How to be more authentic with your communication

The secret to being authentic, is knowing exactly who you are and who you’re not. 

In this episode, I’m sharing 4 questions (plus a heck of a lot more) that will help you craft your brand persona so that you can make big strides in becoming a more magnetic communicator. 

Maybe you have a live presentation coming up or you're wanting to get better on camera. Or maybe you want to be more compelling and increase your conversion rates in your sales conversations. 

You can't make real progress in those areas until you’re clear on how you want others to perceive you-- here’s why. If you start trying to acquire those skills without having clarity on your brand persona, when you start learning from and modeling others, that modeling will quickly turn into mimicry. And soon enough you’ll be a tapestry of other people. It feels inauthentic. Show up as yourself (the ONE thing that makes your brand unique) by exploring some key questions to bring your brand to life. 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Have you ever wondered how some people just seem to have a way with words? They have this spark that lights you up when you're near them. They have the if factor and while most people think it's something that only a few are born with, I believe that you can find it so it can become your super power to grow your business. It's about you bringing your brand to life by becoming a magnetic communicator in person and on camera, showing up with confidence, authenticity, and inspiration. So, are you ready to become magnetic? I thought so. I'm Heather Sager and I'd like to welcome you to finding your it factor.

Speaker 3: 1:00

guys, we're here. We're finally here for the first episode of finding your it factor and I say finally because I have been dreaming about doing a show for years and it wasn't up until very recently that I finally got the courage to actually do it and probably for a variety of reasons. Also probably a lot of reasons why you maybe are a little shy of the camera or sitting in front of an audience. We all have our own doubts and thoughts around why we should or shouldn't do something, but the reality is we still just got to do it anyways. That's when the good stuff happens, so we're here and if about me, let's talk about you and why you're here. I know that first episode of any podcast, it's an audition. Let's be honest here. It's an audition. You want to know who the heck is this chick? What does she know? What is she going to teach me?

Speaker 1: 1:51

Am I really going to commit the next bit of my time to listening to her and at my hope is he? Yes. I'm hoping we're going to have a lot of fun. I'll make you laugh and sure as heck you're going to learn something today that'll help you in your pursuit of wanting to become more magnetic in your communication. If you listened to the trailer, you know that my jam is helping people with their communication skills. You see, I think that we all take for granted this gift that we all have and being able to communicate with one another. It's like breathing. We don't think about it. We just breathe in and out and our bodies just do it on autopilot. And the end of the day, I think our voice is a lot like that because we, for the most part all can speak and hear. Although I mean full caveat disclaimer, I had a hearing loss and we'll talk about that at another time so I can kinda hear, uh, but this idea that we can, we can communicate back and forth with one another. We take it for granted. And I say that because we, we just do it on autopilot for the most part in our personal lives and also in our career. And it's, it's not really until we have a very significant moment, a really important conversation or we're giving a big talk or we have a really important sales call that we're, we're getting on, or maybe we're pulling up a microphone or a camera to shoot a video. It isn't until those moments that we actually put some thought into, oh my gosh, what am I going to say? And hopefully, how am I going to say it? And here's how I, this is my pure belief. If you can train for those big significant moments with more strategy and more intention, and you can show up in those most difficult moments as the best version of you, so that audience gets your best, whoever your audience is, right? It could be a big ass audience, it could be a little audience. If you can do in those moments and you show up and put the energy into it, just imagine how much more impactful everyday conversations would be conversations with your significant other or with your kids or with your coworkers, with your boss, with your clients, with, with, uh, just on social media. How much better would every single one of those interactions go if you practiced good old fashioned communication skills to become better at being articulate and empathetic and energetic and compassionate or whatever the skills are that you want to bring to the table. If you trained for the Marathon, a 5k would be a piece of cake, right? You'll learn about me. I'm a, I'm a runner. I'm getting back into running. So I might have some running analogy. So if you're not, I think you'll still get the analogy and we'll be just fine uni. But today, why we're here. I want you to really think about on this first episode, we're going to start at the most important thing and that is becoming more intentional with yourself and how you show up. So follow me in this thought process for just a moment. I want you to imagine that you have just had the most amazing conversation with your dream client, with your dream client. Now side note, if you are not a business owner and you're listening, let's say you're an employee in an organization, I want you to think about you having an incredible conversation with a still, it could be a client or a prospect, whatever that translates for your job. So you've just had the most incredible interaction at this conversation. And you walk away feeling, I mean, just elated. You feel like you nailed it, you're going to close the deal, whatever that next step would be for you. And let's say I am hanging out over in the little corner and I walk up to that person you just spoke to and I ask them, hey, how would you describe that person? Meaning how would they describe you? I know that's really crazy to think about and we're not supposed to speculate around what other people think about us, but come on oil, do it. And I don't want you to get caught up in like worrying what other people think about you. But for a moment, I want us to be mildly scientific here. And think for a second. How would that person describe their interaction with you? Would they say you had positive energy where you charismatic? Were you empathetic? Were you compassionate? Were you, uh, open where you vulnerable? Were you witty? Were you intelligent? What, what would they say? And I want you to really stew and speculate on that for just a moment. If you had the best engagement with your ideal client, how would you show up? How would they perceive you? And if we all think about our best days and the most positive, amazing version of ourselves, I mean we can give ourselves a pat on the back for that. But the question we have to ask is, do we bring that same level of us, that best version of us? Do we bring that in every single interaction in our business or in our personal lives every single day? And I think we would be fully in ourselves if we said yes, we all know we have good days and bad days. But I think we also need to be real with ourselves. That we, we bring more intention to higher stakes conversations than we do everyday conversations. And when you think about your business, especially if you're a personal brand, every single interaction that you have with your audience or if you're an employee, every single interaction that you have with your coworkers or, uh, the people that are above you in the organization, in executive roles or whatever else, um, every interaction that you have leads back to how people perceive you. And you can either just let this happen and hope that people see the best version of you or you can become far more intentional around your reputation and how others see you. Start associating yourself with the things that you want people describing you as. Because when you can have more control over your brand, meaning how other people perceive you, you can unlock so many opportunities for you to work with the people that you want to work with, not just the people that are showing up and connect with what they see. I hope that makes sense. It's this idea about being much more intentional with who you attract and if you think about the word persona, what does it mean? Well, a quick Internet search tells us that persona is the aspect of someone's character that is presented to or perceived by others. That is our public persona. And another way to look at it is our reputation. And the reason why I want to focus on this topic before we go into any other aspect of communication on future episodes is when we are more clear about who we are and how we want to show up for others, we can become far more intentional for showing up on video or walking into an interview or a showing up on a Webinar or a live presentation or whatever. The, the important moment is when we are clear around who we are, we can be, we can be really strategic and how we position ourselves and our personal brand. So today we're gonna talk about that. We're going to talk about why it's so important that we have that persona. I'm going to beat that dead horse because it's really important to consider. And then I'm going to walk you through exactly how do you identify what your persona is so that you can use it to become more intentional. Sound good? All right, let's do it. Okay. If we want to become more intentional in how we communicate. First we have to recognize how are we communicating right now today. And I want you to think about how you show up as a dial. So imagine really imagine in front of you right now is a giant knob like a dial and you can turn it to the left and you can turn to the right. And on that dial I want you to consider there's a version of you that you bring forth into the world. So I'll give you an example. Uh, there's a version of me when I get on a stage and talk in front of c suite executives what I'm going to wear, the type of vocabulary that I use in my presentation, the types of stories that I use. Um, just the overall way I hold my posture and my body language. It's very specific. It's the, let's call it the Sunday best version of me where it's still 100% me, but I'm a little bit more polished in my word choices. I might use a little bigger words for that audience. I definitely going to keep my language shorter, more concise because their tolerance level for long stories is much, much lower. I'm definitely going to wear my best clothes, my higher end clothes. I'm gonna wear a most likely gonna wear a blazer. I'm telling you all this because what I want you to consider this, it's still me still my clothes still my hairstyle, still my words, but it's my Sunday best. And then on the other end of the spectrum, I have ratty sweat pants version of Heather. I have what my husband and my two kids see on Saturday morning when I'm hanging around the house drinking coffee with no bra and my ratty sweats that have paint stains all over them because I love them and they're cozy on the inside. Still me, just a very, very dialed back, very raw version of me. And each of us have, I would say that same version. It's The Sunday best contrast to these Saturday morning coffee that you would be totally and terrified if the doorbell rang and you had to figure out how to answer the door. Is that just me? I don't know. Sometimes I hide and I don't actually answer the door when that happens. True story, but the reality is is those, if you saw that person that me and my sweats versus me and my Sunday basket and ready to talk to c suite executives, here's what I know to be true. You probably would look at it and be like, Woo, that's a stark contrast. But also you would see it's the exact same person and that is the dial that I want you to consider is when you think about how you show up to your audience, you have to be completely, authentically yourself. Designing your own brand persona isn't about you saying you're going to be, you're going to be one way versus another with different audiences because that's fake. That's not, that's not authentic. You have to understand who you are at your core to be able to understand, whoa, like what is that dial in its entirety. And then you can adjust that dial based around the audience that you're speaking to. So let's apply this to business. So you know me, I'm an entrepreneur. I work with entrepreneurs, primarily personal brand based entrepreneurs online and I've had to go through quite a shift over the last 12 months because moving from a corporate world where business communication is a little bit more polished, a, you use a little different words in your email and your writing skills and in your conversations in meetings and in classrooms versus working with entrepreneurs that have lifestyle brands for the most part, uh, it's way more conversational. You actually type wanna instead of want to in an email, you can clean up what you talk about. Uh, on social media, showing up in Instagram stories, I can wear a messy bun and it wouldn't be perceived me as being disheveled. It would be B being an entrepreneur or working at home on my laptop with sweatpants on. So me understanding that who my audience is and how I've transformed and how I show up for my audience, um, has been really interesting. But the, the common line between both is a couple things and I wanted to share these with you. When I think about my brand persona, there's some things that are really, really important to me. And it, again, it doesn't matter if I'm on stage in front of c suite executives or I'm in a classroom talking to Grad students, or I'm talking to multimillion entrepreneurs or nonprofit. Like it doesn't matter who I'm talking to. These are the things that ring true for me. Uh, I want people to perceive me as being, uh, having really strong common sense that I actually speak to people like a person. I am relatable. Uh, I'm real authentic. I don't try to pretend that I'm perfect, that I embrace the imperfections, the stumbles in my language, uh, the, the mess ups. If I, if I have them, I acknowledge them. I laugh at myself. I want to make people laugh and when appropriate, I want to make people cry because to me, the contrast of the two of actually sharing very open and vulnerable stories or things about myself, I feel like that is something that is signature to me. And my story is telling storytelling style. And I think it's important to help people feel something so they're compelled to do something. I want to be seen as stylish. That's important to me. If you know me, you know, a fun, interesting fact about me as I competed in the Miss America program in my teens slash early twenties. And uh, I learned a lot about myself, but I definitely care about my appearance and how I look and not because I want other people to think I'm pretty or whatever else like that. That's not the case. I actually feel better when I show up and I feel like I look good. I always wear heels when I present because I feel like I stand up a little bit straighter and have better posture and it allows me to have better hand gestures when I have better posture. It's like a super, super specific reference, but it's totally 100% true for me. I also feel far better when I wear eyeliner, really, really specific. But something that I know about myself. Uh, you know the question, if you were ever to be deserted on an island, if you were to be on a deserted island, whatever the phrase is, you're on an island, you have no one around you and you could take one thing. My answer to that question was always my eyelash curler, which is super weird and again, oddly specific, but I just feel like a whole new person when I have my eyelashes curled. And if you're a man listening to do this, this is not probably relatable to you. However, I want you to imagine for a second or what are the things about you that just make you feel like a million bucks? You feel like you can show up and be the best version of you. To me, I want to be stylish, but approachable and not stuffy. And these are all things that I think about when it comes to me and my brand. They're important to me. It's part of my brand persona. And when I say persona, it's not this fictitious thing. It's the WHO I am. But it also comes back to the definition of persona. And remember that was around this aspect of someone's character that's presented or perceived by others. So me understanding how I want to be perceived as others is in direct alignment with me wanting to be true to myself. These things are important to me and my image of myself. Therefore, I'm able to be more intentionally with how I project that into my videos, my social media, uh, my live presentations, my client conversations. These are all very important things. Oh, uh, I forgot to mention one of the other really important things for me is compassion and empathy of being vulnerable so that I can encourage other peoples to be vulnerable real. So I share with you all these things cause I think it's really easy for us to think about our brand as a style guide. If you're an entrepreneur, you've gone through the process where you've had a style guide created, you have the fonts, you have the colors, you have the textures, you have the logo, you have all of those things. And maybe you even taken it a step further to consider. Okay, what's Your Voice Guide? Meaning for your written copy on your emails and your website and your social media, what does that look like? And all of those things are so important. But when we think about how we engage with other people, I want you to consider that your brand has two facets. I think about this. Your brand has the curated part and then it has the live and candid part. And let me break that down for a second here. The curated piece, this is content that you bring up that's curated. These are social posts there, the copy on your website, it's the content on your website, it's your graphics. It's the things that you choose to like and share online. It's your prerecorded videos, things that you have premeditated, like predesigned and you release it. So there's intention behind that. So you can apply your style guide and your tone of voice and all those things to it, but, and you and you can be intentional and work on those things. But then you also have these more live candid aspects of your brand. These are on social media would be your Instagram stories or your Facebook live streams or you speaking up on a Webinar. You've actually doing a Webinar, your client calls, your prospect calls, going to networking events and talking to peers, a schmoozing with your coworkers or employees in your business, uh, actual live presentations or talks. All of these interactions have a live impromptu element and they all require you and your voice. And what's fascinating to me is how much time and energy we put in being intentional with the curated content. Again, the website, the prescheduled, social media posts, the predesigned videos, all those types of things. But on the other hand, how little little planning or intention we put behind the live interactions. When you consider what you, what resonates with you as a listener or watcher or per user, online, whatever word resonates with you best there. I sure the curated stuff is fine, but what we really love are the stories or in a, at a conference. We love the interactions with people. You know, it's so funny thinking about live events here for a moment. The organization that I work with. We were huge on live events and my team produced and we always got such great feedback about the content we created. But beyond that, whenever we asked what was the number one value that people received out of those conferences, it was always the interactions with their peers, with each other. And I'm learning this to be very true. Attending conferences myself, I've gone to some incredible conferences here and uh, it's always about the interactions with other people. So for a moment, think about you being someone who is attending a conference, networking with other people. How much time or energy do you spend thinking about how you're going to show up in those conversations, how you want people to perceive you, what is your persona that you're bringing to the party? We don't spend time and energy thinking about how we're going to show up and how we're going to be perceived by other people. And that has a huge miss because if you want to attract people into your business or if you want to ascend in your career, if you work at an organization, if you want people to think about you as being the most logical, obvious choice for them to promote you or you want to be the like, hello, Duh, I want to work with this person. If people are consuming your content online as an entrepreneur, like you have to be crystal clear around how you want other people to see you do. We have far more control over that than we give ourselves credit for it. But it's because we spend so much time on the curated content, the planned content, the kind that we can spend our time finessing and tweaking and perfecting. That's where we spend our energy. But what if we were just to put even a fraction of that energy into the live real engagements with people? Like how much more magical would it be to have people connect with you real in the moment? So that's what we're going to focus on is the how do you bring more intention and strategy into those live interactions? So people are attracted to you, to, to you as a brand, to you as a person and therefore they want to follow you and work with you and ideally become excited and enthusiastic ambassadors of your brand and bring their friends to the party. That's really what this is all about. So let's dive in and talk about some questions that you can explore to start understanding what is your brand persona so that you can be more intentional with how you bring that persona into your interactions. I've already shared with you some of the things that I think about and my persona and if those resonate with you, totally steal those and use them for yourself. Uh, but let's help you identify yours. So here we go. I have, uh, I have about five or six questions here that you can ask yourself. And as we get going here, I might think of a couple more, but let's dive into them. And these are questions that I really want you to think about. You're probably in the car driving and or maybe on a walker or run. So when you have a moment, uh, I also have these posted on the show notes so you can head over there and actually print them out and journal on these. I think that'd be a really great episode. But for now, hopefully this will give you some thoughts to start provoking your thinking a little bit more and as you need to just pause this and let your mind flow and see where it takes you. Because the more that you can, you can dream up on this, that the more you can bring your ideas into action when it comes to designing your interactions with other humans. I mean that's what this is all about. Okay. So question number one, and it goes back to the initial question I asked you at the top of this episode. I want you to imagine that you are having an interaction with, you can do this how you want, but I, I would say with your existing clients, you just have an interaction with them. When they are done with that conversation, what are the words that they would use to describe you? So let me rephrase that. After you have a conversation with a client, what are the words that they would use to describe their interaction with you? How are they describing their their experiences? Now, if you are an entrepreneur and you're already getting surveys from people, you actually might have some information that you can pull from on this, but if you're not, you need to speculate for a moment. If you're a team member, you can ask yourself the question, if you work with clients, whoever your end client is that you work with on a daily basis, think about the last conversation you had or maybe the ideal conversation that you, you would like to have is how would people feel and how would they describe that conversation? That's a really great starting point because for most of us, for far more, well, you fit into two camps. You either might be instantly seeing all of the great, wonderful things and if that's the case, good, keep going, write those down. But if you're on the side of things where you're tend to be a little bit more critical with yourself, I want to stop. You're just right there for a moment and encourage you to focus more on that side of your strengths. Don't worry about what you're not doing or, uh, getting on your, on top of yourself because you're not doing it how you would like to do it. So if you were describing that ideal scenario and you started going, oh, I'm not doing that yet, or I need to be better at consistently doing that and stop, cut that out, like stop that. That's not what this exercise is about. We're focused on how do you ideally want to show up and the how you do it. We'll focus on that a little bit later on. But for now, I want you to focus on your strengths and your positivity. So that first question really start thinking about in your actual interactions you have with your clients today, how would they describe you? What are your strengths? How are you coming across? Okay, let's go to question number two. I want you to dream up a little bit in the future. Think about where you want to be. Let's not go to distant the future. Let's go a year from now. Think about where you want to be in a year from now and what do you want to be known for when someone says your name, what do you want to be known for? And I want you to think about two different things here, right? You can think about your craft. So what do you want to be known for? While for me, I want to be known for teaching people to be better communicators. Like that's not a sexy way to say it, but that's really what it is. What it comes down to. People who want to become better communicators to attract their ideal audience. I want to be known for that. So helping people give live presentations and showing up on video. I want people to know me for that. They want to come to me for that. But beyond that, I want you to think about the secondary piece. It's not just about what you do, it's also about who you are. So how do you want people to think of you? What do you want to be known for? I want to be known for being a little silly, but wicked smart. I want to be known for being funny. I think I'm funny. Hopefully you will develop my style or you'll develop a taste for my sense of humor as we get to know each other a bit. But what do you want to be known for? Like how do you want people to know you, a describe you. It's not just about what you do, but it's also who you are. I want you to chew on that for a few minutes. Okay. Question number three, how are you right now? So we talked a little bit about thinking more aspirationally in the future. Now I really want you to be tough and real with yourself of how you're showing up right now. When you think about the good and you think about maybe the not so great moments, what are the things that really stand out for you? Are you great with being empathetic? Are you really good at asking questions? Are you super relatable? Do you have a tendency to talk over people? Do you have a tendency to interrupt? Do you have a tendency to not speak up? Do you have a tendency to shy away from difficult conversations? Do you have a tendency to clam up on camera in live presentations? Do you get more focused on how you feel versus your audience? I want you to take a second and just explore for a moment. How do you actually show up today and start really strict, understand or are speculating real quick for a moment around what is the difference between how you're showing up right now versus those first few questions around how you want to show up in the future. Taking a couple minutes to to start understanding that the contrast between these two things and if you're, if the gap between the two is not very large, that's incredible. Good for you. Now we need to about how do we actually crank up that dial so that your bringing the best version of you in more conversations. But if you're sitting there going, oh, there's these things that I keep doing, like interrupting people or a, I mess up on words so often that now I've developed this fear of speaking that I don't speak up in those higher level meetings because I don't want to sound dumb. Or maybe you have this hesitation on camera where all the sudden you know the phrase, the camera adds five pounds. While there's also a, I believe there is this a thing that happens with the camera that makes us all go dumb, dumb, like the vibrant and charismatic, personable versions of ourselves. When the camera hits us, we just become very bitter. Like you have to bring more energy to the camera. But if that, if that's you, just recognizing that and knowing maybe where the opportunity lies for you to start focusing on bringing more of you into that interaction. That's a really powerful thing. If you want to be somebody who is more charismatic or you want to bring your humor into conversations and you're struggling to be able to get more comfortable on camera, well how powerful it is it if you know that, hey, you're funny, hey, you're personable. Hey, you don't have to be perfect. Those are strengths of yours. Bring that on camera and don't worry about trying to get it perfect or to sound smart. So you can start using your strengths and your aspirational areas into those areas that make you a little nervous or a little more self conscious. And that's bringing your brand persona to life with really, really strong, uh, intentional, um, focus. Okay. Exploring this idea around, uh, who you are and starting to develop an understanding for who is your brand persona when it comes to your communication style. Uh, another way that you can look at this. Here's the fourth question is look at the people who you follow online, the people that you admire, and ask yourself, why do you follow them? What is it about them that attracts you to them and start writing out? What are those things? A lot of times you'll notice the people that you follow online as you love them. Yes, for their content. The fact that they always show up and have something to say and it feels like they're talking directly to you. You feel like they're open, they're honest, they're vulnerable, they share the good with the bad. Maybe you love them because they're unapologetically themselves. They don't try to adapt who they are for you or anyone else. They just show up as them. So thinking for a moment about who you follow online and why you're so attracted to them, oftentimes we're attracted to those things because we, we see something in there in them that either we have a glimmer of to or we really would like to be more like those things. So those specific characteristics speak to you for a reason and it's because most likely you would like to have those qualities too or what? I actually think as you have, you have a little sense of that quality. You seem to draw it out of you more, so really exploring who you follow online, who your mentors are. It'll help you start getting more clear around what your brand persona is. Let's leave it with that four questions. I think that's quite a bit for you to start exploring and going through the exercise of starting to think about how do you want to be perceived by others. Getting a list of those things. What I want you to do from here is as I go through those questions and come up with a list of all of those qualities, you're probably going to come up with 30 different qualities or things that surface and start working through those and if you boil those down to 10 things and then down to five things, you'll start getting a lot more clarity around how you want to show up as a communicator online in your business or you'll, if you're an employee, you can be a lot more clear on how do you want others to perceive you in your role in your organization and when you're clear around who you are, you can be far more clear around how you show up in situations that are stressful or in everyday conversations that might not seem to have a lot of weight behind them. But remember every touch point that others have with you, it's all of those touch points together that sum up who you are as a brand. That sums up your reputation. So you don't want to undervalue those little seemingly meaningless, seemingly meaningless. You know what I'm trying to say? There, but those moments don't undervalue them. And if you, if you know how you want to be in the big moments, you can definitely knock it out of park and the little moments. I really believe that the secret to being authentic is knowing exactly who you are and exactly who you're not. And when you get clear on this, you can be far more effective and attracting people into your world and attracting opportunities into your career and in your business that you're far more excited about. And when you attract people into your universe, you're going to have a heck of a lot more fun building your business or building your career. So I want you to consider this your brand persona. Once you get clear around what are those core things of who you are. And again, for me it was common sense speaking like a person being real on authentic, sharing the good and the bad, making people laugh. Also getting emotional and it's okay if we cry together, uh, being stylish. I want to feel good about how I show up to my audience because when I feel better, I feel more confident. And more competent. These are just some of the things that, again, I come back within my persona, but remember once you pull those things together, they become aspects of your dial and you get to choose how you show up and level of formality depending around the audience that you're working with. But at the end of the day, your persona persona is always there. You're always being true to who you are, and therefore you can be more intentional with how you practice your communication skills depending on the format in which you're communicating. So maybe you have a live presentation coming up or maybe you're wanting to get better on camera, or maybe you want to be more compelling and increase your conversion rates in your sales conversations. You can't get tactical and do all those things until you are super clear around how you want others to perceive you. Because if you start trying to acquire those skills and work on all those other things without having clarity around who you are, what will happen is you'll start seeing other people who you like and then you'll start copying them intentionally or not. But what you'll do is you'll start borrowing other people's scripts or borrowing other people's way of doing that thing, that tactic, and you'll try it on and sure it might work, but it's not going to feel quite right for you. It's gonna feel inauthentic. And that mismatching of borrowing a, an online personality who is really good at video versus an online personality who is really good at Instagram or somebody who's really good at live presentations. When you start borrowing from all these different people, it starts feeling kind of okay. You know, you know when you're trying to, uh, do some interior design on your house. If you're a good interior designer right now, this, this analogy does not apply to you. But for the rest of us who really don't have an aesthetic eye for design, here's what happens. We go to the store and we pick out a pillow that we think looks cool and then we pick out a pattern of a curtain that we think looks cool and then we pick out a rug and all these things individually are super cool. And then we bring them together and house looks terrible. Like it just is a mishmash where you've, you've meshed all these different patterns and designs together that don't really come back and you've spent all of this money and time and you don't love it. Maybe that's just me. My husband and I have this experience where, um, we call it the argument of the curtains where, uh, this is like a total tangent here, but for years in our very first house we bought like, I dunno, 10 years ago, maybe more, uh, we argued over the pattern of the curtains and we couldn't agree on it. I had the, I think I wanted something like Paisley and he wanted these really weird contemporary circles that I strongly felt looked like they were like circa 2001 and we argued over it. So we settled on something that we didn't both love. And then I made him change the curtains, I swear like six times over the course of living in our house, that house for a year. And we never felt like we were in love with the house. Okay. And I bring this up. Coming back to you is I consider this idea not when you're not clear around what your specific style is. When you're not clear of exactly who you are and exactly who you're not, you cannot be authentic, so borrowing other people's styles, their scripts, their processes, it doesn't work if you don't start with you being clear on you, and that's why I cannot impress the need for going through this initial work that we've talked about today. Those questions, they might sound super simplistic, but the, the impact of exploring your own thoughts and your own identity and how you want to be perceived by other people, it is a mentally impactful. If you want to position yourself as someone who attracts their ideal clients, their ideal projects are ideal opportunities into their universe to pick up the pace on accelerating your success. That's what this is about. So don't skimp on this. Don't be like, Oh yeah, yeah, I know I'm already gonna do the work on this. Spend an hour, spend 10[inaudible], five minutes thinking about this for a moment. Any work that you would do in on this now is going to accelerate any work we do later on helping you become an even warm, magnetic communicator on any facet we talk about when it comes to communication. So, okay, if you love today's conversation, would you please, please do me a huge favor, take a screenshot of wherever it is that you're listening, post it on Instagram or Facebook and tag me, I'm at the Heather Sager and shoot me a message. I would love to know what really stuck with you today and what are you going to do? What are the characteristics, the persona that you're looking to embody? Please tell me I would love the feedback beyond that. I can't wait to connect with you again next week as we are on the journey of finding your it factor and bringing it into so many dynamic conversations in your business. So until then, I hope you have an incredible week and I'll see you next week. Same time, same place.