Two wars, a crashing economy bleeding millions of jobs and hardly a hair out of place.

Former US president Barack Obama yesterday shared his life hack for maintaining his famed cool in stressful situations. The "no-drama Obama" recalled the tumultuous period as he stepped into office in 2008, in the shadow of the sub-prime crisis that devastated the United States economy and rocked nearly all other economies linked to it through trade and finance.

"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 eight million jobs," he said.

So why did he not get more stressed? "I attribute some of this to my Hawaiian/Indonesian vibe," he said, harking back on his childhood in Indonesia from 1967 till 1971, when he returned to his birthplace in Honolulu.

The secret, he added, was a two-ingredient sauce: people and process. "If you are in any kind of leadership situation, your first job is to put together the best possible talent, people who have integrity, who subscribe to your work values and believe in your vision.

"You put them in positions to succeed and you make decisions based on best available information and set up a process where you are able to see from every angle what kind of solutions you might come up.

"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. "It landed up on my desk... Clean it up!"

He coped by grappling with solutions attended by the probability of failure. "But what we were able to do was to set up a process that I trusted, where I had confidence that we looked at every problem from every angle. So I could go to sleep at night feeling as if what I decided may not work, but nobody could have made a better decision than I made in that circumstance. That we had set up a great process and I had great people."

Mr Obama is working on his new memoir, which is expected to be released next year.