The hidden power of not (always) fitting in. | Marianne Cantwell | TEDxNorwichED

[Music] this talk is for those of us who are good at looking like we fit in the different worlds we move in so beat your industry or social group different interests you have or just the stage you stand on it's like from the outside it looks like you fit but secretly a little piece of you never feels you a hundred percent fit into any of them now if you've ever had an inkling of feeling that way you're not alone I mean I felt the same there are definitely two of us and I've spent the last eight years helping thousands of people get paid without compromising their personality and doing that I discovered a few things that surprised me about being this way you see for me not quite fitting into any one identity started from the moment I could talk see I was born in Australia but my father's English and my mum was from a little island of Mauritius so I grew up speaking English and French with a sort of weird accent that didn't really fit anywhere in the world especially not where I grew up but the first time I really thought about this topic was one day when I was 16 so being a lifelong nerd at 16 I was at the top of my class along with this other boy and one day my teacher took me aside and said Maryann you and I have something in common we're both generalists at which point I thought great that sounds like a good word and then he continued now the other boy he's different from us he is a specialist and the one thing I've learned is that the world rewards specialists not generalists that's why he's going to do really well hearing these words sixteen-year-old me just thought well he's right you know my teacher must be right if I want to fit and thrive as an adult I'm gonna have to focus on one thing you really make it my mission to fit cleanly into one identity and leave old messy me behind and so that's what I did I went to university I graduated moved across the world to London so I had to rise in the work world and I mean fitting in it kind of worked like on the outside I was alright at playing the part sometimes but to be honest on the inside I was stuck like feeling sort of smaller and smaller by that point I was googling for better options like every night but there were no ideas on how to fix this I mean all the advice was the usual clichés like you find your one big passion or find your tribe like seriously what do you do when you've never seen a place that you completely fit you know I'm not just one where you kind of look like you do and so a decade ago I decided to take this seriously and I asked myself if it was possible to create a career where you don't have to fit into a box and then I quit my job to make that happen as my own boss since then I've experimented with different free-range ways of working I've run my business from everywhere places like Bali and Costa Rica or New York and London I've run these global online festivals where brilliant thinkers share how they handle these questions but most of all I've been privileged to poke inside the heads of thousands of people who feel like this and the biggest thing I've learnt is this we are told through our parents education media and more that we live in a black and white world where the game is to get good at one thing you're fit into one identity like what one thing will you be when you grow up for heard that right but some of us just aren't that person at heart and so that advice leaves us feeling stuck but what if the mistake isn't in how you are but in how you were told you should be Graham green said human nature is not black and white but black and gray guys this is how we are as humans this is how we actually are as humans and you're realizing that is a game changer because it means you haven't been getting it wrong that pull inside that was saying it has to be another way other than to squish myself into this one dimensional one-track version of me it's not wrong we're simply not given a model for the world that lets that way of being thrive and to be clear not only is this way of being a thing there's a word for it liminal this is my favorite word and it describes a state of in betweenness like you're not quite one thing but not quite another you're on the borderland a part of this but also a part of that of becoming and when I first heard this word I just thought wow that describes me and not just the big life stuff but say right now on my bookshelf the Sex and the City novel is cuddling up to a behavioral economics textbook and I love pho for them equally right it's actually a word for this you know a great example of liminality would be vampires they're not quite alive but they're not quite dead they're not quite human but not quite other they're not fully evil but they're not all good they're in between worlds it's like they don't fit into any one space but why would I mention that here well because it's no mistake that over the past few decades vampires and zombies have been the topic of some of the cult TV series with the biggest and most dedicated fan bases you see we watch what we desire to be but aren't allowed to be and the one thing a society does not allow us to be is liminal and in a world full of black and white messages that are you in or out with us or against us this or that then this has a big pull and heads up now said it you'll see it everywhere I mean so many popular dramas do the same like Breaking Bad it's a runaway hit that revolves around the question is the main character a family man or something else or both yeah that show is literally about liminality you see we watch this stuff whenever we turn on our TVs or load up our Netflix but then we go back to real life and you squish ourselves down be one thing fit in your box millions of us are doing this but it doesn't have to be that way see here's a different model the way we're told the world works is kind of like a bunch of continents now these continents could be different industries or identities so if this was careers it could be here is continent lawyer here's continent small business owner here's continent and a cupcake Baker or something and your role we're told is to find the continent where you really fit get the visa learn the customs rise the ranks by being the one who fits best but that's a losing game if you're liminal because you don't quite feel like you fit so your only option other than to pretend is to look for a continent where you fit better but even though that other world might seem exciting at first soon you get disappointed right like it wasn't quite as you as you thought but you have to leave another bit of yourself behind and so the cycle continues but what's the alternative well it's to create your own island an island where every bit of you fits and you create this island just off the shore of your favorite continent and it takes the best of that world and fills out the rest with the best of the other worlds you have a foot in so these could be bits of your personality or background or something you can't help being so let me just give you an example consider an island where you do business strategy for people who run their own thing now the continent approach would be to look for others who do this and tell yourself should be more like them maybe Facebook stalk them or something here you get to create your own version so your island could be populated by the fact that you're a highly sensitive person in a field that's traditionally more brash could have some of the storytelling you can't help do a sprinkle of your travel lust a light dusting of being a straight talker and so on and by the way that's a fair description of one of my islands and I couldn't have found that job description anywhere right I did look and that's the bottom line you don't find your place as a liminal person you create it so as I said that I realized this could sound like isn't this a compromise like a workaround to deal with your weirdness wouldn't it be better not be like this in the first place well when you take the things it means to be liminal like having a foot in more than one place and bridging worlds a slightly different personality to others around you maybe not focusing on one idea forever to the exclusion of anything else when you take those things and apply them to yourself we can feel shame like we're getting it wrong being weird not doing the grown-up thing right but here's the thing if you take those same traits and apply them to others you know who that describes it describes leaders it describes change makers innovators creators it describes the very people we're telling our children to aspire to be and they get there through the traits that we tell ourselves to squish down and hide our you take successful innovators innovation does not happen by some guy sitting in a silent white room for weeks just waiting for inspiration to strike that's kind of sounds like how writer's block happens but innovation however happens from a through well generally from an idea being taken from one world and used in another like say a tiny camera with a tiny plastic lens that didn't sell to camera buyers but put it on the back of a mobile phone and bingo like similarly people who create movements who will see at the forefront of their field that he'd get there by being like everyone else in that continent they created their own island off the coast of that space movements are created by lemon or people so your liminal edge could be something about background or maybe a personality trait that you could hide away for being too different but instead you step into like this guy Ricky who organized conferences where world leading specialists gave insightful speeches but Ricky well he had a personality quirk a little different to others around him in patience he was a conference organizer who got really bored by long speeches so he started giving speakers shorter and shorter time slots shorter than anything on the scene at the time and the little-known TED conference started to take off that's why we're sitting here today you see this is not about being some sort of rebel who's all different for the sake of it being liminal it's like being an inside outsider with one foot in the world you want to move in and a foot elsewhere and you get to the side where those borders life from introverts to extrovert every shade of gray in between this applies it's always those pieces with so tempted to hide in the shadows that turn out to be our edge when we bring them into the light oh Jesus I just want to stop you're a sec and say you might be listening to this and thinking this is inspiring stuff hopefully oh I like these ideas I'm totally going to tell my kids about them but realistically maybe you already are a leader or you're just somewhere you've worked hard for right and there can be a sense that maybe this is for someone younger or newer without so much to lose not me not now and I get this I really get this because to be honest with you that is how I felt a few years ago see everything had come together with my work finally after a lot of hard work I had a business doing stuff I loved with great people living between beautiful countries and then one day to my publishers surprise I found myself the author of a best-selling book related to this and suddenly things exploded like those opportunities I was circling for years were just no pinging in my inbox it was like my little island I created was attractive and I everyone wanted to come in and visit and so I did just what you'd expect at that point when my star was like at its highest and I had a breakdown I disappeared from the scene very quietly and turned down everything from keynote invitations I mean I didn't create anything new in that time either I just I just couldn't but the weird thing was at that same time the National Press saw me is this sort of expert in entrepreneurship and location independence I was kind of like the poster girl for digital nomads and every time I get a call I would think why are they talking to me I mean yes I had a business that I was running from around the world but I didn't feel like the person the magazine's wanted to write about I mean if the starters digital nomads are supposed to be these sort of frugal travelers without a home who live out of there perfectly packed suitcase with that kind of two t-shirts or here or something or as I am terrible at packing like seriously it's not a key strength my hobby is interior design I can't stop buying cushions and so I felt like my messy liminal self didn't have any way to breathe I was like they've got this one wrong and even want to be what they think I am just to be clear if that happened earlier it wouldn't been a problem right I just would have stepped into my differences without a second thought it wouldn't have even bothered me but not now you see in my mind it was fine to be all messy and liminal when you were the scrappy upstart but there was still that 16 year old girl who believed her teacher who believed that proper success meant fitting into one place properly and staying there others would kill for that opportunity for heard that rap play the part but I couldn't keep talking about this stuff while feeling that way so I took time out and went on a journey to figure this out and it finally clicked one day that the people I most admired people at the top of their field I'm talking real household names they didn't do things the way I was telling myself I had to do them now they didn't let success on their Island turn it into a trap that defined like who they could be or the one way to do things instead they turn their island into a boat and they moved it along with them take Elizabeth Gilbert author of Eat Pray Love at your major bestseller about a part of her life now she could have ridden off that one story forever right gone on the speaker circuit talked about that one thing on a loop but instead she holed up in a small town and wrote a novel about 19th century plant collectors and then went on the Ted stage talked about creativity released a book on that and you know the funny thing Eat Pray Love is how most people first heard of Liz Gilbert but that wasn't even her first success the 1990s movie coyote ugly was based on an article she wrote about her experiences working in a bar and imagine if she'd stop them if she said oh but writers like me only meant to take these steps from here I might feel too different but now I'm too far along hide all that away he no instead it was about moving forward with her Island and as a result she's made a much bigger impact than had she stopped and said that was it you got one go now stay still it doesn't have to be that dramatic of course there were certainly more subtle evolutions out there but this theme was consistent among anyone I admired who was world class and what they did you see up until then I thought that embracing your differences and your liminal nature was kind of a tool like a nifty marketing approach you'd use to stand out or get an edge when you were younger or new I thought it was a tool but what I didn't realize is it's who we are and right now is your time as a liminal person right now the world is changing so fast there is no way to predict what specialism or skill will be in demand except for one thing the ability to bridge genres to navigate industries and change to be in a word liminal and that's what you have already and what's more the world needs you at a time when the world is putting up its borders and trying to divide people into this or that we need people like you who can straddle those borders and bring in fresh perspectives we need you now more than ever so if you like these ideas the one thing you can do is live them because it's hard to inspire other generations and do so authentically when you think there's no option than to be stuck for ourselves I mean imagine if my teacher when I was 16 had known we talked about here today here's what he might have said maryann you and I have something in common we're liminal and the world won't always understand that but I want you to know it's a valuable way to be and I just take my word for it the examples and islands are all around when you know how to look so I don't hide that away you see you won't succeed despite your liminality but because of it and I say the same to you if you've thought that's me even once here then know that you're not alone you're in good company along with the innovators and change makers of the world or simply those with a quirk who in the past would have hidden their true colors but who know their time is now because you belong here as does every part of you thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 350,913

Rating: 4.8745022 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Life, Career, Development, Education, Freedom, Life Development, Life Hack, Personal education, Personal growth, Work

Id: cnooCepNZv4

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 03 2017