# “Staying Neutral in Divisive Times”
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## Article Content
Here's an email I just sent to the 225 bureau agents on my mailing list. It's been an interesting day. These are divisive times. As speakers, bureau owners and agents, all of us are trying our best to navigate these perilous times. Last week, I shared on my blog my Social Media Serenity Prayer. Here's what I wrote: I am trying very hard not to post what I think. I’m mostly successful, but I do slip. So I need a 2026 version of my Social Media Serenity Prayer. Maybe something like this: “Grant me the ability to avoid the stress, rage anxiety from things I cannot control, the courage to change the things I can, & the wisdom to know the difference!” Every morning, I open the news and encounter another statement, tariff announcement, threat, insult, provocation, bizarre claim, or astonishing bit of political theatre coming out of the United States. As a Canadian, I get angry, sometimes really angry, and my instinct is to fire up LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, or my blog and say exactly what is on my mind. And then I stop. Or at least, I am trying very hard to stop. I promptly broke my pledge, and a recent comment I made on LinkedIn drew some attention. I won't bother sharing it, other than observing that it referenced a line on a particularly popular site in Canada at this moment. As a speaker for 33 years, I've worked tremendously hard to be neutral on stage, particularly when it comes to politics. I've done keynotes in blue states and red states and national associations which have featured everything in between. I cover the trends that matter. The closest I've come to expressing an opinion is when I carefully shared a cartoon image of when the Jetsons met the Flintstones. It usually drew a lot of laughs. Then, it didn't, and afew years ago, I even stopped doing that. That discipline of staying neutral hasn't changed, and it isn't going to. My job on stage was never to tell an audience what to think about the news of the day — it's to help them see past it, to the trends that will still be true long after this news cycle is forgotten. Whatever I feel whille scrolling social media stays off the stage. That's the deal I've kept for 33 years, in blue rooms and red ones, and it's the same one I'm making with all of you today. Here's an interesting trend I think about a lot - as a new grandfather, my son and his wife - they of the social media generation - spend very little time on social media. I'm not even allowed to post pictures of my grandson online - their generation views social media as destructive. I view this as a positive sign, in that perhaps the cancer that is social media might decline in use and impact over time. If a client ever has a concern, call me directly — I'd rather have that conversation than have you guess at the answer. Thanks, as always, for keeping me working in rooms across the map. Jim

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/09/staying-neutral-in-divisive-times/