 when we're communicating, we choose our words wisely. Thinking at 400 words a minute, but speaking at 125, we're weighing what we're gonna say, what side of our personality we're gonna show, what stories are we gonna share? And whatever we choose is extremely important to us. We value it immensely. So if you bring value to others and you cherish what they're choosing to share with you, being that great listener, you're taking the value that they're giving you and what they're sharing, and you give them value for opening up, for feeling good, for expressing themselves, for sharing that information with you, you've unlocked powerful communication. You're making an impact on others. Now the problem that we see time and time again with some of our clients is they tend to overuse humor. Let's be honest, we love making people laugh. It feels good to have people laughing around us and to find our humor to be fun, to be engaging. So we can sometimes overdo it. It's like too much salt in the dish. If you're constantly relying on humor, witty one-liners, comical retorts, or even self-deprecation in your communication, you're not giving the other person value for what they're sharing. You're devaluing the story they just told, the bit of information they shared with you, the answer to your question that they gave you by turning the spotlight back on yourself with that humor. And of course, over time, if you're just constantly the court jester, no one's gonna take you seriously and they're not gonna feel comfortable expressing themselves and getting vulnerable around you. And there's a reason for this. I mean, we've been told our whole lives that people like to laugh and if you can make them laugh, they're gonna see you in a favorable light. And think about all the television shows and the comedy that we watch because we all know intrinsically it's inside of us that we love to laugh and we love people who make us laugh. So we wanna be humorous, we wanna be funny. And those people who are good at doing that, the comedians, the actors, the performance artists, these are people who practice this skill. If you're not regularly practicing this skill, you're going to find yourself sticking your foot in your mouth, right? It gets you in trouble. I've done it a million times because we all wanna contribute to the conversation. We all wanna shoot our shot as the kids like to say. But if this is something that you don't work on, it's going to be difficult. And when people try to get to know us and we always go for the joke, we always go for humor, we break that rapport. And as AJ mentioned, people are not gonna take us seriously but it's also going to push people away from us rather than drawing them in because humor and a lot of times in order to create humor, we need tension. And in order to create this tension, we have to be on a contrarian or negate what the other person is saying in order to create this tension. But if they don't know us very well, our efforts to create that tension works against us rather than for us. So what we have to do is break that pattern and give people other tools to use to open things up, to gain that trust so that we then can use that tension to our advantage. A little bit of humor goes a long way. A laugh or two is great but it very quickly can be overdone when we're communicating with others and certainly in a professional setting. So what do we do? If you find yourself in this pitfall that you constantly love to go for the one-liners, you want people laughing, you want everyone around you to think you're funny, how do you shift your communication to be more powerful? You give value. And this is really one of the core tenants of our X Factor Accelerator program and it's why we've been teaching boot camps and training the military for the last 16 years because we believe essentially all human relationships are built on humans feeling, heard, appreciated, and accepted. So what does that mean? Giving someone attention as we talked about in the first pillar being an excellent listener is step one to giving someone value. And if you're constantly coming back immediately with rapid-fire follow-up questions or you're having your interjection of humor, you're not listening. You're not giving that person your full attention. You're waiting to jump back in and take the spotlight. Well, the second one, approval. How do you give someone approval? How do you make them feel really good for sharing with you and open up that door, as Johnny said, to more vulnerability? Well, you don't give approval by cracking jokes about them, by making what they just said, the butt of the joke or yourself the butt of the joke. That's not gonna make the other person feel approved and feel good and comfortable in that environment. And the last one is acceptance. So if we can give approval, we can say, that was amazing. We can share what we like about that story. If we can let them know what about their personality traits shine through in their communication or we can get to the unsaid, we're actually giving that person approval. We're letting them know that we actually enjoyed this conversation. We enjoy communicating with them. And acceptance is actually welcoming them into your tribe. We've talked a lot about the show, how humans are tribal by nature. As herd animals, we need to be accepted in order to feel safe, in order to feel like we're not putting ourselves in a dangerous situation. So the quicker you can give someone your attention, give them that approval, what you appreciate about them and welcome them into your tribe, exchange contact information, add them on LinkedIn, ask for their phone number, suggest hanging out again. Giving that value to the other person is a core tenant of being a powerful communicator, allowing the other person to feel their best when communicating with you.