So welcome back. What was that experience like for you? Was it difficult for you to come up with the examples, the stories of times when you had, and you had not acted on your values? I'd often find both for myself and for the folks that I work with that it isn't an easy exercise, but it's an important one. Were you surprised by any of your own responses? Any of your own actions and their impact and I guess also just how did you feel about what you learned about yourself? We do this exercise for a couple important reasons. The first reason, probably the most important reason, is that we want to clarify that given voice to value is not by sorting the good people from the bad people. What we've learned from doing this exercise is that we all haveacted on our values at some point in our lives, we're all capable of that. And we've all failed to act [LAUGH] on our values at other points in our lives. So this is not really not about identifying your moral character. It's more about building that moral competence to understand how you can do this more often and more effectively. And the second reason why we do this exercise is because we want to identify some patterns. We want to be able to identify, in the stories you tell, and especially in the enablers and the disablers that you identify. What are the conditions that enable you and enable others to act effectively on their values? And what are the conditions that make this more difficult? Later, in this course, you'll have a chance to revisit your tale of two stories and to have a sort of do over, to look back, hopefully at the story when you failed to act on your values and see if you can create an alternate ending. See if the things you're learning in this course allow you to feel that you actually have more options but for now I want to take what you learned from doing the tale of two stories and tie it to another one of the giving voice to values pillars, this time we're going to be talking about choice. Choice is important for giving voice to values because I have to say that in the many years that I've been working in this area, I've talked to many people, gathered many, many stories. Hundreds of stories of times when people have and have not acted on their values. And typically when people tell me these stories, if I ask them, why didn't you act on your values when you didn't? You're clearly somebody who has values, who cares about values. They've told me stories sometimes when they have acted on their values. So I ask, why didn't you when you didn't? And they almost always say, because I didn't have a choice. It's not because they didn't know what the right thing to do was, it's not because they didn't care, it's because they felt they had no choice. Giving voice to values is about helping people understand that we often have more options than we believe. But this requires some effort. It requires some learning and some practice. It requires preparation because you'll see that many of the kinds of values conflicts that people encounter, come up again and again in their lives and in other people's lives. It requires pre-scripting and rehearsal and peer coaching. And sometimes that requires reinterpreting and reframing the challenge that you're facing so that you can actually define a response that's different from the one that you thought you were restricted to. So for a moment, I would like you to look back at the questions you answered during week one of this course when you took the GVV survey. You answered a number of questions that had to do with choice. You were asked to think about, do I feel that I have a choice? Have I acted effectively on my values in the past? Have I failed to do so? Etc., etc. When you think about the experience you had with the tale of two stories and you also think about some of the stories you've been hearing during this course, would you answer these questions in the same way now? Would you change any of your answers? Or even if you don't think you would change them, if I asked you to think about trying to change them, can you anticipate or imagine an alternative response? That's really what giving voice to values is about. It's about asking you to engage in that kind of creative thinking. And to look back at the times when you have acted on your values and to learn from the things that empowered you. So I'm hoping that you'll back at your tale of two stories exercise and your answers to these questions and try and reconsider those now.