Years ago, I went to Sweden to do a presentation.

It was a pretty big deal with lots of press. I remember standing on stage, feeling overwhelmed by a huge screen behind me. It was ridiculously massive, but it matched the size of the crowd.

I recall the joy of feeling the response of an audience that not only acknowledged what I had to say, but allowed me to dabble in fun so freely. I realised that laughter is a language in its own right. It doesn’t care about flags or borders or Swedish vowels that make your jaws go in all sorts of awkward directions.

I also remember a Swedish photographer who described me as being ‘tirelessly expressive’. He went into great detail to explain how ‘difficult’ it was for him to take a ‘decent’ picture of me, and even went so far as to imitate the ‘weird’ faces I made to make my story come alive. Since the experience of being compared to a ‘muppet’ left me feeling a bit unsettled, I reined in my newly found love for Nordic umlauts and gave up on a dream to make more people smile.

Instead of raising the bar, I crawled underneath.

Yesterday, as we were filming the launch of a campaign to promote the importance of mental wellbeing, my friend Kris took a couple of pictures of me presenting. Seeing them, I was reminded of my experience in Sweden. It suddenly dawned on me that the photographer wasn’t necessarily being rude, but was perhaps trying to pay me a compliment. I mean, why would a country famous for producing ABBA and Europe not embrace a flailing muppet’s frenzied attempt at having a moment?

Long story short: sometimes looking back is a great way to move forward. It wasn’t the photographer’s remark that disparaged me all those years ago, nor was it the size of the screen. It was the way I was framing my own story.
Muppeteering has always been a part of my vocabulary – and from now I have no intention whatsoever of reining it in.