Former United States president Barack Obama on Monday shared his hack for maintaining his famed cool in stressful situations before an enthralled audience of more than 4,500, mostly professionals and company executives from Singapore and around the region.
Recalling the tumultuous period as he stepped into office in 2008, in the shadow of the sub-prime crisis that devastated the US economy and rocked nearly all other economies linked to it through trade and finance, Mr Obama said that his plate was full."We were shedding 800,000 jobs a month, month after month, in six months prior to when I came into office. In total, we lost 8 million jobs.
"All the problems I was facing were hard. If you are in the White House, in the West Wing, the only issues that came to my desk were ones that had no good solution and nobody else could solve."We had the expression - and I believe you would have an equivalent here - that poop does not roll downhill in the White House, it rolls uphill... to me," he said, as laughter broke out in the hall.He said he always found himself grappling with probabilities.
"And that's how I was able to manage stress throughout the presidency and I could feel like we did the best we could and for the right reasons. And we maintained our integrity throughout and didn't have major scandals.Although Mr Trump was never mentioned by name, there were allusions to his policies in Mr Obama's responses which were critical of the stark political polarisation evident in the US today.