Why Feelings Fail You – And What Doesn’t

We've been told to honour our feelings — and mostly we've overcorrected, pandering to them at great cost to our motivation and discipline. Feelings do matter, but not for being effective.

There’s a stronger foundation; one you walk past every day. It’s the single most powerful tool you have as a human being. This episode is about that foundation.

We humans are linguistic systems. Our job is to maintain the integrity of that system. It’s the single most powerful thing you can do.

In this episode, I contrast two foundations you can build a life on: feelings and word. 

One you didn't create and can't control – and is therefore unreliable, even flaky. The other is available to you at any moment, needs nobody's permission, and — used with integrity — builds something most people value: consistency and reliability without the cost of emotional effort. The secondary gain is self-belief and self-efficacy. 

There's a task at the end to begin practicing immediately. You can check the results for yourself. 

Come sceptical. Stay curious.

SHOW NOTES

This is the second of four episodes on humans and language. Episode 8 established that we live in a sea of language and that language doesn't just describe reality — it creates it. Episode 9 takes one class of that — the declaration, the "I will" — and shows what changes when you platform your life on your word rather than on how you feel.

Covered inside: the declaration versus the "internal weather report"; integrity as a scientific term (the bucket, the circuit, the balloon) and integrity with word; how integrity builds self-belief and self-efficacy; the science that shows how feelings follow action; how to be flexible and not use your word against yourself; feelings as information rather than commands.

Some terms that are used: integrity with your word; doing what you say you will do; how language creates reality; your power to create; drifting off-course and getting back on track; self-belief, self-efficacy, self-compassion, self-flagellation. 

References & going deeper: David Barlow's Unified Protocol (feelings as information); Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Viktor Frankl on the autotelic personality; the Five Motivational States series on the flow state. There's an earlier YouTube piece on the "I will" shift — linked below.

Written companion on Substack under my name. Ways to work with me are in the links.

Transcript

– The baby and the bathwater: our trouble with feelings

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi and welcome to episode 9. I'm Neil Biobaum. We live in a world where it's become important to pay attention to our feelings. And like with everything we humans do, we've thrown the baby out with a bathwater. And now we tend to pander to those feelings to a great degree. And sometimes it's not really useful for us. And then we struggle with motivation and discipline and wonder why. Today I'm going to show you both the science and philosophy behind why I say that. I'll contrast two principles that you can platform your life on, word and feeling. And I'll show you why a life based on feelings is unreliable and ineffective, and how you can use language, your word, to change that, to build a strong foundation for your life. And for all the binary brains out there, I'm not saying the feelings are useless or that we must reject them entirely. Feelings make us human, and there's a place for feelings. We need to recognize that place and engage them when it's appropriate, beneficial, relevant. What I want to hand you is this what I regard as the single most powerful tool in the whole being human toolkit. That is your own word. And show you what changes when you platform your life on that instead of on how you feel. So we'll look at declarations, the speech act that I introduced in the previous episode. We'll use an engineering stroke scientific definition of integrity applied to word. And we'll look at why motivation almost never shows up before you've taken action, or at least it doesn't need to. And at the end I'll give you a task or something that you can take away to start doing this week. This is what to believe, finding signal in the noise. In

– Recap: we live in a sea of language

SPEAKER_00 1:33

the previous episode, I talked about how we live in a sea of language. Everything that humans do takes the form of language. I gave the example of working as a carpenter, working with wood, and then you become a manager, a leader, and now you work with people. People involves language, it involves conversations. We took that home to your personal relationships. Between work and home, you might travel in traffic. The rules of traffic are defined in language. You might go shopping, what you need, what's on the list, the advertising, the product information, all takes the form of language. Money itself is language, an agreement in language. You get home, you watch sport on television. The rugby players don't beat up the riff because they've agreed to a set of rules written in language. Your child needs to know something, you give them language for it. And so on and on and on. And so we live in that

– Speech acts and the declaration

SPEAKER_00 2:22

sea of language. I also showed that language doesn't just describe reality, it creates the thing. So if I say to you, I congratulate you, the congratulation lives as language. That is the thing. The congratulation, the speaking of it is the doing of it, is the existence of it. And one of the key classes of creating through language is what we call a speech act and a particular speech act called the declaration. And that's the example I just used of saying congratulations, I congratulate you, or you're fired, or the defendant is guilty. And as an individual, there's a particular declaration that's available to you that is tremendously powerful. That's what we'll be looking into today. And that is when you use the phrase such as I will, I am going to, I commit, I promise, that we would call a declaration.

– "I will" vs the internal weather report

SPEAKER_00 3:11

And you could contrast that with a phrase such as, I want to, I hope, I need to, I must, I should. Well, those are really just kind of internal weather reports. They are sharing an internal state. They don't actually create anything, and you can feel that because they don't commit you to anything. When you say I will, people are hesitant to say I will because they know what it means. So you have an unlimited capacity to declare things in the domain of your life. Of course, there needs to be legitimacy surrounding it, so you need to have the legitimate authority. You can't declare yourself king or a billionaire on a Tuesday just because you feel like it. You need to have the money or the system supporting you to be that person, to be that thing. You certainly have the power to say, I will go and get a job, I will get fit for somehow. Nobody can take that away from you. And we take that statement seriously, I will. If you ever try to get somebody to say I will instead of I should, you'll see the difficulty they have with it because it registers deep inside us that this is a commitment and I'm creating something and I'm committing myself to a path. So that simple piece of language when we shift that has a tremendous knock-on effect in our life. I've done a video on YouTube on that. You can go and have a look for that. I'll put the reference in the show notes. And when we do that, when we speak in that way, when we make a declaration, you use a speech act, these are the terminology that we use, we create a piece of the future at the moment

– Why a life built on feelings is unstable

SPEAKER_00 4:45

of speaking. And then the second part is that you would actually take the action towards doing that. And that's the key piece here that we're going to be exploring. Because when you get into thoughts and feelings about things, and then we wake up and we don't feel like it, or as soon as we start on a path and we hit a few obstacles, then we don't think it's a good idea anymore. And that's why I'm saying that a life based on feelings and the thoughts that sometimes lead to those feelings is not a very stable foundation. If we wait until we feel like doing something or only act when we feel like it, we're not going to be very reliable in doing those exercises to get fit or making the sales calls or doing what it is that we need to do. If we rely on inspiration and mood and feeling all the time, well, we're going to have a pretty irregular production cycle and we're probably not going to achieve our goal. I mean, it may happen like that for some people where they are inspired, they take two or three steps towards something out of inspiration and suddenly it takes off, and they're able to ride that feeling for an extended period. I'm sure at some point the success tape is off, whatever they were doing in the beginning doesn't work anymore, and then they find themselves struggling to know what to do next, how to sustain

– Integrity in the engineering sense

SPEAKER_00 5:57

that. So, what is that? Let me get right into it then. So we're going to use the word integrity, integrity with your word. And integrity in the scientific sense means that a system is whole and complete. So an electrical circuit that has integrity, the current runs through it. A bucket that has integrity holds the water that's in it. A balloon that has integrity holds the air pressure that's within it. And if you think of all of those things, a tiny hole in the bucket, a tiny break in the electrical circuit, a tiny pinprick in the balloon will completely break down that system. And so if we take that into the fact that we humans are made of language, we create our reality with language. When we speak a word, if we say, I will get fit and have a beach bot this summer by going to the gym three times a week, or I will become a millionaire or billionaire by doing, taking the following actions. And then if we step in and we do those actions as we said, we can then say that we have integrity with our word. In other words, the system is whole

– The energy system: self-belief and self-efficacy

SPEAKER_00 6:57

and complete. And let's think about that system. What is that system? It's a it's kind of an energy system. I like to think of it as a like a balloon. It builds energy. If you think that you do what you say you will do and you do that consistently, what does that do? It builds up a level of self-belief. The belief that you can say something and follow through with it. And saying something and following through with it implies moving obstacles, overcoming difficulties, and of course, overcoming your own feelings. You get tired of doing it. You don't think it's a good idea anymore. You wonder whether it's worthwhile when you're not making progress as fast as you would like to. So while you're doing that, you're managing all of these feelings and you're staying in integrity with your word. And as you do that, you build the belief, the self-awareness that you can do that. And we would call that self-efficacy, the fact that you can speak something and then make it happen. And once you've achieved that one or two or three times, you start to build a case for yourself. Not just a case where you have to convince yourself to feel good about it or feel confident, but it registers at a subconscious level because you've proved with real evidence that you actually do follow through with your word. Then if you had to take that a whole lot further, when people meet you and speak to you, they're likely to trust you because they can feel at a visceral level that when you speak it, you trust it, your body gives off that energy, that sense, and people can feel a visceral level of trust that this person is reliable in the sense that they do what they say they will do. So this process of integrity is tremendously powerful. It creates an energy circuit, a energy bubble, we could say. And the more that we comply with it, the more that that energy system builds. And it's both useful for us, it builds our self-belief, self-efficacy at a subconscious level, and it projects that outwards as an energy. I hope you can see that this is a tremendously powerful way of being and it's fundamental to everything that we do. And so we can see that you are a system, a linguistic system. And when you give your word and you keep it through action, you build that energy. And when the word is not kept, there's a leak. And if you do that consistently, well, you never build that pressure, never build that strength, never build that belief. Later I'll address that in terms of how to deal with it when you break your word. But at the moment, we're looking firstly at the broad level of if you base things on feelings, well, one day I don't feel like going to the gym, so I don't. I don't feel like showing up today, so I don't. We can see that our feelings are not necessarily reliable. You didn't create them. We don't wake up in the morning and decide how are we going

– Surrender to the commitment — feelings fall in line

SPEAKER_00 9:36

to feel. And if you rely on feelings, that's when it requires a lot of energy convincing yourself, positive self-talk and mantras and all kinds of things to get yourself up so you feel like it. This is a very different path. This is the path of, well, I said I'm going to do it, and I surrender to the commitment. I honor that commitment without a story. And I find myself doing the activity. And what you find very often when you do that, and this is proven by science, by the way, the studies of the flow state, your feelings fall in line. If you've ever been to the gym when you didn't feel like it, and then you come away afterwards, glad that you had gone, feeling much better about it. You didn't feel like making those sales calls or having that meeting. You come away with a positive outcome. You feel much more energized. So the motivation that you need, the feeling that you seek, comes after the action, which is in alignment with a word that we have given in the past. This is a much more reliable foundation, and if you need proof from outside, you know, the science supports it. I'm sure your common sense and your intuition will tell you that it's true, and you can certainly experiment with it yourself. We'll design some exercises at the end of this. This is not about affirmation, it's about a direct recognition and alignment with the commitment that you've made through the declaration, saying I will, and then giving up any resistance to that. We spend a lot of energy on resistance to those

– Make it a platform (and stay flexible)

SPEAKER_00 11:07

things. And so to get to that point, you would need to actually make a decision to live this way. This is not something that you can you sort of pick up and you go, well, today I'll feel like being an integrity and then tomorrow I won't. Well, then we're platforming being an integrity on whether I feel like it or not. That wouldn't work. It's more of a decision like this is a platform I want to live my life on. I am going to be the person who does what I say I will do. And I won't allow my identity, my ego identity that's full of excuses to give me a way out of that when I don't feel like it. It's going to be an all or nothing thing. And of course, we're going to be flexible with that as well. I always like to use the analogy of the tree stand strong in nature for hundreds of years. Part of its strength is its flexibility. So, yes, there are days when I am exhausted. There are days where I need a break. But if we're doing that 60% of the time or 70% of the time, then we're making excuses and we're not being in integrity with our world. I would say allowing for 10, 20% in our very busy world would be acceptable. And also not looking at things in very short time frames. So if I say I'm going to go to the gym three times a week and I don't do it in the first week, and then I feel like that's a failure. Well, the first thing to do is to acknowledge the facts. Okay, I didn't do it. And then have a look at what I could do soonest to make up for that, and how quickly can I get back on track?

– The line in the sand and the autopilot

SPEAKER_00 12:39

So naturally you might have a busy week. So your commitment's got to pot for a whole week or maybe two weeks. Well, how quickly can you get them back on track? And so the way that I see this is that when you make a commitment, it's like drawing a line in the sand. If you can imagine a straight line, so your commitment is a straight line. I will go to the gym three times a week. It's the simplest example to use. And then what you'll find is you deviate from that line. And every time you deviate, you come up with a story, a reason why, an excuse. Well, I was busy, it was raining, I felt sick, etc., etc. And so the distance between the line of where you are and the straight line in the middle is your story. But what you want to be doing is always tending back towards that line. So you want to bring yourself back towards that line as soon as possible for as long as possible. So maybe you manage for another two or three weeks to go to the gym every day, three times a week, as you committed, and then suddenly something else happens. And you're always striving to stay as close to that line as possible. A good analogy for that is autopilot on a plane. So the plane's autopilot has its target destination and it keeps drifting off and bringing itself back, drifting off and bringing itself back. So what you're doing when you create a word is creating a kind of an autopilot for yourself, a target, a goal, a future place where you want to be and the steps along

– Getting specific with your word

SPEAKER_00 14:00

the way. So the place where you want to be with a gym example, as I said, is have a beach body ready for summer, or be able to play sport at a certain level, run a marathon, for example. Then you need to do the training, and then you set out the training three times a week, five times a week at a certain level of intensity. The more detail you can put in there, the better for you. If it's a business goal, then it might be certain levels of activity. Networking, for example. So you could you could bring this to anything, buying a house, setting yourself financial goals, finding a relationship, any of those things, this can work for you. Create what it is that you're after in Word, and you can get very specific with that. I've seen this work tremendously where I've put down a lot of detail into a situation, a job that I was looking for, a partner, a house, a car, and obviously with legitimacy, so it was stuff in the range that I could afford, a little bit of a stretch out of the comfort zone, but it's being very precise about what it is that you're after, so that it can help you to know what to look for, what to say yes and no to, and that becomes a filter with which you look at life. So you start selecting for things, it helps you there. And who knows, maybe it just puts out a message to the universe to send something to you. That might be the case. Don't have any proof on that. It's worth holding as a possibility. So that's the broad principle that we're applying here when you work with your word speech acts declarations as a foundation for your life and for operating. We call that doing what you say you will do, being your word, acting in integrity with your word. These are the phrases that we use. And as we said, it's contrasted with basing a life on random thoughts and feelings which you didn't create, which you find yourself with. And as I said, we contrasted this with the life based on feelings where you have to feel like it. So the science and logic, if you have a look at the ontology of it, is very clear that your feelings are unreliable. And if you have to work based on your feelings and you have to change your feelings first, that's not a reliable step, firstly. And secondly, it requires a lot of energy, positive thinking, affirmations, all the kind of effort that goes into trying to shift the feeling before you even get started on the action. Whereas that energy can be available simply for taking action, in which case you're using that energy to get things going. And interestingly, your feelings will fall in line because once you start achieving things, or once you start focusing on the task and meeting the challenges of the task, you'll find yourself getting into the flow state. And very soon you will have accomplished something. You will have done the exercise, you will have completed the work steps, you will have made the sales calls, and with that your feelings fall in line. They get the satisfaction, and then you start building the energy of the system. So I'm repeating that again, and we can see that the application of word is contrasted with basing it on thoughts and feelings, which requires and even wastes energy. People often ask me, how do you get the amount done that you do? And my first response is always, I don't waste energy on resistance. In other words, I surrender to my commitment, I do what's needed to be done, and I don't worry about the feelings, I wait for the feelings to fall in line. And as I said, there's sometimes exceptions. There are times when you are tired, when you need to rest, when you need to attend to other things. We do deviate from the line. And it's always about bringing ourselves back as fast and as regularly as we can. And just a little detail on that when we deviate from the line is when we give our story, our justification, our excuse, our explanation. And that usually follows the phrase, but or because I wanted to, but I didn't because. And that will be the focus of the next episode. We'll look at that as an entire episode, because that's very important as well. And when we get stuck in story, believing our story is the real thing, or that being in story can make a difference, that's when we really lose our power and get lost. So that will be an episode to look out for, the next episode. And the good news with this approach that we're talking about is that anybody can do it. You can give your word at any time. Nobody has to give you permission to do that. You can create a word, any word that you choose. Obviously, as I said, it needs to be in line with reality, with what's possible. And we should be stretching ourselves a little bit out of the comfort zone in order to do that. That's part of the conditions for the flow state for starters, but also it's how we stretch and grow and develop ourselves. And the reason why we do this, we wouldn't need it if we weren't trying to do something.

– When you're identified with your feelings

SPEAKER_00 18:26

There's one thing that would hold us back, particularly, and that is around feelings. And that is when we're strongly identified with our feelings. I'm a feeling type of person, or feelings are important to me. And then that becomes the story that we layer over it, and so we can't make this shift. So this is important to see that we're not negating feelings. Feelings have a place. However, if you have created a strong identity, a strong sense of the importance of feelings and who you are as a feeling-based person, then I would challenge that and the importance of that as a foundation. We'd go back to the idea that you didn't create yourself as you are, you find yourself being the way you are, and then you defend yourself, not because it's true, but because it's you. And we could examine that foundation of being a feeling-based person.

– Feelings are information

SPEAKER_00 19:14

When we go into it, we can see that feelings are not a foundation, they're also not the enemy. Feelings are information. They're based on a judgment, they follow a judgment. So something happens and I deem it as good or bad, and usually that's related to how it affects me and how it affects my identity, my sense of self, what it says about me. But generally those feelings can be treated as information. If we look into cognitive behavior therapy, the work of David Barlow, the Unified Protocol, that talks about feelings as information. And so, for example, if you're frustrated, it means that you have unmet expectations that you would need to communicate. If you are angry, perhaps a boundary has been violated, and so on. And so what we can do is we can take that feeling, the information out of that feeling, and we can use it to create a word. So we can say, if I'm frustrated, the information is that I have an unmet expectation. What I would do with that is I would go and make a request to somebody. I would create a word, a commitment. I will go and ask them by this time for that thing, and then I'll take the answer that I'll get. You can see I'm using the word will, and by that I'm turning it into an action and I'm resolving it. My feelings will fall in line. I will get the result, or I will get an answer that will be a definitive yes or no, and then I'll deal with that in a similar way. So we can see from this that feelings are not absolutes, they're not commands, they're not something that we have to obey and follow and identify with at all costs. Feelings give us information and they can be useful, they can be guides to what needs to happen next, to what is most important. So there we can see that feelings can be subordinated to our intention, our word, our integrity, and they fit within that. Feelings can also tell us when we are doing damage. There's an element of empathy when we're doing damage to ourselves or others, you know, how demanding or harsh to be when we're making our word. Are we going to do something that is plainly cruel or just unrealistic? Our feelings are guides to that. But really, if we are basing the life on feeling and subordinating word, we're not creating a high level of effectiveness. We're becoming victim to our feelings if we do that. So feelings need to be recognized and put into context. I will do a whole episode on that.

– How this differs: CBT, Stoicism, mindfulness

SPEAKER_00 21:42

And by the way, I'm drawing from a field called linguistic ontology, which has been developed into a modality called ontological coaching. I've developed my own version of that called effective inquiry, which is what we'll be using and doing and applying today. And this will be a good point to have a look at how the approach we're taking here differs from. From some of the other approaches I mentioned, the alignment with cognitive behavior therapy, which recognizes feelings as information that you can deal with intentionally. Shikshink Mikali has talked around the conscious intention and establishing things through conscious intention. We can see that the Stoics, it's about having a look at the situation and seeing what is in front of you and giving an ascent to what is real, what is good, what you can work with. And this gives some substance and texture to that yes, which is to actually use your word, use the language to create an intention and take things in a direction. So it's an active step and it has the dimension of language added to it. We've also got mindfulness, which lets you watch the feelings that I don't feel like it arise and pass without grabbing onto it necessarily. And ontology, this approach adds the lever. So once you let it go by, you still need something to act on. And what is that that you act on? And that is

– Logos and eros: the boat and the ocean

SPEAKER_00 23:02

your word. And one more that's interesting is the Greek terms logos for word and eros for feeling. And these are broad principles aligned with the masculine principle, logos, the word, and the feminine principle, eros. And another analogy that I've heard used for this to describe exactly that the masculine and the feminine is the boat on an ocean. So the masculine principle is about intention. The boat is a piece of technology that goes on the ocean and it heads in a direction. You steer it in a direction. Then the waves would represent the feminine or the eros, which is the feelings, the emotion. And so we can think of the ocean having tides and waves, and those can throw the boat around. It's a similar principle to the to drawing the line in the sand, the boat on the ocean, you're going in a direction, and then the waves come and toss you off course. And your job is to bring yourself back on course. You can't do anything about the waves or the ocean. That's what you're living in. Just as we live in feelings and in thoughts, we can't do anything about it. They come in waves. One day I might feel very positive. The next day I might feel quite negative. The one day my feelings are quite mild on a certain subject, the next day they're very strong. So the ocean is a very good analogy for the feeling state, the thoughts and the feelings that arise of their own accord. And if we follow them, we're like we're adrift on that ocean and we can't determine where we're going to go, what direction we're going to go, where we're going to be tomorrow. Whereas the boat with a compass can point us in a direction and we can steer that boat towards in a specific direction. So we could equate that to logos, the masculine principle, and eros, the feminine principle, represented by the boat and the ocean.

– Your task for this week

SPEAKER_00 24:47

So here's something that you can do in the next week, and that is to choose something that you have been putting off doing, where you've been using the language, I want to, I should, I must, or I'll try, and change that to I will, I shall, I am going to, I promise, I commit. Use one of those words. Say exactly what it is that you commit to. So that can be a longer term goal. It can be I commit to writing a book and put a time on it within six months, and then break that down. I will achieve that by writing three times a week for an hour at a time, however, it works out. And start with something small. Maybe a book is probably not the smallest thing in the world. So maybe exercise, getting up in the morning half an hour early and doing some stretches, you know, might be something smaller. You will you'll know what it is. And then go ahead and do that and then start to notice. Acting on your words, surrendering to the commitment, just finding yourself doing the activity and going through it and completing it, and noting that the feelings kind of follow in line. You don't have to change the feelings. You can carry them along with you. And you can still do the activity while the feelings lurk around. And then check yourself at the end and see where those feelings are. Are they still resisting or have they adjusted a little bit? And there might be a part of you that's wanting to be right that this isn't working. So you might check for that if your feelings aren't shifting. Ideally, according to the science and my experience of this, you should find your feelings and most often falling in line and you being happy at the end that you did it. And then notice the impact on you when you go into other situations. You'll start to notice how often people avoid the term I will and say I should or I must. You'll notice it in meetings, you'll notice it with colleagues, with family, that nobody wants to commit to anything. And that will give you a sharp lens on reality, on where we are and what people are really doing out there. And then you can start to request, well, is that a commitment or not? You might start asking that. If you start doing that in your meetings at work, you'll find that it sharpens up a lot of things, gets a lot of things done that weren't going to be done otherwise. You'll find yourself becoming a lot more effective. So start small, start with lifting the small weights in the gym and build up to those bigger ones, gathering evidence all along the way of how that works for you. So that you can build a case for continuing to use it, even in the bigger situations, and build it as a habit and as a way of life. And remember, ultimately what you want to be doing is recognizing the effectiveness of this, the reality of it. This is not something that is just made up. We've seen that language is a technology. Life is language. So when we're doing this, we're not grabbing at some fantastical idea. We are aligning ourselves with things the way they are and putting ourselves in touch with reality in the most powerful and effective way that we can. And if that's the game that you want to play, then you would choose this to platform your life on, to make this a way of life. And you would find the tremendous benefits from doing so. So there you have it. You didn't create your thoughts or your feelings, but you can give your word and act in line with it, and let your body gather the evidence that you can move your own life in a direction that you choose. That's not about believing something new about yourself. It's doing one thing that you said you would do each time. And once again, this isn't another thing to believe. As you can see, it's a technology that you can use and test and that will inevitably impact what you believe. And by using it, you'll get better at dealing with what's real and what matters.

– Going deeper: the Five Motivational States

SPEAKER_00 28:31

If you want some more detailed application, you can find it on my website, YouTube, Substack. I've done a series on the five motivational states and the different applications of that. That's based very much on the science of the flow state, the studies done by Mihaili Shikshen Michalli, and the work of Victor Frankel, both of whom described what you could call the autotelic personality, auto meaning self and telos meaning goal from the Greek, and the person who can set themselves a goal and work towards it. In the next episode, as I said, I'll unpack the whole bit about story, the thing that shows up as soon as you step off the line with its butt and it's because. And I believe you'll come to see that most of us spend the majority of our lives inside story, mistaking it for reality, and it costs us way more than we realize. We'll look at how to spot that in others, and of course, the more difficult one in yourself. This is what to believe. If you're finding value from this, please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you're listening. If something landed, not just made sense, but actually landed, then share it with someone who you think could benefit. That's how this work spreads. You'll find a written companion on Substack under my name. And if you want to take it further, there are ways to work with me in the show notes. I'm Neil Biobaum, thank you for listening. See you next time.