Want folks to hang on your words when you speak? Want to be heard loud and clear from the boardroom to the bedroom? From stage to podcasts? Then this episode on effective communicating with guest Brenda Viola is for YOU!
Brenda Viola is an author, speaker, and award-winning communicator. She teaches us how to captivate our listener…whether in the boardroom, on stage, TV, podcasts or in the home.
Her book, “How to be Heard without Screaming,” promises you CAN learn tips to be a more skillful communicator…in only 30 days.
The book includes daily exercises to improve communication skills, overcome the fear of speaking up and know the joy of watching people lean into you and your message
Good communication will improve every area of your life, and you can get better.
KEY DISCUSSION POINTS
**Brenda’s Journey:**
– Brenda was 10 years old when tragedy struck (her father died suddenly). She went from being a confident live wire and aspiring news reporter to a reserved, silent bookworm, afraid to stand up and speak up to bullies. She receded into the shadows to avoid burdening her grieving mother.
– She later found her voice again through personal growth and the realization that effective communication is essential for personal and professional success.
As a journalist, TV reporter and later public information officer, she learned the power of effective communication and storytelling to engage the audience, making information memorable.
2. **Brenda’s Top Communication Tips
– **Pause and Savor Words:** Rushing through material without pausing can make the audience feel disconnected. Taking pauses allows for better engagement and understanding.
– **Active Listening:** Reflecting back what you heard can build a bridge and ensure clear communication.
– **Speaking the Truth in Love:** Conveying hard truths with patience, kindness, and empathy ensures better reception and connection.
3. ** Sound Bites:**
– Be memorable on a TV interview or podcast with a SOUND BITE, condensing you message into 7-15 seconds. But ensure you begin with a verbal highlighter like: “Here’s what you really need to know” or “The bottom line is.” These signal to the audience the importance of the information being shared.
4. **Brenda today:**
After the death of her mother and partner in one year, Brenda started over at 60 with a new company VICI Communications focusing on improving communication, confidence, and culture within organizations and individuals.
#### Conclusion
Get Brenda’s book How to Be heard Without Screaming, and find her at https://www.brendaviola.com/
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TRANSCRIPT
**Brenda Viola:** People used to get frustrated when I was a reporter because I would do a half-hour interview and maybe 15 seconds would end up on the evening news. But smart people knew to wrap their information around soundbites.
**Caryl Westmore:** My guest today, Brenda Viola, is an author, speaker, and award-winning communicator who encourages people to love themselves and speak to be heard without screaming. She has worked as a public information officer, news anchor, reporter, and marketing VP. Her new book, *How to Be Heard Without Screaming*, promises that you can learn to find your voice and use it skillfully in 30 days. Welcome, Brenda.
**Brenda Viola:** Hello, Caryl. It’s wonderful to be here, and thank you for that lovely introduction.
[ Introduction with music: Hello and welcome to the *Write the Book Inside You* podcast. Tips, tools, and interviews for coaches and healers like you who want to write a non-fiction book to boost your visibility, clients, and cash flow while making a difference. I’m your host, Caryl Westmore, a multi-published author and energy psychology tapping book coach. Now, let’s jump into today’s episode.]
**Caryl Westmore:** I’m absolutely revved up to share as much as we can to help my authors, speakers, and coaches get on podcasts and know how to speak up and not be put down.
**Brenda Viola:** It’s so often our tendency to shut down, especially when we take our cues from what’s happening externally. I wrote the book in part because I would meet people everywhere, and they were terrified of speaking. And yet, it was the very thing they needed to do to break through and achieve their next level of growth and success. I became a student of people who were listened to, and I observed what they did. There are strategies that you can use to make your voice heard more effectively.
**Caryl Westmore:** Thank you. So, Brenda, share the pivotal moment in your life that turned you from a confident live wire and wannabe news reporter as a child into a bookworm, hiding silently in the shadows with low self-esteem, too afraid to stand up and speak up to the bullies at school.
**Brenda Viola:** Ooh, just having you read that touched my heart because it brings me right back. I was, as you said, this whole-of-life fiery little girl who loved to perform for family and friends. I would get a hairbrush and sing into it and do Cher impressions. My favorite gift as a little girl was a tape recorder with a microphone, and I would go around interviewing everyone. I was engaged with life and full of spunk. But when I was ten years old, my father died suddenly. He just went to work one day, a man in his early fifties, and had one heart attack that ended and changed our world forever. My mom became a widow in her late thirties, raising my sister and me. As a ten-year-old girl, I said, “I don’t want to rock the boat. I know my mom is under enough pressure, so I’m just going to be quiet and recede into the shadows.” I became very inward. It’s almost as if the joy in me shut down and the desire to be seen shut down because I just wanted to be invisible; I didn’t want to be a problem for anyone.
Now, I share that story in the book because I feel like so many of us have a pivotal moment that shut us down. Maybe we spoke up, and we were received poorly, bullied, criticized, or shamed. Those pivotal moments stay trapped inside of us until someone very smart said to me, “You can’t fix it if you don’t face it.” Facing what shut me down, I would be so gripped with nerves when called upon to speak that my throat would get red, my nose would get red, and I would choke on my words and want to cry. I knew intuitively that this was not normal or healthy. More than that, trapped inside of me were words, thoughts, and ideas longing to be expressed. I believe every person has those ideas and thoughts inside of them longing to be set free.
**Caryl Westmore:** Yeah, and as you know, many of my listeners in the energy psychology and healing field, and the whole way we look at trauma today, goes back. That’s why I asked you that question because it was so typical of many people over the years that I’ve coached who either had some sexual abuse or something happened when they were young that closed them down, making them unable to function even at a cocktail party. One lady said to me, “I can’t understand it; my voice just closes up.” That’s why I asked you that question because yours is a very dramatic example of a vibrant little girl who just shuts down. You went back and obviously did the work to feed yourself again. When we listen to your podcast, where you have a voice and the alchemy of pain, you’re aiming to help other people reveal their pivotal moments, whether as adults or children, that help them overcome a traumatic moment. Going back to your book and giving our message to the world, one of the things you say is, “Let your mess be your message.” But you have some rules about how not to do it and the positive way of doing it.
**Brenda Viola:** One of the lies that many of us are plagued with is, “Oh, there’s something wrong with me. Fundamentally wrong. If I share it, I will be rejected.” When actually, the truth is your truth builds bridges. It’s not perfection that creates connection. It is you being your awesome, flossom self. I always say you’re flawed. Settle it. You’re flawed. Don’t be shocked and don’t be dismayed. You are flawed. We are humans, and we have our foibles. But you’re also awesome. You’re flossom. And so embrace your flossomeness when you accept yourself. Good, bad, ugly, all of it. But the thing is, are you trying? Are you growing? Are you learning? Then it wasn’t a mistake. When you know better, you do better. All the things that you learned along the way are actually beacons of light that can help other people find their way too. So, no, I don’t just indiscriminately share, blap my truth to just anyone. But when there are obvious doors where me sharing what I’ve been through can help someone else or create that important connection so that they can open their hearts to receive more truth, then yes, I go there. I always say, though, and this is a scripture I absolutely love, speaking the truth in love. If you can do that, that’s the secret sauce to all communication. You can even say hard things, but if you can say them in love, they will be received. Love means impatience and kindness and long-suffering, thinking no evil, bearing all things, believing all things.
Another communication tip is if you are angry and if you want to put someone in their place and you’re full of righteous indignation and judgment, it’s not the time to talk because it’s probably not going to be received well. Yet, I can hear your audience saying, “Yeah, but I’m mad.” And I agree, you should be mad and work through it, and you can even set the record straight without veering out of love.
**Caryl Westmore:** You have a saying, “Let your words breathe like red wine,” and that actually refers to not only the verbal way you communicate but as you say, “Ninety-three percent of communication is non-verbal.” Share that with us.
**Brenda Viola:** You are asking all my favorite questions, Caryl, so thank you. I hope that your audience will take some of these tips and apply them. The whole book is a series of exercises, and every day there is an exercise that you can use. Your point about letting words breathe speaks to the power of the pause. Sometimes we just race through our material without taking a breath, and we’re racing through it like we’re trying to get it done and over with, and your audience can feel that. But if you take the time to really savor your words, you know your material, you deliver it, but then when you’re pausing, you’re actually allowing for the interplay. In that pause, you can be either looking at your audience or even if it’s an audience of one, checking their body language. Are they receiving it? Are they nodding? Are they folding their arms, reading the tea leaves? So you know whether to proceed or whether you need to sit for a minute and say, “You know, how did what I just say land there?” Then you’re getting important intel and feedback because good communication is a dance. It’s not a monologue. It’s a back and forth, just like we’re doing today. People don’t pause because they are terrified of silence. Silence can be your very best friend. It actually causes people to lean in a little bit and listen more.
**Caryl Westmore:** There’s something you said that comes down to listening deeply. Now, this is if you’re just even speaking to your spouse or your children, or you have something to say, and you tell a lovely story about a teacher. Could you tell that story?
**Brenda Viola:** Judy DeAngelo is this very— you wouldn’t look at her and say, “Wow, she’s this charismatic individual. I really want to listen to her.” And nobody was listening to us, but every time Judy DeAngelo opened her mouth, people were leaning in. So I was quite annoyed, Caryl, because I’m a professional communicator and nobody was listening to me. So I did what any smart woman would do. I took her out to dinner, and after the first glass of wine, I went in for the jugular, and I’m like, “Judy, why is it that you get people to listen to you?
She said, “Oh, Brenda, I’m very strategic about it. There’s a method.”
“Oh, what? There’s a method? And I can learn it? I’m taking notes.”
And this is what Judy DeAngelo would do.
So when a topic would be raised and they would ask for feedback from the class, we would all raise our hands just like Arnold Horschach in Welcome Back, Kotter, “Ooh, ooh, pick me, pick me, pick me.” And we’d all talk. As we were all talking, she would write down highlights of what had been said. She would also write down her thoughts about what might be important. When someone would say something on her list, she would check it off and put their initials next to it. And then at the end, when everybody had had their say, she would raise her hand and they would say, “Dr. DeAngelo.” And she would open not with her content. She would first acknowledge, “Lisa said blah, blah, blah. And then Joseph came in and added blah, blah, blah. These are excellent points and I would just like to submit,” and boom, she would drop something that nobody else had said yet.
And the brilliance of this was, as Dale Carnegie said, “The most favored words to any human being are their own name.” So she was naming names and people were leaning in because, ooh, maybe she is going to mention my name. And then she would humbly offer something new that nobody else had said. Because she waited and was the last to speak, without trying to prove points by giving kudos to other people in the room, everybody wanted to hear what Judy DeAngelo had to say. And for me, this was something I had to practice, Caryl, because being silent is not my default these days. I always love to jump in, and it’s probably even hard for you to get a word in edgewise with me these days. But in a group setting, if you want to be heard, be the last to speak.
Caryl Westmore: I like that because it relates to another point in your book about how to listen. Now, this could be with your spouse or your teenager. When you’re having a conversation, you’re listening and nodding and maybe reflecting back what they say before you jump in. Or maybe you’re at a cocktail party, and some people can’t wait to share what they’ve got to say. I’ll never forget someone saying, “Everyone thought this man was interesting, and all he did was ask people questions about themselves.” But to get back to an interaction with your spouse or your partner or your teenage son, it seems you have a way of applying that too. Is there more you could add to that?
Brenda Viola: It’s so easy to fall into the trap of not really listening. We’re already thinking about the next 10 things we want to wedge into the conversation instead of being present and in the moment. It is a practice to sort of reel in your monkey mind and really give people the gift of true attention. Ways of doing that are simply when they’re done saying, “You know, I think what I heard you say is,” and then restating it, because sometimes we miss the meaning. Restating what you think you heard can help to build a bridge so that there’s no miscommunication. I’ve often found that dates go badly if it’s a one-sided conversation, and if you finally let people open up, it’s just a wonderful thing to watch them blossom under the sunshine of what attention will do. If they go on and on and on and never ask you a question, that’s a problem and a red flag. Your entire life will be a one-sided conversation. Making sure you heard what they said by restating it is one of the ways you can let people know you listened. I’ve had to learn to do that.
Caryl Westmore: I can so relate. I think I’ve been married for 16 years to my husband, and sometimes he’ll come back and want to share something. He’s been up to the shops, he wanted to return something, and he’ll start to tell me. There were times when I’d go, “Just get to the point, so did they give you the money back or not?” But now I’ve learned to really let him explain; he feels heard.
Brenda: Well, I just was also thinking that it has occurred to me that when I don’t find people interesting, it’s because I haven’t taken the time to be interested in them by asking questions and trying to draw out the essence of who they are. I find it now to be sort of a game when I’m at a dinner party and someone seems kind of locked down or not engaging. To me, it’s fun to be interested in them and see what the secret person is there that could maybe come out. And it’s lovely. You know, so many times we just ignore people that are more introverted or less likely to carry on the conversation. But sometimes the greatest gems are the ones worth mining.
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Now back to today’s episode. So, information is simply giving out. I’ve got my list of talking points and I’m going to rattle them off and when I’m done, I’m done. But communication is getting through. There’s a difference between just slapping a plate on a table and saying, “Help yourself,” or serving up a meal. Now, as you’re speaking, I’m seeing you in your role that we haven’t talked about in the public service community where you don’t just go and give the facts, the information about a disaster; you communicate and connect. I think that was a good point. Can you tell us about that part of your life?
Brenda Viola: Yeah, I was a public information officer. Working in local government, you always have public meetings, and these meetings are often televised. All the leaders of the various departments—libraries, public works, police, fire, planning—we would be required to give reports to the public. You could feel the people that dreaded this. They would literally race through their talking points, and at the end, they would say, “Any questions?” with this sense of, “Please don’t ask me any questions, I just want this over.” You know, people will forget what you said. They will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. And they’re not going to feel anything different than what you are emanating. So if you are approaching this communication opportunity as an obligation instead of an opportunity, people will feel that it’ll be just as much fun as going to the dentist without novocaine. And if you are enjoying and savoring what you want to say, you’re going to deliver it in a way that makes the listener want to hear it.
Oftentimes, and you and I were talking about this before we started recording, telling stories so that people can actually picture what you’re saying. Instead of, you know, giving a report about the finances that came through and a grant for the park, paint a picture of how the park is going to serve the community and the children that will get to play on the new swings and the merry-go-round. Painting pictures for people. So information, yep, you did the bare minimum, you said what you needed to say, just the facts, but communication is making sure you’re connecting, which is not just getting through your material. It’s incorporating them in a way people want to listen and will remember.
People remember stories and also reading the tea leaves and the cues. Are people nodding? Are they looking mad? Addressing it head-on. That’s true communication, getting through.
Caryl Westmore: I’m going to get on to your book writing journey. But there’s one thing I think is key. When someone has been interviewed on a podcast or anywhere, I want you to talk about sound bites and the magic phrase called verbal highlights that you emphasize in the book. I think that is so memorable.
Brenda Viola: Well, think about if someone gave you a 10-page document single-spaced. That, to me, is overwhelming. I get a headache just thinking about it. But if someone does a couple of lines on each page highlighted, it’s like, “Oh, okay, I can scan that.” And that’s manageable to me. Well, we often do this with written documents, but you can do the same thing with your words. People used to get frustrated when I was a reporter because I would do a half-hour interview and maybe 15 seconds would end up on the evening news. But smart people knew to wrap their information around sound bites. Now, sound bites are seven to 15-second nuggets that are the essence of what you’re trying to convey. I always tell people the number one rule is to know what you want to say before you go into any situation. Because if you just wing it, you’re going to blow it.
So knowing what you want to say, writing it out, and then condensing it, condensing it, condensing it. If you could imagine and consider the one takeaway you want people to leave with, that’s your sound bite. You don’t say in a conversation, “Now here’s the sound bite.” No, you don’t say that. But just like you were teeing up a golf ball on the golf course, you have to tee up your sound bites. The way to do that is with a verbal highlighter. A verbal highlighter is just like a yellow highlighter on a piece of paper. It says to the audience, “This is important. You need to lean in. Warning, warning, warning. This is the stuff.” Some key phrases to keep in your back pocket are, “Here’s what you really need to know,” or, “The bottom line is,” or even, “If you just leave with one thought, this is it.” These highlighters make the audience lean in, perk up their ears, say to themselves, “Oh, wait a minute, if I only have to remember one thing, this is it,” and then boom, you deliver your sound bite. And you bring that back several times in the conversation so that there’s no confusion about what the takeaway is. This is a way of serving your audience.
Caryl Westmore: I love it. I love it. I love it. And I’m going to put you on the spot. Uh-oh. Show us this when it comes to your book. So if I say, what’s the one thing you want my listeners to take away from your book? What message would it be or what sound bite would you give them? I mean, I’m putting you on the spot to explain how you would come up or came up with your sound bite.
Brenda Viola: “Good communication will change your life for the better, and you can get better.”
Bottom line, good communication. It’s so interesting to me, Caryl. People don’t hesitate to get a golf coach to improve their swing. They have no problem hiring a professional to do their hair, but communication, which is the most important aspect of life, which will affect you in the boardroom and the bedroom, why don’t we try to get better at it?
Caryl Westmore: So, is that the key to your coaching business entrepreneurs? Tell us, you have a business, and aside from your book, we’re going to talk about it. It’s called VICI, which is Latin for “I conquered,” right?
Brenda Viola: Yes, yes. Vici Communications means “I conquered.” Yes, but now what is it that you teach in that coach? Are you coaching what kind of people? Because you say it can be learned. Give us a sound bite again and apply it to one of your clients that you do that with.
Brenda Viola: Good communication will improve every area of your life, and you can get better. So, my company is Vici Communications, and communication is the cornerstone of everything I do. I help people conquer their communication, their confidence, and their culture challenges. I’ll go through those three really quickly. If someone has a big speaking engagement coming up or a podcast they’re going to be on, or they’re pitching their book to the press, I do one-on-one coaching like that where in one hour, I guarantee that you will have tips that will serve you for the rest of your career, and you will hit it out of the park. You will definitely have an improved communication experience. So that’s one-on-one. That’s not the biggest part of my business.
Culture: I will go into organizations, corporations, even local governments, when morale is very low, and recruitment and retention are challenges and people are bailing, there is a culture problem. And when there is a culture problem in an organization, largely there’s a communication problem because people want to feel seen and heard. So I will go in and I will embed with a company for a period of three months, and I have specific strategies from employee surveys to all-hands-on-deck meetings to culture clubs and appreciation programs that help turn the culture around.
And then one of my favorite aspects of my business is conferences. Conference organizers will hire me to come and give speeches, workshops, training sessions, and keynotes about everything from knowing your self-worth to how to be a better communicator, to work-life balance, dealing with difficult people, resilience. So I love speaking to large groups of people and inspiring them because I feel like that is my life’s purpose, which is to help others navigate this life in a more joyful way.
Caryl Westmore: So I’m going to switch in the time we’ve got to the process of writing your book. Tell us about your book writing process.
Brenda Viola: So in 2020, I wrote the Public Servant’s Survival Guide. As a former public servant, I was often going to conferences and seeing people show up running on empty. They were on fumes. And so I would speak and encourage them. Oftentimes afterward, they would say, “Well, do you have a book?” And it had always been a dream in my heart to write a book. So I took some of the material from my work-life balance sessions and created the Public Servant’s Survival Guide, which came out in 2020. And then right after it came out, boom, COVID hit. My whole life went virtual, but the book to this day continues to do well, and it is the cornerstone of a workshop I do.
So once you start to write a book, and I bet your audience can relate, when you finally get one book done, you can’t wait to write the next. I knew my second book had to be about communication. I’ve spent my entire career in communication. People were always calling me and asking me, “How do I say this? How do I approach the sticky situation?” And I knew that I had the skills to convey into a book. So this was 2021. I had worked with my publisher, had the outline, and then, as life will tend to happen, and this goes back to my messes or my message, my mom, who had been ill, passed away finally, after a long and excruciating illness. If anybody in the audience has dealt with an ailing parent or loved one, you never know when you’re going to get that call to go to the hospital or, “Oh no, they fell,” or, “Oh no, oh no,” you’re living on high alert. So there was that trauma and the grief of finally losing her.
And just as I was starting to find my footing, you know, during that period, writing was the last thing on my mind. But then I started to feel like, “Okay, okay, I’m sad that I lost mom, but I’m back to it.” Without warning, and suddenly, my beloved partner, Mark, passed away. And I was gutted. This was all in 2021. And not only was I not thinking about writing a book, I was just thinking about surviving and putting one foot in front of the next. What do I do with this rest of my life that’s not going to be the way I imagined? I think so many of us have these turning points where it’s like, “I would have never asked for this. And now what do I do with it?” So I had to give myself the space to process. And as you can hear in my voice, I’m still finding layers of trauma that, in my desire to be okay quickly, I passed through without processing. It is a process. Grief is not linear. It comes in waves, and it changes you.
It’s interesting, Caryl. I look at photos of myself from 2020, and I see photos of myself today, and I even see not just a physical thing, but my very essence has changed because pain changes you. Now, pain will either make you bitter or better, and that’s our choice. Now it’s a fight of a choice sometimes because sometimes you just want to give up and lay in bed and eat donuts and say, “You know what, forget it. I’m done. Stick a fork in me, I’m done.” And I had those days. Those days are important too. But when I finally, the dust settled, I had moved, I had decided that it was time to go all in on me and start my own business. I had always worked for other people. I finally found a new rhythm in my life. And in the healing, I found the stories coming forth again and this desire to write.
Now, there are two schools of thought when it comes to writing a book. One is the discipline of writing every day. Just make a point of it, put it on your schedule, just like going to the gym, write every day. And there are merits to that. But then there is also the blessing of waiting for that prompting on the inside, and when it flows, it goes so much easier. So if I had tried to fight through writing the second book, the end result would have been quite different. Whereas this time around, and here it is 2024, so there was quite a pause there between one and 24 when the book came out, and in that pause was a new Brenda that emerged. My company logo is a butterfly, and the butterfly isn’t just pretty to me. It signals transformation. A friend had a butterfly farm, and when she was learning how to cultivate the proper plants and all of this to nurture butterflies, she saw this one butterfly trying to emerge from the chrysalis. If you’ve ever seen that, it is not pretty, it’s violent, it is a twisting, it is a get me out of here. And I think everybody has felt like that at some point in their life. So she, out of the goodness of her heart, thought, “Well, let me help.” So she took the chrysalis and opened it up,she saw this one butterfly trying to emerge from the chrysalis. If you’ve ever seen that, it is not pretty; it’s violent. It is a twisting, a “get me out of here” struggle. I think everybody has felt like that at some point in their life. So she, out of the goodness of her heart, thought, “Well, let me help.” So she took the chrysalis and opened it up, and the butterfly emerged. It was beautiful but it could not fly because it is in the struggle that you create the strength in your wings so that you can fly.
I realized that all the struggle between 2021 and 2024 was necessary for me to emerge as a new Brenda, a transformed Brenda, an even better Brenda. Although I would have never chosen the method that occurred that changed me, it was essential.
Caryl Westmore: But that’s sort of why you do the podcast, The Alchemy of Pain, because you love telling stories of people like yourself who had traumatic things happen, and it didn’t break them; it actually ended up making them. So telling people to keep going, keep pressing against that chrysalis so that you can fly ultimately.
Brenda Viola: Exactly. That is why How to Be Heard Without Screaming, my new book, came out in 2024. It’s probably a very different book than one I would have written in early 2021.
Caryl Westmore: Yes, and it just underlines that you can’t just churn out a book. It has its own timing to come out of the chrysalis as yours has. It’s part of your new emerging self with your business, with your podcast. And really, it’s going to be so helpful if people would just buy it and apply it.
Brenda Viola: Absolutely. I would love for them to connect with me. My website is easy to remember. It’s BrendaViola.com, and you can follow me on Instagram, @BrendaViola_ViciCommunications. You’ll see my face pop up and say, “Oh, that’s her.” I’m also on Facebook at BrendaViola.com. I love engaging with people. I love hearing how the book has given people new boldness to speak up. The subtitle is Find Your Voice and Use It Skillfully. Like I said, communication is one thing that can definitely make your life better if you do it well, and everyone can get better at it.
Caryl Westmore: Thanks, Brenda.
Brenda Viola: Thank you, Caryl. It was a privilege.
Caryl Westmore: Thanks for joining me on today’s podcast. Want a free gift to inspire you further on your book writing adventure? My free checklist, “5 Book Hook Tips to Kickstart Your Book Writing Journey,” will help you get clarity on the key essentials to make your book a winner. Download it at WriteTheBookInsideYou.com/freegift. The links are in the show notes. Until next time, a big virtual hug and keep writing.
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