And now I invite other people to experience it on purpose.
For most of my life, I think I’ve been misunderstood.
Of course, there’s a catch.
For a good portion of that time, I didn’t understand myself.
I’ve written about some of this in my book, and it’s a story with plenty of twists, contradictions, questionable decisions and, occasionally, excellent punchlines.
But the part that interests me today is what happens after you figure out who you are.
Because you can understand yourself perfectly clearly and still have a hell of a time getting anyone else to understand you.
That’s the problem I’ve dedicated my work to solving.
And it’s why I created First Contact Live.
A boy who didn’t fit the box
There’s a familiar idea that somewhere around the age of seven, we begin trading our natural individuality for the privilege of fitting in.
I don’t know that there’s a magic age when it happens. I do know the experience.
I grew up an observant Jewish boy with interests and ambitions that didn’t necessarily fit the expectations surrounding me.
Stand-up comedian? Screenwriter? A career in entertainment?
Not exactly the conventional blueprint.
So I learned early to modify my expectations of myself to accommodate someone else’s parameters.
The trouble is, after a while, you can lose track of which expectations are yours and which ones you’ve inherited.
That confusion followed me into adulthood.
I had a career that was often successful, but rarely straightforward.
I was a publicist and a screenwriter. A brand strategist and a stand-up comedian. An advisor and a humorist.
A truth-teller and, at times, a sadist.
An original voice and an impressionist.
Some of these identities complemented each other beautifully. Others appeared to be actively trying to get each other fired.
I was many things at once, some of them contradictory.
And I spent years trying to figure out whether I was supposed to choose one, reconcile them all, or simply keep spinning the plates and hope nobody noticed.
The problem changes when you finally understand yourself
Here’s where the story takes an interesting turn.
The work I do today isn’t primarily about helping people discover who they are.
That can be important work. It’s just not the problem I most often encounter.
I work with accomplished people who frequently understand themselves, their work and their ambitions extremely well.
They know what they’re building.
They know why it matters.
They know what makes it different.
And then they try to explain it to someone else.
Suddenly, the whole thing gets complicated.
Because the audience isn’t us.
They haven’t lived our experiences. They don’t have our context. They don’t know the history behind our decisions or the significance of the distinctions we’re making.
They don’t experience our work the way we experience it.
And they don’t necessarily want to receive information in the language we’re most comfortable using.
That last part took me a long time to understand.
It’s not enough to know what you mean.
You have to understand what someone else hears.
Interesting people who are tired of explaining themselves
That’s the phrase I use to describe the people I work with.
It’s intentionally broad.
Because the problem takes many forms.
Sometimes people have no idea what you’re talking about.
Sometimes they think they understand you, but they’ve reduced something distinctive to a familiar, inadequate category.
And sometimes what you’re doing is genuinely new enough that the audience doesn’t yet have a frame of reference for it.
Different circumstances. Same underlying problem.
You know what you mean.
They don’t.
And so you explain.
Then you explain again.
Then you explain the explanation.
I call it the explanation tax.
It’s not just an inconvenience.
It’s the opportunity that never develops because someone didn’t understand what was possible.
The conversation that goes nowhere.
The deal that doesn’t close.
The introduction that doesn’t happen because someone can’t explain what you do to the next person.
You can be brilliant at your work and still pay that tax every day.
Believe me. I’ve paid my share.
So I built a laboratory
I created First Contact Live because I wanted to see this problem unfold in real time.
Not in a survey.
Not through an AI-generated analysis.
Not in a carefully polished positioning statement that everyone has already agreed sounds terrific.
In a room with actual human beings.
Here’s how it works.
One person takes the Hot Seat and introduces their business or work.
A small, thoughtful Gallery listens.
Then we find out what they actually heard.
Not what the person intended to communicate.
Not what they wish the audience had understood.
What landed.
It’s a safe space, but it isn’t a place where we pretend everyone understood everything perfectly.
It’s a laboratory for people who aren’t confused about their work but may be confusing to others.
And I love it.
Then the laboratory turned on me
Today, I asked the FCL community a question.
Who is this really for? Why do you come? What would make it more valuable?
My friend Nancy Zare, a sales psychologist, had a suggestion.
Essentially: Hersh, why don’t you get in the Hot Seat?
Well played, Nancy.
As we talked, something became obvious.
I’d been describing First Contact Live largely as an opportunity to sit in the Gallery.
Come watch.
See how other people communicate.
Offer your impressions.
Think differently about your own business.
All worthwhile things.
But Nancy pointed out that people should be lining up around the block to sit in the Hot Seat.
And she’s right.
I’ve been marketing the observation when I should have been marketing the revelation.
Why?
Partly because I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.
I didn’t want people to feel exposed, judged or put on the spot.
So I made the Gallery the easy invitation and the Hot Seat something they might work up to.
Come a few times. Get comfortable. Maybe someday you’ll want to try it yourself.
In other words, I was inadvertently teaching people to be apprehensive about the very experience I’d created for their benefit.
There’s some irony for you.
A guy who helps people understand how they’re being understood wasn’t fully communicating the value of his own work.
Welcome to First Contact Live, Hersh.
What actually happens in the Hot Seat
Let’s clear something up.
The Hot Seat isn’t a public branding makeover.
You don’t arrive with a complicated business and leave 45 minutes later with a perfect tagline, a new website and a standing ovation.
That’s not what we’re doing.
The Gallery offers its impressions, observations and occasional suggestions.
I offer insights into where understanding may be breaking down and what kind of audience clarity might be missing.
But I stop short of prescribing a complete solution.
For one thing, solving these problems is my professional work, and people pay me well to do it.
For another, I have to curb my natural tendency to become a walk-up therapist for every interesting business problem I encounter.
But there’s a more important reason.
First Contact Live is about more than the solution.
It’s about exploration.
Understanding.
Sometimes confrontation.
Sometimes acceptance.
It’s about experiencing the difference between what you believe you’re communicating and what another human being actually receives.
You cannot discover that difference entirely from inside your own head.
You need another person.
Preferably several.
And preferably people who care enough to tell you what they really heard.
The Hot Seat is the point
So I’m changing how I talk about First Contact Live.
The invitation isn’t primarily to come watch somebody else wrestle with their message.
It’s to discover what happens when your work meets an audience without the benefit of all the explanations you’ve been carrying around.
That’s the Hot Seat.
And if you’d rather experience the room from the Gallery first, you’re welcome to.
But I don’t want to bury the real opportunity under a softer invitation anymore.
Because I know what it feels like to be misunderstood.
I know what it feels like to have several seemingly contradictory things be true about you at once.
And I know what it feels like when somebody finally sees the thread connecting them.
Whether my own winding road was always leading me toward this work, I couldn’t tell you.
But somewhere along the way, I developed an uncanny ability to recognize the struggle and see a path through it.
Now I want more people to experience what happens when someone else helps them see what they’ve been unable to see from the inside.
You know what you mean.
Come find out what they hear.
That’s First Contact Live.
And there’s a seat waiting for you.