Quick Quiz: How's Your Body Language Literacy? Rank the following in order of effective physical placement:

A) Lying on the bed, whining, your head at the lowest point in the room, while you try to get everyone to agree that their constant persecution and careless ignorance of your all-important emotions should make them feel terrible about themselves.
B) Sitting on the bed, giving a feeling of informality and team togetherness, even as the de facto leader of the team attempts to address the concerns of the emotionally wounded in a way that might get him back on track.
C) Standing, next to the de facto leader, in a way that makes the wounded child on the bed feel ganged-up on and justifying his feelings of being marginalized and chastened.
D) Standing, at the high point of the room, commanding attention and demanding teamwork and on-task performance regardless of past issues, willing to acknowledge and then move beyond hurt feelings for the good of the team.

Answer Key: D, B, C, A. Optimally, this conversation should have taken place at a table, round if possible, with equal placement of the four players so that Clay wouldn't feel any more imbalance in the group dynamic than he already (rightly) does -- it would have underscored Alla's point of moving beyond the Boardroom and into the next task, which admittedly is a hard sell for Clay, and needs all the nonverbal backup it can get. Points to Felisha for at least attempting to balance out the standing/sitting ratio by sitting on the bed, and demerits to Adam for standing there like Alla's lieutenant.

Alla interviews, again, that Clay's negativity and inability to look at things objectively is a major issue. She refers to him as a roadblock, but I think a Detour is more appropriate, so a skinny, kind-hearted and smart dude in ill-fitting pants pops up at this point. A Detour is a choice between two tasks, each with its own pros and cons. In "Moccasins," a player must navigate his or her inability to see things through the lens of Clay's innate narcissism in order to alert him to reality. In "Machinations," the player must give the illusion of taking Clay's input at face value, while secretly correcting for his egocentric bullshit for a win. Ultimately, Alla says, "You cannot change Clay. We've tried. He's Clay and he'll stay Clay." Which is the crux of the narcissism issue: if God himself told Clay to take it down a notch, he'd still say, "That's just your opinion." There's no hitting bottom with someone like that, because there's no bottom to hit. (Show some class and don't giggle -- real professionals bunt the easy pitch.) That is to say strictly that if the entire world is the box, you can't criticize him from outside it and have it sound legit to him. (Cf. every episode of Intervention for more about this very grave issue.)