The Lonely Extrovert, The Risk Of Relevance, And Change-Proofing With Dr. Nick Morgan

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day, we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Barkel and his inspiring guest explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change.

Proof.

Hey, everybody. On today's show, I have a good friend, Dr. Nick Morgan. He's 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. That's a 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, to deliver unforgettable test TED talks. He has worked widely with political and educational leaders, and he himself has spoken, led conferences and moderated panels at venues around the world. During the last election cycle, he provided expert commentary on the presidential debates for CNN. Please welcome Dr. Nick Morgan. So, Nick, as a, as a speaker, a seasoned speaker, as you are, you hear your own introduction, which is kind of a surreal and weird experience. At least it is for me to hear myself get introduced. So what's one thing that's not part of your bio that you would love for people to know about you?

There are a number of things I would say, but the first thing that comes to mind is that it's a story I have told, which is why I hesitated, but not, not as part of my bio. When I was 17, I was in a tobogganing accident and it fractured my skull and I was in a coma for five days. During that time, I died and came back to life. And my deep interest in communications really evolved from then. I didn't know it at the time, but I lost the ability to be able to read other people's body language in the way that we all can when we know somebody. So when you have a friend, a colleague, a loved one, a family member, you look at them, you can tell when they're in a good mood or a bad mood because they're used to the signs. You know, everybody's a little different, but you know what the signs are. You can tell if they're really excited or if they're unhappy or down in the dumps. And we expect that as part of ordinary human conversation, we expect to be able to read each other. We sometimes get it wrong, but mostly we get it right. I lost that ability. I just couldn't do it for About a year until I could retrain it. And that just made me fascinated with the idea of how much of that is not in the words themselves, but is in the attitude with which you deliver the words. Not a surprise. Everybody knows that. If I say, Adam, great to see you and I don't sound very excited, you get a funny message, right? But if I say, Adam, it's great to see you and I really seem excited, then it's different. So it's reading those things in the intent behind the words that's really fascinating to me. Having that taken away and then having it, having to win it back or self educate myself to get it back, that was a profound process for me. And so I've been fascinated with that ever since. It took me a while to figure out how I could make a career out of it, but I've been fascinated ever since. And I have this weird need or ability or whatever you want to call it, to read body language all the time in a conscious way. Most people read it unconsciously and that's the efficient way to do it. Your unconscious mind immediately picks up on the intent, as I say, of people that you know. But I also read it consciously because I had to relearn it. And that gives me a funny perspective on humanity.

Wow, that's fascinating. And you know, our folks, people watching this, listening to this, may already know of your work and some it's the first time they're being introduced to you. So maybe let's assume that folks don't know about Public Words, which is your very, I think, famous blog, really. And just one question which is some kind of a version of that, which today I'm going to flip the script on you because it's going to be just a few more than one question.

You go right ahead, Adam.

Thank you, sir, appreciate it. So my question to you then is how is it that you're utilizing that study of non verbal communication of the body language, et cetera, in helping speakers, people who are on stage regularly, or even occasionally, I suppose, in their work and things. How do you use it as part of your training of people who speak publicly?

Well, I'll give you, for instance, I had a call from a woman who was allowed to by her boss for the first time, give a speech. And he didn't really want to let her blossom as an employee. He wanted to keep doing all the rain making, but she had insisted that she was going to leave if he didn't give her this chance. So he said, all right, you can take the next speech well, the next speech was 6,000 people at the annual industry conference.

So she was, what a sweetheart, by the way.

Wasn't that a great thing to do? And she knew she'd been set up. He was hoping clearly that she would fail and never ask again. So there's a lot going on in this consulting company. But she wanted, she was determined to nail it. And she said, she was very self aware and she said, look, I'm good at what I do, my consulting because I calm people down, I get them to work together, I create peace in the room. That's my superpower. And she said, I'm guessing that's not going to be great on a stage in front of 6,000 people. And I said, yeah, you can make a lot of choices on stage. There are a lot of things that work. But going quiet, peaceful probably isn't going to be a great one. It just, on the whole, you got to go big with 6,000 people. You know, there are many exceptions and ways around it and so on and so forth, but you got to go big. Six thousand people is when you get a large group of people together, they want to laugh, they want to cry, they want to emote, they want to cheer, they want to root for their team. It's why we love to go to sports events and music events and things like that. So she said, what am I going to do? And we only had a couple of weeks to get her ready. So I said, well, I'm going to do something I don't usually do. I'm going to tell you to do a certain body language technique that's going to get the audience to pay attention for 45 minutes, but you're not going to like it. You're going to think it's weird. She said, what is that? I said, you're going to hold your hands up here the entire time. You give the talk for 45 minutes. And she said, she's a very polite woman. She said, you're expletive deleted crazy. And it took me a while to persuade her to try this. Well, why is that effective? So she's got her hands up like this and she was convinced that I was crazy and that the audience would notice like two minutes in. Why is this weird speaker holding her hands up here? Well, she got the highest rating of the two day conference of all the speakers and nobody in the response form said why it was weird. You had your hands up. The reason for that is we humans are not wired to carry, to care. Sorry about people's body language per Se what we care about is the intent behind the body language. We want to know what the body language is for, what it can tell us about your intent or my intent. I want to be able to read you in that sense. I want to know, do you mean what you're saying? Are you being sarcastic? Are you being friendly? What's the deal? What's your intent toward me? And so we don't really care about the body language per se, unless it's really bizarre. And this comes, believe it or not, within the realm of fairly normal. And so she went out there 45 minutes, she gave the whole talk waving her. She wasn't holding them still like this, but she was gesturing like this. And the funny thing about this is that it has now become a norm for people who are really good on zoom because. And virtual video conferencing because it helps to see the hands. The hands create a sense of energy and engagement. And if we just have head and shoulders on the video conferencing that we've all gotten used to and you keep your hands below the screen, then you're cutting out a good 30% of your effectiveness as an emoter, as a high energy person. So I've been often thinking about her. This was a few years before the pandemic thinking about that speech. So that's how it can come up. But that was a please don't try this at home. That was a Hail Mary pass. It was a desperation move. So she would succeed in that speech again with a very calm, soothing, not dynamic personality. We couldn't train her to be suddenly emotive and leaping and yelling and screaming all over the stage. So this was a Hail Mary pass.

It's almost like teaching her to be Italian.

Exactly. Talk with your hands.

I want you to talk with your hands. Yeah, that's fascinating. And I would think certainly in training people who are speaking or training facilitating on zoom, that the hands are a key component of it. Because when you can't see, it's sort of like what you know, what am I? I don't know what, what's, what is that trigger? Then it's just basically your facial expression. And there's only so many ways that you can vary without seeming like you're crazy.

Right.

You know, vary your facial expression. Although what we sometimes will say to people is that if you want to create that dynamic range, which think is, is so important in, in speaking is that you are just that you're never quite predictable because the predictable speaker, which I hate the word boring in Part because I have trauma about once having someone who was training me berate me for being boring, you know, like. So the worst. I tend not to be that, you know, I don't know what the word is. Unkind to other people, but we talk about dynamics and dynamic variance and that kind of thing. And. And one way you can do it is simply to smile. Right, Nick? I mean, because you're resting face. Like, if we both go to our resting face for a second. For those who are watching this on YouTube, I always got people coming up to me when I was a kid going, adam, is everything all right? Exactly like, yeah, everything's fine. How many times can you be asked, are you okay? Is everything all right? Because I have kind of a resting sad face. Some people have resting, you know, resting face.

But it's surprising how you're absolutely right. The resting face can look pretty grim in many situations. You know, you remind me, I was working very recently with a speaker who's incredibly high energy, a lot of fun to work with. He's going to be great out on the. On the stage, but his whole speech, very excited about. His whole speech was screamed. It was. It was like. And. And I had to tell him. What you want in a speech is like in an action movie. If the whole thing were done at top speed, if it was one endless car chase, you get bored after a while. You can only take so much of that. That's why a good action movie has periods of action followed by periods of relative calm. So I said, you got to find a way to bring it down at least a couple of times in the speech. Give us some. A bit of variety, so that then the yelling and the passion and whatnot comes across as riveting and whatnot. Because even that, even that incredible high energy can get a bit dull after a while. If that's all you get.

Yeah. If there's no modulation, even that becomes predictable at a certain point.

Exactly. I like the word predictable in that. In that way. Because that's exactly the problem. It's not so much boring. It isn't boring to be yelled at for an hour, but it is predictable.

And what's wrong with it? And we know that right now you're sort of battling whether it's digitally in a format like this or it's even in a room. You're battling technology all the time because it's vying for their attention. And it will win. Invariably, it will win if you become the slightest bit. You know, whether it's predictable or you're not able to create that bit of a roller coaster experience for them. You know, before we started, you and I were just chatting a little bit about the, the sort of. The thing that speakers do experience that they don't often, I don't think, talk about with other speakers. They don't really commiserate. And you called it lonely, like being a lonely extrovert. Will you just bring us into that, just pull us into that context for, for a second and explain what it means to be a lonely extrovert?

Yeah, sure. The, the, the up and down nature of a speaker's life, of a. Any kind of performer really. Unless, unless you're like a member of a group of performers, then you, you have that community that goes with you. But, but speakers are. We're very extroverted. We love to get out there on stage, especially now that it's coming back, and we love to perform for people. And then once it's done, then it's back to the hotel room and you're sitting there recovering, having dinner. Often as not, you're on your own and you're suddenly gone from having been the center of attention and the, the entertaining 500 people or a thousand people to a room full of one. And that extreme really does have an effect on people. And it takes a very balanced and stable personality to be able to handle that over the long term. It's hard on. It is hard on people. So, yeah, that's the loneliest. We are the most extroverted and most loneliest group in the world.

It really is a. And it's not. Again, I don't think I've ever heard anybody kind of talk about it until you mentioned it to me. And I thought, well, I guess it's, you know, again, we're not alone. We always think we're sort of separate. It's one of the great original issues we have in our lives, thinking somehow that we're separate, only to find out ironically, how similar and even alike, you know, as one we really are in so many ways.

That's true.

The. So with speakers, they're seemingly on this bit of an island. There's another thing that's kind of curious about that island, which is that if you're a great accountant. I mean, my part of my history was I spent 18 years as a lawyer, and at a certain point my business was really thriving. And it was in part not because I was a great advertiser or anything. Lawyers typically, on average, don't do a lot of marketing and advertising, although they do more of it today certainly than when I was practicing, but I got a lot of repeat business. You know, it was referral business. And people that you did a great job by, they didn't start, hey, listen, let me go try someone else out. You know, because they knew what they were getting and if they were happy with it, then they were, you know, they come back to you. But speaking is so different, isn't it, Nick?

That's right. You speak at a conference, at an association annual meeting or a company's annual meeting, and the last thing in the world they want then is to get you back again because they've heard your message. It's like seeing a movie twice. They don't feel the need to do it. And so you're constantly chasing the next thing. And it also suggests a way, Adam, in which we speakers can work together. One thing I frequently coach people to do is to partner up with at least one other person, but preferably a group, so that you can, after you've spoken at a place and they've paid you some nice compliments, you can say, you know, this other guy gal would be great, gives this kind of speech and talks about this sort of issue. Why don't you think about hiring them? And. And when that's genuine and real, then it's very helpful for the conference of the company too, because they're in the position every year of having to reinvent that annual meeting or that quarterly meeting or whatever. So that's a good thing for us all to do. But it points up another part of the business which is a little strange, a little cockeyed. As we were talking before, most businesses, if you like your lawyer, lawyer chums are your former business. If you do good work, you get rehired.

Exactly. And it's interesting too because there's a. I think with lawyers or accountants or maybe other areas, there's sort of a competition which is sort of the idea that if I win a client, I win business, that I wouldn't want to share that business with some one outside my organization because then they could win the business away from me. And it was, you know, there's this, this kind of scarcity mentality about it, whatever. But with speaking, and this is the curious part, I think, is that there really isn't that competition. I mean, we might think somehow that we are still competing like we would in other spaces, but with speaking they're really isn't. So it's shocking on some level that there isn't sort of more, at least I haven't found this more collaboration that what you're speaking about. So a community where people could be, where that, that bit of wisdom really is, is shared and acknowledged might, might help. And I think you're, you're in some stage of facilitating a community for speakers, paid public speakers, seasoned experienced speakers and maybe even some junior folks. Is that right?

Yes, I've started the group. I started it just the beginning of this year, so we're just getting underway. The idea is to create a network of people who know and understand each other's work so that they can quickly and easily be a word of mouth recommendation network as well as we're bringing in speakers from the industry to tell us about what's going on and what they think the future will be. There's a lot of question right now, for example, about how fast are we going back to in person work versus continued hybrid sort of arrangements. So what does the speaker have to do? What's the smart thing to do? Is it to invest $50,000 in a home studio and be ready to go virtual or is it better to get back out on the road? And what are all these various options? It's an interesting time to be a speaker and to be watching the industry come back. It's similar to what happened by the way, after 2001, after 911 and after 2008, 2009 after the economic meltdown. The speaking business went away for about nine months after 911 and then for almost two years, a year to a year and a half in some areas to two years after 2008, 2009 and watching it come back now, this has a real deja vu kind of feeling this time around. So it's just interesting to be able to talk about and get the best brains together to figure out how it's going to fly.

Maybe we get Yogi Berra deja vu all over again or something.

All over again. Yes sir. Yeah.

It'Ll be in the show notes of course, but I'd love for you to just say out loud the name of the community, if you're good to do that, Nick.

Yeah, sure. It's the Public Words hub and if you go to our publicwords.com website, you can see a link to it on there and you can, can apply to join. We want you to have some speaking experience but you can be pretty much at any stage of your speaking career.

Love it. I mentioned, well, you know, stick to this and then I'm going to get something else.

But.

The advice that you could give to someone who's speaking now I mean, I imagine there are. Speaking is similar in some respects. I'm going to ask this question, I want to make the statement. Do you think speaking is similar to the way Realtors in good times, when mortgages rates are low, real estate prices are high, there's like a good market, there's lots of real estate agents. When the market turns, it goes in the other direction. People who are in the real estate business tend to go, do other things for some period of time. They come in and they go out. Do you think speaking is like that? That during the pandemic people may have left the profession, at least temporarily.

So I think rather the opposite. What happened in 2008, 2009 was a lot of people, as the economic world melted down, a lot of people got laid off and thought, you know, as another career, as a second career, why don't I try speaking? I've got a lot of industry expertise, I could, I could start doing this for a living. And people look at that hour on the stage and they know you can get a pretty nice paycheck for their hour and they think, boy, this is a great business. I only have to work for an hour and I get a great paycheck and I'm done. What they don't see is all the prep work and the other hours leading up to that. So by the time you get that hours paycheck, you've earned it from all the other, all the other hours you've had to put in getting ready. But the Speaking business after 2008, 2009 both boomed itself. There were many more opportunities and there was also a lot more competition. And I think the same thing is going to happen again.

Interesting. So maybe then this is the perfect thing to ask you in terms of just not only the people that have been in the industry for some time and are now just experiencing yet another, another cycle change. And some things maybe could have been expected, some things about the future of work maybe that weren't expected and the like, but what's the best advice? And it's not necessarily one single thing. I don't, I don't want to imply that somehow there's one piece of advice, but if you're giving advice, and I know you, you do, and you invite people to come on, on your show to speak about the business itself, the industry, what's one or more pieces of advice that you think are really sage for speakers of any level of experience at this point, given where we are?

You mean to capitalize on the business and get yourself launched for the future.

Yeah. Or even, and maybe it's a separate answer, the, the idea that somebody's been a seasoned speaker. But right now, let's say the deal flow, the leads that they've got are just not what they were before the pandemic. As an example.

Yeah, I think that the business is going to boom, but I think it's going to be a slow ramp up. I mean, take one of the simple phenomena that's affecting this here is a lot of travel budgets got cut back during pandemic. Once you cut back a travel budget, then it takes an act of will on the part of the executive team to say, yeah, let's put that money back in there. And so just as a matter of form and budgeting, a number of companies work on a fiscal year that starts in July. So I don't think you're going to see full return of travel budgets until the second half of the year. Now, obviously there's some companies that work on calendar year and so on and so forth, and some are adding in travel budgets. They are coming back, but I think it's just going to take a while. It's a big flywheel kind of industry and business. It takes a while for it to get cranking back up again. And then people have to feel safe, too, to go to conferences and to feel like they can travel easily. It can't be too much of a hassle. And there's still some ways in which it can be challenging. So all those things have to have to come back. And then it will. And then it will. It will boom. So my first. Let's see, how many pieces of advice do I get? My.

I'll give you two.

Okay. All right. So the nature of a speech is that you have to give people the sense that they get something there that they can't get anywhere else in quite the same way. The advantage of a speech is it's a live exchange of meaning and information and persuasion. And so you can really genuinely change people in the moment. That's, for me, is the value of the thrill of being a speaker is that opportunity to meet an audience and. And to change the way they see the world on a good day. Also, every speech needs to know, or every speaker needs to know why their message matters now. So it's not just that you're giving them some information about some subject in the abstract. It has to matter. Now, speeches are creatures of time. They have to be topical. And a good question to ask yourself as you're getting ready to start speaking again or Speaking more is like, why is my speech, why is my message important now? And everybody needs to crisp up or revise or freshen their speech and their messaging and whatnot to make sure that it answers that question. Because the world has changed. The pandemic changed us. The post pandemic era is going to be different and we, we don't know precisely what that's going to look like yet, but that's the job of experts in areas of various kinds of knowledge is to figure that out and to say, yeah, this is what AI is going to look like going forward. This is what software is going to look like going forward. This is what leadership is going to look like going forward. The last two years, especially in leadership, which is by the way the most common area for speakers, roughly a third of all speaking engagements are leadership related. That's what people who hire you to speak are looking for. So it's the single most common area. Leadership changed over the pandemic. And what's it going to look like going forward? I think it's going to be quite different. And so you need to know that as a speaker you have to have a sharp message that focused on what's different now, why is this message relevant now?

I think, yeah, I so appreciate that insight. There's relevancy, risk. I was having a conversation with a client who hired us recently and yesterday we were talking about this is a conservative group of folks that are risk averse and some of what they been avoiding certain risks, not wanting to make mistakes, that kind of risk avoidance. But really what they're now shifting to is whether or not this group of people that's been around thanks to the, to the US government for about 105 years, they're seeing that there's the risk of not being relevant going forward.

Sure.

And relevancy, as you pointed out, is such a big deal. I mean it's a little self serving to bring this up, but I'm going to just say that it was fortuitous. I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Pivot and that book when it came out wasn't. I mean it was, it hit some metrics, it did well, bestseller and all that kind of stuff. But people really were a bit sort of put off by the term pivot because it implied mistake and somehow meant that it was like a vulnerability and not everybody was keen to embrace that. So it was a little before its time. More recently we've had a book come out called Change Proof. I know you had a chance to look at that too. And that, I think, is meeting the moment a little bit differently because the book is about how it is that we leverage the power of uncertainty, interestingly enough, as a catalyst for growth and to produce resilience. Ultimately, I think that message, to your point, is being well received because there's a lack of understanding or people are feeling tired and worn out and not understanding how it is that they fill their tanks back up. So resilience in that concept is really, really meeting the moment now pretty well. I think going forward, there's some risk that companies go back, organizations think that resilience is a thing that you. You get a lot of people, you know, thinking about it, talking about it, working on it, get a speaker in when, when, you know, there's chaos. But when things, when the seas calm down and things return to, quote, normal, you know, then we won't need a resilience. You will need that topic which, which is surprising. I'm just curious what, you know, you've. You've had a chance to check out the book for a minute. Let's probably. Just a minute. But, but do you think that this is something, Nick, that is, you know, that's going to have a shelf life, that's. That is tied to crisis? Or is your sense that resilience is more of an operationalized concept, more of a hard skill, than something that's more ephemeral, or I should say more temporal?

Yeah, it's a good question. The. I think resilience is here to stay. I think you're onto something. I mean, it's a whole industry now, and it started probably. There were a couple of good books about 10 years ago that introduced the concept for the first time. But it's something that you see it now through all ages and all walks of life. Parents are keen to get their kids to be more resilient, and employers, to your point, are keen to get their employees to be more resilient. And those of us in relationships want our spouses or significant others to be more resilient when we're not at our best and so on. So the need for resilience is not going to go away. And I think this is the result really of something. The pandemic accelerated, like a lot of other trends, but was there already? It's hard to remember now, but the discussion in the business world in 2018, let's say in 2019, was all about change and innovation and how can I get my employees to embrace change and to embrace constant change and to embrace continual change. And for that you need resilience. And so that's not going to go away. When the pandemic is well and truly done, as we all hope it will be, and we return to something that's post normal or so called normal, we'll still be dealing with change. Just it will become part of our everyday experience in ways that will still need. We will desperately need resilience. So do not allow yourself to be talked out of relevancy in this one. Because. Because it's going to be very important. We're just getting started.

We all have to be change proof.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're just getting started on the speed of change. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if anybody feels like the last couple years have been a little chaotic and you know, and as you alluded to, there is a lot of weariness out there and a lot of feeling like I've been handling stress for a long time, like, when am I going to get a break? Yeah, I'm afraid not. What's going to happen is things that have been put on hold during the pandemic are simply going to start accelerating again as soon as we feel like we're done. And it's. You ain't seen nothing yet in terms of the speed of change. We're going to be on a high speed train to the future in ways that the pandemic actually slowed down for us fairly for a bit and are starting to cease doing that now. We're in for it, my friend. Put on your seatbelt. Get ready.

Yikes. I have one final question. This is just one final question. Oh, good, Nick, you have this show and I don't even know if I can call it a show, but Just One Question is a video blog, sort of, right?

Podcast, vlog, whatever you want to call it.

Yeah, love it. And I am a routine listener. I'm a huge fan of that work and the people that you bring on. I've been honored to be a guest on that show. I think we've got a second show that's coming out at some point soon too, and that's cool. I am fascinated by those answers to the Just One Question and maybe the follow up, right? Follow up question. Nick, I'm asking you now, and this puts you on the spot a little bit. But what's the most interesting answer as you sit here in this moment? Go through the catalog in your brain of God knows many episodes at this point? Is there one answer from a standpoint of just either it surprised you, it was interesting, it was so wise. And you can use a person's name or not, up to you. But I'm curious if an answer to that question stands out for you.

Yeah, I mean, they were all wonderful. You were wonderful, all the guests are great.

Oh, I don't. I'm certainly not expecting to hear my name being used, that's for sure.

However, there is one that stood out, and it's because it was early in the pandemic when we still didn't know what the heck was going on. If you recall, everybody thought at first it was going to last a couple of weeks, and then we realized, whoops, the calendar's is telescoping outward here. This isn't a couple of weeks. We don't know how long it's going to be, but it ain't a couple of weeks. And so we've got to sort of recalibrate and figure out how we're going to get in this for some long term of uncertain duration. And I had a person on who was a speaker and a friend whom I'd met a little bit but didn't know very well. And I asked her what best perform prepared her for dealing with this pandemic. And her answer, as they say on the Internet, really surprised me, because she said she'd been in the Peace Corps. And what the Peace Corps teaches you is how to drop in to a place you've never been before. Maybe you've had a little prep in terms of the language or whatever and the culture, but basically it's all new to you. And you've got to create a structure around yourself so that you can, going forward, you can be of service to the people in the community that you're in. But it's up to you to create that structure. And that literally means figuring out what your week's going to look like, how you're going to build up the necessary things that you need to support you as you go along and whatnot. And all of this was just immediately irrelevant to the pandemic, how when you're dropped into a new situation where the rules are all suddenly changed, you're not quite sure how long it's going to last or what it's going to look like. How do you set up a structure that will enable you to get through that? And her answer was just brilliant, I thought, because she said, well, you need a weekly structure, you need a monthly structure, you need to set yourself rules and things you do some days and other days and that kind of thing. And then she said, and this is the part that I really love, she said. And then one day a week, Sunday or whatever day you want to pick, then break the rules. Don't do exactly what you'd planned to do every now and then. Just do that. Because to keep a routine, to keep structure, that's a good thing. But you also need to. Humans crave that variety and that change just to keep them engaged and keep them bought into the structure. So I thought that was just bright, brilliant, and that actually was enormously helpful during the. During the pandemic, especially those early days. So that's my favorite answer, I have to say.

Love that. Oh, my gosh. You know, it almost was like, we planned that. You had a good one, really, right there. You think about how it is that you handle any situation that is the unknown. How do you handle the unknown? What is it that that serves us well? Structure, for one thing, does. When there's no structure, to assume that.

That.

That's the. That becomes the status quo. Oh, there's no structure here. So therefore I should. I'm in. I'm in chaos. I'm, you know, producing cortisol and fear of this, you know, this uncertainty. And yet here's somebody that says, no, we got dropped in here and there, and, you know, we create our own structure out of no structure. What a phenomenal lesson in business and life and all of it. Yeah, well, I'll break a rule now. So I said this was the last question, but I'll break the rule.

Good for you, right?

You inspired this. Nick, I want to know what you're enthusiastic about as we're going to finish up our conversation here. Um, I see you as an, you know, like, we've known each other a little while now. Not terribly long, but a little while. I'll make this assessment. I think you're pragmatic. That's how I would describe you. Not optimistic. Certainly not pessimistic. Just, you know, nice, nice down the middle. Like, you know, they hit the headpin strike, knock them all down. I think pragmatism is a. Is a good harmony of the extremes. I don't know if I got that right or wrong, but I'd like to know what it is that you're pragmatically enthusiastic about in your life or in your business. This moment.

I like that. I'm going to accept that analysis. I like it. I do think of myself as an idealistic, realist, pragmatist and do what's got to be done. I'm very excited to be starting work on A new book which is some years off. This is a big project, but I've been working on and working with some people on the voice. And all of that means both technically what speakers do with their voices as well as that kind of more cosmic sense of when somebody speaks, speaks with a full voice and everybody stops and listens. Like an Oprah or a singer who sings with full voice, like Adele or somebody like that. The people who, when they open their mouths, 150% of their power comes out. That's rare. And we really notice it when it happens. And I'm trying to figure out how we can talk about that, help people, make that happen and make everybody's voices stronger in both the technical sense and the soul sense, the individual human sense. Because I think ultimately that's what's most important, is that we all have a chance to have our full voices and for other people to hear them in this crazy community, crazy quilt community we live in.

Indeed. Indeed. Well, Nick, I so appreciate you and your time and the wisdom you shared with, with our folks and, and our friendship, which is. Is still budding. And I so appreciate that as well. Thanks for. Thanks for propping up the book and giving it a read and, and just for the person that you are in the world, I look forward to where our paths continue to cross in the future.

Excellent. Thank you, Adam. Great, great pleasure today and every day.

Thank you. Well, we'd love to hear from all of you as well, so your comments are so welcome. You can go obviously to AdamMarkel.com podcast. Leave a comment there. We'd love it. If you think somebody who's out there would really enjoy hearing this conversation, please share it, subscribe to the channel. You know, all the good stuff to help us get the word out. We appreciate the support greatly, and for now, I'll just say ciao. Wow. I have just absolutely loved the conversation with Dr. Nick Morgan. Nick is a. Is a such a. He's just a wise man, and I feel very fortunate to actually call him a friend. We today talked about lonely extroverts, if you're curious. Wow, man. Lonely extroverts. How. What a concept. I've never heard that before. And it just so struck me as in many ways, there is tremendous loneliness in the world as a result of the pandemic. But in particular, when we're speaking about this industry of public speaking, paid public speaking, the one that I spent a great deal of my time in, there is a lot of our people who are situational extroverts, meaning we get on stage and we rile up the crowd and share insights and create laughter and moments for, for emotions and thinking differently. And it's one of the great joys that I've ever experienced. And yet there's also this, this loneliness that comes when you're back in your hotel room all by yourself and the crowd isn't there, nobody's cheering, and you can't see the looks on people's faces as you're, as you're doing your thing. And so that was, that was quite interesting. We talked about some things too that really were unexpected, including how it is that a veteran of the Peace Corps expressed how. How learning in the Peace Corps, learning how to adapt to the situation that you were put in, in the Peace Corps resembles in many ways how we have to learn how to adapt to the situations that are happening in our world. Whether it's been the pandemic, the ongoing aftermath of the pandemic, and for sure the clear acceleration of so many things going into the future, the fact that change is ever present, that it's not just enough to recognize that change is happening, but to really move toward how it is that we embrace this constant, this continual, this ever present, never ending change that will only seemingly, or not seemingly, that will only just continue to accelerate in the future. In fact, the pandemic may have even slowed it up. That's shocking enough. But that to think of it from the perspective of what people learn when they're in the Peace Corps, they have to create from a new situation, from something that has no structure and new rules even to be able to create the structure and the rules, to adapt and deal with a new situation. The way people who are working in the Peace Corps and get sent to various places around the world to assist, they have to create everything from scratch. And that becomes the norm, that there are no rules or no structure to begin with. So you have to replace or fill that space with structure and rules. And then ultimately to remember that not only the weekly and the monthly structures that you put in place, that you should also remember the, that just what we crave as human beings is sometimes to break the rules, to have one day a month, let's say, where you don't keep the rules, you don't keep the structure. Because we crave that difference, that differentiation, that variance, if you will. I just absolutely loved hearing Nick talk about that. And also two pieces of advice that we have to change, that we have an opportunity as communicators in the world to change people's perception of the world. We have this really wonderful opportunity to change how people see things. And at the same time, it's, it's such sage wisdom at this moment to be evaluating why the message that you want to share is actually relevant now. Not just, you know, what do you want to say? Or what does it matter? Like, why does what you have to say matter? But why does what you have to say matter now? Now that relevancy and the risk of not being relevant, I think is so profoundly important. That really resonated with me. Not just because of the content that we're continually creating, curating, sharing about change, about resilience, etc. But just in my personal life, being someone in my 50s now and wanting more, more than almost anything else, to be relevant, to continue to have relevancy in the world. And I think that's, you know, that's just, there's so much that feels right about that, that to feel alive is, is to feel as though you're contributing something valuable. And, and we, we have to do that fresh every day. We can't live on, on yesterday's demonstrations, yesterday's successes, even as we have to be relevant and fresh and provide value each and every day, which makes every day quite an opportunity, quite interesting and also, you know, a challenge for many. So I love this conversation with Dr. Nick Morgan. I know you, you probably will gain so much from, from listening to him. And we'd love to hear your comments. As always, share, share your thoughts, share it with friends and family who may benefit as well, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change proof. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over@adammarkelle.com podcast for more results, resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change proof teams, visit AdamMarkel.com BecomeChangeproof.