Well, ladies and gentlemen, with that, it is time for us to kick start off the summit with a brand where, you know, whose mere mention is likely to bring a smile to consumers' faces because of the brand's multiple campaigns. I'm sure all of us remember the iconic 1990s, kuch baak hai, zindigi mein, kuch khahas hai, hum tum sabhi mein, campaign, which the brand successfully recreated in 2021. Also, don't forget the meethe mein kuch meetha hojai campaign, and the brand continues to strike the right chord with the consumers, or as they may remind us, ki asli swad zindigi kaha actually kya hai. Well, taking us down the nostalgia trip is our keynote speaker, Deepak Ayer, President India, Maudheli Spurz, who talks about the Cadbury Dairy Milk journey, building one of India's most trusted brands. Well, with this, it is time for me to call upon the iconic Mr. Deepak Ayer. Thank you so much for your valuable time, and it's great to have you and biggest smiles to welcome you over to you, and it's great to have you today. How are you doing today? Very well. Thank you so much, Varma. Great. And hello and good afternoon, friends. Thank you, Anurag and Pink for having me speak at the Pitch CMO Summit. It's my pleasure and honor to be speaking at this August gathering, and of course, I'll be speaking on the theme of the summit that's building brand trust. And of course, I will talk about the journey of Cadbury Dairy Milk, which Varma very fondly referred to, in building brand trust. And I will speak with, and whenever I say CDM, it means Cadbury Dairy Milk. We are so used to using this word CDM instead of using the full phrase. So I just thought I'd say that whenever we talk about the brand, we have so much passion around the brand and it's always referred to as CDM. So can I have the presentation, please? Sure. Could the team please roll out the presentation? Thank you. Over to you. Thank you so much, Varma. The next slide, please. Yeah, as most of you might know, CDM was voted the number one trusted brand in India by brand equity in 2020 in the most trusted brands survey. See, it was number one, not just among snacking brands or chocolate brands or FMCG brands. It was number one across all categories of brands and all brands in this country. And I will talk today on what it took for CDM to get there. Can I have the next slide, please? So talking about trust, without getting lost in a very convoluted or esoteric definition of trust, let me simply define trust in any relationship as a consistent and reliable connection, which is normally built over time. This is very much like how we build trust in our personal lives with our family, our colleagues, or our friends, right? The next slide, please. Now, this brings me on to say, how did CDM or Cadbury Daily Milk do it over the years? So at Monolees, we attributed to four sets of reasons. One, having a meaningful connection with the consumer. Two, being consistent over time. Three, always being there, always engaging. And four, not just telling stories, but doing something about it. We call that story doing versus storytelling. Now, I don't mean to say storytelling is not important. So don't get me wrong, it's important. But to take the brand trust to the next level, the brand needs to do something more. It needs to do something about the story it is telling. And in CDM's case, the story is always about generosity. So I'll talk about each of these four points, and that'll be the core of the content of my chat today. So the next slide, please. Thank you. So the starting point of building trust with consumers is to create a strong connection with them. Long ago in my childhood, and likely before many of the young folks in the audience today were even born, chocolates were something that your rich dad or your rich uncle bought for you as a gift from his last visit overseas. Now, if he had left CDM as such without localizing its appeal, you would never have made the connection with our consumers. You could never have built out CDM the way we have built it up today. CDM built a connection with all of us through kuch neetha ho jaya. Think of those four powerful words and what it means to us. It's in Hindi, our local language. It makes it Indian. It embodies Indian-ness. And most importantly, it resonates with any Indian who would say, what is the point of living in India if you can't say kuch neetha ho jaya? That's the part of the connection. This is how CDM made a connection with consumers in India. It firmly made a western category to be seen as a modern addition to the wonderful assortment of Mathai and sweets that be so much relished. And the important thing here is that CDM never chose to compete with Indian sweets, which is what we so much love. It rather chose to blend with them. Now, when I say blend with them, think about integrating with them. So think chocolate modak. Think chocolate sandesh, etc. Which are all chocolate-favorite sweets, which is so much relish. So once again, CDM made a connection with Indian consumers. I hope you're getting the point of connections that I'm talking about. Another very important point on making connections is how many consumers are you able to connect with? How many consumers are you talking to? And on how many occasions? So long ago, chocolates were for kids. But like Bhavana said, with the iconic 1994 commercial, the Shimona ad, as you properly call it, the lady dancing out of the cricket stadium into the cricket field, CDM made a connection with adults. So it enrolled adults. It made connections with not expanded the connections beyond the kids to be adults. Again, CDM made connections, not just with the number of cohorts, but also with various occasions. So let's say, it made connections with every part of the consumer's life. Now, let me recall some CDM ads. Let me recall some Cadbury Daily Milk ads. Think of Pehli Tariq ad and the connection it made with consumers then. Recall the Pappu Paas Hoge ad. Think of Khane Keva ad. Think of Shubharam. Think of the Rocky ads. Think of the Diwali ad. Think of the Valentine ads. Today, every occasion where we have sweets is accessible to CDM, whether it's daily snacking, or celebrations, or festivities, or gifting. And hence, CDM built category relevance for chocolates and made chocolates a part of the consumer's life. And that's what I want to talk about, how you make connections, how many cohorts do you connect with, and how many occasions. And there's one more part I would like to make connections. You might have noticed the CDM ads. They never made the brand the hero. It was always, kuch khas hai hum sabhi mein, not Cadbury mein. Kuch khas hai zindagi mein, not Cadbury mein. Kuch meetha hojaya, not kuch Cadbury hojaya. There's another very important way CDM connected, very, very humbly with consumers and customers. Now, CDM became the fabric of the nation. It represents the taste of chocolate. Today it stands for the modern progress of India. And that's a great story on how you make connections. Next slide, please. So the second chapter on brand trust is the notion of quality and consistency. Now, both the product and proposition. So at the core of this is how we have kept the CDM product quality and experience accent. The product recipe remains the same over the years. Despite living in an inflationary environment in India, which we have been living for the last 70 years that we have had the brand in India, 70 plus years, we have resisted all temptations to value engineer the recipe. Productivity is important for businesses, but we don't fiddle with the quality of the product. Like one of my colleagues mentioned it to me, we do quality and not productivity. It's a very nice way to frame the dual importance of quality and productivity. Now, let me talk about consistency. We call it fresh consistency. Our proposition, our message has evolved over time, but only within the bounds of kuch meetha. Our consumer work gave us deep insights on how we could leverage meetha to tell inspiring meetha stories over the years. Different manifestations, but around the core of kuch meetha. Despite getting to 20 years of the tagline, kuch meetha hojai is still fresh and it remains our sign-off till today. Very often we see new brand managers or new client servicing managers wanting to do something different and wanting to make a difference and wanting to leave a mark or leave a legacy. And in this zest, they begin thinkering with propositions and messages. Now we have ensured that this doesn't happen because we believe in being consistent and we believe in strengthening our brand's distinctive memory asset. As we all know, marketers get bored of their own work much faster than consumers get bored of their work. It's very tempting to go and change something there. So in summary, today, when any Indian consumer picks up a bar of CDN, she or he can be assured of the same great taste that they grew up on. When she or he sees a CDM ad, they can feel the same joy, the same warmth, the same spirit of giving, the same spirit of generosity, the same tagline that they are used to. And this is what we call consistency. Well, let me caveat this. It is not that we have not made any mistakes. We have, for example, a few years ago, we played Martian's ad. It is a nice ad, but it's not the genre of the brand. But however, we were sensible enough to realize a mistake and correct it. So I'm not saying we have played a perfect ad. It is just that we have tried to do it consistently. And whenever we have made mistakes, we say, okay, we have made a mistake. Let's correct it. Let's recoil and see how we can put the right thing out there. So that's what I have to say on consistency. Next slide, please. Now, having built strong connections and having remained quality obsessed and delivered consistent messaging, the other important role in building trust is to always be there for a consumer. Having a point of view on what is happening around us, being present in the new mediums and touch points of the consumers are of equal importance. Hence, being present on digital and social media, speaking the language of Gen Z consumers is just as important as it is to be aspirational and relevant to a rural household on the other side. So as context changes with time, staying relevant as a brand becomes challenging. Hence, brand need to evolve to stay relevant to the consumer's new context. Creating platforms like Valentine's Day, Friendship Day, having critical, as these occasions have become very important to consumers, and they didn't exist 20, 30 years ago. These are not typical media occasions, but we have created this and today we have become so important in our consuming lives. Now, having a point of view on matters like diversity has become very relevant today. And CTM's work on the retake of the iconic Shimona Act, celebrating the outstanding progress of our sports women, resonated very, very well with the consumers. Even other examples like the Unity Bar, the four different chocolates in one bar embodies the unity that we have amongst diversity in this country. The propaganda again cyberbullying, a purple hat campaign. The same thank you to COVID workers, and I'll talk more about that a little later, when we changed the logo on our tanks and we called it the thank you bar. All these have assured our consumers that we do have a point of view on what is important for our culture and what's important for our society. So you're always being there and you're always being engaged. And that's the point I want to leave behind with you on this slide. The next slide please. Finally, trust is built when consumers realize that brands exist, not just for themselves and their profits, but for making a difference. Making a difference to the society is a very deeply rooted value in CDM's persona. For CDM, it is about generosity. It's a value that the Capri family espoused ever since they set up the company. And it now translates as the brand purpose across the globe. In India, we call it achchha vada. Over the past years, we have built on it and done work, which has really stood out in a way that the brand highlights challenges around us and how the brand and the consumer can come together to solve it. So we launched the thank you bar as a salute to our COVID workers in 2020 because we felt what the whole nation was feeling, which was being grateful to them for working selflessly to protect our health and well-being. We created not just a Cadbury Ang in Diwali 2020 and followed up with the second version last day, but because we realized that small retailers were losing out on business and needed all the help they could get. On other occasions, we stood for unity, like talk about the unity bar. We stood again cyberbullying and many such activations where the brand was focused on making an impact on people's lives. This is what we call story doing and not just story telling, which means working with the consumers to espouse simple acts of generosity versus just talking about it. Another important set of points that I would like to call out here are that CDM never provoked any controversy. It was not about the brand wanting the limelight. It was always about a real consumer or a social issue. CDM's acts of generosity were consistent to what the brand stood for and hence the brand was not seen to be exploiting the situation in its engagements. After all, if CDM doesn't stand up for puch achha ho jai, then who will, right? Now I will end with another point that I made at the start. Brand trust is built over time and very often we see marketing ecosystems of brand managers or agency partners wrongly aspire to achieve this in a single year or the single campaign. No creative is breakthrough enough. No celebrity is large enough to build this trust overnight. Our learning is that it takes time and hence it's important for generations of brand managers to pass the beton to the new generation to first hold the beton and not drop it. Think of one's role as, you know, think of one's role as getting and passing the beton of the brand from one generation to the brand team to the other generation while holding close the core of the brand. In the period that we wrote, that we hold our roles, we must focus on deeply understanding of brands and build on its legacy while writing our chapter in the book of the brand story. That's the way you create legacy and not by writing a new book. You know, so this entire thing about trying to do it overnight doesn't work. Think of it that for 70 years, so many brand managers have worked on this brand, right? Everybody handed over the beton to the other and the other person took that beton instead of dropping it and trying to run a different race, right? It is not a 100 meter sprint, right? This is a real race. It's done by different brand managers, different leaders over years but they need to write their own chapters but in the brand's book, they cannot write their own book on the brand. Now, friends, that's what I have to say on CDM's journey on building brand trust, a meaningful connection with consumers, consistent product and propositions over time, always there, always engaging consumers and not just storytelling but also storytelling. Now, a few minutes later, Anurag and the E4M team, thank you. Well, what a fabulous hearing this was, Mr. Ayer. I have to say that definitely brought the biggest of smile and as we always say that this brand definitely has the connect with the consumers. So a lot of questions have been coming in but of course, we would like to appreciate your time. So we are going to go and give ahead only 10 minutes to the Q&A looking at your schedule. Would that be okay, Mr. Ayer? Perfectly fine. Please go ahead. Okay, perfect. So first, one of the questions is from Jayan Bose who asked that your view on measurement techniques for measuring subconscious response leading to brand loyalty and how senses impact brand choice and loyalty. So what's your view on the measurement techniques for measuring subconscious response? So quite honestly, Bhama, so Jayan as well. So I'm not an expert on this domain, so I don't think I'm in the best position to answer this. What I still do know is that things are evolving. So today, the way used to measure, let's say people's feelings or responses or the subconscious was very different 10 years ago. And the way digital progress is happening today, there's a lot more that's happening. The way image processing is progressing with leaps and bounds, I think this is an evolving area. So I would like to summarize an answer. I really don't know exactly. That's not my area of expertise. But what I do know is that the old is changing for new ways and data and digital is coming up in a very, very big way. So also machine learning, AI, PR, VR and all the technological advances that are happening. Right, absolutely. Also, the brand has multiple memorable iconic campaigns, of course, while introducing you, we mentioned a few. But we'd like to get a heads up from you as to what have been your favorites, something which is recalled in your entire journey. Could you give us a few tidbits on those as well? Of course, Haas has in the game, I mean, Shimona's ad was easily the most iconic ad. It went down as the campaign of the century of the last century. So I mean, it's iconic in that sense. So easily one of the best campaigns and head and shoulders about the best. It's not that I'm getting head and shoulders about the rest of the CDM ads, not an easy, easy ask in itself, right? Every one of those ads, I will look at Pappu Paso guy till today, people who have seen it, then we'll recall Amitabh Bachchan and his initial style, right? So, or you recall all the recent ads, or you will recall the Bharata, it was a wonderful ad between the mom and daughter and daughter. So how do you bring out these meta stories has been the hallmark of CDM. The one that stands out for me, of course, is 1994 Shimona or the retake in 2021. Right, that's great to know. Also, of course, because of COVID, a lot of companies have gone digital, a lot of business transformations have happened. So Pallavi Shah asked that, how has your business adapted to the digital change and e-commerce adoption? Is there anything you'd like to contribute to that? Absolutely, so I'm not really sure of the question, Pallavi, are talking digital and data in the holistic sense across businesses or in the sphere of marketing and e-commerce. I'm presuming you're saying overall business, right? Now, see, digital and tech and data was always there. COVID just gave it a huge flip, almost all of them exponentially raised the importance of these things. It's not dramatically today, it's touching every aspect of a field and let me give you a few very quick examples. So let's stop marketing. Technology today allows you to personalize at scale. Whereas television, you could just give one message to every audience, right? Digital allows you to make it a two-way interaction, right? And hence, how do you bring that out? So we had 96,000 versions of a digital iron fuse, because what a hunger meant at 4 p.m. to a girl traveling in the metro, college girl traveling back home to the metro was very different from what a hunger meant for, let's say, a person who was working in the fields and coming back from the fields at 6 p.m. in the rural market, right? You could do that personalizing at scale. The second big thing is, you know, the two-way communication. So once you start getting to know the consumers, right? It is not just about talking to them, but it's also about hearing them and seeing their responses, etc. So those are two big advances in marketing. You look at sales. Today, we use big data. We use artificial intelligence. We use machine learning. We use AR. We are for design of US materials. So it's actually touching every aspect of sales. In manufacturing as well, you know, the two examples I continuously give is that long time back, around four or five years back, we started putting sensors in all our machines in one of our factory cities. And what the sensors used to do, you get all the vital statistics of the line on a laptop screen. Now happened lockdown 1.0. All the operators were staying in the same district. They were on the floor in the factory, but the supervisor was in the next district and he couldn't travel. And he couldn't travel for three weeks. For three weeks, he ran the line from his home in his laptop. This could have been impossible without technology. So the smart factories, as we keep hearing industry 4.0, is not something for the books. It's actually real and it's happening all around us. Right. A great, great adoption right there. You know, there's a question coming from Deepi and we always talk about young marketeers. So, you know, she would like an advice to young marketeers such as her starting out. So Deepi would love to hear from you as a piece of advice to the young marketeers out there. I mean, the advice is pretty much similar to almost everybody. Right. So and surely for young marketeers, invest in learning. Today, the world is changing so rapidly. You can't say I learnt it all from college or learnt it all for my first job or my first assignment. Right. It's changing. Today, I'm now possibly 30 years in this industry. Right. So in the professional world, right, or in the corporate jungle, as you would call it. Right. But I'm still coming. I didn't know anything about AI or machine learning five years ago. I didn't know how, what would be the use cases of AR and VR. But today, unless and until I change myself, you know, it's impossible. I keep telling this very, very, very nice example to most of the people I talk about. Very often, we read these news clips, right? Technology, AI, machine learning is going to eat up jobs.  You know, their jobs will stay because there is physicality to those jobs. The names on that list whose jobs will go away or you are in mind. And unless and until we invest and learn and change, right, it won't. So my one simple advice, if I were to give you, of course, I could give you many more is to say invest in learning. Invest in learning. Absolutely. You know, Amo Gagurwal asked that celebrity endorsement. So let's let's indulge into that arena. You know, celebrity endorsements varies from brand to brand. And you know, one brand ambassador does multiple brand campaigns. So do you feel that this would impact the brand dilution in some sense, you know, when you are looking at it, how does you and your entire team decide? So that's what Amo was trying to ask to you, Mr. Yurt. It's contextual, right? So there's a brand who has a persona and there is a celebrity who has a persona. The best way is the brand persona and the celebrity persona have a fit, a fitment of what they stand for, the values, the way the consumers see it, right? And that's when you get a multiplier effect. Because what the persona brings, let's say what the celebrity brings to you is taking the clutter. So when you're looking at a television with so many ads, you stand up when you have a big celebrity there doing an ad, because you like to see a celebrity and you like the ad and many of them work very well, right? And they help break the clutter. But if the genre of the message that that celebrity is giving is very different from what the brand persona stands for, it's not really going to resonate very well with the consumers. So a lot of it is about the brand, the persona of the celebrity, what message you're giving and in what context you're talking to the consumers. So all of that needs to come together. Right, absolutely. You know, firstly, I have to say, Mr. Ayur, of course, we respect your time because there are a lot of questions coming. We've got another three minutes only to go. So we'll go ahead with one of the other questions. Rohit Singh asks that truly appreciate your personalized Diwali ad with Shah Rukh Khan. How does a brand ensure to maintain trust and legacy while they adapt newer ways of marketing and technology like AR, AI, AR, etc. What would your take be on that? See, actually, it's an enabler AI and technology. Look at this ad of Shah Rukh Khan. What is it made of? It's made out of the good use of deepfakes. So what we use is artificial intelligence. So who is able to recreate how a Shah Rukh Khan would emote or talk or sound in different contexts, right? And so technology can be very, very big enabler. I don't think they are in conflict or dissonance. It's just that we need to understand how to use that and in the right way. Right. Go ahead. And I have to say, I was a big fan of the ad because we saw so many adaptions to it. And you know, the small businesses, of course, benefiting with it, that really helped. Just one final question in a new of time, we're going to be going ahead. Sumit asked that, are you also looking to explore CTV medium? Has there been a major shift from linear channel to hot and hot cutting activity? A lot of technical questions also. I didn't get this at all. Tell me, what are the words? Are you looking to explore CTV medium? Apologetic if I'm also not aware on certain terminologies from my side. If you want, maybe there could be a typo error. Would you like to skip that question and move towards a personalization one? Okay, or maybe I don't know this word. So what of them could be true? I'm apologetic even I wasn't really aware on that. But just your final closing thought, Mr Aiyar, because I know there are a lot of questions coming in and we cannot take them on directly to you right now in new of time. Just your closing part before we wrap up your wonderful session today, Mr Aiyar. Yeah, so I think Brand Trust today, especially after what's happened over the last two years for all of us in pandemic, it's actually been elevated to a level which it was never before. And that kind of levels, we have never seen a brand required to sort of perform at. And hence, it's become super challenging for many brands. But equally, it has been a blessing in the skies for other brands who always stood for some purpose. And today, what are the consumers doing? They're gravitating to brands of the purpose. They're gravitating to brands of the trust. They're gravitating to brands have been consistent and have always been there for them. Those are the messages I gave today. So I would say building brand trust has become even more important today than ever before. Yeah, I think you have to invest in it. A brand, you have a brand and you want that brand to live for long and you want it to be around and actually become stronger and stronger. The one area which you must invest, you can't run away from this brand trust. I talked to you about our stories on brand trust and how we're going to see them. There are many of the stories to be very different. Yeah, so I wouldn't say just rely on the stories that are the themes that I gave you. Look around, there'll be even better ways and even more complementary ways to build it, depending on the genre of your brand. If you have a very tongue in cheek kind of a brand, which has cutting edge humor, wit and reparty, you don't build it the way we have built this, but the fundamentals are still the same. You need to engage, you need to be there, you need to be consistent, you need to use some story the way those won't go away. Right, absolutely. Thank you so much, Mr. Arya. There's so much we've learned from your session. They say that experience counts a lot and whatever you spoke and the nuggets of wisdom you brought about on the screen have been truly invaluable. Thank you so much. That is mine. Thank you so much, Rama. Thank you so much, Pitch Summit. Thank you.


Welcome everyone to today's presentation, Conquering the Critical Intervoice by Robert and Lisa Firestone. During this presentation, we're going to define what the critical inner voice is, identify helpful responses to the voice, and reflect upon why positive affirmations and prior interventions may not have worked. So what is the critical inner voice? It's the defended negative side of our personality that's opposed to our ongoing development. Now, that sounds a little odd. Why would we have something like this? Well, think about it in terms of the small child that's inside of you that wants to stay small and wants to withdraw. Pardon me. The voice consists of negative thoughts and beliefs and attitudes that oppose our best interest. It doesn't want us to grow. It doesn't want us to step outside the comfort zone. It may diminish our self-esteem, which makes us more dependent or keeps us dependent. It warns us about other people, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can promote angry and cynical attitudes, and we'll talk about how that can form a protective function, and it creates a negative or pessimistic picture of the world. So the question is, why would we want to do that? Well, it protects us from disappointment. It protects us from the unknown. It makes us keep ourselves sort of walled off and defended, so we don't risk mental, emotional, or physical hurt. The voice edits our thoughts, controls our behavior, and inhibits our actions. So think all of us have a negative internal critic. Some of us have tamed it, some of us have befriended it, others of us still have it running rampant. But think about yours. When you go to do something, and it says, you know you can't do that. Or why would you even think that you could accomplish this, or you're not good enough? These are the thoughts that we need to figure out what to do with those so they don't negatively impact our self-esteem. This voice, like I said a few minutes ago, it thinks it's protecting us from being hurt or feeling abandoned. It's telling us, come over here. I've got your best interest in mind. Why don't you stay away from anything that could be threatening? Which unfortunately reinforces our feelings of helplessness, shame, and guilt. So if we're constantly telling ourselves, you're not good enough, you're not smart enough, you can't do this, why did you even think that you should be able to do this? Then of course we're gonna start believing that and wondering, you know, am I good enough? When managed effectively, the barbs of your inner critic prevent complacency and boredom while nudging you to improve your life. Now if you think back to the crisis intervention presentation, we talked about how crisis is an opportunity for change. We wanna push people out of their comfort zone into a state of a little bit of chaos. So in order to emerge from that chaos, they've got to make some changes. They can't just stand on the edge and go, mm, do I wanna jump? You know, we're kinda pushing them off the edge and hoping the ball isn't too deep in order to encourage them to continue to grow as individuals, in order to encourage them to explore what this crisis resolution would mean to them.   I use that word more than I probably should. Now, do I let it affect me globally? Do I think I'm stupid? No, do I know that there are some things that I'm not very smart about? Yeah, but there are other things that I am. So these voices, we wanna start walking the middle road and go, okay, if this voice is telling me I'm stupid, let's look at that. Let's look at the objective evidence. Is there something I need to learn? Is there some way I need to grow? And what do I already know that I'm smart about, that I'm good with? The voice that says, you're unattractive. Again, we can take a good look in the mirror and go, am I doing everything that I can with what I've got? I mean, we are not all going to look like Christy Brinkley. So looking in the mirror and going, am I trying my best or am I rolling out of bed, not even bothering to brush my hair and walking out the door? So this voice can tell you, you need to step up your game a little bit. I like this one, the voice that says, you're not like other people. Well, good, I don't wanna be like everybody else. I like being kind of my own unique person. I walk to the beat of my own drummer and that's okay with me. So we want to look at what does that mean? If the voice is telling you you're not like everyone else and you don't fit in, that's very different than just, you're different. So if you don't feel like you fit in, then evaluating what is it that makes you feel like you don't fit in? And if you want to fit into a certain group, what do you need to do? And if you don't care, then that's fine too.  This is one of those that we talk about with the all or none thinking.  That's a global representation of a person. It's saying that you didn't fail at a certain thing. You didn't fail at a certain task.  Now that's an awful big statement and I would be really hard pressed to think of anyone that you could say this about globally. Everybody has successes in something. So calling that voice on the carpet and going, I'm not a failure at everything. Yes, I may have failed at this and I may have failed at some other things, but failing means I'm trying. I'm stepping outside of my comfort zone. And yeah, when we fail, it sometimes really hurts. However, when you come out the other end, you can say, I tried, I gave it my best shot. What did I learn from this failure? But not internalizing it as I am a failure. A lot of these voices are very, if you look at your cognitive distortions are very steeped in cognitive distortions. All are non-thinking, magnification, globalization. So many of the techniques we're going to use to address these voices are going to be cognitive behavioral, but not all of them. You never get anything right. Never and anything, extreme words. We all get something right sometimes. So what did you get right? And if you mess up more than you would like to, how can you address it? No one will ever love you. That's one of those irrational thoughts that come straight out of the pages of the CBD team manual. So encouraging the person to look and say, who does love me and do I love myself? If we don't love ourselves, then we can't really expect everybody else or anybody else to love us, can we? Now, we all love things about each other and it's important to consider what that means. What does it look like if somebody loves you? What does it feel like if somebody loves you? And how is that different than codependency? How is that different than just having power over someone?  These are some negative voices that people may have internalized from when they were younger. They may be voices that came through the media. The media gives us a lot of messages about what we're supposed to look like and what we're supposed to be like to be successful. And if we are not conforming to that, either because we can't for some reason or we choose not to, should we, and this is kind of a rhetorical question, should we hold ourselves accountable and say, well, you're fat, who says? And we'll get to talking back to it in a minute. You'll never make friends. Well, if you never try to make friends, you're never gonna get hurt. But I don't know of anybody who can't make friends if they try. So it's a matter of you may not make friends with a certain group of people or you may not make friends with a certain person, but does that mean you can't make friends with anybody ever? And another one of those extremes, you'll never accomplish anything. Well, you've accomplished surviving until now. You've accomplished, you know, graduating from high school. You've accomplished a lot of things. Let's look at some of those. Now, there may be some other things over here that you want to accomplish. So let's talk about how to set those goals. Common voices in your career, these are things that we hear, especially as we get older in life, not as much when we're knee-high to a grasshopper, but as we get older, as we're starting to develop our sense of competence in what we do, going back to those Ericksonian stages, we hear these voices going, you don't know what you're doing. Now that could come internally or it could have come from a parent or caregiver who was not good at providing constructive feedback and they said, back off, let me do it. You don't know what you're doing. Who do you think you are? You'll never be successful. You're under too much pressure. You can't take it. Well, a lot of our clients feel this way. They feel like they're under too much pressure and they can't take it. And that's probably one of the reasons they're in our office. So let's take a look at that. You are under too much pressure. You're feeling that right now. So how can we fix that? This is your internal voice going, we need to survive. We need to protect ourselves. So you need to take down the pressure notch a little bit because eventually you're not gonna be able to take it. It's like a pressure cooker. So what can we do to fix it? Instead of getting stuck listening to that voice going, you can't deal with this. The person needs to say, you know what? You're right. There's a lot of stuff going on and I'm having difficulty dealing. What can I do differently? You're lazy. Followed by you should just put it off till tomorrow. Imagine how those two things work together.  It hurts. It's a failure. So people who are afraid of failure and who thrive on perfectionism often are some of our worst procrastinators. No one appreciates you. Well, you know what? There are gonna be a lot of people in the world who don't appreciate you. And that's just reality. Some people may not have any interaction with you. So of course they can't appreciate you. Some people may not have the ability to appreciate other people because they're just so stuck in their own stuff. But can you really realistically say no one appreciates you? You'd better be perfect or you'll get fired. I've had employees for years. I've been an employee for years. And you know what? I've never been perfect and I've never been fired. So this kind of perfectionism keeps people anxious, keeps people nervous, keeps people revved up and makes them focus on every little itty bitty mistake they make and make it a huge thing. Because oops, I got this paper in 24 hours late. I'm not perfect. The world is going to end. Nobody likes you here? Well, if that's the case, then we need to look at why that is. But is that really accurate? What is your source of information for this statement? Is there a reliable resource that's going, yeah, you know what? Nobody likes you here. Go away. My sense is in many cases, this is more of a emotional reasoning that somebody's doing. When are you ever going to get a real job?  Maybe you haven't been able to achieve some of the career goals you wanted to because something else has come up. Does it mean you don't have a real job? If you are in a non-traditional job, does it mean you don't have a real job? And no one would hire you. Well, if your voice is telling you that, then you need to look at why wouldn't someone hire me? If I were a boss, why wouldn't I hire me? This is using that voice and almost making friends with it in a way to say, okay, there's probably a kernel of truth in what you're saying and you're telling me this to protect me in some way. So let me take a look at how I can understand your point of view. Think about having a really, really critical supervisor or parent who may not be good at saying, providing constructive criticism. This is kind of like the voice, the critical inner voice. In relationships, we hear these same messages. You're never gonna find someone who understands you. You get too hooked on people. They don't really care about you. How did this statement come to be? Most of the time, you're using prior experiences, whether it's from your family of origin or from prior relationships, where the person's been hurt, where the person has thought that there was more to a relationship than there was, where the person has been in a lot of relationships and felt misunderstood. So this is prior learning coming back, but being blown out of proportion in a very extreme way. It's not, you'll never find another person who understands you, but yeah, it's hard work. Don't get hooked on that person, parenthetically, because they're going to leave. People leave. Sometimes it happens, but not everybody leaves. She or he is too good for you. Who says that? You're better off on your own. Well, sometimes it's easier, because then you don't have the question about whether somebody cares about you or whether they're going to leave, but is that the goal you want for your life? As soon as he or she gets to know you, he or she will reject you. Well, that could be prior learning coming out and going, warning, warning, that's fine. Warnings are okay. Warning doesn't mean stop. It's kind of like the yellow light, not the red one. You've got to be in control. This tells me that somewhere in the person's past, they weren't in control and there were negative consequences. So I'm going to want to go back and take a look at that and also look at times when the person hasn't been in control, but things have turned out okay. So we want to challenge these cognitions with evidence. It's your fault if he or she gets upset. True lack of boundaries here. I hear this a lot from people who grew up in addicted households where you don't talk, you don't trust and you don't feel. So people are always pointing the blame. It's not my fault I got upset. It's your fault. You made me do it. And don't be vulnerable or you'll wind up getting hurt. It's a possibility. It's a real possibility every time we're vulnerable that we will end up getting hurt. But it's also a possibility that we will end up growing from it, that we will end up benefiting from it. So again, we want to look at the experiences this person has had that brings them to this point that has got that voice saying these things and go, okay, when you've been vulnerable in the past, let's talk about those times. A, what does it mean to be vulnerable to you?  And let's take, talk about when you've been vulnerable before but you haven't gotten hurt. And being vulnerable runs a really broad spectrum.  And if people say no, it's like, oh, okay. Some people take that and go, all right, was it a bad fit? No big deal. Other people will take that and feel it very personally. So we want to look at where these messages are coming from and what they mean to the person. So this is my favorite part because I love talking back. When we hear those voices, what do we do with it? So what?  I am who I am and I'm okay with that. And that is the caveat. The person actually has to believe that they're okay. Who says that you will never find somebody to love you again? Right now, likely it's just your own inner voice telling you that. Why is it telling you that to protect you? It doesn't want you to go out, get in a relationship and get hurt again. So it's saying, you know, you're not gonna find anybody.  Who cares? If your voice is telling you something very critical, you can say, who cares? I don't care. But the key is the person has to truly not care. Prove it. And this is my favorite one because it encourages people to bring out objective evidence. Prove to me that you will never find someone again. Prove to me that every time you've done this, it's wound up in catastrophe. Helping them highlight the exceptions will help them take a more balanced approach, walk the middle road, be able to accept the fact that, you know, for example, being vulnerable. Being vulnerable can hurt a lot, but it also can produce wonderful results. So being able to tolerate the ambiguity. Positive affirmations only help when you actually believe the message. If you look in the mirror and you say, I'm okay, that's great. But if you don't believe it, you're just talking to them in a mirror. The person has to actually believe that they're okay, which means their self-esteem has to be on some level, okay. Trying to substitute positive words for negative feelings can delay self-discovery.    And A, is it important? And B, if it is, what can you do about it? More responses. Cognitive restructuring is only effective when you have no subconscious desire to hold on to a negative thought. And as we went through a bunch of those thoughts, I pointed out that there are legitimate, survival sort of motivations to holding on to some of these thoughts. A lot of times these protect us from putting ourselves in our situation, where we might fail or be rejected or be exposed to the unknown or loss of control. These are the things that we naturally fear as individuals. These are the things that naturally trigger that fight or flight reaction. So it makes sense that there's going to be a protective voice in the back of our head going, you don't wanna do that. And this is sort of a, if you think back to Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket was his conscience. Well, this is a really critical mean, Jiminy Cricket, but it's trying to protect us. So we wanna replace negative thoughts with realistic ones, not necessarily positive ones. Instead of saying, I have to be the best, how many times are we really the best?  So do you have to be the best or do your best? And when you take on something, when you embark on a journey, when you try a challenge, is it to impress someone else? And if so, why is that important? Why do you need their validation? Or is it to prove to yourself that you can do it? So this is, goes back to that whole self-esteem thing, when people have a strong sense of self and a positive self-esteem, they don't need the external validation. They don't need to try and work to impress people, to avoid rejection. They do what they can, they do their best, which makes them happy with themselves, which most of the time gives people the ability to go, you know what? I'm not perfect, but I'm pretty darn good. So if you like me, great. If you don't, that's on you. So how do we identify this critical inner voice, except for hearing the noise in our head constantly? Recognize events that trigger this voice, if you're getting ready to be vulnerable, if you're getting ready to do something that is anxiety-provoking.  It's safer in here. But there are also other things, like going to a family reunion that can trigger that critical inner voice, cause all those negative messages you heard when you were growing up, or maybe even now, come back. So understanding that there are certain events where that critical inner voice is just gonna be screaming to keep you grounded or to try to convince you that this is probably not where you need to be right now. We wanna recognize the specific outside criticisms that support your inner critical voice. So what did people say when you were growing up? What did people say yesterday that support your internal critical voice? Cause if we have a loud internal critical voice, guess what we hear and guess what we remember more than anything else? External criticisms. If it supports our perspective of ourselves, we're gonna hear it and we're gonna remember it. And a lot of times, again, those cognitive distortions, wacky little things, we discount anything positive that we hear. We always have a yes, but. Your boss says that was a really great job on that project. And your critical inner voice says you could have done better. So your response is yes, but I could have done better. Excuse me. We want to encourage ourselves to pay attention to the positive outside feedback as well as the constructive criticism and learn how to separate constructive criticism from just criticism. Become aware of times you may be projecting your self attacks onto other people. So if you're feeling insecure, you're doing a group project and you're feeling insecure about your abilities in this particular class or on this particular project or you begin feeling insecure that your group is going to produce what you think they should produce, you may start projecting that anxiety and anger on them to work harder, do things differently, do things your way and become something of a bully. With all this, we wanna notice changes in emotions, thoughts, sensations or urges. Our feelings. If we notice that we're getting anxious or angry or even depressed, that's probably that critical inner voice is in there somewhere telling us something. So we need to say, what am I telling myself? If you wanna go back to the ABCs, you can say, what are these beliefs? What are these automatic beliefs that I'm hearing that are triggering my threat response, my fight or flight response? Visualizing the real you in developing self-esteem help the person make a list of their positive qualities and abilities because we all have them. Make a list of their interests and activities, long-term goals, short-term goals and then they can figure out where they stand in relation to their goals and how to get there. They can make an action plan. Once they've got it down on paper, once they've got it kinda out in the open, they've hashed it out, it becomes more concrete, it becomes more doable to start working toward self-actualization if you will it. They've identified what they wanna do and where they wanna go and sometimes they need a little help figuring out how to get from point A to point F over here but that's okay, that's what our job is. We can help people figure out how to make a plan and achieve their goals. Small steps, small successes, if they want to become a doctor. Wonderful, you're in high school right now.  So what do you need to do? And start laying out those steps because each step is an accomplishment. Each step is an affirmation of their self-esteem. Each step is something they can look back on and go, you know, I did that. It was scary but I did it or it was hard work but I did it. So then when the negative voice starts coming and going, you're lazy, you're this, you're that, the person can look back on these objective successes and go, you know what, no, no, I'm not really. So why am I telling myself that? In therapy and this is something they talk about in the book, the client will identify the content of the thought process. So when they start having these negative thoughts, they identify the content and articulate it in the second person.   Then discuss insights and reactions to verbalizing the voice. So as a therapist, I'm gonna say, all right, how do you feel when the voice says you are stupid?  What do you wanna do? How old do you feel when the voice says that? Cause it may take them back to a time when they were five or 15, when somebody was telling them they were stupid, which can identify a sticking point that the person needs to work on, either individually or in therapy. We wanna help them attempt to understand the relationship between the voice attacks and early life experiences. A lot of these things, you know, go back to that list, they were, a lot of them were very dichotomous. And what do we know about children's thinking when they are younger, elementary and earlier? It's very dichotomous. They don't have the gray area. They don't have the abstract thinking. So anything that the child took in and sort of filed away in their memory banks back before the formal operational period is likely to be very extreme in its tone. So this is why we wanna look back at early life experiences. If the current negative voice is extreme in its tone, then it's reflecting an earlier stage of learning and development when the person started telling themself this, most likely. Then we wanna teach them how to answer back to the voice attacks.  Okay, so when your internal voice says you're stupid, what are you going to say to it?  What would you want your child's response to be to that? And so envision the critical internal voice as something outside of oneself in order to get the emotional detachment in order to make a cognitive choice about how they're gonna handle it. Develop insight about how the internal critical is influencing present day behaviors. So if you have an internal voice that's always said, you're never going to amount to anything, then in the present day, how is that affecting you?  Is it causing more anxiety or is it something that you can silence? And then plan changes for any needed behaviors. If this internal voice is holding you back, if this internal voice is creating an emotional distress, then how are you going to address it? Other interventions, stop ruminating. Something happens and you play it over in your head, not once, not twice, but more like two or 3000 times. How could you have done it differently? Oh my gosh, I wish I wouldn't have said that. And you keep remembering that you lay down at night and maybe you said something insensitive when you were at work or at a party and you go home and you lay down at night and that's all you can think about. You replay that situation in your head over and over and over again. And I encourage clients to think about, in reality, if there were 50 people at the party and maybe all 50 heard you say it, how many of them are even remembering that two days later, a week later? So the ruminating is keeping it alive in your head because for some reason that is devastatingly important to you. But for most other people, they hear it and they brush it off and they're just like, whatever. And they move on. Very rarely will they ruminate on it unless maybe you said something really mean to somebody then they may ruminate on it. Shift your attention, kind of a DPT focus. Find something in the room that you can focus on or do your typical mindfulness exercises. Identify four things you see, three things you hear, two things you smell. It helps you get your attention away from whatever those thoughts are. Write it down. Kind of like that list when you're laying down and bed at night and you're like, I've got to remember to pick up dog food tomorrow. I've got to remember to do this tomorrow. I've got to remember. And you can't get to sleep because your mind is just going, don't forget. You've got to get dog food tomorrow.  Same sort of thing with our internal critical voice. If we hear it, we can write down what it's saying. We can write down the response to it and then we can let it go. Get it out of our head. If we let it bounce around in there, it may stick for a while. Kind of like ping pong, not ping pong. What's pinball? That was it. Remember playing pinball when you were little. You could keep that ball bouncing around for a really long time if you were focused on it. But if you shifted your attention away from it, the ball would fall out and you'd lose the game. These negative thoughts are kind of like that ping pong ball, not ping pong. I keep saying that. Pinball. We want to shift our attention away from it so we can leave the board. That's not something we want to pay attention to. Obviously you can't write down a pinball game, but getting it out of your head so it's not bouncing around in there. Think about who these voices sound like. When you hear the voices, I know when I was, oh golly, about eight, my grandfather said something and it was just an off the cuff comment but it stuck with me for decades. And whenever a situation would come up that would prompt that criticism to come up again, I would hear his voice in the back of my mind saying that over and over again. So direct experience is definitely something that sticks with us. If somebody who is important in your life says something to you, especially something critical, you may hang onto it. Now if somebody important to you says something awesome, then of course we're not going to care and we're going to go like, yeah, we want to dwell on that. But if it's critical, then we may need to look and objectively think about what did that person mean and did that person mean anything big or were they just making an off the cuff and sensitive comment? We can also hear voices that, from things that weren't directly said to us, observational learning. Like I said, the media tells us a lot of things about how we should be, what we should look like, what we should want, what our aspirations should be. Our family and our friends, they also communicate a lot. Even if they're talking amongst themselves and you just happen to be in the room, you hear these things. We get messages that tell us, okay, the people that are important in my life think these things are important so they should be important to me. This is how we get a lot of these messages in our brains. Now the question is, at what point do we evaluate them and separate the wheat from shaft? Do we go, this is important to me? Yeah, I agree. And you know what? No, I don't really care. For example, exercise. Exercise is really important to me. It's my stress relief. Yeah, I feel really good after I go to the gym and it's sort of necessary for survival. It's how I get my stress out and clear my head in the morning. Not necessarily because there's anything all that bad but I wake up and I'm just kind of foggy-headed. Get the oxygen going, the blood flowing and I have a much more productive day. Now my children see me exercise all the time and neither one of them has any interest in it. They're just like, yeah, you can go on to the gym. I don't need to run 10 miles and get absolutely nowhere. That's goodie on you. So they've heard what I think is important but what is important to me and they've taken a day and gone, yeah, no, not important for us. And you know, I'm okay with that and they're okay with that and everybody's okay. But we do need to encourage our children and ourselves to check those messages. Every time we get one and start saying I should, who says, and do I agree? Ask what advice you would give a friend who is experiencing self-doubt. So if you have a friend who has this negative internal voice, always telling them they're not good enough, they're not smart enough, nobody's ever gonna like them. What would you tell them? What would you encourage them to look at objectively to either support or negate this broad statement? Examine the evidence. I've talked about that quite a bit in this presentation. Look at exceptions to the rule. Yes, we've all failed. When you've tried and you've succeeded, tell me about that too. We can talk about what failure feels like and how it hurts and embarrassing and anything else. I'm not gonna take that away from you. But before you say you are a complete failure all the time, let's look at the evidence for that. Replace overly critical thoughts with more accurate ones, specific, let's see, changeable. You know, I may be unintelligent when it comes to computers. I walk into a room and computers blue screen. It's just the way it is. But could I learn about computers if I wanted to? I certainly could. Is it important to me? No, at this point in my life I have an IT person that fixes it because I know that's just not where I want to invest my energy.  So replacing those overly critical thoughts, those global generalizations with specifics. Balance acceptance with self-improvement. Accepting that you're not perfect with, okay, what things do I have the energy and the time and the desire to work on improving? Because we can only do so much. There's only so many hours in the day. Balance the negative with the positive and practice self-compassion. Everybody has a critical inner voice. In some ways you can look at it as something or someone that is trying to protect us in keeping our comfort zone. Conquering the voice requires understanding of what you may want to hold on to in those messages. What's important in those messages? What's the kernel that I need to take away? And then develop self-acceptance and practice. We've spent so many years listening to this voice and succumbing to the voice that it's gonna take practice to talk back and go, you know what? No, I'm not listening to you today.


The limited chemical diversity of nucleic acid libraries used in CEL-X has been a major constraint, but by introducing functional groups and exploring modifications to uracil at the five position, we have developed SOM amers with low dissociation rate constants and increased hydrophobicity, allowing for more effective binding to proteins. This has led to the creation of a large collection of SOM amers targeting human proteins and expanding their potential applications in diagnostics and therapeutics. This article was authored by John C. Roloff, Amy DeGelinas, Thales C. Jarvis, and others.


On the breakfast, protests at the unity fountain in Abuja by civil society groups demanding that President Mohamed Abouhari should sign the electoral act in Tullour happened yesterday. The former governor of Kano State Rabi Musa Kwankwaso has announced the formation of a third force under the agents of the National Movement for Nigeria of the National Movement Rada in Abuja but what will this third force be able to do to dislodge the two dominant political parties in the country in 2023? And as always, we will be looking through the national dailies and have an analyst join the conversation. A very good morning to you. It's the breakfast in Plastiv Africa. We're back for another two hours of robust, interesting conversations and analysis right here on Plastiv Africa. My name is Kofi Bartels. And I am Mesebo. What's beautiful are Wednesday? Yes, indeed. It happens, Mersi, sometimes that, you know, you forget the day of the week. It's okay. It happens to me sometimes, you know. But anyway, it's been quite interesting. You know, yesterday we had interesting conversations and today new developments and new developments regarding what was said by some politicians, some other politicians have replied to them. For instance, we talked about the trending issues was that one of the first presidential aspirants, Bola Mettinubu, said something.  And that's beautiful. Oh, really? Which one is that? I can't say it because the lyrics are not very clear. Oh, okay, okay. Oh, I see. Ah. Okay, interesting. But anyway, let's get into our top trending segment.  You had a lot of people tweeting Ansar's and it was trending all over social media after Tintubu's statement.  I mean, look at all the presidents who have been, or the heads of state, the five-year-old guests heads of state in Nigeria's history. You have the likes of Mutala Muhammad. You know, you have, what's the name of him again? I'm trying to remember the person. But Tune Diabon is there, Mutala Muhammad. You have even himself, Yakub Goan is also there as well. You have, even President Buhari was president, I think, at 41. And before he became president at 41, he was a federal commissioner or what you call minister. And he had been an administrator, a governor of a state. But for us this morning? He was a top military, you know, lead officer. Well, but for us this morning, we set off on the fact that you have a teenage girl who is called out. Another girl, we don't know whether the girl is actually a teenage girl. But the fact that she's a young person, I mean quite very young, the issue surrounding this conversation is that she's too young. A lot of people would say when I was in my 12, 14, 17, about this age, this was not my priority. So this teenage girl calls out Esther to leave her boyfriend alone because she's back. We quickly just, I don't know if we'll have that audio right now and we can take that. But for me, it's, you know, for me this has been like a serious argument with the production team as regards this particular story because I feel like, I don't know. So maybe this, with all of this, the reason why this is happening is because the older generation, the generation before now, we're thinking that this is not a priority. Okay? Usually, so she looks like she would be in her, she could probably be a 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. So she is a teen. Yes. But we just quickly take, you know, take a look at this, play a role, the tape, you know, as Goofy would like to see and afterwards, we'll come back to continue the conversation. Just take a listen. Hello. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. I'm Goofy. She just Shefts for me. If you need Shefts for me, I'm going to try to leave her, no, please. Okay, so, so that's it. So you have this young, I mean, she's a teenager from it, not with a, in particular, specific age, but I think that she would be between the age, or ages, we're looking at her, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, not 19. What did she say then? She's there calling out another girl named Esther to leave her boyfriend alone and the big question here is how did we get to this point really? Well I don't know what to say about the situation you know being a teen it's something I think kids are just being kids you know and people have come out on social media to say you know this is this is wrong you know why children are saying things like this you know but it's a kid just being kids basically you know children always be children. That's alright we'll just quickly move away from that and let's also look at another issue the federal government has directed the filmmakers to drop money-retro content from the movies now if you follow the trend if you live in Nigeria if you are in this space then you will know that there seem to be a pattern and that calls for a little consent whether or not you have teens involved in ritual killings because of a head of you know young boys are killing people in the name of making money and so they call it ritual I mean so you kill people ritual money or money rituals have I want to put it now the federal government in her knowledge is thinking that this is actually you know we should actually blame this on the fact that you have the film industry that's nollywood responsible for this particular act so the federal government has directed filmmakers to drop money-retro content from their movies now you have the minister of information and culture like Mohammed confirming that particularly move during a visa to a media visa actually in the FCT now the minister said that some suspected rituals killers have been arrested and they confessed that they learned the ritual killings act on social media that's number one and this has called for change by the federal government to you know cleanse the entire system that's the social media space now another is that many have also blamed nollywood for future in money rituals in some of its movies saying that these have you know they've directed and because you have the nollywood putting out some of this content where you have a saying of when you make so there's a scene where you probably just go to the bubble allow you bring a head and all of that and then you make money and this has also been blamed for the spate at which you have a lot of people engaging be it teenage people be young adults whatever it is that you call it but that's been on the increase constantly you have lives been lost and all of this so but but there's been a lot of argument with this particular one talking about ritual killings the content in Niger some people are saying it's necessarily this is really not the problem the problem is a lot of people are jobless a lot of people do not have means you know to echo leave it and so we need to pay attention to the economic situation we need to do the need for it's like saying we want to stop so you stop the acting the movie but that doesn't necessarily stop I'm robbery so you if you look at the Hollywood movies some of this movies the portray a lot of things gone carrying their robbery but doesn't really stop the real action so if you stop the movies does this stop the people from carrying out the act it doesn't necessarily so we need to and that's why I constantly have to say that if we have to address issues we need to look at the root cause of it we need to understand why people have actually moved on to it yes we we cannot also what's the root cause in your opinion no so if you if you really look at this the issue right here is money and then what do we use money to do we use money to you know purchase I mean money is it's actually that tool where you used to make demands you actually buy and all of that and so at the end of all of this you when you see people do is people get into robbery because they want to probably feed and all of that people do a lot of stuff and so the big question here is are we addressing the issue so if the federal government says we want to enforce a new law to ban money rituals and nollywood does that really solve the problem does that take away the issue of money rituals you know so so it's so interesting analysis from you mercy people have been commenting on this and saying you know bearing their minds and opinions in this and of course you know that they are Minnesota information and culture al-haji line Mohammed isn't particularly the most popular amongst young Nigerians right now the issue of you know rituals killings and all that has become pronounced amongst young people recently and so young people are the ones who are at this center of this and they the reaction the comments to a large alive Mohammed have not been really favorable to him you know people saying okay and how can you tell people who are using their money to run their business how to do it this is just a movie industry and maybe the industry in the movie industry just I'm mirroring what you have in society you know that's that's what basically we're saying so leave the movies alone they're not the ones calling or asking people to go and back or get involved in rituals and some of those who also criticize this statement by the government said that every movie that has a ritual content you know or you know acts out you know rituals in in some part of the movie always has an ending that tells you that the rituals are not good it always has an ending that tells you that doing bad is good I haven't seen an Nigerian movie what about rituals or about Queen of the Coast I'm working on the coast I'm not seeing anyone that ended with the people who went into these things succeeding they always lose that's how I come in the Bible and then an angel dropped from heaven you know I mean these new ones don't do that you're this banking doubly at this one and what's the name of that other guy your body man guy you know all this they don't but the days of the other guys he used to do you know kind of your kind of y'all and then cool you know Mama J and cool you know but you know the way the Bible an angel for fire or strike the demon you say I'm dying I have died you know but but we don't have any you know so so anyway so but but you need to also understand where all of this is coming from I don't want to talk about nollywood they're doing very great you know but I think it's evolving yes you know we don't see those things again where someone is still there so it's been categorized if you look at if you follow the films there's some movies that have been put out in cinema cinema okay yes yes and over time this is what has been going on we cannot negate the fact that these would probably have contributed we're not taking that away so there's a possibility there's a plus on that okay that's probably the hype of course I mean I haven't seen the likes of the media actor I don't know what I he would want to dress in red and black and green you know I don't if you get it I'm saying that if you have if you follow if you've been following nollywood and the content that I put out of the recent recently not recently okay prior to this time prior to recently okay you were friendly that the content has always been about it and then the spin like category so you have the epic movies and if it's like some of the epic movies would you know tell you about all of the juju stuff and me I'm still questioning how but but have you seen anyone I don't know how anyone you know let's say it's kind of your kind of your for instance and you know sorry I'm using your name but have you seen any one of those movies that ends with the people who are involved in the money rituals winning or you know so in the movie right yeah they always don't pay attention to it people do they watch to the end it doesn't really matter what the end is it's what they get so it's what they see because usually in the films you got to see that when they probably use some part of their bodies and sacrifice and then they begin to get money you know money's will start coming out in the house I don't know where how this narrative was gotten I don't know how real this is because I constantly have questioned I am still asking till today how does that really work does that really if you look at to be realistic I'm sorry if you look at it if we look at all of the recently you have folks putting our list of people I haven't really seen anyone saying that because there's a way money works money works if you're rendering service you're producing something no no no one who is yes so the way money works is you have to render a service you probably have to be mercy I have a question for you if you want to preach against the movie against them maybe maybe the kind of content is for I'm robbery for instance I'm robbery or you want to the movie against prostitution I want to do a movie against sexual trafficking you understand I want to do a movie against unprotected sex you know when AIDS was new remember that means watch movies I want to the movie against teenage pregnancy remember when teenage pregnancy was a thing you know it is still a thing no but then nobody was afraid now I don't know what are the the teens are aware of it like we were where you know if you're pregnant then it's almost like the world has come down you know starting you cry so all those movies you don't preach it against teenage we don't see people preaching against in each pregnancy anymore you can you do such a movie without acting showing someone who got pregnant as a teen so this is no it's a simple answer no you can't move against against human trafficking you know without showing so this is the premise I'll come from the Nigerian government is thinking that the content has been chunked out or been brought by nolly nollywood yes nollywood is influencing you know younger generation but I asked you a question I question which you are not answering I said can you put out a movie that speaks of preaches against maybe drug drug abuse without showing somebody who involved in drug abuse so it depends on the January depends on where I'm coming from so I know let's talk about a contemporary movie say no to drugs right or let's preach against rape or abuse of women and girls can you social issues can you put out a movie against drug abuse without and depicting someone who was so movies are stories that's number one we need to understand I don't want you to put me in that box I'm answering your question but I don't want to be in a box no it's a question that you're not answering it no I am answering it you want a yes or no answer and I can't give you that okay so you've been to answer that no if you want to you know you want to show effectively show young people that drug abuse is wrong you know that you know they should stop buying loud how do I know about loud one day I came to Nero here here for an event and someone came up to my car and was selling it to me they've done that a couple of times to me okay all right the police don't know that they are selling loud on Nero they don't know let's do that for another day that's enough for another day if you want to tell I don't want to take a loud or to take a codeine or to take cocaine or to take crack or whatever or crystal meth which is everywhere I don't know that one crystal-ethic method they even have a local name for it and put me I think it's called in the southeast we're going crazy I'm mad about it you want to tell you about you have to show effectively we all did drama in school you know so somebody who went who went into it took it and then their life just went the real and maybe they were helped and they came and said I shouldn't have taken this thing or see my life is better now these movies are teaching and preaching they move preaching against ritualist showing you at the end I've not seen anyone that the ritualist or the guy who was doing the blood money was was the winner and he always lose out at the end they're showing you it was a moral of the story tells my moonlight was a moral of the story that oh and Richard Ossifo or Kanayo Kanayo so I'm going back they came went to do blood money and at the end of the day he died so blood money is not good that's it that's it so people are not listening to that moral then so you know how so what I'm saying is this year we have a government that constantly misses the issue and the major issue is that the major people who are engaged in ritual killings in this country have people in high places true they are people in high places and if it's just like the problem of cultism they come on TV stand and talk and shout and say and not the laws even sometimes they both send the laws and the laws are members of cults and secret societies and so they'll say these things so if you want to go after those who are funding ritual killings in this country you start at the top because that's where they are so who is who is who is fooling who why is it that during election period we have an increase in ritual killings people's children being abducted babies being killed why is that during elections these things increase why this let's stop deceiving ourselves let's move on you know like I rightly mentioned it's more like chasing the shadows like we have rightly said we have the issue of inflation we have the fact that a lot of people are jobless there's a lot that needs to be done but we cannot also take out the fact that yes there might be one or two influence I mean there might just be a moral you probably have a story truth is people actually listen to what they want to people actually practice what they want to do and that's what it is so like you have mentioned that in the tales by moonlight when you have the tales by moonlight the story that's been put out movies are actually stories and it's a reflection of what happened in societies if you look at Hollywood over time a lot of people have criticized criticized the nollywood industry and saying oh how come you you constantly just put out or the fetish stuff and you know this is the kind of story somebody poisoning somebody it's just a reflection of what's going on and that's what these people put so you have the nonfiction and the fiction stories and usually mostly you have the fact that these producers these directors this content providers that put out what's actually happening if you look at nollywood have you ever had a time where they say oh let's you know stop the use of gun gun issue gun control is a big issue in the United States and that's the an issue but we have never seen we've never come to where you have the government thing or we need to take out it it's like stopping he's like saying we can go we can go on this one I know our producers are asking us to move on but maybe we should just ask the country but you know you know you know and society is dynamic and we can't you can if if you narrow down the problem to just one second you just stick to that you know and then then you're not going to move forward you're not going to solve the problems the problem is is that the moral fabric of our society has has been has gone down okay has been eroded and one of the things that has eroded moral fabric of society is the the the thirst for money they believe that you must have the most money at all costs you must get rich at all costs all right and and it's been fueled by politicians it's been fueled by those who are in leadership who steal the nation's money and also blow it in our faces you have one politician who is moving in on the road in the convoy you know and over so it's about money people want money see the the able traders today who have shops would tell you that they can't even put the young people in their shops anymore because the young people who normally will come to the shops as apprentices mercy you know do not want to stay in the shops because don't believe that I will give them quick money they want quick money all right now how did how did the young people get exposed to having quick money fast money this are the values that we've talked talk them you know these are the values you've talked them and even if not it would stop producing these ritual movies it won't stop it's actually about money greed you want money won't have big cars drive faster cars have five phones live in big houses because everything in this country is big you know so that the authorities especially not national orientation agency minister of culture and tourism and a government at hold they need to start you know reorientate in the country you know and and having a values revolution that's that for me is the answer you know and I do agree the movies have a role to play but this is not the approach well we have to you know take a break down that's the much we can take on top trending when we return we'll be looking at the national dailies and of course talking about the big stories on our papers this morning I guess we'll be joining that conversation please stay tuned


Hi there my friend and friends thank you so much for coming to watch yet another video but just in case you're new here my name is Kevin and here at my channel I help people fall in love with CSS and if I can't get them to fall in love with it I'm hoping to at least help them be a little bit less frustrated by it and if you clicked on this video there's a good chance that maybe you're a little bit frustrated with CSS and in general that's very normal because once people get past the very basics of it they run into some of the added complexity that comes along with it and it just becomes a bit of a roadblock they start to struggle with it they get frustrated with it so today I'm going to explore five different tips on how you can improve at CSS and get beyond those frustrations and maybe fall in love with it just a little bit so my very first tip is do not let CSS trick you into thinking that it is a simple language yes it's just a declarative language with property value pairs color white we get white text background black we get a black background that is nice and simple but that does not mean that CSS is actually a simple language once we get beyond those very basics and you know maybe you start feeling like a little bit of a hacker when you start using hex codes instead of named color keywords but when you actually go into the like the real world of like creating a layout and you're using a display flex or display grid that opens up a whole new complexity to how CSS actually works and that's because we're no longer dealing with single property value pairs but instead we're dealing with combinations of property value pairs and that is completely different for example when you do a display flex that opens up over a thousand possible combinations of property value pairs that you can use just to control how flex boxes are working and so like there's this hidden complexity behind the hood on how things are actually working so while it can seem really easy at first do not fall for that trick there is a lot of complexity and you should approach CSS knowing that it's not going to be easy and because it is not going to be easy and because it actually is maybe a lot more complex than you first thought that leads me to my second tip which is maybe go back over the fundamentals when we're first learning a new language whatever it is we're learning a lot of different things at once we're learning the syntax of the language with CSS in particular we're learning a ton of properties and a whole bunch of values that go with those properties we're learning about the units that we can use as well there's a lot of information coming at us just to be able to get things to work and then on top of that we're learning about things like the box model and specificity understanding how the cascade works there's a lot of other things that we're learning about but it's hard to absorb all of that information at once so what we usually do is we absorb the stuff that we really need to know I need to remember those properties and the values that go with them and that means I can sort of put these other things on the side or I can just come up with very generic rules like let's use a class selector for everything so I don't have to worry about specificity that doesn't mean that you shouldn't eventually go back and revisit what that is now the other problem with this is you might be going Kevin I know all of the fundamentals don't worry about it but yeah you'll probably be able to know that there is specificity and maybe some of the impacts of it or maybe you know what stacking contexts are and you understand that side of things a little bit but a lot of the time it's more terms that we're aware of we know there's a box model and we sort of know the bait you know it's margins and paddings and that's good enough right so we know all of these terms we see them or yeah I recognize that that's fine but we don't understand the greater implications of it whereas once you know those terms you've been writing CSS for a little while when you actually take a step backwards and you go back over some of those fundamental concepts so many things can fall into place because you might tell me you completely understand the box model and how margins work and all of that and then you run into a situation where there's collapsing margins and you have no idea what's actually going on or you get really frustrated with it and you're using hacky solutions like a one pixel padding type of thing to try and fix it rather than working with them or understanding how they're working and it results in a lot of little hacky code type things and I've been there I've done it I know and for me I rediscovered a lot of the fundamentals because I started teaching so I had to go over the very basics to teach those to my students and then I was like oh my goodness that makes so much more sense now I wish I'd done this five years ago and I really see a lot of people just gain so much understanding of the of how the language is actually working and all the different connections between different things that are there that they're just not aware of because they think they know what the fundamentals are because they covered them a long time ago and I'm not going to go and cover that but by going backwards you're not actually going backwards what you're doing is filling in knowledge gaps that you have and those knowledge gaps can really hold you back and actually knowing how powerful this is and having seen it for myself and having seen other students go through the same thing when I was helping them that was a big motivation for me to create my course CSS demystified the whole point of that course is for people who have been writing CSS for a little while but just haven't got past that they're feeling a little bit stuck or a little bit frustrated with it still and it's to go back over the fundamentals but not in the way you cover them as a beginner but covering them with the knowledge that you know what you're doing already and you can already write some CSS and more about understanding the impact of what those have on how we can write our CSS and then also covering things that are fundamental to the language but are talked a lot less about like containing blocks and formatting contexts and just understand how everything fits together and works and it just helps you write CSS with more confidence when you put all those puzzle pieces together and so if you are interested in that course it is linked down in the description but before worrying about that let's get on to point number three which is having the right mindset when you're writing CSS. CSS is a very unique language and it's different from other ones so if you're coming from a JavaScript background or a computer science background it's not going to work the way that you're used to languages working because in most languages well you can end up with very complex things going on at the end of the day they're basically in this situation do x in this other situation do y you know you're you're we could be changing state because we've run into a certain situation or somebody adds something to their shopping cart and we have to add that to their shopping cart and then we have to recalculate the total of their shopping cart and we have to keep track of how many items there can be a lot going on but it's all using no one values and no one's right there there's no unknown things going on whereas CSS is sort of all about the unknowns and I recently talked about this in my podcast which I'll link to in the description as well and I will go a lot more it the whole episode is about this the CSS mindset but it's about embracing the fact that it works with unknowns and that we don't have everything we don't have all of the information there and I'm going to link to another video too and I'd actually you know if you're into podcast check out my podcast but if you have nothing like if you're going to watch one more video in the next week and you're someone who occasionally writes CSS stop this video even and watch the one I'm going to talk about now it's by Miriam Susan and it's called why is CSS so weird honestly like that video is she just presents it so well it explains you know sort of how CSS got to where it is today and why CSS is actually been created any way that gives the end user control rather than the person who's authoring the style sheets it's a really good talk check that out it's fantastic if you're going to consume nothing else that's the video to watch don't even finish this one go watch that one instead but then if you're gonna watch more than one thing maybe finish this one first and then go and check that one out but yeah the the main TLDR I guess in a way is we shouldn't be trying to make the browser show us exactly what we want we need to work with the browser and we need to work within these unknowns and sort of understand that things there's middle grounds and there's movement and you know we don't have this if this then that it's very fuzzy and then embracing that idea and working within that mindset really can change how you're approaching things rather than if you're coming from a different approach where you just need it to look like this and that's the absolute answer you're never going to get that and it's not because CSS is broken it's because it's intentionally made that way and it's because of all those unknowns from the screen size the resolution the color gamut the input device we there's and we don't know all of these things the user has control over those they can change their default browser zoom level they can change their os settings to force colors to be different or to change their font sizes at the system level as well there's a million things the user can do to take control and that's good because the user is the one who's consuming the content and we want them to actually consume it and if we try and prevent them from having those choices they're just going to leave and go to another site that actually works the way they want it to our looks the way they want it to so embrace those changes work with CSS work with the browser instead of trying to force things to be the way you want them to be or to work the way you think they should and a little bit in that working the way you think they should point is my fourth point which is don't limit yourself people do this all the time where they learn flexbox and that's a layout tool so they're using flexbox for all their layouts and then when they're struggling to get a layout to work they get really frustrated because that layout's not working how can I make this work this way because this is my layout tool and it goes well just use grid I don't want to use grid that's you know I'm using flexbox well I could do that in three lines with CSS grid why you've trying to force it with flexbox or vice versa it goes both ways there and then of course you get people why do we have two layout tools well why do we have 500 different types of pliers for you know pulling stuff out right you have your needle nose pliers you have bulky pliers you have bigger pliers smaller pliers you have a million types of pliers for basically pulling on stuff so like having two layout tools isn't that crazy is it how many pairs of shoes do you have and different types of shoes do you have you probably have dress shoes and outdoor shoes and running shoes and hiking shoes and we have all these specialized shoes for walking and basically right and like they're just something that we put on our feet we have two layout tools because each one has a strength and that's it which one has its own little niche within the realm of layout and it's not that bad I have to be able to make layouts with either one of them yes it takes a little bit of time to really get super comfortable with both of them but in general you can use like the basics of flexbox and the basics of grid aren't that complicated and can probably achieve like 80% of any layout you'd ever want to do and then it's when you start getting into a little bit more advanced stuff that yeah it can get a little bit more into the weeds for sure but that's the same as anything else and right now I'm talking specifically flexbox or grid because that's where I see most people sort of being very stubborn about their choice but you know this applies to anything if you're trying something and it's not working find out if there's a different way that you can approach it instead of just like layering all these solutions on top of each other fighting with the solution you're trying to and don't limit yourself to what you already know about the language and see if there's other things out there especially now with where modern CSS has gotten to things are so much easier now than they used to be don't be stuck in your old ways and a lot of these newer CSS features have really good browser support and might be a lot better than what you actually think so check the browser support and you might surprise yourself and be like oh I can use this thing that I can do in one line of CSS instead of using tons of JavaScript or forcing my way through some other strange way of doing it or whatever it is so just don't limit yourself to what you already know feel you know learn some a couple of new things and it might make your life a lot easier and one way that you can push things a little bit is my fifth point which is if you have a little bit of spare time and you like mucking around with stuff do some CSS experiments or CSS only solutions or play some CSS games even there are definitely some drawbacks to CSS only solutions you know they can have accessibility issues there can be performance issues with them but that's not usually at least when I create them and I know a lot of other people who do the point of creating CSS only solutions often isn't it's it's to see is this possible it's to push the boundaries it might take longer to do something but it's to learn what's actually possible and it's to see I can do that that's a really cool and maybe that solution isn't practical to print into production and that's fine but some of the things you learn along the way trying to create that are things that you could put into production and there's these little tips and little things that you just pick up while you're just getting super creative and trying to come up with like these hacky ways of doing something that all of a sudden you're making new connections you're learning new ways that certain properties work that you never would have thought of before and it just sort of opens up like these new ideas so when you are stuck on something on a regular production project you have these little tips and little ideas that you can use that actually are practical and actually are applicable to what you're trying to do and if you prefer to gamify stuff there's things like CSS battle as well where it's more about like yes an SVG would be a million times more practical to creating that but I'm going to learn a lot more about how box shadows work and how gradients work and how positioning works by trying to create these weird shapes and weird patterns and all these different things in these little CSS battles and then if you want to try and go for a high score you can start learning about hacky solutions on like reducing how many characters you're using or better ways of doing gradients and like there's so much you can learn by doing these types of things and they just tend to be a little bit of fun and you know not everyone wants to relax by coding you might want to go play a video game or watch Netflix or whatever but you know if you have 15 minutes to spare and you open up a CSS battle just to play around with it a little bit or you have a little side project you're working on of a CSS only solution I promise you you're going to learn a lot more about how CSS is working just by hacking away at things and mucking around a lot again it's not going to be something you put into production necessarily but it doesn't mean you're not learning valuable lessons from that on how CSS works and then I guarantee you you're going to think of things when you're actually working on something you're going to get an idea from one of these weird things you did one time that's actually going to help you have a solution to what you're working on and as a quick reminder please do check out that why is CSS so weird video honestly it is 100% worth listening and if you're more into podcast mode of course as I said my latest podcast episode was on the CSS mindset where I go much deeper into that topic so that's linked down below as well and some related videos and other stuff just go check the description if you want some other good videos on CSS basically and yeah I guess that's it so a big thank you to my enablers of awesome who are Johnny Tim Simon Michael and Andrew as well as all my other patrons through their monthly support and of course until next time don't forget to make your corner of the internet just a little bit more awesome