did you ever assume that the other person wanted to talk about something good? No, never. And that's that unconscious response kicking in. It's the uncertainty and the negative bias. So that's the reason why that doesn't help much. There are things you can do and you'd asked about those. I can jump into those if you want, but unfortunately just explaining why it's hard doesn't help much.

Well, let me ask it a little differently and then we can jump into some other things too. Do you think it does any harm in sort of setting out at the beginning as a part of how you create a context that, hey, just to let you know, this is what's actually happening. Sort of on an unconscious or on a subconscious level. Does it help? Or you said it may not help, but will it hurt? Because I'm actually thinking this is a good thing to do.

No, I think it is a good thing to do. I'm just saying it doesn't help stop that instant response. But I think it's very helpful for people to understand the context. It's reassuring. As you reacted, it's good to know, oh, that's why I feel tired. It's not because there's something wrong with me. It's because that's the way I'm hardwired and we're all hardwired. So I think it is helpful. It's reassuring and just having a rational explanation for why these strange things are going on during this stressful time, I think, is helpful.

And it's good to know for me personally that I can't sort of get ahead of people judging me as an idiot. It would have been so great if that was the case, but obviously it's so quick. It's so instantaneous. That's, that's happened many times in my life. So—

Yeah, I think what you need to do, Adam, is just immediately the first thing out of your mouth should be, I'm a genius. I'm a genius. Just remember that. See how that works out.

I'm gonna try it.

Yeah, good luck.

Wow, the pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid, and if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different, something new, but the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. So other things tactically that can be done, I mean, again, so many people are delivering these kind of trainings or participating in them.

Yeah, I think the first thing to keep in mind is that The power dynamic, and I don't mean that in a sort of controlling evil way, but just the relationship between speaker, let's say, and audience or instructor and trainees, people in the room, changes online. And think about a traditional keynote speaker. He or she comes out on a stage that's elevated above the audience. The audience is in the dark. The speaker is lit up. There's applause. And there's a great introduction and there may even be music and there's, the stage is decorated. There's a lot of implicit signals that this person is important. And there's an inequality that the speaker learns to use to his or her advantage to help the audience focus. And it's all good to help the audience focus, to help the audience pay attention and get a good experience out of it, right? That's why we do those things. Because we say this hour is special, this person has something interesting to say to us. That's sort of the built-in presumption. In the online world, we're all on the same computer network. We're just all nodes on a network. It's all equalized. All equalized. So you have to start from the assumption that this is one big democracy. One big democracy. And everybody's input therefore feels as important as everybody else's. And so that means a couple of things. First of all, you've simply got to make everybody include themselves. You've got to get— put everybody to work. Everybody has to be in on it. And then second, you've got to understand that if you're not allowing other people to have their voice and to express their opinion, they're just going to tune out. They're going to cut the link. It's so easy to leave these settings. You don't— those of us who remember going to conferences, I hope that's everybody. You remember what it was like to sit in the audience.

It's a mythical time.

Yeah, it was a beautiful golden era that we can hardly remember now. But remember that sitting in the audience and maybe you had to leave for one reason or another, a call of nature, or you got an emergency phone call or something, a text saying there was some reason why, or you had another meeting to go to. And it was awkward to get up in the middle of this thing and walk out. It was. And you watch the body language of people leaving early and they've got their heads down. They're trying to minimize themselves to be invisible as they go out, right? None of that happens online. Online, you just click, you just go. And so if you don't give people a reason both to participate and then to feel like their voices are being heard, they're part of this new network that you created, then the feeling is not going to be good and they're not going to be enthusiastic. They'll just leave.

They'll just check out whether they physically, as you say, sort of turn their camera off and then go to the loo or whatever they, you know, pick up a paper. They just mentally check out. So I think for those folks that are out there thinking that they either are already leading groups online or they're wanting to step up and do that kind of thing, part of my takeaway here is that you've got to have a lot of interactivity. It's different. I was just on with Eileen McDarg. She's an experienced public speaker, many, many years. And we both speak about resilience. And so we had a conversation earlier today. And that's one of the things that when typically you're on a stage, it's less conversational. I always want— wanted a lot of engagements, kind of how I was trained. So there was quite a bit, but even still, that's a different dynamic, less conversational. Whereas right now in this arena, as you said, for more eloquently than I'm about to say, that interaction, that interactivity is really how you not only keep people sort of there and present. But there's something more going on that you just sort of unearthed for us, which is that there isn't this sort of importantness to the person who's, say, leading, that all eyes should be on them. The lights are on them. You're sort of being rude if you're not paying attention, you're not at least staying in the room in body. Very, very different situation now. So if you're leading a group or you're facilitating for someone else for, for hire, let's say, I think it's really good practice. in that period of time, whether it's 30 minutes or 45 or an hour or something, that there's just a lot more conversation and interaction going on than the classic, here, let me just show you my slide deck, let me hit you with all my great stories, and I'll take my check and head to the airport kind of thing.

Yeah, I mean, we like interactive speeches, audiences do, and they consistently rate them higher. So I'm glad to hear you were— when it was face-to-face, you were keen on interactivity. They consistently rate interactive speakers higher than ones who just preach more. But it's still the case with a keynote speech. If you're a good charismatic kind of speaker, you could talk for 45 and then do your 15 Q&A and out you go. There's the hour. You can't do that online. You simply cannot deliver that standard speech online and expect people to get the same thing out of it. They won't. And so I was arguing with an old friend of mine the other day, can you go 5 minutes or 10 minutes without interactivity?

Yes.

And we had a vicious argument about that. And I would say the jury's out, you know, if you're good, and you got something really interesting to say and you've got the audience involved, then probably you can go as much as 10. But I would use that as a good rule of thumb and think and err toward 5 minutes. Every 5 minutes, look for some way to bring the people in, whether it's an online chat comment or a vote or a poll or those sort of things. That's the good news about video conferencing and these platforms. They give us the opportunity to have these kind of virtual interactions, so use them.

Yes. Are you currently working with TED speakers as well? Is that still part of your daily work?

Oh, absolutely. We— well, I mean, at the moment we're not prepping a lot of TED Talks, but just because like everything else it slowed down. But I'm still involved in the TED world and I've done a number of them over the years. I love TED. I love the format. I think it did a huge amount to sort of elevate public speaking in general and It did. That's all to the good. I think the only thing you could critique it for is it made all public speakers think they could be rock stars.

Aren't all public speakers rock stars?

Yeah, I love all my children equally.

Are you gonna just like tear every vestige of what I consider truth out from under me today, Nick?

Absolutely not.

Oh my gosh.

You're

a rock star. Oh, thank God you said that. I want to ask you about your own personal definition of resilience. I've got a couple of questions that are really important to this community. And so I'll cover those now. How would you define resilience?

I'm with the Chinese on this one. The Chinese have a saying, and I can never remember whether it's fall down 8 times, get up 9, or fall down 9 times, get up 10. It's one of those two. I think resilience is about putting yourself back together after you've been punched in the gut or something tough has been dealt to you. I had a personal pivot a couple of years ago. My spouse left me and I was devastated and putting myself back together was the hardest thing I ever did. And it also, in retrospect, was one of the better learning experiences for me. I've meditated long and hard about why the marriage had failed and spent a lot of time Thinking about how I needed to be a different person to make it better. And so at this point, at this remove, I can say I'm grateful for that. Not easy to say.

Yeah.

But at this point, I am now grateful. But at the time, it was devastating. So I would say resilience for me is getting back up and then owning the experience, understanding what your role was in it, what was your fault, what wasn't your fault, or what happened because of you. Let's take the word fault out of it and What was external to you? Understanding those things and any experience can be this huge learning opportunity. Learning is not always fun. It can be painful. But once you're through it, it's amazing. And you never want to go back. You never want to say, yeah, put me back in that pre-time before I knew what I knew, because that's not a place you want to go back to once you know something larger and bigger and better.

Agreed. Agreed. If you were creating a recipe for what resilience looks like. There's a lot of people that are having to pivot at the moment. And I talked about that before we started. This is a time of pandemic change and something the likes that many of us, most of us haven't seen. And the only thing that even sort of resembles it in memory for me is 9/11. Let's look at even just our own industry. People had speaking gigs booked, many dozens or more, have been doing this work for a long, long time, and most, if not all, of those events have either been canceled or moved to a date uncertain. Whole industry has just sort of changed. So I know you speak to our industry a lot, so that is a part of our audience now. Those folks, they've got to be resilient. What does that recipe for resilience look like if you're a, you know, a public speaker who, let's say, is mid-career? You know, got started not just yesterday, but has house mortgage, car, kids, and all the rest sort of tied to their speaking income. And now this thing comes along and just literally stops it on a dime. They've got to be resilient. What is, what does that look like?

It's brutal. There are very few, as you say, it's very hard to point to other times in our experience where you could go from 95% booked to zero in a couple of weeks, which is what happened to a lot of speakers. Very good speakers, speakers who grace the keynote stages of great conferences around the world. So it's just brutal. And we can all say, you can redesign your speeches and pick up the slack with some virtual stuff, but it's not going to be the same. It's not going to be 100% of that. So I would say resilience, and this is a tough message. It's much easier for me to say this than it is for anybody to hear it, but resilience is now going, okay, This is like a season-ending injury for a sports player. And what do you do when that happens? Well, this is the time to write the book. This is the time to redo the speech. This is the time to do that kind of basic homework. And I just hope that you've got enough salted bae so that you can get through it, or you've got a supportive spouse, or you've got enough money in the bank. Let's be blunt, so you can get through the time. Of course, there are things you can do. You do what you have to do to pick up a bit of the slack. But if you want to stay in the speaking business, I will tell you, when it comes back, it will come back twice as strong as ever, or 10 times as strong as ever. It did after 9/11. It did after the 2008-2009 so-called Great Recession, which doesn't look so great anymore from this standpoint. And it will again in 2021. Maybe 2022. We just don't know. We're all hoping it's going to come back vaccine-enabled by the end of this year, the beginning of next, but we don't know. So it's potentially a long haul. And so this is the time to do that pivot, to use your word, toward develop the new content, develop the new speech. A friend of mine whom I have deep reverence for and is a great speaker and always allows me to use his name, Josh Linkner, He's also a jazz guitarist. And I asked him how he was dealing with this. And he said, I'm treating it like a band that's been on the road, no time to develop new material. So now I'm going to the studio and I'm going to develop a bunch of new material as long as this lasts. So when the road happens again, I'll be ready to go out the road with a bunch of new material back better than ever. So that's what resilience means in the speaking business. And boy, is it hard.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary Resilience Assessment Tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. Thank you for going into it at that depth, Nick. And something you said to me that I really want to just sort of restate because I personally, it landed, was the distinction between a season-ending injury. Because analogies are just great because they create a visual for people and you don't have to be a sports fan to get this. There's a difference between a season-ending injury and a career-ending injury.

Yeah.

And I think part of how you are tackling this now and what will help you to be more resilient has a lot to do with the way you see it, the way you frame this whole situation. And reframing things is a really important element of what we've found through research. And we've studied thousands and thousands of people in all walks of life and business, et cetera, that the most resilient people have this capacity to reframe things. Almost automatically, but even by way of training. At least that's the good news. The silver lining is you can actually learn how to do this. And you just helped us with a reframe because frankly, if you realize that this might be a season-ending kind of a thing, then yeah, what are you doing? You're rehabbing, you're working on yourself. I love that Josh's own example of that being like a band that's now going to work on new material because you just can't be on the road, but it doesn't mean it's career— it's a career-ending thing. And what's also great that you threw in there that I think people absolutely crave hearing is that your experience of having been through the cycle at least 2 other times where there was this sort of very unexpected macro event that changed the landscape for a period of time, that after that event cleared, whether it was 9/11 or the— you said the financial crisis started in 2008— that the market for the work that many of us do was even stronger upon return.

That's right. It came back stronger than ever. The speaking business starting in about late 2009, early 2010 became better. And the last 10 years was better than we've ever seen. But yeah, the same thing happened after 9/11. Those of us who are old enough to remember, it's hard to imagine, but there are people who've been born since 9/11 now that are grownups. Yeah. Go figure. You know, people wouldn't get on a plane. Essentially, the conference business just stopped for 9 months. And then everybody got back on planes and there was more air traffic, more conferences than ever. So the same thing will happen. And I'll just give one more analogy, which I happened to be doing a little research on recently. And that is the Spanish flu from the second decade of the 1900s. Most of us have heard a reference to that. It killed more people than World War I. And people may not be aware of is that for 2 years, essentially, the world was shut down much the way it is now. Only it was scarier in many ways because people then didn't have the medical knowledge that we do, and they weren't working on a vaccine. There was still a lot of witchcraft in their thinking about medicine. And so there was a huge amount of fear, and people talked about it in exactly the same way they're talking about it now— the fear of contagion, the fear of getting too close to other people. And so the world was put on hold in a very eerily similar way. And what happened after that? We got the Roaring Twenties. People went out and partied for a decade. So that's what happens when you confine human beings, when you build up that urge to connect. Humans have a deep urge to connect with each other. And when you build that up and when you frustrate that for a year or 2 years, it comes back delightfully stronger than ever. So that's what will happen. However long it takes this time too.

So we talk a lot about, and our research finds that creating rituals are very important when it comes to how you develop that strength, that internal strength, that fortitude, that grit, that resilience. Is there a particular ritual that you have that you use on a daily basis that keeps your head— your head looks like it's on straight. I'm going to look carefully at you now. It seems like your head's on pretty straight. So Is there a ritual to help you to do that?

Well, I do 4 things every day that— so I don't know if those count as rituals so much, but I exercise every day. I have to do that just because I have a very slow metabolism. So if I don't, I'll balloon up to about 300 pounds in no time. I'll have fun doing it, but it's much harder to lose it than it is to put it on. So I exercise every day. I meditate every day. That's the closest thing, I guess, to a ritual. And I'm an amateur musician, so I play guitar and piano. So I do that every day. And that's very helpful for letting go of the stresses of the day. And then finally, I'm a writer, so I always make sure I write something every day. So those are my, those are my activities. Yeah. Call them rituals if you like. They're ritualistic for me, certainly.

Yeah. You know, they're habits, but we think of, or at least I like to think of rituals as something you do consciously. And sometimes habits are the, you know, the hand you brush your teeth with and don't think about it. So, The last question I've got for you, Nick, and this is one in particular that I know our audience really appreciates. So I'm going to ask you this question. Do you love your life?

I sure do. Somebody asked me this the other day. He says, Nick, you've been doing this since '97. You've had a great run. You could just take this as a sign to retire, take the rest of your life off. And would you do that? And I said, no way. I'm just having too much fun. Even virtually connecting with people is what floats my boat. So it's just endlessly interesting. I never know what new world of knowledge and experience and what new stories I'm going to run across. That's such a thrill. Yeah, I do love it.

Good. Well, you answered the second part of the question, which was why. And, um, so as we sign off from this episode, I will restate my own waking ritual, which was the topic of my own TED Talk. regarding how it is that we deal with adversity in our lives. And the question for me and the question I posed to the audience that day, which was met controversially, not at the time, but in comments on YouTube once it was released, actually, was this idea of whether you could love your life no matter what. And it's this idea of no matter what, I think that people are grappling with and always do. And right now have more fodder there than they probably would like. But I have a simple sort of way to wake up in the morning that sort of hacks that. And that is to wake up to begin with. So it's not a guarantee. It's not a given that we'll all get to wake up again tomorrow. We did today. You and I evidently are sort of at least half awake, I would say, today. And if we're really fortunate, we'll get to wake up again tomorrow. And if you're one of those fortunate ones that will have that happen for you. It's a moment you can pause and feel gratitude. The impact and all the research, all the science behind just the impact of gratitude is profound. And in particular, the impact of gratitude at the start of the day. Hmm. It's kind of like my grandmother would say, leaving the house on the right foot or planting a seed in soil versus trying to see something grow if you throw it out on concrete. So that first seed of the day can be gratitude by just acknowledging the fact that as you take your first conscious breath of the day, there are people who are taking their last breath in that exact same moment. And for me, I wanted to convert that thought and that intention, as you were speaking about earlier, into something that was sort of a catalyst for how my day would go. And so I decided I'd say something out loud. And the thing I've been saying for about 12 years now, every day when I wake up in morning, good, bad, or otherwise day, is I put my feet on the floor and I say those 4 words. I say, I love my life. And lately, comma, no matter what. So, with that, Nick, Dr. Morgan, been a pleasure to have you on the show today. I know people have gotten tremendous value out of this and I really appreciate your time.

Adam, it's been a great pleasure chatting with you. And who knew I'd get to connect with somebody, my new best friend in Martha's Vineyard. So very cool. Great to meet you.

Now you got a place you can go to go clamming and muscling and fishing and all that kind of thing.

It's all good.

All right. Well, listen, everybody, please check the show notes for more information about Public Words and look for a really great video series called Just One Question, as well as other information about what Nick is up to. And I would say get his book, Can You Hear Me? I think it's really, really relevant right now, especially. And we'd love to hear from you, get your comments and questions and thoughts. You go to adamarkel.com/podcast to get access to that. We answer everything and we just really appreciate you being a part of this community. So, I'll say ciao for now.

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