Transcriber: Sara Abdel-Kader Atahan Reviewer: Thien Vo
Thank you so much, John. Before I begin,
I want to take a moment to say thank you to the team here, to John,
Russia and Jessica for having the passion,
the courage and the energy to create this event during such an uncertain
and challenging and strange time that we are living in.
So I want to say thank you to each of you for the opportunity.
I also want to say congratulation to all of the speakers for coming here today
and sharing their stories, sharing their wisdom with each of us.
Meaningful conversations are so important
they’ve never been more important than they are today.
And so I want to applaud and thank each of you for
sharing your energy with everyone here.
So my talk today is why slowing down and stopping is the way forward.
And I want to share with you a story from an experience I had in El Salvador.
It's a country that I've traveled to many times through the years,
and I have a great intersection of people, experiences and opportunities there.
Whenever I visit, I spend time with amazing people that are incredibly warm,
incredibly hospitable, incredibly intelligent and have a great
inner strength about them. And I learned so much from the people there.
I also have life-changing experiences when I'm there,
I’m going to share one with you today, and also opportunities for growth.
And wherever I go whenever I travel, the intersection between
people, experiences, and opportunities
is something I seek out actively.
And so El Salvador is a small Central American country.
Again, I’ve traveled there many times through the years,
where I’ve engaged in several projects
with a very small rural community
about two hours outside of the capital of San Salvador.
And as is the case when I go there,
I’ve made relationships with
incredible people and spent a great deal of time with,
and I have so much respect for them.
We engage in these projects that the community identifies
and simply try and provide a little bit of support to increase their capacity.
On this particular occasion,
I was there with my wife and a couple of friends from Canada,
we were there helping people in this small mountainside community
build stoves in their homes,
something that’s very important there.
And on this particular occasion, as we wrap up each visit there,
we spent a lot of time at the school.
The school in these small Al Salvadorian communities,
as is the case in much of the world, really becomes a center,
the focal point for a community.
So we use the school as a place to meet with community leaders,
with the teachers and others to coordinate our projects.
And typically, we wrap up these projects with some time at the school
to play with the schoolchildren and hang out with them,
and just experience what pure joy really looks like and feels like.
And it's always the best way to wrap up our trip.
And I remember as we were getting ready to close our time at the school,
a dear friend of mine, Don Freddy,
who was driving us that day motions to the skies,
we were there during a rainy season.
And he said to us, “if we don’t get going soon,
the skies are going to open up,
we’re going to experience some pretty heavy rainfall,
If you don’t want to sleep at the school tonight, we better get going”.
Everybody thought that was quite humorous,
seeing the gringo sleeping at the school be kind of funny,
not so funny for me, so I thought we better get going.
So no sooner did we pile into the truck that the raindrops start to fall.
And as is the case, the children kind of chase along our vehicle
as we take these curves up this this very steep mountain road.
And as they disappear into the distance behind one of the corners,
the rain really starts to intensify.
Again, if you’ve ever experienced what it looks like,
this is after a rainfall in El Salvador and these large crevices get dug into
the road very, very quickly.
I remember as we were driving up the mountain that day,
I was thinking the last stretch of road,
which is a very, very steep stretch of gravel dirt road,
I thought it would be somewhat difficult to get up.
And I remember as we were turning that last corner to the apex of this hill,
to the flatness of the peak of this hill,
Thinking, I took a peek and saw these large crevices were
quite deep into the Earth at this time.
And no sooner do we make this turn that we get stuck,
And there we are. We’re stuck in our truck
on the side of a mountain in the middle of a downpour.
We’re already soaked to the bone and the experience comes to a halt.
And so what do we do?
Naturally, we get out of the truck.
We start to figure out a way how we're going to push or pull
or whatever we’re going to do to get this truck up the mountain
No one wants to see the gringo sleep at the school.
So as we’re getting behind the truck, trying to push our way,
sliding back and forth, but not making much progress at all.
And in fact, we're not really going anywhere at this point.
Due to the time of the day it was getting late into the afternoon,
people were coming home from work, on the coffee plantations, in the local town,
primarily young men coming back from their days of work.
They got behind the truck with us. and our number started to increase.
So we had more people power. And as we’re pushing, we’re pushing harder,
we’re still not making any progress. We’re not going anywhere.
And I could sense the sense of frustration in
the young man who was standing beside me,
at one point in time, he starts banging on the quarter panel of the truck
on the rear of the truck.
And he says, to Don Freddy, “Amigo, necesitas ir más rápido”,
“Hey buddy, you got to go faster”.
And it was at that moment that I could see into the cab of the truck
Don Freddy put the vehicle in park,
very slowly, methodically got out of the vehicle,
and walked back to where this young man was standing
and he put his arm around him, and he said to him,
“going faster doesn’t always get you further ahead.
You just end up spinning your wheels.
Sometimes you need to slow down and stop before you can move forward”.
And for me, that was a moment that is absolutely frozen in time.
Here we are, stuck on the side of a mountain, stuck in life.
And what an incredible metaphor at that moment that I heard,
those sage words of advice that sometimes you need to slow down
before you can move forward, before you can climb that mountain in front of you.
And I thought for a moment,
as we’re standing there in the pouring rain
and we hear these incredible words that are spoken to us
and we take this moment to pause and reflect
some really interesting things happen there
When I look at that moment,
when I go back in time in the weeks and months after,
I thought “this wasn’t a spontaneous act,
this was an act of great intention”.
I like to call this “a pause with a purpose”
This was a time out with intention that we were given at this moment.
And when we do this, when we slow down and stop,
a lot of really incredible things happen
At that moment on the mountainside, the first thing that happened to us,
we were able to catch our breath.
We’re able to slow down.
Our heart rate slows down, our breathing patterns begin to normalize.
We rest and we recover.
Such an important thing, we’re doing something so physical,
but at the same time, you can relate to anything in life.
And what happens when we slow down and we give ourselves a chance to recover?
We get our sense of clarity.
We find a greater sense of clarity, clarity to see the world as it truly is,
not as we want to see it. And so that’s the first thing.
And when we start to see and think and feel more clearly,
it gives us an opportunity to reflect.
And again, that day on the mountain, we reflected on a couple of things.
We reflected on our plan, the path that we had chosen.
Do we need to alter our plan? Do we need to recalibrate?
Do we need a backup further down the mountain?
Do we need to shift our focus a little bit?
Do we need to pull more than we were pushing?
All of those things come into play.
When we reflect on our plan, what we’re really doing is we’re preparing.
We’re doing our homework.
And when we do that, we build a sense of confidence in ourselves.
Preparedness does that. It breeds confidence.
The other thing we reflected on
were past times in our lives where we’ve overcome challenges.
All of these people live in this environment.
They experienced challenges on a daily basis.
So you go back into your memory banks
and think about times where you’ve had to climb a mountain,
where you've had to get yourself unstuck.
And at that moment in time,
we gain the confidence to realize that we've done this before
and we can do this again.
And then lastly, when we give ourselves this moment of pause to stop and reflect,
“reconnection” is a really, really important thing.
And at that moment on the mountainside, as we looked around to each other,
we had this incredible sense of solidarity to know that we were all
in this together, to know that we are not alone.
So as we’re standing there on the mountainside, looking at each other,
realizing that we can do this
we have the people power to do this.
We have the connection to do this.
We have this shared experience that we all want to get off
this mountainside right now.
And what that does is it helps us develop a sense of conviction,
the wherewithal to persevere through challenging times.
To face adversity and still move forward.
And so when I think about this time on the mountain
and I relate it to life, again in the years since then,
and all the challenges that I’ve faced and how I’ve used this formula of recovery,
of reflection and of reconnection,
I think about the time that we're living in right now.
Global challenges with very, very personal impacts.
Living during this time of a pandemic
has left all of us feeling a myriad of emotions that are all valid
and all need to be acknowledged and all need to be embraced.
Some of us feel sad, some of us feel anger or frustration.
Some of us are feeling a great sense of loss and grieving,
and many of us are left feeling isolated or alone.
And when you think about what’s happening in the world today,
whether it is the pandemic or climate change, or social and political unrest,
we've all been impacted by this in a significant way.
And so when I think about global challenges and personal impact,
there is a way forward. But until we acknowledge
the emotions that we’re feeling, until we slow down and stop,
we’re not going to be able to move forward
And what this is done to each of us is it’s forced us to ask some really,
really important questions of ourselves about our future,
about our career choices, about our relationships,
questions about our personal health and well-being and how important it is.
And finally, a lot of questions around our purpose
and the desire to find greater meaning in our day-to-day lives.
We’ve all been given this opportunity. And sort of seeing a global pandemic,
I like to think of it as a global pause.
And the opportunity that we’ve been given to slow down and stop,
and recover, and reflect, and reconnect.
And so this is the opportunity that there is another way forward.
We need to take this moment in time to do that, to recover, to find clarity.
It's OK to acknowledge our emotions.
We need to give ourselves the time and space to acknowledge those emotions,
to find a greater sense of clarity. A greater sense of clarity over
who we are, where we are, and what it is that we are truly seeking.
To reflect on the path that we have chosen
to reflect on the decisions that we’ve made
to reflect on our plan in life,
and to make appropriate decisions that align with our identity
and where we are in life, and what it is that we are truly seeking.
And I think it's also important to reflect on our history.
The challenges that we’ve faced,
the scars that we have are all part of us and who we are today.
And reflecting on all those successes and achievements to know that we have
the confidence to believe in our ability to move forward.
And finally, to reconnect, to develop conviction.
This is an incredible shared experience that we have
in this moment in time in our history.
Living during this pandemic has affected
every single human being on this planet.
And we can say that we have a shared experience like never before.
And in doing so, we've all felt feelings of isolation.
We've all felt some of these emotions that have run through us over
the course of the past 18 months.
So we have this shared experience that we need to connect with, on each other.
To move forward, to have the conviction, to say that we can do this.
So when I go back to that day on the mountain side,
and as we took our moment of pause, and we recovered, and we reflected
on our plan, and we were buoyed by the sense of connectedness and solidarity,
we got back behind the truck and we started to push.
And as we slowly made our way up the mountain
we got to the top of this hill,
of this crest.
And we gave some high fives to everyone who was there,
and some hugs and a sense of celebration was happening
in the pouring rain in the mountains of El Salvador.
And it was incredible.
And as we jump back in the truck
and started to make our way down this bumpy road,
I remember there was a sense of calm that overcame all of us.
I don’t know if it was a sense of relief, a quiet sense of celebration.
But I know for myself it was this incredible experience of knowing that
we overcame something, we overcame a challenge.
We got ourselves unstuck from something.
We climb the mountain. We did this together.
But I remember thinking that we’re going to see more rainy days.
There will be more mountains ahead of us.
There will be more challenges that we will face.
There's going to be adversity out there.
But for myself, knowing that I have the opportunity and the ability
to slow down and stop,
to slow down and stop and find the clarity, the confidence and
the conviction to carry on,
that helps me move forward in life.
I would encourage everyone to think of these moments,
as we’ve heard several times today,
to slow down and stop and the importance of that.
And so when I go back to this
I think about “where we are right here right now”.
And this is a really important message for me,
probably one of the most challenging things that we are faced with.
All these questions about our lives is to understand and embrace
the fact that we are exactly where we are supposed to be.
I’m going to say that again because it’s really, really hard to hear sometimes.
When we’re stuck in life,
or stuck on the side of a mountain, it doesn’t matter.
Sometimes it's hard to believe that we are exactly where we are supposed to be.
And what has led us to this point.
And so for myself, when I go back to that formula
of clarity, confidence and conviction,
this is why I believe
“slowing down and stopping is the way forward”.
Thank you.
(Clapping and cheering)