Authentic Storytelling

I had just finished reading her book, The Elegance of Simplicity, when I filmed this interview with Sophie McLean at her house in the French Provence. The night before we had a very deep and expansive conversation, and I wanted to condense in an hour as much learnings as I could. https://youtu.be/vF_Cz0aonsI Language creates our life I was eager to talk about language, and how it creates reality. Sophie says it's actually the only tool to create in this dimension. And she acknowledges that it is a limited tool. I am passionate about what kind of language has that actual power. Most of us use the language of description. When you use the language of description you don't have any power to alter what is. I do not have a say in the matter of life. There is another language that is called the language of declaration. And that is the one that creates your reality. That language is extremely powerful because in the moment of the declaration you create a future that didn't exist before. And it's not the future "one day I'll get to it". It's the future now. That language is available to everybody and can indeed create your life. The art of listening There is no effective and authentic communication without real listening. Yet most of humans don't really listen. We just filter for ideas to judge, for things to agree or disagree on, so we can comment and reinforce our attention-thirsty egos. Sophie assures me that the access to the art of listening is very simple: You have to give up everything. Mainly opinion, judgment, evaluation, fear, thinking about something else, commenting about what the other person just said, agreeing, disagreeing, right, wrong, good, bad. All that has to be given up so there is nothing. And when there is nothing from you then you will actually be able to listen and have an experience of the other person. The way she puts it, it sounds extraordinary. Life is experience, which allows growth, and Sophie says that in every conversation there is the potential of an experience. As long as we let ourselves really listen. I love this. Authentic Storytelling Sophie McLean has been leading transformational seminars for years, and she tells me the secret to connection when doing public speaking is to care so much for your audience that all your attention is on them instead of you. I ask what is the role of us storytellers in my pursuit for authenticity. She starts by sharing that it is a waste of time to regret the past, which doesn't really exist anymore. Share your own experience and the experience of others in as many different points of view about what's possible. Through your experience and what you learn from what happened to you, create what's possible. And I wonder how that is achievable, that quest for authenticity, through media. Maybe the way to have authentic media that will really provide people with the opportunity to make up their own point of view will be a media that will give so many different points of view that people will look, let's say, at 10 points of views and then make up their own. The problem with the ego is that we don't like watching different points of views, because it invalidates ours. So mostly what we do as people we watch what goes in agreement with our own point of view. The ego (that misunderstood part of ourselves) But we didn't go straight into the power of language. I asked her to share what she learned during the many years she spent studying the ego, which she defines as "the sum of all identifications". If you think the ego is who you are, you are inauthentic. So do you see the paradox? You do need an ego but you have to know you're making it up and you're creating it.To examine opinions, your actions, your feelings, your judgement. That is by itself transformational. People are inquiring into love, generosity, integrity, connection, consciousness, awareness. It's very exciting.

Connie-Lee Bennet trains people to be authentic leaders. With her 7 steps process to authenticity, she aims to empower humans to change the world. "We're talking about authenticity in terms of connecting people to love", she says. Imagine a world where our businesses were created from that authentic space of who we are rather than what other people outside of us have told us to do. https://youtu.be/2Fi_WWCHPOA Watch the full conversation between storytellers Connie-Lee Bennett and Albert Bonet. I enjoyed this conversation so much. It helped me learn about authenticity, and how people let our traumas from the past dim our true self behind a layer of conditioning. There is no right and there is no wrong. There are only actions that are in alignment with your truth and actions that are out of alignment with your truth. It's about me being that spirit with you in this moment, no matter what I'm wearing, no matter what you think of me. Because your thoughts of me are just seen from your filter. You can find Connie-Lee Bennett on her website and on Instagram. READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT: ALBERT: So here I am, in Paris, meeting this wonderful wonderful leader, Connie-Lee Bennett. Thank you so much, Connie-Lee, for accepting my invitation to record his interview.CONNIE-LEE: It's my honour, really. Thank you very much for inviting me.ALBERT: And rather than introducing you, I'm going to just ask the question that you always ask everybody. Who are you?CONNIE-LEE: You know, when I first started with that, "who are you?" question, I never realised that whenever people interviewed me, they were gonna ask me the same thing. So you gotta be careful what you put out there. Thank you for asking that question, because it's different who I am and what I do. So who I am really is somebody who's passionate about impacting the world in connecting or impacting the world so that people can connect with the authentic leader that they are. Because I believe everyone is an authentic leader. And what I do, how I do that is I have many different hats, like many leaders around the world, I think. I'm the CEO of Meraki CLB group. We have online academy. We do coaching. We do authentic leadership training. We do workshops. Annual events. Also have Meraki charity, which really looks at empowering women to start authentic businesses. And I am of course an international public speaker and the Director of Global Woman Club here in France. I'm an author, TV show host, radio host and all round impact all over the world.ALBERT: Wonderful. So I have many, many, many questions to ask you.CONNIE-LEE: I'm gonna sit back. I'm gonna sit back wayALBERT: We're going to be here for 5 hours. Can we have some drinks here?CONNIE-LEE: Like glass of wine . An authentic leader likes her wine.ALBERT: Exactly. So the thing that most called my attention about you is this authentic leadership training. You train people to be authentic. That is so cool because I'm learning about authentic storytelling. So how do you do that?CONNIE-LEE: Great question.ALBERT: I'm sorry. I have a feeling this answer is going to go on for, like twenty minutes.CONNIE-LEE: So I'll give you the two minute answer. Great. Well, let's look at the definition of, an authentic leader. To me, an authentic leader is someone, like Tony Robbins says, "the only way we feel fulfilled is through growth and contribution". So I was really inspired by that on it became the cornerstone of my training. So my training is in two parts. One is about growing, growing into who you are. Really looking at peeling off those layers because we've put those layers on to protect ourselves. So we've kind of put those layers on, you know about "in order to be accepted, I need to be more intelligent, I need to be more beautiful, I need to have this car, I need to have this, I need to earn that money".So it's really looking at identifying all those places where you are not connected with who you authentically are,...

Bernard Paes is an Entrepreneur and Creative Director. In his many years living in Dubai, he was managing his own advertising company. We discuss how authentic advertising is. How much "makeup" a fizzy drink advert needs in order to sell. There is a certain amount of makeup to beautify yourself in front of people or to beautify a product in front of people. https://youtu.be/kTsMUTxvPcs Watch the full conversation between storytellers Bernard Paes and Albert Bonet. He compares marketing to dress codes, that we use to be appropriate, to fit in a certain environment. We're used to that level of appearance, we're expecting it, and so a good marketer as to present their product accordingly. You want the outside world to understand you because in advertising there's a phrase "you've got two seconds to catch your consumer". If you don't present it in the way that the consumer is already accustomed to, then you straight away have a disadvantage. We talk about principles, and how he left the advertising industry because of the business practices of big companies, where marketing managers are not commited to the company. I am committed to a brand for the rest of my life. Like for example I will never drink Pepsi. Never. Because I've handled CocaCola for 10 years in the advertising agency. Even today although I'm not an advertising man I don't drink Pepsi, I don't drink any other cola. READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT: ALBERT: Here I am in Paris, still. I'm sitting here with Bernard Paes, who is an entrepreneur and creative director. Hi Bernard.BERNARD: Hi, how are you?ALBERT: Thank you for accepting this and being so willing.BERNARD: It's my pleasure.ALBERT: You've been telling me that you're a citizen of the world.BERNARD: I've been everywhere. But yeah, I'm I'm an Indian born in Kuwait, who lived most of my life in Dubai. I had a couple of businesses in Dubai, and now I'm a Portuguese citizen living in France. So yeah, I consider myself a citizen of the world. I've travelled enough, so yeah.ALBERT: And you've been working for most of your life in creative direction, in advertising, you have your own advertising company. Now you work on packaging for perfumes.BERNARD: Yes, luxury perfume packaging.ALBERT: And we were discussing earlier about marketing, because you know that my thing is is authenticity. Authentic Storytelling. And we were just discussing how from my point of view, marketing is is far away from authenticity because it kind of pretends there's something there that people want to buy and is that something that they it's pretended that they feel attracted to. What are your views on this?BERNARD: There are two sides to it. The way the way I look at it is I give equal bias to both, because I've seen and done both sides of it. You try and oversell in marketing yes but you also try and oversell yourself sometimes, so there is a certain amount of makeup as you would say to beautify yourself in front of people or to beautify a product in front of people. Because the truth is if I did for example a photograph of a simple can of soft drink I would have to retouch that can to make it presentable. And that's exactly what advertising is. It would over glorify our product just to make it presentable. You could interpret it in two ways: they're doing especially to make it look better than it really is or they're making a presentation of their product. I find the same thing in the human self and also in marketing.ALBERT: Isn't one of the conditions of the human mind that we want to look good? And isn't ugliness somehow raw and attractive?Just because it's raw because it doesn't have any makeup on? It's like a child that doesn't pretend to be anything, they just are. Like animals, you're a big animal lover, right?BERNARD: I'm a creature lover. I love any of God's creatures.ALBERT: Humans are the only ones that overthink how they look and they want to look good. Animals don't care about that and that beautiful.

Hana Sim is Orgasmic Meditation Trainer and Relationship Coach from South Korea. She says she used to be a floating head, having spent most of her life in universities, doing Masters and a PhD. I ask her how can we more authentic in our storytelling when most people are in their heads. Hana explains how Orgasmic Meditation helped her to be present. Nicole Daedone is the one who made this practice; her first book is called “Slow Sex”. After it goes to our mindset, if we make it slow enough...

Hana Sim is Orgasmic Meditation Trainer and Relationship Coach from South Korea. She says she used to be a floating head, having spent most of her life in universities, doing Masters and a PhD. I ask her how can we more authentic in our storytelling when most people are in their heads. Hana explains how Orgasmic Meditation helped her to be present. Nicole Daedone is the one who made this practice; her first book is called “Slow Sex”. After it goes to our mindset, if we make it slow enough then we can see ourselves from the moment I see something new and then add up the interpretation. We talk about how easy it is to label things, to judge them instead of observing them. I think my judgement diffuses to other people, so at the end we think the same thing. The way we trained ourselves in Orgasmic Meditation is call what I see, and it changes our mentality. https://youtu.be/S8couT0r8Qw Watch the full conversation between storytellers Hana Sim and Albert Bonet. She recognises she learned all the other things which can look good, but never really learned how to nourish herself as an adult human being. I could not keep functioning in my old conditioning. I always had to perform and always had to show others that I’m worthy. It kept giving me a diminishing return. The more hard work I put in, it was giving me less and less satisfaction. At one point, it hit zero. We discuss about being present in our bodies, and how if we do this we all feel each other. But we’re so busy thinking, she says, that we don’t recall all the things we feel. And about being in our masculinity or in our femininity: The masculine way is to calculate the most efficient point to the end. The feminine way is "oh I’d like to feel this thing and maybe if I feel that then I can move to another point". It’s always moving and always very flexible. When we follow our feelings it doesn’t make sense. You can get in touch with Hana Sim in Facebook READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT: ALBERT: So, here I am in Paris with Hana Sim. Hi Hana HANA: Hi ALBERT: Hana is an orgasmic meditation trainer and relationship coach and I’m meeting her to talk about authentic storytelling, of course, so we’ve been talking already a bit about your background, about what you do. Just tell me again what is orgasmic meditation for those of us who don’t know. HANA: OK, orgasmic meditation is a mindfulness practice so that means we train our attention on our body and how we feel and the way we do it is with another person so that’s more interesting and dynamic and there are lots of surprises. And if the normal zen or mindfulness practice concentrate their attention on their respiration and their breath, here we concentrate our attention on the point of contact between the fingertip and clitoris of woman so that’s really electric and very dynamic. ALBERT: OK so that’s definitely very intimate, right and when you told me just a few minutes ago about this, this is like wow this is very intimate and what I find very interesting is that you’re originally from South Korea, right, but you live now in Paris and you mostly practice in Paris. So being you from this background with a society in Asia with this more constricted social norms, how was your journey from that environment to going headfirst into orgasmic meditation? What was your journey there? What happened? HANA: There are many things that happened, there is my personal story and my different plans and my plan failed and there are many things, but first thing that I want to say because I changed many times my country, I’m from South Korea and I live in Paris and many times I go to English speaking countries very, very often and I think one thing which really helped me was the language barrier. Some people say we understand language mostly from the body language and the sensation so there are long periods of time I could not understand other languages, but somehow we understand each other like whether the fe...

Aashish Rego is a music and film producer and has been composing music for films and TV series in India for years. Where does intuition come from? How do you build human connection through music and film? For him, the human senses are only useful for forming opinions through our limited mind. But we have the infinite potential to feel through our soul, and the soul is infinite and is connected and linked to all the energy in the universe. I ask him how can we be more authentic...

Aashish Rego is a music and film producer and has been composing music for films and TV series in India for years. Where does intuition come from? How do you build human connection through music and film? For him, the human senses are only useful for forming opinions through our limited mind. But we have the infinite potential to feel through our soul, and the soul is infinite and is connected and linked to all the energy in the universe. I ask him how can we be more authentic storytellers. The biggest issues in life is being disconnected with our own selves. So when we are connected with ourselves, we build a channel, we become the channel by which the universe passes its force to you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hujv-2tnlU Watch the full conversation between storytellers Aashish Rego and Albert Bonet. About the path to real connection: How do people connect normally? Normally by surrendering, by trusting, by loving. Aashish says his aim as a storyteller is: to alleviate the distrust, the mistrust that people have for anyone or anything that’s different from them. Because I am just another you, and you're just another me. You can get in touch with Aashish Rego in Facebook and Twitter. Read the full transcript: ALBERT: So here I am with Aashish Rego from India. He's a music and film producer, and we've been connecting the last few days here in Kuala Lumpur for these crazy courses that we're doing.AASHISH: Highly crazyALBERT: Hi Aashish, how are you doing?AASHISH: Great, how are you?ALBERT: I'm good. It's been great to be working with you in the last few days. You're just so heart centered and so calm under pressure all the time, and I feel I have to learn that.AASHISH: And you're so professional, and it was an absolute delight to work with you. Collaborating with you in the project we did together. It was totally amazing. And I think we rocked it.ALBERT: Yeah, we rocked it! Us and all the other forty people, right?AASHISH: AbsolutelyALBERT: It was great, thank you for that. So, were talking about intuition and I want to bring that to the field of authenticity. So of course animals are the most authentic they can be because they don't have rationality that makes them act in a way that they look good, that they're right, they're in control, right?AASHISH: I would say they don't have unnecessary baggage.ALBERT: Unnecessary baggage. And so they're connected with their intuition.AASHISH: Yes.ALBERT: What were you telling me about the source of intuition for humans and animals?AASHISH: Well in my experience, animals are connected from a position of fear. Humans have the ability to think much, much beyond animals and a lot of times we tend to overthink things and that complicates matters. And leads to circles within circles within circles. And we somehow lose track of the intuitive abilities within us. Whereas animals, if you just observe them, they just go around sniffing each other, then you probably get the feeling that “He’s cool, he’s ok”. And sometimes, their hackles are raised and it’s obvious that they've not even communicated with each other but they know the other animal knows it is in a position that is threatening to them. And so they raise their hackles. As humans when we observe each other, we observe through our eyes, the nose, the five senses. We form our opinions based on that, through our mind, which is limited in nature.But we have the infinite potential to feel through our soul, and the soul is infinite and is connected and linked to all the energy in the universe. That is how we get hunches, and why certain feelings that we get sometimes when we meet a person we can still be vulnerable to them. So that is the feeling of intuition we have at times. And there is the other intuition which comes from knowledge and wisdom. And a third level further than that which is awareness. ALBERT: Awareness?AASHISH: Awareness. Awareness means awareness of the truth,