- We think of vulnerability
as a dark emotion. We think of it as the core of fear and shame and grief and disappointment, uncertainty. Things that we do not want to feel right. I call perfectionism the 2010 shield. We carry it around thinking
it's going to protect us from being hurt.
- Yeah. - But it protects us from being seen. But how many of you
were raised in families where you encouraged to get
curious about your emotions and talk about them
and explore them right? Versus how many of you
were raised in families where you were taught, hey suck it up. - Yep.
- Push through and get it done. - Hello a Believe Nation,
my name is Evan Carmichael. My one reason to believe
in entrepreneurs will solve all of the world's major problems. So now open up your
journey today we're going to learn from best
selling author Brene Brown and my take on her top
10 rules to success. Rule number one is my personal favorite and I'd love to know which
ones you guys like best. And as always as you're watching if you see something that
really resonates_ with you please leave it in the comments below or quotes so other people can be inspired. And you can win a prize, as well. And also when you write it
down it's much more likely to stick for yourself, as well. Enjoy. (airplane noise) (basketball bounce) (pop music) - And so my story is
that I am a researcher and I never thought I would
have a big public career. And so I did a TED talk
that went very viral. And in the wake of that
I was kind of everywhere for a couple of months on every CNN.com, NPR it was everywhere. And something it was
something I wasn't used to. And the marching orders from my therapist and my husband were, do not read the comments online. (laughing) So I read all the comments online. (laughing) It's, so one morning I woke up and there were two or
three new articles out and I started reading the comments. And they were devastating. They weren't about my
work, they were about me, they were super personal. And they were the things that creative people play in their mind and then give up doing what they really want to do. Like if I asked every single one of you you would try, what
would you try if you knew people would never say this about you? What would that, what would this be? It would, those were the
comments that morning. Of course she embraces imperfection, what choice does she have? Look at how she looks. I feel sorry for her kids. Less research more Botox. Just mean personal attacks,
the things that really up until that moment had inspired me to stay very small in my life and in my career just so I could avoid these things. So that morning Steve the kids leave. I say home. I get on the couch and
I watch eight hours of Downton Abbey (laughing) And when it's over I don't want to turn off Downton Abbey because I then, because the
minute you turn off Downton Abbey it's like soccer practice and dinner and back to the mean people. And maybe, should I get Botox? And maybe you know, maybe if
I stand still when I talk. So I get my laptop and I do a search for who was president in the United States during the Downton Abbey era. Have you ever done that
like you're numbing with TV or movie and so when it's over you just like stay in that space by like learning more about the actors and what's going on?
(laughing) I've been doing this long enough
to know this is like you're laughing with me, not at me. (laughing) So I put it in and Theodore
Roosevelt comes up and a quote comes up. And I read it and this is what it says. It's a quote from a speech
that he gave in the early 1900's of (mumbling) And a lot of people call it
the man in the arena speech. And this is the passage that
changed-- changes my life. It's not the critic who counts. It's not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done it better. The credit belongs to the person
who's actually in the arena whose face is marred with
blood and sweat and dust. Who, at the best in the
end knows the triumph of high achievement. And who at worst, if he failed he fails daring greatly. So the moment that I read
that I closed my laptop and this is what shifted in me. Three huge things. First, I spent the last 12
years studying vulnerability and that quote was everything
I know about vulnerability. It is not about winning it's not about losing. It's about showing up and being seen. The second thing, this
is who I want to be. I want to create. I want to make things
that didn't exist before. I touched them. I want to show up and be seen in my work and in my life. And if you're going to show up and be seen there is only one guarantee. And that is, you will get your ass kicked. That is the guarantee. That's the only certainty you have if you're going to go in the arena and spend any time in there whatsoever especially if you've committed to creating in your life you
will get your ass kicked. So you have to decide at that
moment I think for all of us if courage is a value that we hold this is a consequence. You can't avoid it. The third thing which really set me free and I think Steve my husband would argue has made me somewhat dangerous. Is kind of a new
philosophy about criticism which is this, if you're not in the arena also getting your ass kicked I'm not interested in your feedback. (laughing and applause) - [Interviewer] what does it mean to be a wholehearted person? You have actually you know a list of ten different qualities
that wholehearted people have in common. And so cultivating authenticity. Letting go of what people
think that's the first one let's talk about that. - [Brene] It's so hard I
thought doing this research I thought going into it
you're authentic people and inauthentic people. I had I did not find any
evidence of that at all. What I found its
authenticity is a practice and you choose it every
day sometimes every hour of every day. And it's a practice. It's not I just like, I am authentic. It's that when you walk into a meeting you have to make the choice,
am I going to show up and let myself be seen? Am I going to if I can raise my hand say, Wow you all look super
excited I don't know what in the hell you're talking about. (laughing) You know that's a choice. - Yes uh huh. - Right. And to be make that
authentic choice you got to let go of. - Of the faker faker ooh, I say. Yeah, call it the faker ooh. But you know what I have found I mean I consider myself to
be an authentic person but when I am inauthentic
is when I've allowed myself to be around people who were not. And then I have to fake it to be with them. - [Brene] Oh for sure, It's contagious - [Oprah] Yes so they're faking it. - Yeah. - [Opah] And then and you
know you're in that situation when you do that uh huh
that kind of uh huh. You're laughing at
jokes that aren't funny. You're pretending to be
comfortable when you're not and lose your own authenticity. - Yeah, and I do it. One of the shocking findings of my work was the idea that the
most compassionate people I have interviewed over the last 13 years were also the absolutely most boundaried. - [Interviewer] The most boundaried? - I'll give you the definition of boundary that I use in the book boundary is simply what's okay and what's not okay. What I think we do is
we don't set boundaries. We let people do things that are not okay or get away with behaviors
that are not okay. Then we're just resentful people. Me, I'd rather be loving and generous and very straightforward with what's okay and what's not okay. So my question is big B-I-G. What boundaries need to be in place for me to stay in my integrity and make the most generous
assumptions about you. The generosity can't
exist without boundaries and we are not comfortable
setting boundaries. Because we care more about
what people will think and we don't want to disappoint anyone. We want everyone to like us and boundaries are not easy. But I think they're the key to self love and I think they're the
key to treating others with loving kindness. - [Interviewer] To sustain. - To sustain. Nothing is sustainable without boundaries. When I found you know 12 years of research 11,000 pieces of data I did not interview in all that time a
person who would describe themselves as joyful. Or described their lives as joyous. Who did not actively practice gratitude. And for me it was very counterintuitive because I kind of went
into the research thinking that the relationship
between joy and gratitude was if you're joyful then
you should be grateful. But it wasn't that way at all it was really that practicing gratitude invites joy into our lives. And when I say practice I think this is this is the part that
really changed my life, it changed my family the
way we live every day. When I say practice gratitude I don't mean kind of like
the attitude of gratitude or feeling grateful I
mean practicing gratitude. These folks shared in common a tangible gratitude practice. They either kept gratitude journals. Some of them did
interesting things like at one, two, three, four like
at 12:30 for every day they said something out loud
that they were grateful for. They one of the things that we do like we say grace at dinner. And so now after grace we go around and everyone in my family says
something they're grateful for. I mean including what's
interesting is when we first started I have a first grader at first grader son Charlie and
eighth grade daughter Ellen and at first I thought and
we've been doing it for a couple years, now like they're like, oh God mom. And if there was a little like this is are you experimenting on us? (laughs) A little bit of that but
now what's interesting even after we did it for
like a couple of weeks that on those crazy busy
nights where we're trying to like get to soccer and piano and homework. And Steve and I are just like we say a quick prayer we start eating my kids are like whoa, what are you grateful for? And it's been extraordinary because not only absolutely does it invite more joy into our house. It also is such a soulful window into what's going on in my kids lives. You know so there's some days
my eighth grader will be like, I'm joyful that there's
a huge thick wall between my room and my brother's room you know something just very you know honest. But there other days she'll say you know she had a friend his mother recently died and she said you know for
a month she would say, I'm just so grateful that you
all are healthy right now. You know and so not only
did it make us all more aware of what we had and more willing to
slow down and really be thankful for the joyful moments we had. But it let me know where she
was emotionally in her life. You know my son is always, you know, I'm grateful for bugs,
I'm grateful for frogs. But sometimes he'll say you know, I'm grateful that you picked me up early. Or you know, I'm grateful that I finally understand adjectives you know. So it's there's a great quote that says it's not granted it's not joy that makes us grateful it's
gratitude it makes us joyful. And it's by a Jesuit
brother a Jesuit priest. And I guess I was just amazed to find that
bubble up so strongly in the research. It's life-changing. We think about vulnerability
as a dark emotion. You know there are a lot of
people who talk about light or you know positive
emotions, negative emotions, dark emotions, light emotions. We think of vulnerability
as a dark emotion. We think of it as the
core of fear and shame and grief and disappointment, uncertainty. Things that we do not want to feel right. Things that I don't want to be vulnerable because that means I'm afraid,
that means I'm uncertain. That means I'm at risk, I'm exposed. I'm in grief. So what we do is we armor up and we say I do not want
to slip into these dark emotions I will not let
myself be vulnerable. But here's what I learn from the research and certainly put into
motion in my own life that was the most life-changing
is that vulnerability is the center of difficult emotion. But it's also the birthplace of every positive emotion that we need in our lives. Love, belonging, joy, empathy. How many of you would agree
that we're in a serious empathy deficit in our culture today? Totally, right? No vulnerability, no empathy. And a culture where people
are afraid to be vulnerable you can't have empathy. Here empathy is not a default response. If you share something
with me that's difficult in order for me to be truly empathic I have to step into what you're feeling. And that's vulnerable. So there can be no empathy
without vulnerability. Why do you think in that
example that I used while ago daughter comes home and says you know tears. No one sat with me at
lunch today and made fun of what I was wearing. So-and-so won't talk to me. They poured my books out of my locker. And the response back is, I told you I bought you
all those cute jeans. Why aren't you wearing those jeans and pulling your hair back. Is that an empathic response? No, it's a shaming response. Could that shaming
response be, could a mother who absolutely adores her child respond with that shaming response? Please say yes, don't kid yourself. I mean come on. If you've got a if you're
a parent sitting in here then you sure as hell know
the answer to that is yes. But why, why did that happen? What where was the
access to vulnerability? Where was, I mean, where was empathy? You can't access empathy if you're not willing to be vulnerable. So if my daughter comes
home and tells that to me, guess what I have to do? I have to reactivate that sweaty palmed seventh grader who lives inside me. And I have to go, oh God that's so hard. I'm so sorry. That's happened to me. That's happened to me when
I was in middle school and it's happened to me last week. Let's talk about it. But you can't get there
without vulnerability. You can't fake empathy. Innovation creativity
born of vulnerability. This is my favorite part I talked about this admit I did another
TED talk this year at Long Beach and I told the story that during 2011 and even this year after the big TEDX Houston talk went viral the big calls came from
Fortune 500 companies. Oh my God we loved your
TED talk, it was great. Please come talk to all
of our senior leaders. And it's like okay. What do you want to talk about? Like we don't care just
come and talk to us. Just if you could ixnay the
shame and vulnerability talk. (laughing) Every single conversation barring maybe 10%. I was like, well what do you mean? Well we let you know your you're funny you have this great research. I think there's a real
fit with what we do. We just we don't really
do you know that kind of stuff around here so you could not mention vulnerability and shame. (laughing) So just for fun for
grins I would say, okay, so what would you like me to talk about? You know, fourth-quarter earnings I frickin' don't even
balance my checkbook. (laughing) Like I'm not going to talk about that. So what do we what do
you want me talk about? Well, the big issue,
creativity and innovation. Mmm. And change, we're going
through a lot of change. It's like okay so vulnerability is the birthplace of
creativity innovation change. And the reason that crisis is happening is because you're not talking
about vulnerability. Imagine creativity innovation
without vulnerability. I'm asking you for a work product that has never been made before. That's completely innovative
I need you to be creative and I need a percent of people
who are going to happen when I think it's stupid
and not understand it. No vulnerability there. Perfectionism what
emerged for me in the data was that perfectionism is not
about striving for excellence or healthy striving which I'm for. - [Oprah] Yeah. - It's a cognitive behavioral process a way of thinking and
feeling that says this. If I look perfect do
it perfect work perfect and live perfect I can avoid or minimize shame, blame and judgment. - [Oprah] You know what I
thought when I was reading this I had another aha aha (high five) - To people. - This was my other aha that perfectionism I
never gotten this before that perfectionism is the ultimate fear. That the people who are walking around as perfectionists who have everything so. - Yeah. - [Oprah] That they are ultimately afraid that the world is going to see them for who they really are and
they won't measure up. - There's no question
that's that's what it that's right right that's
exactly what it is. It's fear. - [Oprah] Because it's
very different than trying to be excellent and working
hard and doing your best. - [Brene] Yeah yeah and so I call perfectionism
the 20-ton shield. We carry it around thinking
it is going to protect us from being hurt.
- Yeah. - But it protects us from being seen. Let me tell you this real
story this just happened. I spoke at HubSpot last week. Okay 13,000 people in this Lawson convention center. It's like 10 minutes before I go on and I'm making that I look at Twitter and I'm this person sends
this tweet out that says, why is Brene at HubSpot? Why is a@BrenéBrown at HubSpot 2015? And he just tweeted like love Seth Godin, love Amy Schumer all these people. But why is Brene Brown,
and I'm like oh my God why am I at HubSpot, what am I doing here? And then I'm like I start sweating and it's like any with the Convention Center is like because you
ladies you know I'm like oh my God what am I doing
on the opening keynote. I'm like and then he tweets it
again and I'm like oh my God. And so these are like marketing people I don't know anything so I
start Googling in my phone marketing terms 2015.
(laughing) And great the first time that comes is incentivize, I'm like
I've got to work that I've got to work the word
incentive into this this keynote. I'm like what does that
mean exactly, I don't know. But I'm going to say
we're going to incentivize I'm like what is happening and I have a total crisis of confidence. Like because you know
shame drives two tapes not good enough and who
do you think you are. And like who am I, right? That's terrible. And so then all of a
sudden I'm like who is it because what happens when
you get backed into a corner my brain is making up the story. You don't belong here,
I'm like that story's not going to work because
I'm going on in five seconds. (laughing)
I'm like so I'm like okay the best-case scenario attack. Attack, attack this guy. Maybe attack them from the stage. Maybe use that as my opening. Maybe say like John Doe asked what I'm doing
here, well let me tell you all, you know. And then I click on the tweet
to figure out what his name is and I accidentally hit
the link in his tweet and it goes to this page that says, What is Brené Brown doing at HubSpot? She's talking about vulnerability and that's so important. Here's her TED talk.
(laughing) Here are her books. But could you imagine if
I would have got out there and been like a great fear. Yes totally. No and that's a true
story it just happened because what happens is
when something hard happens and were captured by something difficult our emotions get the first crack at making sense of something. A bad look, a hard phone
call, a disagreement at work we think that we're rational
beings we think that cognition is going to carry us through
and make sense of it. But it doesn't you know emotions driving thought and behavior are not even in the front seat riding shotgun. They're not even the back seat. Thought and behavior
and the trunk going hey and emotions driving. So the first thing we
do is we tell ourselves a story that reduces
ambiguity about what happened. So, oh I'm not supposed to be here, I'm not good enough to be here. Men and women who have
the greatest capacity for rising strong in the
moment something happens. They hack into that
neurobiological process of making up a story. They stop and say, wait a minute what's actually going on here? What is what am I feeling? What do I know for sure? Because what is a story? You know there's a name
and research for a story that has one or two limited data points. And we fill in the rest with fear. - Wow.
- It's called a conspiracy. (laughing) A conspiracy is a story
with limited data points. So here's what I know I
know. guy sent a tweet. I know I'm getting ready to talk that's all I know. So now that I'm ready to ruin his career and use him as a whipping person you know as I talk, what is going on? This first step of rising
strong is recognize you've been snagged by emotion and get
curious about it, that's it. But how many of you
were raised in families where you encouraged to get
curious about your emotions and talk about them
and explore them right? (laughing) Versus how many of you
were raised in families where you were taught, hey suck it up. - Yep.
- Push through and get it done. So the first thing is really
reckoning with emotion. What am I feeling? And and what do I need to know more about? That is a huge, so that
thing that you say like does something that someone
knows something that I don't know, do they have
information I don't have? That's a huge part of the reckoning we just don't do it. So in that minute in the backstage when I was hopping on my
phone I could have just said, whoa Brene, your like heart is racing your where your teeth are clenched and you're going in for the kill here. What do you know about this? - Yeah. - Nothing, you know nothing. And what if you do everything
who cares who gives a shit? - Yeah. - You know there are 13,000 people here you're going to spend an
hour targeting one guy you don't know? Shame is far more likely to
cause destructive behaviors than it is to cure it. What we know is that
shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, bullying. It's not helpful to be ashamed. For this reason I think
this is really a core thing that we need to get our
heads and hearts around as a culture. Shame corrodes the part
of us that believes we can change. So to chain someone into changing is like saying to them you
are horrible and worthless and you're not capable of change. Get better. I have interviewed over
600 men and women now across the country about shame and across the interviews men and women with high levels of resilience to shame share four things in common. The first is they physically recognize when they're in shame and
they know what triggered it. So let's say something happens
at work I make a mistake or something happens and
that warm wash comes over me. You know that feeling yes yeah. We all know it.
(laughs) If I can physically say oh my Go, this is shame, I'm in shame it's very helpful because we are not fit for human consumption when we're in shame. We need to pull away and get re-grounded, take some deep breaths and
figure out how to respond. One of the things that
makes aim worse is normally when we're in it, we act out. For example, the mother that I interviewed she fills her car up, she
goes into the gas station. She goes to pay. Her credit card's declined. The man shames her in
front of the other patrons makes her leave her I think
her wedding band and her wallet and leave with just an ATM card. So she's filled with
shame, she gets in the car she slams the door. When she slammed the door it
wakes up her three-year-old toddler who's in the backseat
who starts screaming. What happens next? She starts screaming
back, "Shut up, shut up." - [Interviewer] Right. - So now she's in the shame
of having this credit card declined, being belittled
in front of people. And now having to deal with you know the struggle of, I'm a horrible mom and why am I taking this out of my child? So men and women with
high levels of resilience recognize physically when they're in shame and what triggered it. - Okay.
- Then they practice critical awareness. How realistic are the
expectations and messages that we put on ourselves
or that others put on us that tell us who we're supposed to be. The third thing is men and
women with high levels of resilience reach out. We've got to share our story. - [Interviewer] So they talk about it. - [Brene] They talk about it. You know we breathe through
it we recognize we're in it and then we call and
say, hey Patricia it's me you're not going to believe what happened. Can you listen? It's hard. And then we speak shame you know it's I try to explain
to people the importance of using the word shame. And this is not just laypeople this is mental health professionals. - [Interviewer] Right. - You know we've got to use the word. It's different if I were
to call you and say, Oh Patricia Brene is so embarrassed that would be one thing right? But if I were to call you and say, Patricia, it's Brene I'm really
struggling with some shame that's different. - [Interviewer] It's a
different conversation. - Right. Shame cannot hold on when we name it. - [Interviewer] Right. - So it's not just you know
it's an academic pet peeve I want everybody to get
the semantics correct. Men and women with high
levels of shame resilience use the word and talk about the emotion. I think there's like a thin film of terror wrapped around us. And so if it's not I'm not safe enough,
I'm not secure enough. It's, I'm not liked enough,
I'm not promoted enough, I'm not loved enough. - [Oprah] I don't have enough. - I don't have enough. - I am not enough. - At the very bottom.
- [Oprah] Yeah. - That's not enough.
- [Oprah] Yeah. - Well that's big beg beg beg beg. Somebody ring some bells. We need some bells to ring on this show. - [Brene] Well that's it and
so guess what the number one casualty is of a scarcity culture. - [Oprah] What?
- [Brene] Vulnerability. - [Oprah] We shut down.
- [Brene] We shut down. - Because I'm not going to let you know. - [Brene] No.
- Because I don't I'm not all together.
- [Brene] Right. - Yeah.
- And the thing is that people like oh well we
lose a little vulnerability but vulnerability is not
just about fear and grief and disappointment. It's the birthplace of
everything we're hungry for: - [Oprah] Creativity.
- Joy, creativity, faith, love.
- Innovation. And all of that, yes. - And the whole thing is
there is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period. - So we got to be open enough
to take the risk to fail. - Yeah. - What I have found in
my life and what I found in my research which fueled what I did in my life is that the people who have the most courage who are willing to show them be the most vulnerable are the ones who are very clear
about who the critics are. The ones who reserve
seats for them and say, I hear you, I get it, I know where the messaging is coming from. I'm not I'm not an I'm
not buying it anymore. So to get very clear the last thing which I think
is the hardest is this, one of these seats needs to be reserved for you. One of these seats needs
to be reserved for me. I need when we look up and we're putting an idea our piece of art, our design forward who do you think the biggest critic in the arena normally is? Yourself. And so definitely me like I have never watched either of those TED Talks because it's not in
service of the work for me. And I try to do things are only in service of my work because what would what would
it serve for me to watch it. I would sit there and go, oh my God suck in your stomach. Oh my God that's not what
you were going to say. You know we're so self-critical. And one of the things that I think happens and I think this happens a lot it happens in different professions but I think I see it a lot with creatives is there is an ideal of
what you're supposed to be. And what a lot of us end
up doing is we orphan the parts ourselves
that don't fit what that ideal is supposed to be. And what it leaves, when we
orphan all those parts of us is it just leaves the critic. And so reserved in this seat is this. Where we came from. How we started. Our families, that's me
the oldest, of course. (laughing) The lost years. (laughing) The years where I was so lost and confused and hurt and disillusioned that I thought the only path to freedom was a Flock of Seagulls haircut. (laughing) The higher the hair the
closer to God we say in Texas. (laughing) The people who love us,
the moments that make us who we are. And in that chair should be this person. The person who believes
in what we're doing and why we're doing it. And the person who says, yeah it's so scary to show up. It feels dangerous to be seen. It's terrifying. But it is not as scary,
dangerous, or terrifying as getting to the end of our lives and thinking, what if
I would have shown up? What would have been different? - Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed, cast your vote on who you want to see in the next top 10. Check out the link in the description and go vote for the
person that you want me to profile next. I'd also like to know
which Clips resonates the most with you. What you keep from this
video and immediately apply to your life or to business somehow leave it down the comments below. I'm really curious to find
out what you have to say. I also want to give a quick
shout out to Lucille Kate Natura thank you so much Lucille for
picking up a copy of my book Your One Word and posting
the picture on Instagram. I really really really
appreciate your support and I'm so glad that you enjoyed them. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you teach to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love I'll see you soon. (airplane flying) (basketball bounce) - We numb vulnerability. When we're waiting for the call. When we're trying to think about if we're going, you know, it was funny. I guess Wednesday I sent
something out on Twitter on Twitter and on Facebook
that says, what how would you define vulnerability, what
makes you feel vulnerable? And within an hour and a half I had 150 responses. Because I wanted to know
you know what's out there. Having to ask my husband
for help because I'm sick and we're newly married. Initiating sex with my husband. Initiating sex with my wife. Being turned down. Asking someone out. Waiting for the doctor to call back. Getting laid off. Laying off people. This is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability. And I think there's evidence,
and it's not the only reason this evidence exists. But I think that there
is a huge cause we are the most in debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in US history. The problem is why? The problem is and I learned
this from the research that you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can't say, here's the bad stuff. Here's vulnerability,
here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. I don't want to feel these. I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. (laughing) I don't want to feel these. And I know that I know
that's knowing laughter I hack into your lives for a living, I know that's (laughs) God. (laughing) You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the
other effects or emotion. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those we numb joy. We numb gratitude. We numb happiness. And then we are miserable and we are looking for
purpose and meaning. And then we feel vulnerable so then we have a couple of beers
and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle. One of the things that I think that we need to think about is why in hell we numb. And it doesn't just have to be addiction. The other thing we do is we
make everything that's uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. I'm right, you're wrong, shut up. That's it. Just certain. The more afraid we are
the more vulnerable we are the more afraid we are. This is what politics looks like today there's no discourse anymore. There's no conversation. There's just blame, you know what blame you know how blame is
described in the research? A way to discharge pain and discomfort. We perfect. Now let me check if there's
anyone who wants their life to look like this it would be me. But it doesn't work
because what we do is we take fat from our butts
and put it in our cheeks. (laughing) Which doesn't which
just I hope in 100 years people will look back and go, wow. (laughing) And we perfect most
dangerously our children. Let me tell you what we think about let me thank you very
quickly about children. They're hardwired for
struggle when they get here. When you hold those perfect
little babies in your hand our job is not to say,
look at them, look at her, she's perfect. My job is just to keep her perfect make sure she makes the
tennis team by fifth grade and Yale by seventh grade. (laughing) Our job, that's not our job. Our job is to look and say
you know what you're imperfect and you're wired for struggle but you are worthy of love and belonging. That's our job. Show me a generation of
kids raised like that and we'll end the problems
I think that we see today. We pretend that what we do doesn't
have an effect on people. We do that in our personal lives, we do that corporate. Whether it's a bailout, an oil spill. A recall we pretend like what we're
doing doesn't have a huge impact on other people. Yeah I would say to
companies if this is not our first rodeo people. We just need you to be authentic and real and say we're sorry. We'll fix it. But there's another way and
I'll leave you with this. This is what I have found. To let ourselves be seen. Deeply seen. Vulnerably seen. To love with our whole hearts even though there's no guarantee. And that's really hard I
can tell you as a parent that's excruciatingly difficult. To practice gratitude and joy in those moments of kind of terror when we're wondering,
can I love you this much? Can I believe in this as passionately? Can I be this fierce about this? Just to be able to stop and
instead of catastrophizing what might happen to say,
I'm just so grateful. Because to feel this
vulnerable means I'm alive. And the last, which I think is
probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from
a place I believe that says I'm enough, then we stop screaming
and start listening. We're kinder and gentler
to the people around us and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves. That's all I have.
