What Audiences Ask After I Share My Story

After every talk I give about resilience and adversity, there’s a Q&A. And after the Q&A, there’s the real Q&A. The one that happens in the hallway, at the signing table, in quiet conversations as the room empties. Those questions are different from the ones people ask with a microphone in their hand.

I’ve spoken to corporate audiences, associations, nonprofits, and leadership groups across the country. The topics vary, but the questions converge on the same themes. People want to know how to handle what they’re carrying. They want permission to be honest. And they want to know if what they’re experiencing is normal.

Here are the questions I get asked most often, and the honest answers I’ve developed over years of these conversations.

TL;DR: The real questions don’t come during the Q&A. They come in the hallway afterward, when people ask how to handle what they’re carrying. After hundreds of talks on resilience, I’ve noticed the same themes: people want permission to be honest, and they want to know if what they’re feeling is normal.

“How did you know you were ready to talk about it?”

This is the most common question, and the honest answer is: I didn’t. There wasn’t a moment of readiness. There was a moment of exhaustion with the alternative. After 36 years of silence about my mother’s suicide, I was tired of carrying it. Tired of the energy it took to maintain the performance. Tired of relationships that could only go so deep because I’d built a wall around the biggest fact of my life.

Readiness isn’t a feeling. It’s a decision. You decide that the cost of silence has become higher than the cost of honesty. That’s different for everyone, and there’s no timeline that applies universally. What I tell people is to watch for the moment when the energy of hiding becomes greater than the fear of being seen. For me, it happened at a dinner with close friends. Someone asked about my family, and I realized I was running the same script I had been running for three decades, the careful redirect, the surface-level answer. I was exhausted by my own performance. That is when I knew.

“Do you ever regret being so open?”

No. But I understand why people ask this. When you share something personal publicly, you lose control of the narrative. People interpret your story through their own lens. Some will misunderstand. Some will judge. A few will try to use it against you.

What I’ve found is that the people who respond negatively to your honesty were never going to be your allies anyway. The people who respond positively become deeper connections, better colleagues, and stronger supporters than you would have had if you’d stayed behind the wall. The only thing I have lost by being open is access to people who would have left eventually anyway. That is a trade I would make every time. What I have gained, deeper relationships with my team, more honest conversations with my kids, the ability to connect with audiences on a level that hiding makes impossible, far outweighs any discomfort the openness has created.

“Does it ever get easier?”

Yes and no. The pain of the specific experiences, losing my mother, losing my business, those do not go away. What gets easier is the telling. The first time I talked about my mother’s suicide in front of an audience, I could barely get through it. Now I can share that story with clarity and control. Not because it hurts less. Because I have done the work of integrating it into who I am rather than keeping it locked in a room I never enter.

What also gets easier is recognizing the signals in other people. When someone in the audience is carrying something heavy, I can see it now. The way they sit. The way they avoid eye contact during certain parts of the talk. The way they linger afterward. That recognition used to be unconscious. Now it is intentional. I look for those people because they are the reason I do this work.

But I want to be honest: some days are still hard. There are mornings where I wake up and do not feel like being the guy who talks about resilience. I would rather just be the guy who drinks coffee and reads the paper. That is normal. Resilience is not a state you achieve. It is a practice you maintain.

“I’m going through something hard right now. What should I do?”

This question usually comes from someone in the hallway, spoken quietly, often with eyes that are already glassy. My answer is always the same three things:

First, get professional help. A therapist, a counselor, a support group. Whatever form works for you. This is non-negotiable. You wouldn’t set a broken bone yourself.

Second, tell one person you trust. Not everyone. Not publicly. Just one person who can know what you’re carrying so you’re not carrying it alone.

Third, lower your expectations for yourself temporarily. You’re going through something. You don’t need to be at 100%. Give yourself permission to be at 70% for a while. Your team will survive. Your career will survive. You need to survive first. I also tell them this: your work will not be your best right now, and that is fine. The people who try to power through a crisis without acknowledging it usually create more problems than the ones who slow down. I have seen leaders lose team members, damage client relationships, and make strategic mistakes because they refused to admit they were operating at less than capacity. The strongest move is admitting where you are.

“How do you handle it when someone shares something heavy?”

This one comes up more than you would expect. People hear me talk about grief, loss, and adversity, and then someone in the audience or the hallway shares something deeply personal. Sometimes it is something they have never told anyone. The question they are really asking is: what do I do with that responsibility?

My answer: you listen. You do not fix. You do not compare. You do not immediately offer advice or resources unless they ask. You just let them know they have been heard. Most people who share something heavy are not looking for solutions. They are looking for the experience of saying it out loud to someone who will not flinch.

The biggest mistake I see leaders make in these moments is rushing to problem-solve. Someone tells them about a divorce, a health scare, a family member’s addiction, and the leader immediately pivots to action items. That is not what the moment calls for. The moment calls for presence. After the person feels heard, then you can talk about resources, adjustments, support. But only after.

“How do you balance vulnerability and authority?”

This question comes almost exclusively from people in senior leadership roles. They understand the value of being open, but they’re worried about losing credibility or making their teams anxious.

My answer: vulnerability and authority aren’t opposites. They’re complementary. The leader who can say “I’ve been through hard things and here’s what I learned” has more authority than the leader who pretends nothing has ever gone wrong. People don’t follow perfect leaders. They follow real ones.

The calibration matters, though. You don’t share everything with everyone. You share what’s relevant, what serves the moment, and what helps the people in front of you. You don’t use a team meeting as a therapy session. But you don’t pretend to be a robot either. I would add one more thing about authority. The leaders I have met who worry most about losing credibility through vulnerability are often the ones whose credibility depends on performance rather than competence. If your authority depends on appearing invulnerable, it was fragile to begin with. The leaders whose authority survives honesty are the ones who were delivering results all along.

“What do you say to people who think resilience talks are just motivational fluff?”

I agree with them, partially. Most resilience content IS motivational fluff. It’s vague. It’s generic. It tells you to “embrace the struggle” without telling you what that actually means when you’re staring at a P&L that says your business is dying.

What I try to do is different. I don’t sell resilience as a mindset hack. I share specific experiences with specific consequences and specific lessons. When I talk about losing my business, I include the financial details. When I talk about my mother’s death, I include the decades of silence and the therapy that finally broke through. Details create credibility. Generalities create eye rolls. The other thing I would say to the skeptics: pay attention to what happens in the room during a specifics-based talk versus a generalities-based one. In the generic talk, people check their phones. In the specific one, they lean forward. They take notes. They come up afterward with real questions about real problems they are facing. That behavioral difference tells you everything about which approach actually reaches people. If the room is moved but nobody changes their behavior afterward, the talk was entertainment, not education.

Last updated: March 18, 2026