The microphones are going to be taken by the leaders who are healthy, eventually. I don’t know when. We’re being led, for the most part, by narcissists—people who are unresolved.

This is the subtext of what’s going on inside their head when they’re in front of people: “How am I doing?”

They’re talking but what they’re thinking is, “I wonder how I look up here. I wonder how I’m doing. I wonder if this sounds right. Let’s poll test it. I wonder if I look good. I wonder how I’m doing.”

That’s what is going on inside our leaders’ heads, and I’m not just talking about politics, I’m talking across the board. We’re going to flip that on its head. All most speakers are thinking about when they’re on stage is what kind of impact they’re making. When that’s happening, nothing can happen between you and the speaker. So you feel alone and uninspired. There’s a feeling of emptiness because there’s no co-creation. That speaker doesn’t even know you’re out there. If they do see you, they think staring at you is connection. It’s not.

Every time you speak is a co-creation with another human being, and that human being is your lifeline.

If you don’t have that relationship, you have nothing. You may have everything else—good looks, big name, millions of followers—but if you don’t have connection, you have no real power. You’ve got to be ultra present. When that happens, your life shifts forever.

I’m not talking about you being polished. I don’t care about that at all. I don’t care about so-called good speakers who are liked by the media. The reason they like them is because they’re bad speakers too. All they do is read a teleprompter. They’re not connecting to people. They think people are stupid. They talk to us as if we’re stupid. And then what do we become as a constituency, as an audience? Stupid.

We become exactly how we’re spoken to.

My dad woke me and my siblings up every morning and told us we were “the best, goddamnit.” And we were like, “Dad, come on.” We were embarrassed. We didn’t like it for 20 or 25 years. And then we thought, “Maybe, he was onto something.” We just lived into what he saw. We lived into how he spoke us into existence.

What if we did that? What if we started treating our audience like that? You actually speak them and see them into existence, instead of the opposite. Are you doing that now? Let me know by leaving a comment.