In this spoken personal talk, the speaker uses a jack‑in‑the‑box metaphor to describe how a work‑driven, disengaged life left her feeling lifeless, like a dented toy in a rubbish tip. After a traumatic divorce and realizing her son Rory was becoming similarly withdrawn, she deliberately rebuilt their relationship through intentional communication techniques. She adopted a mirroring strategy from a sales training to deepen everyday conversations, instituted tech‑free family meals where each member shares daily highlights and lowlights, and introduced a child‑friendly adaptation of Amy Cuddy’s power‑pose concept—a subtle “jiggle” that boosts confidence during stressful moments at school. These practices not only restored connection with Rory but also rippled into extended family relationships, fostering open communication and shared moments. The speaker concludes with a persuasive call to action, urging listeners not to become lifeless jack‑in‑the‑boxes but to actively participate in family life and create meaningful moments.
Chapters
Thank you. I'd like to share tonight a story of a jack-in-the-box and a rubbish tip. If you imagine the old-style child's toy, the spring Bring your toy, the jack-in-the-box that's got the little handle on the side that you crank and you wait for the lid to go click and out explodes this larger-than-life, happy, smiling clown. It bounces from side to side, it captivates everybody's attention, and everyone laughs and smiles. And you can feel the joy and the anticipation. If I take you now on a journey around the outskirts It's a really, really hot summer's day. The smells are really, really thick and pungent, and you almost have to push through them. But as you're looking around the rubbish tip, you're gazing out over hundreds and hundreds of metres of household waste, items no longer wanted, discarded, and all decaying. Now this little jack-in-the-box has found itself part of the rubbish tip. It's dented. It's very unhappy. Its colors have faded to shades of gray. It can no longer hold its own attention, let alone anyone else's. And if you haven't already guessed it, that jack-in-the-box was me, and the rubbish tip was what I— the life that I had created. And I missed so many moments, so many moments. I was a workaholic and that was my way of avoiding a very unhappy life. Being numb, disengaged and lifeless was my way of denying it. I was missing moments with myself, my family and all of the stories and joys that we could have shared and cherished as a family. Luckily, I did wake up. I made some drastic changes. I did a lot of work on myself, as lots of the other ladies have done here tonight as well. I left a long-term marriage, and that was really traumatic for all of us, all in different ways and for very different lengths of time. But at the time, my son was 5, and I was watching him drift further and further away. He was starting to become disengaged and a little bit colourless and started to look a little bit like that jack-in-the-box. I knew at that point that I needed to rebuild my relationship with him and really reconnect with him in a different way, in a new way. And I find it funny in life how we— little gifts come to us when we're finally awake and ready to receive them. They just pop along. And I found myself in a sales training. I wasn't really enjoying it because I was finding it a little bit manipulative. They were talking about mirroring and pretending to listen to the other person by repeating their last words, so it was very false. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. However, being a little bit on the sneaky side and liking to have fun, I did decide I'd test it on Rory, but in a kinder way, in a way that I was echoing him. So I'll give you an example of the normal conversation when I picked him up from school and drove him home. It would normally go like this. What did you do today, Rory? Painting. What else did you do? Can't remember. End of conversation. So with this little technique of echoing him, the conversation completely changed and went— became this. Rory, what did you do today? Painting. Painting? Yes, we did a painting of a rainbow. A rainbow? Yes, it was all colors. It was red, it was green, it was blue, it was yellow. Yellow? Yes, yellow's my favourite colour. It's precious. It's just like gold. Did you know that? Precious? Yes, it's like silver, rubies, emeralds, and diamonds. All the things you'd find in a pirate's chest. A pirate's chest? Yes, we read a book on pirates today in the library, and we pretended to be characters from it. As you've gathered, that was a much more engaging conversation than what was— than what we normally experience. That conversation lasted longer than our car ride home. Mm-hmm. That conversation was an enormous amount of connection and participation between Rory and I. We actually shared a moment. The reason that was because he actually felt valued. I was actually participating with him in his journey of learning and experiencing. Now that participation has overflowed into other areas of our life. And I work from home and I'm always on my phone or in front of my computer on the email. And I'll be honest, I do like to go and check in on the weekends just to make sure I'm still important, make sure I'm needed, for my own self-esteem more than anything. One of these particular weekends, Rory followed me in. He sat on the floor alongside me. He looked up at me and said, Mummy, you don't ever play with me. The phone was left on the desk. The computer was turned off. I shut the office door and we played. Dinnertime has become an extension of this for us and another way to share. Once again, the TV and the tech is turned off and we share a meal together. And we ask, what's been your highlight of the day? And we share. And little things lead to great things. And every now and then Rory will add a lowlight, a challenge or frustration or something that's rocking his world at that point in time. And we as a family get to know more of what's impacting him and how we can help if we need to. Great things lead to awesome opportunities and moments. Challenges continue in our lives. We all ride the roller coaster of life. We all have ups and downs, and that's okay. One evening, Rory was sitting at the dining room table. He was doing his homework. And I was in the kitchen cooking tea. And he had his head in his hands. He was quite still, but I could sense he was a bit agitated and he was sort of slumping further and further over. And then it happened. He just hit the floor in a sobbing, shaking, teary mess. A stressed-out sobbing mess over homework. The very, very first time that happened, he was only 9. Stressed out at 9. My point here is twofold. Our children need to understand and know that challenges come up and continue to come up, and they need to know that this is part of life and learning and that it is okay. It's how we grow. My second point is that our children learn from us. They see us and they feel us, and even when we think they're not, they actually are, because Rory had just reenacted a scene from my life, my past life, that he was never actually witness to, 'cause he would have only been 3. Now, we were able to talk through this and what had actually happened, and I was able to help him with his stress. However, what actually impacted him the most was a video of a TED Talk by the name— by a lady by the name of Amy Cuddy. And her talk was on how your body language shapes who you are. And she's a social psychologist, and she talks about how our body postures can actually change how other people perceive us, but also how we perceive ourselves. And she talks about how the Uh-huh. The difference in poses are a low-power pose or a high-power pose. So Rory was in his low-power pose at the table, and a high-powered pose is what we see sporting stars do when they win, you know, a high-powered pose, a victory V, as she calls it in her video. And she talks about how this changes the chemistry and— chemically and physically in the body, and how these change in posture do in actual fact change the way we feel about ourselves as a result of the way other people perceive us. Now Rory was totally captivated by it. He really loved it. So a little strategy that we worked out, because Rory likes to have fun like I do, is this. Now standing up in the middle of a classroom, because a lot of his stress comes from his expectations at school and not wanting to actually ask for help if he needs it, so standing Standing up in full victory V in the middle of the classroom for Rory would be a bit of a challenge and probably for most of us. So this is what we've got him— it's his little strategy that we've developed. Now, if you remember back to your early dating years when the boys used to yawn and to pretend to put their arms around their girlfriend, well, I shared that with Rory, not that he liked the girl part at all. But for him, a, you know, a very subtle yawning stretch in class would be okay. So that's the little strategy that we've developed. What we've actually added to that is a little bit of a jiggle. Now Rory's usually sitting like this at the desk at school and often at home because he actually needs to go to the toilet, but he doesn't want to miss out on anything. So we've changed it into a purposeful jiggle, one that goes like this. This is a jiggle that's starting to build momentum, momentum to a yawn that becomes victorious. And this is this little strategy. It's funny, it's quite silly, but trust me, it actually does work. It does change how you feel in your body, and it really becomes a very quick and easy confidence boost. Rory will often do it in the car if he's going off to work and he's got something happening at school— not work, school— that he has to go to. So it can be done anywhere. anywhere, and it is a really great turbo boost for confidence. So through all of this, the biggest key and the greatest learning for me was to learn to participate in life and in family again. We now have an extended family, so we've got— now got each side, we've got 2 extended families that we also now get to share moments Honest communication has rippled over to those families to enable us to be able to do that because prior to that, obviously, we had a very traumatic relationship at one point in our life, but through the things that I've learnt with Rory and the communication and the way that we participate, we've been able to transpose that over to our extended families and we've got some great relationships there and we can develop more moments. But I beg of you, don't become or be like the lifeless jack-in-the-box in a rubbish tip. Participate, because it's actually you that get to make the moments. You may need to set the example, and you know what? That's okay. But your family needs you. You need you. Your kids need you. Don't miss the moments. Go make more. Thank you.
