 Chances are she's probably not. Our ability to change everyone else's emotions is more consistent than the Ferrari. So the world around you is chaos. You've got no control over that. You've got no control of what people are thinking. You've got no control how they're handling stuff. What you do have control over is your reaction to it. The only thing you have 100% control over in your life is how you react to things. So when I'm in a situation, I'm always thinking whether that's a conversation, whether that's an interaction, whether that's doing something crazy, I'm always thinking how can I make this fun? How can I take happiness from this? And the secret is to play. In 1913, Eleanor H. Porter wrote a book called Polyana. And the point of that book was there's a little girl and her life was all about being grateful for everything that happened to her. Now in the story, all she wants for Christmas is a dolly. Someone screwed up and she got crutches. Now that would be okay if her legs were broken, but they weren't. So she took the crutches and she looked at her dad and her dad in the story is like, oh my God, it's like very good. And she says, you know what, I'm really grateful because I don't need them. So she chose to react awesomely. Every situation is just a perspective. Anything that happens to you from one angle could be rubbish. From another angle could be the best thing ever, but it's your perspective that determines everything. And the way you get that perspective is habit. So when I talk to people, I always have lots of energy. I'm always playing. And whenever I go into a conversation, I always think this is even gonna go really well or it's gonna be really fun. The reason is because it always is when I look for it. If I walk into a conversation thinking this is gonna go really well, it's gonna be a bit rubbish, I'll get one of those responses. If you've ever done an exam at school or you've done your driving test, you know, my driving test was terrible. I remember getting in the car, sitting there and thinking any second now I'm gonna fail. It was just like this guy with a clipboard, just looking at me and I was like, oh my God, if I get this wrong, I've screwed. For me, it was a black and white result, one or zero. I could either succeed or I could fail. My advice is get rid of the fail box, cross it out and just write really funny story because you'll find out. A friend of mine has 100% consistency in talking to people. Now what I mean by that is he always has a good result. And I said, how did you get that success? And he said, because every conversation I have had has always gone really well. And I thought, well, I'm a charisma coach. Not every conversation I have goes really well. I screw up all the time. So what's he doing? So I studied and I looked and I found out the only thing he was doing was he was just taking every conversation he had and just thinking that went well, that went funny, that went great, that went funny. And it built up 100% consistency. So he knew that every conversation he was gonna go into was gonna go well, it was gonna be funny, it was gonna be awesome. There was no other reaction. There was no other result. We've forgotten how to play. We grow up and we lose our playful edge. When we're kids, we problem solve by playing, by having fun. Remember all that stuff you learned at school when you're in the first few years of school? How to talk, how to read, all the important stuff? You know, the basics of maths, the stuff that last year, your lifetime? You did it through playing. And then when you get to adult school, all the play goes out the window. It gets replaced with logic. About the age of 12 or 13, you joined senior school and you don't play games in the playground anymore. You play adult games. And you look to people how to act. Because I remember my first day at school, I didn't play tag and running around. I was looking at other people thinking, okay, I play football now because that's the dumb thing. And if I don't, I'm gonna stick out like a sore thumb. School raises you to be a logical thinker. It takes away from your playful creative side and moves you to a logical side. And that's great because you need to be logical to problem solve. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to do business. You wouldn't be able to work. Let's say you were building a room like this and you're putting the last brick on and you say, oh, you know, we finished yet? What's the time? And they have a builder goes, it's half past your mum. I don't know, is it gonna be built? Or if you order some bricks and you say, right, we need 50 bricks. And I go ask you, how many bricks do you need? You say, a billion. This place ain't getting built. It's gonna be really huge. So you need logic to function in the world. The trouble is we forget to be playful. But it's when we're being playful that we're almost emotive, that we're connecting with people in the most engaging way. When we're having fun. People ask me, how do I start conversations with strangers? Sometimes I walk up to them and talk about something I've seen, but more often than not, it's having fun. I was in a coffee shop two days ago and I was in the line and there was a girl and she was buying some coffee, some tea, whatnot. And my client said, how would you talk to her? And I thought, well, I said to him, I said, look, what's fun? And he said, I don't know. So I looked at the situation, she just opened her bag and I thought, this will be fun. I took her brownie and just stuck it in her bag and went, oh my God, I can't believe you're stealing that. Thus, and she went, she had an accident from Canada or somewhere. She's like, oh my God, what have you done? I'm sorry if Canadians don't talk about that. But I said, look, I said, you come over here, right? You think it's one rule for you and one for the natives who live here. And she laughed and she punched me in the arm and we had a conversation and it was fun. So if I wanna start a conversation with a random person, I'll see how I can make it fun for myself. How I can be, you know, amused by it because I always will find that. It's more fun to start a conversation up with somebody in the supermarket, not by going, wow, that looks like you've got a lot you're gonna cook tonight. It's more fun just to throw a banana in their shopping basket. You know, who just random banana throw a person or as I like to do, take your basket, walk up to their basket, go, I don't wanna be weird or anything, but, and then just take something out of the basket and put it in your basket. Now you have to laugh afterwards. A client of mine did that and went and ran off. She's like, come back here. She did fill an emotion though, but that's what I'm getting at. If you can make people fill emotions, you're different from every other person in the room. You get those emotions by feeling them first yourself. Now here's why confidence is bullshit because I have no control of how people are gonna react to me. The only control I have is how I react to them. It's not about their reaction to me. It's about my reaction to their reaction of me. My reaction is always gonna be fricking awesome. You know, the other day I was a friend of mine. He said, listen, I need some help. Can you put up some shelving? Now I know I'm a charisma coach and I'm talking about shelving, bear with me. I said, yeah, fine, I'll do that shelving job for you. And I got his shelves and I took him out of the paper and I was shocked. They were glass, they were wire, possibly some UFO technology in there as well. I just didn't know what to do with it. Now what I didn't tell him is I'd never put up shelves before and this thing was monstrosity. But I thought, okay, I'll give it a go because I'm reveling in the challenge. Play is all about finding something that's a challenge and knowing you've got the skill to do it. Now rather than knowing I had the skill to put up this shelf because I'd never put up a shelf before, I just assumed it would be all right. It'd be fun. So I was drilling my little holes, I put my shelf up and I tell you what, it looked really good. On the way home that night, I must admit, I won't lie, I was sitting on the train and I was having a little sort of dream about, oh, those shelves I put up were great and I was thinking about them. And I thought to myself, if I did that again, how would I put the shelves up differently? And I thought, oh, I would drill the holes slightly closer together so the shelves just sat in some sort of harmony rather than being a little bit skewed with. He never knew they were the first shelves to put up, sucks to be him. And I realized that's the secret of all skill. All natural skill that you build doesn't come from you reading it in a book. It comes from you taking action and it comes from you after every challenge you take on, whether that's talking to somebody you've never met before, whether it's picking up a tennis ball and hitting it across a net, something I've never been able to do. But when you get good at anything, it's because you come away from every challenge and you think, what went really well then and you revel in it and what could I do better next time? What could I do better to improve? The reason you ask that question is because you want to improve. I wanted to put my shelves up better. I tell you what, I had a bit of a fetish going on because I want to put up shelves all the time now. I'm enjoying it so much. But yet many people I talk to hate the fact or hate the feeling of going to talk to strangers. Hate it so much. It's because they look at it as a challenge that they don't have the skill for. Results are bullshit. Confidence is bullshit. My favorite word is bullshit. When we go and talk to somebody, if we have an expectation of what's gonna happen, if I had an expectation those shelves were gonna be brilliant, I would have been screwing because they weren't going, they didn't go great. I was drilling holes in all the wrong places. Dust all over my face, it was just a mess.