Chief Operating Officer, ACADIA HEALTHCARE CO INC
Episode 150: Dr. Nasser Khan on Overcoming Opioid Addiction with Storytelling
150th Anniversary of Speaking to Influence with Dr. Nasser Khan of Acadia Healthcare This week Laura is celebrating the 150th ...
About Nasser Khan
In a September 2023 podcast appearance, Nasser Khan, then Group President of Operations at Acadia Healthcare's comprehensive treatment centers, discussed his work overseeing 151 outpatient clinics across 32 states that treat over 65,000 patients daily for opioid addiction. Khan described addiction as a chronic disease affecting 10 million people in the U.S. and stated that only 10% of people with opioid addiction are currently in treatment. He cited that opioid overdose is the leading cause of death for people aged 18 to 45 and that there were approximately 107,000 opioid-related overdose deaths in the most recent year, a figure he said was twice that of the previous 12 months. Khan also addressed what he called a "serious PR issue" in the industry, saying there is a "massive misunderstanding" of what opioid treatment programs do, and that they are places for treatment rather than for safe drug use. He identified community opposition based on fear and misunderstanding as the biggest challenge in building new clinics. Khan described his primary role as being "an evangelist" to combat stigma, and shared leadership lessons, including the importance of building balanced teams and using personalized, emotional communication to persuade and influence.
Transcript (69 segments)
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Laura Sokola0:03
Welcome to the podcast Speaking to Influence: Communication Secrets of the C-Suite. I'm Dr. Laura Sokola, your host, founder of Vocal Impact Productions and author of Speaking to Influence: Mastering Your Leadership Voice. My guest today is Dr. Nasser Khan. He is the Group President of Operations at Acadia Healthcare's Comprehensive Treatment Centers. He spent the last two decades in the health services industries improving the quality and efficiency of care for patients with complex and chronic diseases. At Acadia, he oversees 151 outpatient clinics across 32 states where they treat over 65,000 patients every day who are suffering from opioid addiction. Now, sir, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.
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Nasser Khan0:44
Thanks for having me, Laura.
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Laura Sokola0:50
Given the fact that opioid addiction is not the most fun topic necessarily, what is your fun fact before we get into the heavy stuff?
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Nasser Khan0:56
My fun fact is that I'm a retired competitive eater.
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Laura Sokola1:05
Okay, eating like the guys who are doing the Nathan's Hot Dogs Fourth of July challenge? How many hot dogs can you eat in an hour or something along those lines?
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Nasser Khan1:13
That's exactly right. That's probably the best known one, but I've done everything from pizza to milkshakes, blueberry pancakes, and even one particularly traumatic experience at Denny's eating a fish fry.
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Laura Sokola1:30
Oh no, I don't even want to know where the trauma came in. I can imagine... I don't know if my imagination is worse than reality. So how did you get started in the competitive eating industry, and did that send you into the need for healthcare and the inspiration for a healthcare career perhaps?
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Nasser Khan1:41
Gosh, I never thought about the connection to what I do today. But it was... I was a hungry growing boy who played sports, liked to eat, and appreciated some good value. And I guess it also runs a little bit in the blood and in the family. We've got a cousin who is a true competitive professional eater, and you've probably seen him at some point or another on ESPN doing the Coney hot dog challenge.
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Laura Sokola2:07
Oh my gosh, that's amazing. So you said you were a retired competitive eater. How long did that career last?
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Nasser Khan2:12
The career lasted for about five years. Once I was able to get my first actual paying job and able to afford food at normal quantities, I switched over. So this was kind of a college side gig. It definitely was a side gig, and it did its job of making some friends and creating some amusement, and I'm ready to move on.
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Laura Sokola2:42
Now you're in a slightly healthier career, which is terrific both for you and everybody else that you serve. So tell us about the work that you're doing with Acadia. What is your 30-second elevator pitch?
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Nasser Khan2:54
Yeah, so Laura, I'm a physician by background. I've worked in the industry as you mentioned for the last two decades, really focused on chronic diseases and how you can improve the quality of care for patients. Addiction is a chronic disease, and it's one that affects 10 million people across the U.S. And what I do each and every day is figure out how I can help people who suffer from addiction rebuild their lives.
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Laura Sokola3:23
Yes, I think that's important that people realize that it is a chronic disease, that addiction is not just a bad habit or laziness or they're not bad people. It's like mental illness and anything else. It is really a disease that needs treating, isn't it?
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Nasser Khan3:39
That's exactly right. You could think about something like diabetes, for example. If we go back even 10 years ago, think about all the stigma around obesity. You could say, well, people choose to be diabetic because they don't control what they eat, they gain weight, and then they develop diabetes. But I think if you were to go around and talk to people, that's not really the first thing that comes out of their mouth when they talk about someone who's diabetic today. So similarly, it's not as if there's 10 million people out there who wake up and say, gosh, you know what, I'd love to become an addict, and this is a part-time thing I do and have fun on the weekends. There's a genetic, social, environmental set of factors that come together that make some people more likely than others, if they were to have an exposure, even a minor one, to certain substances and to enter into a pattern of behavior that we call addiction.
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Laura Sokola4:30
Yes, and it affects so many people, first, second, and third hand and beyond. So in all the crisis of addiction, what's... this may be a strange question to ask, what's your favorite part of your job and why?
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Nasser Khan4:45
In healthcare, I think that the job always comes down to the people and how you can have impact on their lives. And what we do in particular is to help people rebuild and recover. They've done a lot of the hard work to decide to come into our clinics and seek treatment, and then we have the pleasure and the privilege of being their Sherpas and guides along that long and complicated journey. And there's a lot of hard things that happen, but every now and then, believe it or not, we do get good outcomes too. We don't talk about that enough. It's easier to focus on the bad outcomes. And when you do, it's somebody maybe that works, that has a family, that's got productive connections in their community, and they come back and they say thank you, and they help you connect the dots, and it makes it all worth it. Hearing that thank you, knowing that you changed somebody's life.
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Laura Sokola5:38
And especially in your field, changing one person's life is really changing innumerable numbers of people's lives by proxy, isn't it?
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Nasser Khan5:49
Yeah, that's exactly right. And this is a disease that doesn't affect people in isolation. It affects families, it affects communities. And so when you help one person, there are a number of other people behind that that you're helping as well.
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Laura Sokola6:07
Yes. So in doing all of this, what is one of the big issues of the day, and how do you have to adjust your approach when you're personally speaking to different stakeholder groups about it?
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Nasser Khan6:18
We have a serious PR issue in our industry. There's a massive misunderstanding of what it is that we do in our clinics. People often think that an OTP, or an opioid treatment program, which is what I operate, is a place for people to safely inject drugs and exchange needles. It's actually not. It's actually a place where people come to get treatment. And the analogy I might use is: if you are smoking, you are participating... We have a serious PR problem in our industry. There's a complete misunderstanding of what we do in our clinics. People think that this is a place where you come if you're trying to safely inject drugs or exchange needles. And it frustrates me because this is the exact opposite of what it is that we're trying to do and accomplish in our clinics. Think of what we do as not selling cigarettes or trading cigarettes for people to smoke. We're actually distributing the patch. And would you go out and protest in front of a pharmacy for people that are there to buy the patch, that are trying to wear it so that they no longer have the craving to smoke? That's what we do in our clinics.
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Laura Sokola7:45
So are you drawing the analogy that it's actually like a cigarette patch?
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Nasser Khan7:52
It is. What we provide in terms of medication actually works to block the craving that you have to use drugs, which is exactly what the patch does with nicotine for cigarettes.
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Laura Sokola7:59
Well, I didn't realize it was that similar on the technology side. So okay, continue from there.
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Nasser Khan8:04
The other big misperception is who is it that comes into our clinics for treatment. And the thing is, if you were to stand in line in our clinic, we're open from 5 a.m. to around 11 a.m. The first line of people you'll see in the morning are people that are there dressed up to go to work. They're carrying their lunches, maybe they're wearing a uniform. They need to be in and out and go where they need to go, and they're probably working in the local community. Let's face it, people come to get clinics and get healthcare in the places where they live and they work. And then around two or three hours later in the morning, the next line forms, and it's young mothers with children. In fact, sometimes there's so many kids that if I didn't see the sign on the wall, or I guess I didn't work at that clinic, I would think it was the same line that I used to sit in myself five years ago when I was taking my youngest child to daycare. It looked like the daycare drop-off line. It looks exactly the same as the daycare drop-off line. So it's the same idea: it's just the moms in the community, or the dads or whoever in the community, but just to get their own services so that they can then go take the kids to daycare or to wherever.
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Laura Sokola9:17
That's exactly the point.
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Nasser Khan9:22
That's exactly the point. And for me, that's been the biggest aha. Drug use is so pervasive, addiction is such a big societal problem that it affects everybody. And everybody includes people that have jobs, it includes mothers, it increasingly includes adolescents and teenagers and college students. And so you may have the inclination to say, well, this isn't me or this doesn't affect me, but it does. Yeah, at least indirectly. It's who's in your neighborhood, it's who's running your stores or all those other kinds of whoever you engage. We just don't know if they're actually in recovery, if they're in treatment. But there's no way we would know, like any other addiction.
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Laura Sokola10:13
That's exactly right. Nobody is there wearing a sign or has a tattoo that says I have an opioid use disorder. So then in trying to convey this and trying to evangelize this message of sorts, this reframing, who's the toughest audience that you ever had to get through to?
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Nasser Khan10:30
The toughest audience is typically if I'm building a new clinic. And so I opened one up just a few months ago out here in the Pacific Northwest, and we're building in a residential middle-class suburb outside of a big city. And the people that expressed the most concern and came out to start to protest were people that lived in the community and the neighborhood. There were parents, school teachers, long-standing residents, because they were afraid of their safety. And I get it. I'm a parent, I live in a community, I care about safety, I care about making this a place that people want to live in. And so the number one thing I hear from people is, first of all, we don't want this in our community. And then reluctantly, what are you doing about security? But even in that question, it implies that the number one thing that they're afraid of is that people are going to actually be using or distributing drugs in their neighborhoods. But it's backwards, because we're there to treat people so that there's less using and distribution of drugs.
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Laura Sokola11:53
So the people who are the community members who come out protesting, I would imagine a group of protesters is a relatively hard audience to get through to, to convince them that they should support the building of a new treatment site in their community.
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Nasser Khan12:06
If their perception, this goes back to the PR problem we talked about, if they're misunderstanding is that you're actually building a place for addicts to come and use drugs in their backyard, so it's really utterly shifting their understanding of what this facility is going to be.
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Laura Sokola12:26
Do I understand that correctly?
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Nasser Khan12:33
You do. And I think an interesting statistic to share is that only one in ten, so ten percent of people with opioid addiction are in treatment today. These are people that are making the commitment to rebuild their lives and start the journey to recovery. So what we're trying to do is build a space for people in communities that are trying to do exactly that and reintegrate in the community. And I think when you start to frame it that way around this notion of community, people slowly, albeit reluctantly, start to get it.
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Laura Sokola13:08
So what is something that you have done that's helped them start to understand that this actually is in the best interest of their community and not a safety issue?
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Nasser Khan13:21
I tell stories. And in fact, I should say I get other people to tell stories. I get people that had the same concerns and fears from other communities that have this lived experience that can speak for themselves and help allay some of those fears. And they say, hey, I had some of these same opinions or concerns about what was going to happen or what happened in these clinics. Here's what my actual experience has been. And to answer questions, because I think what happens is over time people start to realize more of the benefit and they forget about some of the fears that we spoke about. And all of a sudden this becomes an essential service to the community, which is how we see ourselves.
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Laura Sokola14:07
So it sounds like, if I'm understanding correctly, that it's not just you telling the story, but getting other... it's a testimonial. People who are part of communities, other communities where successful clinics have been built, run, established, etc., to share their own mental or emotional conversion story of sorts, where they were opposed at first and then now they are grateful and they want to help other communities have similar success. Is that the testimonial aspect?
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Nasser Khan14:38
That's exactly right. And that's why I would say that my primary job is to be an evangelist and to open people's eyes to what it is that we need to do in order to solve this enormous problem. And so if I'm successful, then I'm able to convince somebody else who's then able to tell their own or give their own testimony, and so on and so forth. And that is the only way we're going to combat the stigma that keeps people from getting the help that they need.
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Laura Sokola15:13
Yes, and really in any job, the value of a testimonial is almost immeasurable. I mean, look at LinkedIn. They ask on anybody's LinkedIn profile, you know, get recommendations. What are recommendations? Recommendations are testimonials. Someone who's worked with you, someone who's received your service, your product, been a colleague of yours, a boss of yours, something along those lines. Why? Because you can claim that you're great, but if you're looking for my services and I say, hey, I'm great at this, we'll go, uh-huh. But if somebody else says, no, no, Laura's really great, then they'll go, oh, okay, so you had a good experience with her. Yes. That person's experience, that testimonial, is worth so much more as a persuasive piece of evidence than anything you can claim about yourself, anything I can claim about myself. So it makes perfect sense that having someone else from a neighboring community who has learned the reframing of what the clinic is that you're building to be the one to be the messenger on your behalf. It makes perfect sense to me.
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Nasser Khan16:20
Yeah, and the other stakeholder group we bring in is our patients as well that have been successful in recovery. And that's the most powerful story. If I live in your community and you have fears about what this treatment center is, and I come to you with my testimony and my own experience of how this clinic, the services program, helped me rebuild my life, then ultimately that's going to be the most powerful thing in swaying your mindset and opinion.
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Laura Sokola16:51
Of course. The person who actually received the first-hand benefit. So getting those two sides... do you need the service versus is the service presenting itself in your space? A great pair of testimonials there. And with that, what's an important lesson here? You mentioned that you were a physician at first and a practicing physician, and you've moved into various other medical roles. What's an important lesson you learned when you went from being an individual contributor to leading your first team?
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Nasser Khan17:27
Yeah, I think of teams the way that I might think about a sports team, a basketball team in particular. So if you'll bear with me on using a sports analogy, there are five people on the court in five distinct positions. There are people that are there in basketball, okay? Yeah, there's someone there to dribble the ball, there are shooters, there are people that catch rebounds, block play defense. They're discrete roles. And people always make the comment, well, what if you could have all five people on the court be Michael Jordan? Could they beat any team? And people who really know something about basketball will say, no, not really. A well-constructed, well-balanced team will beat that theoretical super team every time. And the reason is because when you're trying to accomplish something that's larger than the sum of the individual contributions of the people on the team, you've got to actually play to everyone's individual strengths and create balance. And so I had the perception early on in my career as a manager that what I need to do is build more individual strong performers like myself and pair them together. But of course, we all have blind spots. There's things I'm not good at. Maybe I didn't know back then, but I've learned, sometimes the hard way over time, that what you need to do is say, for this goal that I'm trying to achieve, these are the specific skills and capabilities, and build that around you in your team. And that's the only way that you're going to ultimately be successful in leadership and management.
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Laura Sokola19:07
Sure. Recognizing it's great that I have these skills, but who has the skills that I don't possess, and then find those people to fill in those blanks.
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Nasser Khan19:13
Yeah, that's right. Pretty quickly, I'm not an accountant. Life is much better when somebody else does my bookkeeping and accounting for me. I don't need more of me to do that. That would just be ugly. My best teams are the ones where I've put them together successfully and I realize some of the skills and the blind spots that I lack, and some of the blind spots I have because there are people on the team with a completely different perspective and skill set. And then you start to really see it for yourself as their leader.
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Laura Sokola19:44
And in identifying some of those blind spots or some of those areas for opportunity, let's go into a very direct challenge. It's time for The Listener 24-Hour Influence Challenge. What is... if you could talk directly to our audience, as a matter of fact, not if, you can right now talk directly to our audience, Nasser, and challenge everyone to take one step that they can complete within 24 hours to have more influence. How would you like to challenge our listeners today?
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Nasser Khan20:10
Well, I am going to not only challenge folks listening, I'm going to urge folks listening to go out and get on the internet and look up the word fentanyl, and maybe add your neighborhood, community, or state to it, and see what comes up. Because unless you've had perhaps a direct or indirect family member, friend, someone in your community that's affected, you probably think, well, this is a hard one, but let's turn the page and the news, so to speak. It's not really affecting me personally. And the truth is, for all of the reasons that we've talked about, it affects all of us. One statistic that every time I say it blows my mind away is that opioid addiction overdose is the leading cause of death in people ages 18 to 45. Wow. Blows my mind away. It's not car accidents, it's not suicides, it's opioid overdose. So you have to care about this. My challenge, what I'll urge everyone to do listening to this, is spend a few minutes, educate yourself. You may someday save someone's life.
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Laura Sokola21:27
Wow. Well, and I mean, I've heard crazy statistics as far as the growth rate of the problem kind of year over year. Is it as bad as I have heard? What's like how fast is this problem growing? Because I want to know if the kind of stuff that I've heard is more exaggerated or accurate. I keep hearing it's like doubling year over year.
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Nasser Khan21:48
Yeah, it's been doubling over the last three to four years, exactly as you said, year over year. In the most recent year, there were about 107,000 opioid-related overdose deaths. And I think the statistic is approximately once every five minutes. So we've been as we've been talking, we've probably lost six to seven people. Oh my gosh. So this year, over the last 12 months, is twice as many as over the previous 12 months. So that doesn't bode well for next year, does it?
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Laura Sokola22:18
It does not bode very well for next year. And we've got a lot of work to do. Is it that much faster? It's likely to come into our communities if it's not here already, which I think you've just proven it most likely already is. So all right, there's your 24-hour influence challenge, everybody. Look up your town, your county, your city, whatever it is. And how do you spell fentanyl, just so people? Because I would have to guess on this one.
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Nasser Khan22:38
Yeah, it's F-E-N-T-A-N-Y-L.
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Laura Sokola22:48
My goodness. Okay, I'm very glad I asked because I think I got half of those letters wrong. You can come back and we'll put it in the show notes for the 24-hour influence challenge. So if you're driving right now, please do not try to write that down. All right, let's talk about a communications-related mistake that you've made along the way. And if you could have a do-over, what would it have looked like?
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Nasser Khan23:08
Yeah, gosh, there's so many to choose from, but where do I start? Look, I think the mistake that I made more than once earlier on in my career was to use the communication style that I had been trained in because I was trained as a physician. And a physician needs to take objective clinical data and share it with patients and do it in a way that often is dispassionate, which is a necessary part of the job. Over time, as I've changed roles, initially I carried that style over. And I realized a couple things. Number one, the obvious point that if you start communicating in techno-speak, you're going to lose a certain percentage of your audience unless the person receiving the information is a technical person themselves. I think that part is obvious. But I think the other piece, which took me longer to appreciate, was that I mentioned that as a physician, I'm communicating information to you a little bit dispassionately. It's a little bit of the nature of the arm's-length relationship I might have with you as my patient. So you're definitely meaning not passionately, take the emotion out of it and just speak very matter-of-factly.
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Laura Sokola24:18
Exactly, exactly.
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Nasser Khan24:30
But if I'm going to persuade you in my communications, and when you're working in leadership and you're working in industry, often your communications are intended to... often I'm trying to persuade you to do something, influence you in some way. So I have to find a way to do the opposite. I have to personalize it. I have to spark an emotion in you that's going to get you to change your thought process or pattern of behavior. It's actually almost the opposite.
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Laura Sokola25:03
Interesting. That on the one hand, you have to... and I guess that makes sense. As a physician, when you're communicating with other physicians, if you're looking at people who are dying, you're looking at people chronically ill, if you are super emotional about the whole thing, I don't know how you get out of bed in the morning. But also you end up scaring patients if you're too emotional per se. But that's different from being impersonal and connecting with them on an emotional level for their sake. Am I getting this right? Like that fine line balance? I would think that's a very difficult line to walk.
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Nasser Khan5:41
I think that's right. And it's counter-intuitive because, yeah, I practice medicine. So if you had asked me, I would have said, oh, I'm great at talking to people. That's kind of what I do all day. And I take things and I explain it to them, or maybe I try to get them to change their behavior. But something is completely different perhaps when you're out of the life-and-death setting. Perhaps when you're getting people to change their patterns of behavior in the work setting, I need to find a way to speak to them in a much different way, with a much different vocabulary, to get them to change.
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Laura Sokola26:16
Understood. And when you're working with your employees, whether it's currently or in your previous role, what is an approach that you've used to address an accountability issue with somebody on your team?
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Nasser Khan26:29
The technique that I have used with some success is to get people to start out by framing what they think their priorities are. So I'll go to someone, one of my direct reports, and I'll say, hey, let's talk about 2023 and what you're focused on. Tell me in your words how you see things. And I'll use that as a teachable moment. If you come to me and you say, hey, I think that the most important thing, my priority, is X, and it's not aligned with what I'm thinking because I have a different vantage point, and in addition to you, I've got four other people, there are five other people that each have their own priorities, and all of these things have to add up so that our team can deliver on its broader objectives. I will use that technique to then help you see the bigger picture and how what you're doing fits in, and often use that to subtly shift or reframe your focus, rather than me saying, that's great, you're completely wrong and focused on the wrong things. That doesn't work. Same point blank, hey, you're wrong. Sure-fire way to lose your team.
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Laura Sokola27:52
So tell me again, what is it you used? A couple of key phrases in there. Tell me what those are again. What's your framing?
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Nasser Khan27:59
The tactic is to, one, get people to first articulate in their own words what they think their priorities are. And then, again, they might have gotten it perfectly right, but then to help subtly shift them so that they see what the broader team priorities are and how what they're doing and what their capabilities and skills are fits into the bigger picture. You know, you could do it the other way around. You could sort of say, here's the bigger picture and here's what you do. But I think there's something for that kind of self-actualization and discovery. So my preferred technique is to start to talk to you and to say, that's great, I want you to also think through my priorities and our team's priorities, and then let's discuss together how we make the two fit. Because I might be wrong. You may have something in your specific lane that I'm not seeing. So I think of it as a collaborative communication process more than anything else.
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Laura Sokola29:02
That's great framing. So tell me how we make the two fit. Tell me... have them talk through their own thought processes first to frame it, and then you can add additional information from there. Then with that, if somebody in your organization wanted to move up into a senior leadership role, aside from their technical expertise, what's one skill they'd have to demonstrate to you and why?
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Nasser Khan29:26
I guess I have to give another answer that's going to be a confession that I did everything wrong for far longer than I'd like to admit to.
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Laura Sokola29:38
Okay, I love confessions. True confession time. Here we go.
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Nasser Khan29:45
So, you know, again, I started out from a technical background, and so I had always assumed that the most technical person is therefore the most capable person, the most capable person is the one who's going to get promoted and be the most successful person. And that sounds right, but it's not quite right. If I could get the do-over, if you will, 20 years later, I now appreciate that it's actually some of the soft skills, if you will, the non-technical skills, that matter even more. At this stage in my career, there has to be a good foundation of content and technical skills, and I have developed that, and that's allowed me a chance to rise. But then to actually rise in your career, I have had to develop a completely different set of skills. So what do I mean by that? I have, first and foremost, had to learn to be a better communicator. I've had to learn to be conscious of how you vary communication in an email versus how I might speak to you in a meeting or on a phone call. I've had to learn to understand almost what they call EQ, or emotional intelligence. What is it that you're thinking? What is it that matters to you? And how do I reframe my approach to achieve my agenda, which sometimes, of course, is going to be our agenda, but not necessarily? And that's the sort of thing that sometimes gets thrown together as politics. It's really not politics. Politics sometimes has a negative connotation. I would say it's really how you interact with people in a way that finds common ground and achieves common goals.
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Laura Sokola31:31
It sounds like it's more about the diplomacy aspect than the quote-unquote politics per se. There's a definition I like by Howard Newton: diplomacy or tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy. That's very well said. I would agree. How do you connect with someone who may see things a little bit differently? I love it. Focusing on that EQ, that emotional intelligence. 30 seconds for The Final Answer. Announcer, as Peter Drucker famously said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. What's one communication pattern that's had a big cultural impact, positive or negative, on a team that you've led?
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Nasser Khan32:08
I think that the most important thing that I have done is to encourage everybody, and do so by modeling it myself, to start with your why and your values and what you stand for. Because you can get lost in the shuffle of all the things that... all the world's problems and all the things you need to do just to get through every day. But at the end of the day, if you lose your why and your North Star, everything sort of can start to fall apart from that rotted core. And so I'll start out by saying, here's why I'm here, here's what drives and motivates me, here's the why for why I do what I do. And I'll encourage everyone to come up with their own why. And I'll encourage people that if we're doing things that are outside of that why, we need to stop and reassess. Like, what is it that we're doing and how does it all fit in and matter if we're going to accomplish what it is that we set out to do? So I come back to the power of why.
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Laura Sokola33:14
Yes, yes. Like a strong focal point to start with once again. And now, sir, this has been a great conversation. I'm sorry it has to come to a close. How can people learn more about you and Acadia Healthcare centers?
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Nasser Khan33:34
Yeah, I would encourage people to take a look at our website. There's a lot of great information there: AcadiaHealthcare.com. And then you can also find me, Nasser Khan, on LinkedIn, where I will link or comment on a lot of issues as they relate to opioid addiction.
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Laura Sokola33:49
Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today.
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Nasser Khan33:54
Thank you for having me.
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Laura Sokola33:54
And to everybody else out there, thanks once again for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe if you haven't done so already so that you never miss an episode. And don't forget to give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or your platform of choice so we can help even more people increase their confidence, presence, and influence. And of course, if you want to download my free guide to equipment recommendations for virtual influence, including my picks for microphones, lights, and more, go to Speaking2Influence.com. I'm Dr. Laura Sokola, and you're listening to Speaking to Influence: Communication Secrets of the C-Suite. Hi everyone, this is Dr. Laura Sokola, and I want to sincerely thank you for listening to the Speaking to Influence podcast. If you love listening to these episodes as much as I love bringing them to you, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And please go to iTunes right now to rate and review our podcast in order to help us expand our reach so even more people can master the three C's: command the room, connect with the audience, and close the deal. Thanks for listening to Speaking to Influence: Communication Secrets of the C-Suite. The show creators who want to speak with impact. The host, producers, owners, and media distributors of the show make no guarantees that the strategies and information discussed will result in profit or other success, and may result in losses. The opinions and statements of the hosts and guests do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the owners, staff, managers, broadcasters, or sponsors of the show. No medical or psychological therapy or personal or professional wellness or relationship advice is offered in the show. You are advised to seek counsel on matters related to your health, family, relationships, job, or other business and legal matters from licensed advisors in those areas prior to making any changes in business or lifestyle. No information provided may be suitable in your situation. As always, take responsibility for the decisions and actions you take, including the reactions they may make in your work, family, health, and life.