 But the more you speak to us through your representative self, the more it becomes kryptonite to the hoary grail of connection. These representative selves are the equivalent of kryptonite to Superman. They weaken you, they dilute you, they distract you, they disconnect you, they detach you from us. So I'm appealing to you in this first session to have the courage, and it is that for some of you that are listening and watching, it's the courage to again and to regularly and more often trust us. We want you to trust us with your heart. There's no guarantee that we will respect that, that we will treat you well, that we will understand you, that we will know exactly where you're coming from. That's why we put a representative out there because the representative kept to the script, said it well. So there's no danger of me getting any bad press, any negative feedback. I'm not going to lose an opportunity. They'll ask me back because I behave myself. If that's what you want, then I get that, I understand that. But I promise you, you will never be a great communicator if you stay inside that safety zone of not speaking to us from your heart. You know, real change, and that's what I think great communicators are looking for, real transformational change shifts in people's lives from here to there. Lights coming on, illumination, real transitional change because we really got into people's thinking, really touched their hearts. That is not possible if you speak to us from your head. Real authentic connection is only possible at a heart and an emotional level. So it's no good being frustrated that you didn't get the outcome you wanted. If the way you delivered what you wanted was with the safety of the representative self. I live in a 17th century farmhouse in England. When we bought that farmhouse years ago, all the beautiful original oak timbers had been painted, you know, over the years and years that that house had had various owners in. They'd painted all the beautiful oak doors and oak timbers in the roof. We decided to strip them down, which was a mega operation as some of you will know who have ever done that, especially back then, because some of the treatments that we got back then weren't as good as they are now. Some of the stuff we used back then, you'd be in jail for having any house. That was stuff you'd probably see only on Breaking Bad in a meth lab. You could buy it back then to strip the beams and get all the layers of paint off. The house, like, you know, was dangerous. We were inhaling all these fumes, using this toxic stuff. Weeks it took us to get these beams down to original oak. Then when we got down to the oak, we treated the wood, oiled it. Now our home is filled with these beautiful oak timbers. Some of them are 13th century timbers, we have been told by the surveyors. It struck me as I went through all the different layers of stripping off this paint, of all the different paint colors I came across as we got down to the bare oak. You could tell when the 60s people were let loose on the beams because these reds and oranges and purples. Imagine painting a beautiful oak beam bright yellow. But they did. It struck me that what happened when I was doing that for weeks on end became a metaphor in my mind at that time, as I was leading people at that time and as I was trying to figure myself out, that those paint layers became a metaphor for what happens to us as humans through life. That from the moment we are born, life and circumstances and culture and environment and parents and nurture gets busy painting us their idea of what color they think we should be. And the bare oak version of us gets lost. Then you get to a point in life where you want to step into a sense of interest or calling or vocation in our case as a communicator. And you start to put your voice out there. Not aware that so much of the struggle you have is because you don't know who you are. When I say to you, speak from your heart and you look for your heart, you just see yellow and green and blue and purple which are other colors people have chosen for you and you think it's your color. So you try to be purple and it's clunky and clumsy and it's not authentic and you don't connect because you are not purple. Or you try to be orange and you don't connect because you think orange is who you are because you loved the people that painted you orange. They had your best interests at heart when they painted you orange. And so because you think they had your best interests at heart and orange works for them and they thought orange would be good for you to keep that metaphor alive you try to be the orange representative version of you and it doesn't connect. And until I think we have the courage and I think this comes with age. I think one of the reasons people are midlife crises is because they realize I have been someone else's version of me all my life. I have been orange all my life and I was never supposed to be. They go on this kind of discovery journey in the life. Hollywood's making movies all the time about this stuff and a self-discovery journey to get down to the bare oak version of them. I think it's that that I want you guys to commit to do in this session. To do the work, to put in the work. This is behind the scenes. This is nothing to do really with the presentation you got coming up next week. In your mind you might think well this isn't helping me you know for my role next week when I got to speak to 100 corporate leaders and I'm terrified. That's okay forget about that. This is about a long game. This is about this is about raising your game in turn. This is about you becoming the best version of you you can be.