 Think about the person you spend a lot of time with, your partner, your co-worker, you share an office with, or maybe even your roommate. How much easier would life be if you knew what they want, what they struggle with, and what makes them happy? How much easier would that make your life? Think about that. Well, you can't force them to do that, but as we've said before, you can lead from the seat you're in. You can lead by example. This is not about persuading or manipulating. This is about understanding how to more effectively communicate with the people that matter. Well, we get a lot of questions. How do I get my partner to do this? How do I get my partner to do this? How do I get my co-worker to do this? You can't make anyone do anything. And reading Gary Chapman's book says, love is about requests. It's not about demands. I love that. It's perfect. And how do you make those requests? First and foremost, you do the very things that you want to be seen from other people. You treat people how you want to be treated. That's the golden rule. It certainly is. And that's the request. Now, sometimes you've got to smack people over the head with your request by saying, hey, when you do this, it makes me feel X. I would appreciate if you could do it in this way, which would allow me to feel much better. Now you're making that request. And how are you going to to affirm that request by using one of the love languages? There's two mindsets we need to focus on here when we're having open conversations to try to connect on these love languages. And the first is your views matter. You're coming to the table and your perspective matters. Some of us dismiss our perspective, especially if we're codependent, and we just focus on our partner's perspective and we allow it to beat ourselves up. But listen, your upbringing, your history, your past relationships have conditioned you to behave in certain ways. And these views and your love language matters and sharing them with your partner, your friend, your coworkers can help make communication more impactful, effective, and allow you to feel safe, loved, trusted in those relationships. Being able to have open conversations is what's necessary to form a strong connection with someone. And if you don't share what's important, well, you've taken yourself out of that relationship. So that's the first mindset. This mindset of entitlement, you can allow yourself to be authentic. That's what mastering connections is all about. Now, we're not talking about the millennial entitlement. I know entitlement right now, it's a bad rap and it's used to smear millennials, but you are entitled to expressing your views and your love language to your partner, your friend, the people that matter. That's what a relationship's about. Yeah. And if you're, if you're scared to because of fear of judgment, well, then perhaps you're with the wrong person. And why, why would you fear that? Did you attract somebody who's wrong for you? Did you attract them on false pretenses? That's very well, right? If you, if you had lied about who you are through your behaviors and just flat out lying to attract somebody in, well, how are you going to deepen the connection when you have to be honest about what it is that you need and want out of this relationship? And I know that we've gone through over the last 12 years, a lot of advice about becoming someone who's fake, changing yourself, being a chameleon to persuade and manipulate and try to get your way. That's not at all what we're talking about here. We're talking about being open and clear about your views on communication and your love languages. The second mindset is it's not easy and it never gets easy. That's why it's called vulnerability. Yes. Being authentic and open in conversations is not your comfort zone. Understand that, recognize that and trust the process. Because these conversations involve vulnerability, assertiveness and setting boundaries. All three of those things can be very scary, but they're worth it. And guess what? If you wait until you're just comfortable with all this, well, you're putting the cart before the horse. Yeah. One of the things about vulnerability, and this goes with a lot of Brene Brown's research, if you express yourself, there's two parts of that. One, you being open about whatever emotions or whatever you're trying to express. And the second part is the person who's receiving it. We were just talking about the sender, the message and the receiver. So if you are going to express yourself to 100 people randomly, then you can imagine that there's going to be people out of that 100 who are not digging what you're putting down. And because of that, you're going to have a gut reaction to that, to where may cause you to close up because of the negative feedback that you had gotten from people you didn't really care about. Strangers. And if you've done that, and I know as an expressive person, as a child, I had gotten a lot of pushback because I was just always being very expressive. And because of that, there had been times where I'd found myself quieting up, putting myself in a shell, only to realize later that that now has gotten me in trouble because I'm not able to get the things that I want. I feel that I'm playing second fiddle. Now I'm being quiet. And of course, because that's, I was not able then because of that to create the life that I wanted for myself. And in order to do that, I had to learn to get comfortable with being vulnerable again. And what I had learned, and this is if you surround yourself by caring high value people, the pushback that you get ever, if you do get any, is only going to be because they care about you want to make sure that you're thinking things through and you're being safe and you're getting, you're being cautious. And that is very supportive and comforting. If you are in a social circle that you feel embarrassed or that you can't speak up and express yourself, you're, you're around the wrong people, you're around people who don't have your best interests at mind.