 If you are monitoring your conversation for self-consciousness, you are having to be self-conscious while you're self-monitoring. So I encourage people, if there's anything you're trying to eliminate from your language that you do it just with an email and just anytime you feel like it or have a regular practice of scanning your emails. And that way, you're not having to try to be self-monitoring but not self-conscious. So this idea that we're using these I, me, mine kind of statements a lot when we feel self-conscious is because we're using them very often as diminishers. And diminishers are any statements that make us smaller in order to not be threatening to other people. Statements like I just thought like I was wondering I could be wrong but and we use all kinds of hedges like actually maybe kind of sort of a lot of these diminishers are introductory preambles to the thing that we wanted to say that are just so incredibly hard to listen to. And so the other person has tuned out by the time we got to the actual thing. There are gender effects here. So women use diminishers and these kinds of preambles more than men do. But this is more a result of power differences than gender differences, at least in my opinion and the opinions of some other researchers who study this stuff. What's interesting is that you don't have this fixed place in a hierarchy, right? In your life, it's all contextual. So there will be some contexts in which you have more situational power and some context in which you have less situational power. And that researcher I mentioned, James Pennebaker did a textual analysis of his own emails writing to a higher status person and a lower status person about the same topic. And he found that he had exactly the same pattern that other people do. When he's writing to the lower status person, he just says the thing. He says, would you be willing to move your office talking to a grad student when he's talking to this esteemed professor? Far more famous than he is. He's like, well, I hope it's not going to come to this, but I think that it's possible that I'm going to have to ask you that have spaces that are, and like, you don't even know what he's talking about. Right. So solutions to diminishers are just say the thing. And also shifting the focus off of yourself by asking questions of the other person. It's not you need to talk about them, but asking their opinion or their advice. What I've noticed in filming our clients for the last 15 years is many times we take this frame to relate. So we'll say, I love that too, or I'm into that too. And this subtle shift that I teach our clients to speak from a we perspective. So instead of saying, I like that too, be like, oh, we should go to the Prince concert together. It says the same thing, but it doesn't put the focus on yourself. And it sets the frame of we. When we speak in terms of we, the assumption is we're already in a relationship, we're already friends, we're already connected. And oftentimes when we feel this social anxiety, we do feel like we have to be the most interesting. We have to offer up all of this information about ourselves. If we all feel that way, then we all feel unheard. And that's where that second paradox comes in, where if all we're thinking about is ourself and all we're doing is sharing ourselves, the other person doesn't feel engaged at all, doesn't feel any charisma from that experience.