Embracing your authentic self: Jennifer Gillivan at TEDxMSVUWomen

so in the spirit of the topic of the conversation I'm about to have with you being authentic I did not rehearse this you're about to get 18 minutes of me unplugged I'm going right off that cliff so when I talk about being authentic and being real it seems a very simplistic thing to talk about but I find when I talk especially to young women a lot of times in universities it really resonates and it resonates at a very deep level I have lots of people cry and lots of people come and talk to me afterwards so to demonstrate to start off I want to tell you a story I'm Irish I'm from Dublin and we only know one way to communicate and that's true storytelling so in one of those talks I was giving at one of your local universities here in Halifax I assumed I was coming into a room full of young people beautiful young people like you guys are here today and not that they weren't beautiful but they were my age and older and I was shocked when I walked in and a lot of them were lawyers and doctors and accountants and very compliment going to talk to these people about but anyway I decided to do my talk and I did my talk and it's all about finding your own personal why and the why in your organization as well as your own sort of authentic self and bringing that to bear in the power of what that can do when I'd finished that talk it was dead silence and I was standing at the podium thinking oh boy had white where's the exit sign how do I get out of here and then a man stood up and he was a very big big man and this group had only started to come together as an mba class they'd only known each other less than a week and he started to speak and I all instantly knew by his energy that this was going to be a powerful moment and he said my mother grew up a past Presbyterian very very strict and she was a good mother she lived a good life but in her latter years she got Alzheimer's disease and for the most part when you would visit her she didn't know who you were she had no idea but in one of those visits he visited her she actually had a lucid moment and she knew he was her son and he said to her mom how are you how are you doing and she said son I can finally be me you don't want to wait till you have Alzheimer's you don't want to wait till you have a major health crisis to say I can finally be me this man stood there with tears in his eyes in this mba class and said from here on in he said after hearing what you talked about it resonated with me the story of my mother saying I can finally be me I'm going back to my place of work I'm going back to my family back to where I live and I'm only going to be me and I was just it was a profound moment and as I looked around the room I saw some of these accomplished grown men in tears and so I knew then that well I would think this is a simplistic message it's obviously a message that needs to keep being told so what you see here is what you get and there are people who work with me in this audience and they will tell you this is exactly who I am so how did I get to be this way how did I get to be confident enough to stand here for 18 minutes of Babylon without having rehearsed it well I have to take you back to when I was 11 and it was in November and within Dublin Ireland and I started my schooling in a Catholic all-girls school run by nuns and it never was a good experience in fact I used to fear going to school when I look at kids now I my youngest daughters a teacher and how creative the classroom is I think oh my god I could have thrived in that kind of environment but that wasn't the environment I went to school in and in this particular day after having had been there for several years and having you know been hit by rulers and just generally being squashed I was dragged out in front of a class a client my own class at 11 years of age or a young girl and you don't want to be seen out you know you want to hide you're just trying to find yourself and I was preceded that the nuns basically talked about all my faults about how stupid I was and basically a waste of space my soul was ripped out I went home and I have this I had this I have still half as I believe in spirituality I have this grandmother who basically taught the Sun shined out of me she just adored me I knew I was the favorite she decided that she would dress up she lived across the street she was a Republican but she actually looked like the Queen and so she dressed up put her brooch on hat on the whole nine yards and forced me back to the school and I didn't want to go but I would never disappoint her so I went back and she proceeded to insist that the head nun and everybody else in the whole class were in the room and then she said I want you all to be silent and I want you to hear me and she proceeded to talk about the real me the creative me then curiosity the world that I dreamed of and who I was and then she turned around and she threatened every single one of them that if they actually touched the hair of my head that they would not wish to be breathing in the next moment what I saw in that moment was a couple of things I had a champion and a mentor and I think everybody needs that in life but I also saw that you pullian comes in different forms it comes in ways that are passive-aggressive it comes in ways that are in authority figures but when you stand up to it when you actually show the real you you'd be surprised at how they cower and how they go back from that moment on nobody ever did that again to me and I was never not my true self that's not to say things got easier in fact I used to have a chair outside the classroom so I was actually truly self-taught but my whole life I have lived to be just myself and also what I have expected is an extraordinary life and I've gotten one so I wanted to do a TED talk Here I am I wanted to see the inside of Coco Chanel's private apartment that's not open to the public I got there I wanted to be on Oprah's Book Club I got there I wanted to run a foundation for women and children I got there one of the saddest moments was when I was in an art gallery in New York and I saw six beautiful tapestries and when I read the little piece that tells you about the tapestries these were the first pieces of art that were ever claimed to be created by women and I sat there and I wept and I thought all of the stories that haven't been told all of the art that hasn't been created all of the science that hasn't been innovated has been suppressed for centuries finally now we're coming out women are coming out they're creating their writing they're being involved in politics in business but we need more of you and you need to start living your life and being yourself you need to lean in and take it on you need to be on the cliff you need to do what I'm doing right now and that's take a chance you'll fail you'll be vulnerable but in the end you will have extraordinary things happen to you I decided today to dedicate this TED talk to someone that I only know on the periphery and that's Jodi Ross she's the daughter of one of my staff one of my team Mary Theresa Ross and Jody has been in the iwk for most of her life she's been very ill and then she transitioned to the adult system and I don't think a month goes by that Mary Theresa doesn't talk about Jody being in you know in the ID of you in the hospital and with some illness or another and this week Jody arrested and basically died for 23 minutes but they brought her back but they put her in an induced coma and she was in that coma for a couple of days and all of us have been praying really hard for her family and you know really really empathizing what's going on and so last night I had a very busy day yesterday and I thought oh my god I have to do a TED talk today what am I going to show we're going to do this and I was looking for real inspiration and last night I got a text very late and it said Jody has come out of her coma and she turned to her mother and said it's not my time to go I still got a lot of to do now if Jodi Ross can do that that's that's true courage courage you you own courage you give you give away to bullies when you give permission to be bullied expectations are something you have to put upon yourself they're not from somebody else but all of us live in a world where we're expected to be a certain way look a certain way act a certain way and I'm here to say you have to do the work on the inside not the outside you have to start understanding what your personal Y is and what I mean by that is watch your juice what do you make time for in your day more than any other thing in your life follow that thread when I talk like this and I'm in universities I see particularly young women come to me and say I don't even know why I'm studying this course I don't even know why I'm here and I go we'll start at the beginning start doing your homework on yourself life is I'm not sure why people are so afraid because life is here to be lived it's here to be a joy you heard Holly speak about being open I have always been open and I fully expect an extraordinary life but doesn't mean I don't work hard and it doesn't mean when you're being authentic that you're going to get everything you want what it means is that you're authentic in what you do you're real and you don't worry about what size you are you don't worry about how you look or how much of a fool you might make of yourself you have to be willing to do that you have to be willing to be vulnerable and to give of yourself and to put yourself out and also to be very grateful for what happens to you I can't count the amount of experiences I've had I'm an immigrant when I was going to school they said I had two choices probably in their in their estimation limited estimation they said you either will probably go into politics but more than likely you'll end up in jail well I came to Canada Canada's been very good to me and it was a wide-open blank canvas and for someone like me to end up having opportunities like I've had working at the CBC and going across this a magnificent country and meeting some of the leaders of this country meeting celebrities even mr. dressup I saw his ticket wrong all of that stuff I mean for somebody who is not from here to have those opportunities it's pretty extraordinary and I'm just ordinary I'm just like everybody else the difference being I have decided and made the decision internally to always follow my inner gut my inner instincts and to be myself and if people either like that or they don't not everybody's going to love you but you've got to start standing up women especially you have to become your own self you have to find it within you make the choice and be confident enough to stand on the ground as I say in my boots and be powerful and say Here I am and I'm here for a reason I'm here for a purpose and I'm here to enjoy life so I put the challenge out to all you on in honor of someone like Jodie who's at the hospital right now in Halifax fighting for her life but willing to say I'm back and I'm going to do this if she could be in any one of our shoes right now she would give us all to be there but she isn't but she's still being her and she's still living her life the best way she can so I encourage all of you and I challenge you especially young women take it hold it go for the gold go for everything you want in life don't hold back don't assume you don't know you think you're not as smart as the next person but mostly more than anything be real and remember those tapestries remember all the lost hundreds of years of brilliance that could have been in this world had we not have been so suppressed and take it from here out and change this world starting with changing yourself and being real thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 64,365

Rating: 4.7951107 out of 5

Keywords: Live, tedx talk, tedx, tedx talks, IWK Health Centre (Hospital), Halifax (City/Town/Village), TEDxMSVUWomen, Nova Scotia (Canadian Province), Canada (Country), ted, ted talk, Self, ted x, ted talks, English Language (Human Language), Authentic Self, Mount Saint Vincent University (Organization), TEDx

Id: wa9LmKL7tJ8

Length: 13min 4sec (784 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 07 2013