Speaker’s Sickness, or Why Keynote Speakers Are Often Quite Healthy

A lot of speakers are in exceptional physical shape. This might not come as a terrible surprise, as they are people whose business it is to be in the limelight, and although speakers are primarily judged by their content and their presentation skills, it’s obvious that being in decent and good-looking shape doesn’t hurt on stage. Just as most, but not all, pop stars are quite fit, most speakers are as well.

This, however, does not mean that speakers lead healthy lives. On the contrary, there are special health issues that seem to afflict primarily speakers and people in similar professions, something I’ve taken to calling speaker’s sickness. Now, this is rarely a sickness unto death, and many speakers are more than capable of performing their duties despite suffering from the same. This, as speaker’s sickness really isn’t a pathology unto itself, but rather a complex syndrome, an amalgamation of many minor afflictions rather than one debilitating one.

You see, the art of keynoting comes with certain less than pleasant bonuses, one of which is incessant traveling. A professional speaker will, depending a little on his/her turf, spend a tremendous amount of time in things like airports, airplanes, trains, taxis, hotels, and conference centers. What unites these is that lots of people either are in them, or have been, leaving their germs around all willy-nilly. Most of these spaces are also far too dependant on air conditioning, or similar systems that circulate the breathing and errant viral particles of other beings over and over again. What I’m trying to say is: Speakers spend a lot of their time in less than healthy rooms.

Now, I’m not saying this to make people pity speakers. Most of us do this because we absolutely love it, and although we’ll moan about the endless parade of lounges and hotel rooms, it’s the life we chose. But it does bring about certain stresses. Just like the traveling salesmen of yore, we have to adapt to life on the road.

In my case this includes, but isn’t limited to, dealing with the often horrid air quality of airplanes and conference rooms, the complex dietary issues of life on the road (where, interestingly, free alcohol is pretty much a constant presence), and spending way too little time in the gym. I’d started to realize that all this was taking its toll on me, and that one of the reasons I often felt a little iffy was that I hadn’t corrected for speaker’s sickness.

So I’ve recently tried to do all those things that we are told as children: Take my vitamins, maintain a healthy diet, exercise. I’ve even succeeded to some degree. And this got me thinking, and prompted this little ditty. I often wondered how come so many speakers I knew were health nuts. I even asked some of them, but no-one had managed to give an answer beyond the obvious “Well, it’s nice to keep fit.”

I’ve now realized that this is only part of the reason. Speakers get pushed towards fitness and a health focus precisely due to speaker’s sickness. Often unconsciously (and in the case of idiots like me, slowly), we realize that we need to keep fit simply because our lives can be so unhealthy. With better fitness comes stronger resistance to the bacteria lurking in endless hotel rooms and airport lounges. Tending to your diet is necessary when you’re constantly surrounded by buffet food and plied with drinks.

And then there’s one final thing: While it’s easy to pick up various illnesses whilst on the road, we simply cannot afford to. No speaker wants to miss a gig. On the contrary, we’re obsessed with not doing so. Gigs mean money, obviously, but it’s also a matter of pride. We hate the very idea of not being able to do a keynote we’ve signed up for, and we’re not going to let something as trivial as illness stop us. So we get healthy, whether we want to or not…