“There is no need to be afraid
of who you really are.”
Destiny meets opportunity
The result: 400 people with tears in their eyes.
Here you see me in 2018 on a stage I conquered. To get there, I had to give up breaks and have the courage to be the first to dare something.
Although the man in the upper left of the picture, the renowned authority Blair Singer, believed that nobody would be ready after such a short training period, the trainer gave me the stage first for a special performance. With absolute certainty that I would nail it, I rocked the room.
Everything fell into place perfectly, I delivered — so that Blair's first comment to me afterwards was: "You've done this before, haven't you?"
What you cannot see — because nobody took a photo in that moment (!) — is when Blair asked me a simple question after my performance. He wanted to know the following, spontaneously:
"If this were a live radio broadcast transmitted to all of humanity, and you had 10 seconds to say something to the world — what would it be?"
Most people, out of fear, simply babble something supposedly clever in situations like these. But I had no fear of being still. Simply standing on that stage, with 800 eyes from different countries looking up at me, closing my eyes, placing my hand on my heart, and taking all the time in the world to find the answer from within my heart.
Those seconds alone plunged the room into an unfamiliar silence — a tension, something new.
A stage where suddenly nothing was being performed anymore, but something real was happening.
Then I raised my head and looked directly into every face. From within me came — with a presence and clarity I cannot explain even to myself — exactly one sentence.
"There is no need to be afraid of who you really are."
Then I was silent again. You could have heard a pin drop in the room. After what felt like an eternity of about 5 seconds — thunderous applause.
People lined up afterwards to hug me. Many said they had tears in their eyes, some had even cried. Deep inside themselves, they had felt touched.
One seized opportunity. One unexpected question. One moment of silence. One sentence full of authenticity. 400 people moved.
It is incredibly simple to give
others something truly meaningful when we stop putting on a show to look good.
And instead — simply be real.
To this day, that sentence stays with me.
And I am still amazed, time and again, by how much we humans fear simply being ourselves.
Helping to change that — that is why I am here.