Adam Markel Keynote Speaker Demo - r72619

Resilience is not just about the physical. It's mental, probably more mental than anything else. It's emotional, it's even spiritual. In other words, it's holistic. We're talking about an integrative approach to resilience. And we have, in our research, discovered that there are four particular traits when it comes to resilient people. And I want to share those with you because many of you not only are resilient, but where you're lacking in some resilience, you can create it. It's something that you can learn. That's what the studies show. So the first step is to reframe. You know, how many of you remember what happened last year in a Starbucks store in Philadelphia last April? Anybody remember what happened? Yeah. Two African American men were arrested for apparently using the restroom. Can you imagine? You're Kevin Johnson, the CEO of Starbucks, and you get that phone call. Everybody pick up your phone. Go ahead, pick up your phone. Here, you've just been promoted to CEO. You're the CEO of Starbucks, publicly traded company. And on the other end, you hear these words. One of our managers arrested two guys in a Starbucks for using the bathroom. Click. What do you do? What do you do with that information? Here's the thing about life, about business. Stuff is happening all the time. Stuff is hitting us all the time. Change is happening constantly. Things we don't expect are happening all the time. And Kevin Johnson picks up that phone call. What do you think he was going to do? What do you think he was told to do? What was the conventional wisdom that his lawyers and others had told him? Fire the manager right off with her head. Blame someone, justify, explain. They're a public company. It could have cost them millions, hundreds of millions in market share. You know what he does? He gets on the. He gets on Good Morning America the next day, and he owns the whole situation. Says, I don't know what happened, but we're going to find out. What I can tell you is that this is not our company. This is not acceptable, and we're gonna do something about it. And a couple of months later, not only had he resolved the dispute with those two men, but he closed down 8,000 stores for four hours for something called unconscious bias training. I never even heard of that before. I was a lawyer for 18 years. Never heard of that. I don't know if Kevin Johnson ever heard of it, but it's a real thing. And four hours of training isn't going to solve it, is it? But it's a start. It was a Great start. Cost the company 11 million bucks to stand for something. That was a moment of reframe. For Kevin Johnson, that was a moment of truthfulness and transparency. He could have framed it a very different way. We're under threat. We gotta distance ourselves. We gotta do all the PR stuff, all the conventional stuff. Instead, he took a counterintuitive approach to it by owning it. He reframed. How many times in our lives we get hit with some information, something, and we tell ourselves a story about what it means. This is an opportunity in every instant. My wife reminds me of this all the time. What's the creative opportunity? I want you to write that question down. This is a key element of reframing. That's what Kevin Johnson did. He answered the question, what's the creative opportunity here? If I wasn't under threat, if I wasn't making up a story about all the worst possible case scenarios that could happen if I simply tell the truth, what would it look like? What's the creative opportunity? My grandmother, who has been. She passed away about 10 years ago, and I miss her every day. She used to make these little cakes, these tiny little cakes when I was a kid. They had this massive flavor. You just bite into. This tiny little cake was probably no bigger than a half dollar. And I bite into that cake, and it had this incredible flavor. And I would say to my grandmother, what do you have in this cake? And she said to me, adam, sometimes little things in life, little things can have a big impact. I've never forgotten that. She called those cakes little gems. Little things can have a big impact. We've got to find the little gem inside every situation that we find ourselves in. Victor Frankl wrote this incredible book, Man's Search for Meaning. He started writing that book, he started thinking about teaching people, sharing the meaning behind things, something he called meaning therapy. He started to develop that theory and that teaching when he was a concentration camp survivor. In the worst of situations, he was finding meaning. He was mining for meaning. That's step two. Resilient people find the meaning. They reframe, and then they find the meaning in things. Step three, we have to recalculate. We see this in our GPS all the time. Why should this be unusual? You make a wrong turn in the car. What does your GPS say to you when it talks to you? Does it say you're an idiot? I can't believe you did that. You've just been doing that your whole entire life. It's just like your father said. Is that what the GPS says to You. That's what we tell ourselves. Your GPS simply goes, what? Recalculate. Say it loud. Say it out loud. Recalculating. That's it. Or it might say it in a British accent. I love. You know, listening to a speaker yesterday, Val, you know, in her British accent. Recalculating. Ron, it's okay. Row it. Let's make a left up here. It's like, recalculate. Create a new vision. Revision. We're always revisioning. What's the problem with that? There's nothing we tell ourselves. It's a story. There's a problem with that. There's no problem. Not really. Nothing has any meaning. Say these words. Say nothing has meaning. Like, literally everybody in the room, please. Nothing has meaning except the meaning I give it. You give everything meaning. Nothing has any inherent meaning until you show up and you give it meaning. I do the same thing. We could simply just be the GPS and recalculate. Create a new. Get to the destination. Different way, different route. And the last thing. And this is really, really important. I'm going to spend just a couple of minutes here as we wrap up on rituals, those rituals to recover and recharge. And I'm going to guess that every single person in this room, this is the biggest challenge for you. Because workaholism isn't a thing of the past, it's a thing of the present. It's more present now than it was when I was a workaholic attorney. 80 hours a week, according to Elon Musk. I'm like a slacker. I'm sorry. 90 hours, 100, 110. These are aspirational qualities that many millennials are being brought up to think. This is what it means to be an entrepreneur. This is what it means to succeed in tech. Burning people out. You might be among them. What do we do about it? We've got to develop our resilience before we need it. That's what we did on the beach. We were prepared before we needed to be prepared. We were ready before we needed to be ready. So how do you take care of yourself is the question. Morning, afternoon and night. Mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually. As a CEO, I used to have a few rituals that I imparted to my teams. I'll share a couple of them with you now. 2 o' clock in the afternoon, 3 o' clock in the afternoon. We had set times. They had to go out. Everybody. People on the call team, the client care teams, the sales teams, had to have periods of the day where they went out and Just looked at something green. We lived. Our office was in San Diego. It was a little easier than in some places.

Like I was in Minnesota a couple of weeks ago.

Different environment. Go out and look at something white. But to take in some fresh air, take a walk, 20 minutes just to walk, clear your head, have a conversation with a colleague about something other than work. We'd have another ritual where on a particular day, it was Wednesdays, we'd ask everybody for just a half hour to text messages to people in their lives that they cared about. People that might have just not been telling. You know, saying to those people, I appreciate you, I'm grateful for you. I'm sorry, what? Whatever it would look like. Just spend a half hour texting people how you felt that was about emotional resilience, taking time to quietly sit, declutter your mind to meditate, or just to create stillness. I'm not a great meditator. I did a TED Talk about this a couple of months ago that just got released. And I declare in that TED Talk I'm a crummy meditator and I really am. But I believe in stillness and prayer, important things. I believe in the green drink, the power of the green drink. Start your day putting something good in your body. Drink lots of water. We've got this thing called constant cognitive arousal that we got to deal with. We're looking at our phones 150 times a day. When was the last time you took a vacation that you didn't check email? Any hands? Who remembers? Haha. How about a day when you didn't look at your cell phone? A cell phone free day. Any hands on that one? Couple of you. Nicely done. How about a meal that you ate? A meal with no cell phone on the table even. Right? Come with you. Good, good, good, good. Those hands are a signal to me that we're getting it right. We're starting to get the message that high performance isn't about exhaustion. It's not about burnout, it's about recovery. That's what athletes know, that's what Olympic athletes know. They've got to recover to come back. You got to let your muscles recover to be able to then expend them again. It's the same thing with us. And it's not about physical exhaustion. That's the easy one. It's mental exhaustion. How many of you take a little vulnerability, honesty? How many of you feel mentally exhausted a lot of the time? Thank you for that. We're all feeling that way. We've got to do something. We got to look out for each other. We've got to have cultures within our organizations, within our teams, even within the team. The culture can be, I got your back. I got your back. It's a got your back culture, not a watch your back culture. We look out for the people we care about.

The last 10 seconds of a football game or a basketball team can take, what, how long? Like, 30 minutes sometimes, right? What the heck is going on? Strategy. Let's change the scenario a little bit.

Okay?

It's the last 10 seconds, right? And one team is down by a lot of points. Almost impossible to come back, and yet it still takes 30 minutes. Why? I heard the word advertising, right? All the cynics in here, the marketer, we know.

Commercials.

Commercial timeouts, right?

What else?

Coaching. What kind of coaching? Here's the kind of coaching it looks like, right?

You get in the huddle, you go.

Hey, listen, there's 10 seconds left. We're down by 12 points. It's a basketball game, and we gotta be in, like, Detroit.

They're in Cleveland, and we gotta take.

A bus and go to Detroit tonight. So there's no way we're gonna win. I mean, we get this, right, we're not gonna win. So let's just dribble the ball out, you know, run out the clock. Let's get showered, get in the locker room, you know, get into the press conference, get it over, get in a bus and get a good night's sleep. So we come out and win that game tomorrow. That's what the coach says, right? How many of you think that's what the coach said? That's good. I saw some of you nodding up and down. Then they got the clue. No, I don't want to have my hand going up. Why is that not what the coach says in that huddle? It's not over till it's over. What happens if that coach gives up right there, says, hey, the game's over. We clearly cannot win. Next.

What happens?

Yeah, players give up. What do they give up on? Themselves? They give up on that coach. That Coach is finished.

10 seconds left.

They're down by 12 points.

It's virtually impossible to win.

Calls every last timeout.

Why?

Any coach worth her salt knows this. You plan for the what? You plan for the miracle. It's part of the business plan. You plan for a miracle.

Miracle can be a mere change in.

Consciousness, a change in awareness. You plan for the miracle. And how often have we seen it in sports? All the time, where it's seemingly impossible. And yet what happens the impossible happens in any organization that even when success is improbable. What do you plan for? Hello?

You.

Do you plan for success no matter what?