Earlier this week, I shared with you the backstage story of nervousness just as I was about to give my talk at TED2013. Two hours before I was shaking violently. In the moment itself, I had a smile on my face and showed up fully alive. What happened in the middle is a trick you can use next time you want to really resonate with a crowd or even just one person.

A month before the talk, someone I hadn’t yet met in person wrote a note asking if a few people could take me out to breakfast the morning of the talk as a way of showing support. I was pretty sure I would have thrown up on their shoes that morning of, so I’m glad I never said yes. Instead, I suggested they wear a bright color and sit up front in the audience. When you see a few friendly face, you remember how much a community wants you to do well. Whenever that happens, I can stop fretting about remembering every idea I had on the topic, and instead just connect. I was counting on this technique to ground me, so that I wouldn’t mentally run up the ladder into my head. When I speak from my head alone, I am going to try and impress with braininess. When a speaker combines head and heart, they not only inform, they resonate.

As I walked into the hall, I made eye contact with Jane McGonigal. If you don’t already know of Jane, you should. She’s a fellow TED speaker, the NYT best-selling author of Reality is Broken, and a brilliant game designer. (I met her years ago playing Werewolf, which is a weird strategy game, at something called Foo Camp at 1:00 in the morning or something like that.) She made a heart with her hand, and gave me a big smile from a few rows away. (Here, in this picture, she’s reproducing the moment for posterity … just caught on my cell phone camera).

I calmed right down.

So that’s the trick. It’s so simple, perhaps even too simple to believe. But research shows people listen better when they connect with you, emotionally. No faster way to do that than to smile. or Laugh. It’s a stance or asana you can use anytime. In family life, in meetings, and if you are ever lucky enough to address a crowd. Just lift up one corner of your mouth and then the other.

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I can hardly believe it.

People always wonder if speakers are nervous. The question is, with enough practice, does this level of professional speaking ever get easy? I myself have had that question, wondering if I was “the only one” who got super nervous for big venues. As I got ready for TED starting, I looked around at my fellow colleagues who were going to speak in the same session. There in one corner was the rockstar, Bono, a former governor, 2 superb economists who teach at top schools (and therefore audiences all the time), and so on. Some were still rehearsing hand gestures in their seat before going on, others were pacing like crazy, one looked like she was going to throw up. Even Bono’s full-surround entourage couldn’t hide the fact that even he was breathing a little uneven.

About two hours before heading into the hall, I was a mess. I hadn’t had enough coffee. My hair was still wet because I didn’t have time to dry it. I was running late to the green room. As I was scurrying around, one errand I had to do was meet a fellow conference attendee, so I could borrow her earrings.

As I was taking off mine to swap, I could barely do the simple task. I wondered what was going on, and then I looked down at my hands. I was shaking violently. “I never do that”, I thought. Well, apparently, I never do that unless I’m facing the red-dot of TED, 6 cameras, 2,000 people live (and countless others watching elsewhere) in this epic arena.

But you know what I’ve learned? Nervousness says you care.

I had no desire, let alone ability to be anything other than my authentic self. I cared.  I wanted the idea to be so clearly delivered, so the idea could spread. What I wanted that day was to show up, fully alive, and be heard.

Well, you can see for yourself how that went.

(I’ll share more what turned the nervousness to calm, in a future post. My hands are shaking a bit, even now as I share the news.)

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I remember when as an analyst at Apple doing pricing and market research work, my job was to read the ($500K/year subscription) Gartner and IDC reports and get the nuggets out and then create a document of insights to circulate.. but only to the executive management team because that’s who would use the information.

Today, of course, all that is moot.

Anyone, quite possibly everyone, can get a pretty good idea of what is going on in a few minutes of web research. No exec team needs to hoard the information. No middle management team needs to parse out what it means. And what any individual can do — with seemingly disparate other people — is as powerful as anything we’ve ever seen. As powerful as governments, as powerful than big Goliath global organizations.

And that changes what we can create in business, the models to measure value creation, the leadership needed and even the very ethos that we effectively function by. It’s the Social Era, and it means change for all of us.

If you’re a regular reader of Yes & Know, you know I’ve been talking about this idea well before last year. But right around March 2012, I started doing my first talks on the topic, and have since published a book with Harvard on the topic and so on. Well, somewhere along the way, I got invited to give a talk at a venue that Google (the company) hosts whereby they invite speakers who are in the area to come talk to their employees and they film it and release it at no charge. Al Gore spoke the day after I did. (!)

I hadn’t honestly thought what it would feel like to be speaking these ideas — in front of effectively one of the most powerful organizations of this change. A little weird actually. But, still. Worth doing and worth sharing.

Filmed in February 2013, and just released today:

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Nilofer Merchant, Author, Speaking at TED2013, Long Beach, CA. February 25, 2013

In case you are interested…

TED coverage:
http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/26/walk-with-me-talk-with-me-nilofer-merchant-at-ted2013/

LA Times coverage:
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-ted-2013-nilofer-merchant-says-sitting-is-the-new-smoking-20130226,0,4815796.story

Wired coverage:
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/02/sitting-is-the-new-smoking/

And Forbes called it one of the 5 inspired ideas of the conference:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhochman/2013/02/28/five-inspired-ideas-emerging-from-ted2013/

While the topical issue is certainly about personal health… remember how it came into being. It took reconciling two seemingly disparate and opposing ideas to create this solution. It was in seeing the situation anew, that a fresh answer became clear.  It seems that there are plenty of domains in the world – policy, governance, business when this could be applied. That’s the lesson … when things are in opposition, reframe. And, come up with something that is better for everyone. 

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Onlyness is that thing that only that one individual can bring to a situation. It includes the journey and passions of each human. Onlyness is fundamentally about honoring each person: first as we view ourselves and second as we are valued. Each of us is standing in a spot that no one else occupies. That unique point of view is born of our accumulated experience, perspective, and vision. Some of those experiences are not as “perfect” as we might want, but even those experiences are a source for what you create. For example, the person whose younger sibling has a disease might grow up to work in medicine to find the cure. The person who is obsessed with beautiful details might end up caring about industrial design and reinvent how we all use technology. The person who has grown up under oppression might end up advocating for freedom of speech and thus advance the condition of his country. This individual onlyness is the fuel of vast creativity, innovations, and adaptability.

Someone can be (for example) only woman in a crowd, but this is not her onlyness. In this case, she is unique because of the context. Onlyness may be present in that story, but onlyness is not a relative thing. It more about what makes that person unique based on their own story, or their “through-line” of their own story, their own narrative. I am trying to point out the inherent source of each person.

Embracing onlyness means that, as contributors, we must embrace our history, not deny it. This includes both our “dark” and our “light” sides. Because when we deny our history, vision, perspective, we are also denying a unique point of view, that which only we can bring to the situation. Each onlyness is essential for solving new problems, as well as for finding new solutions to old problems. Without it, people are simply cogs in a machine – dispensable and undervalued – and we’re back to the 800-pound gorilla approach in organizations (and our economy). With it, gazelles [employees, community members, and partners] are singularly unique and able to contribute meaningfully.

Now, this fall I gave a great many talks, and I learned a lot in the process. This talk that follows is on Onlyness and is — by far — my FAVORITE (and quite possibly the best — if I put my humility aside for a second) talk I’ve ever given. Not only is the topic one I care about deeply, it resonates because it speaks to a universal truth. Which is this:

It’s not that everyone will, but that anyone can contribute.

And until we celebrate onlyness, we are not honoring the person. And, until you unlock your onlyness, you are not fully alive. And, collectively, until we honor onlyness, we are limiting ourselves, our organizations and our economies.

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Yesterday, I shared with you the “big” news that I’m speaking at TED at their Long Beach event a short 40 or so days from now.

The topic of my talk may surprise you. It’s not on business models of the future, or why collaboration matters, or about the need to dissolve us v. them architectures that prevail. The mainstage talk I have been asked to give is on something I’ve come to love and want to share with others: walking meetings. I wrote up the first pass of the idea to share it and see what questions / comments / suggestions ended up being asked. And OH, WOW am I glad I did. The comments section in one short day is chock full of great nuggets that will inspire the next generation of this idea.

AS IS ALWAYS TRUE, I’d love to hear what you think of this idea. (I know I probably don’t need to say it because — perhaps with this many years of blogging history– it can be assumed, but I don’t want to ever take you and it for granted. The reason I write is to learn and share WITH you, not to do a 1-way flow AT you.)

***

I find myself, probably like many of you, spending way too much time in front of my computer. When I do face-to-face meetings, my colleagues and I typically met around some conference table, sometimes at an airport lounge (nothing like getting the most out of a long layover), and quite often at coffee shops (hello Starbucks!). But that means that the most common denominator across all these locations wasn’t the desk, or, the keyboard, or even the coffee. The common denominator in the modern workday is our, um, tush.

As we work, we sit more than we do anything else. We’re averaging 9.3 hours a day, compared to 7.7 hours of sleeping. Sitting is so prevalent and so pervasive that we don’t even question how much we’re doing it. And, everyone else is doing it also, so it doesn’t even occur to us that it’s not okay. In that way, I’ve come to see that sitting is the smoking of our generation.

Of course, health studies conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around. After 1 hour of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat declines by as much as 90%. Extended sitting slows the body’s metabolism affecting things like (good cholesterol) HDL levels in our bodies. Research shows that this lack of physical activity is directly tied to 6% of the impact for heart diseases, 7% for type 2 diabetes, and 10% for breast cancer, or colon cancer. You might already know that the death rate associated with obesity in the US is now 35 million. But do you know what it is in relationship to Tobacco? Just 3.5 million. The New York Times reported on another study, published last year in the journal Circulation that looked at nearly 9,000 Australians and found that for each additional hour of television a person sat and watched per day, the risk of dying rose by 11%. In that article, a doctor is quoted as saying that excessive sitting, which he defines as nine hours a day, is a lethal activity.

And so, over the last couple of years, we saw the mainstreaming of the standing desk. Which, certainly, is a step forward. But even that, while it gets you off your duff, won’t help you get real exercise.

So four years ago, I made a simple change when I switched one meeting from a coffee meeting to a walking-meeting. I liked it so much it became a regular addition to my calendar; I now average four such meetings, and 20 to 30 miles each week. Today it’s life-changing, but it happened almost by accident.

My fundamental problem with exercise has always been this: it took time away from other more “productive things.” Going to the gym to take care of me (vs. companies, colleagues, family) seemed selfish. My American-bred Puritan work ethic nearly always won out. Only when I realized I could do both at the same time, by making exercise part of the meeting, did I finally start to get more exercise. This is one of those 2-for-1 deals. I’m not sacrificing my health for work, nor work for fitness. And maybe that’s why making fitness a priority finally doesn’t feel like a conflict. It’s as easy as stepping out the door and might require as much as a change of shoes.

And, yet, it’s true that some people will turn you down. Probably 30% of the people I ask to do these kinds of meetings say that they are not fit enough to do a walking meeting. I had one person tell me afterwards that they got more active for an entire month before our meeting, so as to not embarrass themselves on their hike with me. I don’t judge the people who won’t do a hiking meeting, and in most cases will choose to do another type of meeting with them (lunch or whatever) but I am also reminded of James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis’s research from their related book, Connected. They observed that obesity spreads according to network effects; if your friend’s friend’s friend who lives a thousand miles away gains weight, you’re likely to gain weight, too. And if that extended friend also loses weight, even if you’re not in the same city, you’re likely to lose weight, too. My goal is to be someone who socializes the idea that physical activity matters, and that we each matter enough to take care of our health.

And after a few hundred of these meetings, I’ve started noticing some unanticipated side benefits. First, I can actually listen better when I am walking next to someone than when I’m across from them in some coffee shop. There’s something about being side-by-side that puts the problem or ideas before us, and us working on it together.

Second, the simple act of moving also means the mobile device mostly stays put away. Undivided attention is perhaps today’s scarcest resource, and hiking meetings allow me to invest that resource very differently.

And, finally we almost always end the hike joyful. The number one thing I’ve heard people say (especially if they’ve resisted this kind of meeting in the past) is “That was the most creative time I’ve had in a long time” And that could be because we’re outside, or a result of walking. Research certainly says that walking is good for the brain.

I’ve learned that if you want to get out of the box thinking, you need to literally get out of the box. When you step outside, you give yourself over to nature, respecting its cycles and unpredictability. It keeps me more awake to what is happening around me by experiencing the extreme heats of summer, or the frigid power of winter. It makes me present to the world around me instead of being insulated from it.

To keep this commitment — to myself and to others — I’ve marked off certain times on my calendar for these meetings. I block off two morning appointments (when I can take a shower afterwards) and two end-of-day appointments for hiking meetings. I try and schedule these slots before scheduling “regular” sitting meetings because it means I have no excuse to not move that day and it helps me be more awake during the day or less zombie-like (and still-thinking-about-my-inbox) going into the evening. On the rare days when someone bails on a hike last minute, I typically still head out for the time, and I find myself hearing even my own voice more clearly.

***

As is the norm for the pieces I first write at Harvard, please help me by contributing your comments on the original posting site (or in long form: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/sitting_is_the_smoking_of_our_generation.html). Thanks!

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I’ve been invited to deliver a talk on the Main Stage at TED2013, in Long Beach. (Link to full list of speakers, here)

The TED conference (an abbreviation of “Technology, Entertainment, Design”) once brought together a few hundred people in California in a single annual event. Today, TED is not just an elite conference, it’s a global phenomenon of “ideas worth spreading.” Getting asked to speak there is like getting invited to the Oscars as an actor. You get their platform to share an idea that you think is worth sharing, well.

If any of you had interacted with me on Thursday (when it went public), my feet were NO where near the ground. So many lovely people wrote and were enthused.

I’ve (mostly) started breathing normal again if only because there’s loads of other stuff to do, and of course the actual work of getting ready to share the idea. I thought you might like to know the news, and in the next few weeks, I will surely share drafts and nuggets of the idea here on the blog where I hope to get your help to develop, shape, and possibly polish it so it’s ready for the sharing with a broader audience.

Hope your year is off to an amazing start, also.

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A few weeks back, Nancy Duarte — three-time bestseller on the power of persuasion, resonance, and story — and I got together to talk about the #SocialEra. (Direct link to video, here)

Besides being a notable author, Nancy is the successful CEO of her own firm, Duarte Design. It’s incredibly well recognized and she as its leader. Not only did she did the slides for Al Gore’s film, an inconvenient Truth (The only set of slides ever to win an Oscar!) … she loves to help people tell their story.

We talked about the counterintuitive nature of the ideas in Social Era and you’ll see by her face that she’s just as scared as anyone. But she’s also courageous to face into it. (As I hope you are) As she and I talked about the shifts that the book raises, we dug into what it means for leadership.

As you listen to it, I suggest you listen for “keeper of the flame” as a way to think about what is shifting. Leaders no longer need to know all the answers (The Chief of Answers is what I called it in the first book, The New How), leaders can shift to being a “Keeper of the flame”.

P.s. Nancy Duarte’s latest book is an HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations. I am probably going to through and read it again, over the holidays as I think about some presentations I have planned for 2013. I highly recommend her ideas and I’m grateful we had a chance to talk together on film about Leadership in the Social Era.

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This is my talk on this idea thread — in many ways a pure business-slant overview of #socialera book. I did it back in June, 2012 at the Dachis Summit in London as it was on the way to my TEDGlobal talk. Since I went on my summer holidays right afterwards, I had actually forgotten this video existed but thought we should add it to the archive by posting it to the blog.

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This is the question I was asked to answer a few weeks back for a #TEDtalk.  TEDxNewEngland’s event was held at the WGBN station, just 3 weeks before the US National Election and the amazing organizers asked a range of politicians, economists, national policy leaders and educators to consider what we would want for America if we could “reinvent it”. I was already going to be on a whirlwind book tour, which I wrote about a few days ago, so I shared some thoughts on the topic.

Everywhere we look, there are groups that believe they are on the outs, unable to influence policy, and believing they are unrepresented or at least underrepresented in the direction of their own country. Is that because many people in power actually believe that power is a limited commodity? That America should be protected and insulated to allow it to thrive?

Yet, we live in an incredible time: the Social Era, with its connected networks enables more than just the sharing of information — it allows the sharing of power. Connected individuals with shared interests and goals, can create together in ways that once only a few could. Those that continue to think that power is about a few “us” vs the many “them” are finding themselves confused by what is going on. Some are holding on even more tightly. Regardless of their wishes …  the times, they are ‘achanging.

There is plenty of evidence that the Social Era will allow a fundamental shift; it is a shift from “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” posture of limitations to “if you’re not against us, you can be with us” stance of abundance. This shift will lead to many things  –  as we let go, we will be poised to create opportunity and abundance, and in doing so enable long-term prosperity. We will get to new and better solutions–and a lot more of them–faster, but only if we open up who is allowed to participate, and share our power with EVERYONE. While not everyone will, anyone can.

So that was my answer in this talk, shared here. I would open up our organizations to allow many more people to participate in the creating of new solutions. I would have organizations collaborate with the marketplace to find new approaches to old problems. I would invite anyone, quite possibly everyone to contribute their onlyness — to step up and into the bigness of becoming part of the solution. This is how I would reinvent business, reinvent America, and reinvent the world. How would you?

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