The Life Altering Power of Perspective | Angela Popplewell | TEDxUofW

hi I'm wondering if you guys wouldn't mind if before I get started if I could just snap a quick selfie is that cool I know hashtag I'm a millennial sorry okay alright ready if everyone could look you know right there one two three one more one two cool awesome thanks for that hi so I'm going to start today sharing a little bit of my story that rewinds back to probably when I was most of your age I when I was 22 about a month after graduating from college I bought a one-way ticket to New York City and during this time I didn't have a job lined up I didn't really know anybody in New York City very well at the time I didn't really have a plan and my parents who have always been very supportive of my ideas we're like oh my goodness Angela can you at least have an interview lined up please don't do this we're going to worry about you so be compromised and I said I'd get an interview so I spent a few weeks sending a cover letter to anyone that I could find in New York City that was looking for any kind of job and I recently found this cover letter because you know Gmail doesn't delete anything and I wish that I could burn it but it has an electronic paper trail and it basically pitches myself as I had no prior work experience to this and I'm applying for jobs in Manhattan saying you know I was a baton twirler at the University so I'm not shy because I twirled in front of 80,000 people or I'm a barista at Starbucks so I deal with really demanding people and I keep them happy so I'm really good with people you should trust me things like that I mean come on I finally got one response after three weeks and the editor in chief and a magazine emailed me back and said you are the least qualified out of hundreds of applicants but we're so intrigued by your cover letter can you come in tomorrow at 4:00 and I said this is on Thursday night at 7:00 p.m. and I say yes I'll be there tomorrow at 4:00 I fly up there I end up landing the job and spoiler alert nine years later I've had an amazing experience I live in Brooklyn with my amazing husband ty and our seven week old son Theodore and this whole story is it's I'm proud of it it sounds bold but if I'm being really honest with you it was completely routed out of fear and I was running from something you see prior to New York City I lived in some communities in India with the Gypsy community in Romania this is really pixelated because it was taken on a disposable camera in 2006 technology has come a long way and I I felt so alive there I had never really left Tallahassee and gone abroad like that before and the people I met there were so inspiring their stories are incredible that the circumstances they live in and they thrive in and these marginalized communities taught me so much about the human race I felt so alive and then I came back home and I started to you know sleeping and I had a featherbed and i had lattes and i had all these things that seemed very frilly and i started to feel very depressed and very depleted i started to feel a lot of feelings of feeling guilty or pity for the people or i was i born here and and the people that i fell in love with in india romania are born there and it's so unfair and you know in all honesty I felt really dark and depleted in all the ways it's really obnoxious for a privileged Westerner to feel dark and depleted you know what I mean and I began to realize that something was so broken within me I didn't really know how to function so New York City was my last-ditch effort trying to reawaken my heartbeat so to speak I had just I think what really had happened is I kind of reversed the narrative I went abroad to try to get to know situations and help people but what had really happened was I had kind of turned into this person suffering from a superhero complex and I was trying to save these people which sounds really disgusting I admit and in my line of work that's a very vulnerable thing to admit that I can sometimes suffer from superhero complex in the nonprofit sector but it happened so as fate would have it though in New York City I had one of the greatest privileges of my life I befriended a community that ultimately this group of friends was responsible for building out the robust model of what 100 cameras is today and 100 camera is what we seek to do is we work with kids living in marginalized communities all across the world and we teach them that their perspective matters and we teach them that the way they see their world is important they can capture realities in those communities in ways that I as a Western foreigner with a camera from the outside looking in just simply cannot do they can tell in such a true untainted way that still shows that life is beautiful to them they're documenting things in their world that shouldn't be that way kids are walking hours to get water that often times does not clean water they're going to schools and huts they're actually they've actually suffered from what starvation feels like we know life shouldn't be this way for them but they're showing it in a way that has such hope and joy and has such a dignity as a fellow human and I fell in love with it you know they they laughed coming back from the schoolyard just like I did in high school and they run through fields and I think that ball is made of like trash kind of wrapped up with duct tape but they're playing soccer they laughed and they joked around and what happened when I saw these images from the first project in South Sudan I'll never forget it I'm in a tiny Manhattan apartment looking at this idea that had just been put into action with our first project in South Sudan and I responded in a way of I want to get back to that I want to get back to there's so much hope in these communities and there's so much that our human race is capable of I want to get back to the glass as half-full I want to become alive again that was the first thing that happened and the second thing that happened when I was looking at these images is what can we do to empower these kids to realize that this perspective is possible to keep as they grow up into an adult what can we do to help keep their joy alive and my favorite part about our model is that we then sell the kids images and that money goes back to their communities to fund their own lifeline supplies their own medical supplies their own educational supplies because we want to be a part of teaching them the full circle if they can be the change makers in their community we want to reverse the concept of Western aid and how they experience it so we've done that we've done projects all over the world we built a robust curriculum we've been pretty reputable but I have to stand before you today and say these kids have taught me way more than I ever possibly teach them and it's broken down into three things they've taught me about perspective and I think this is so applicable in our situation as a generation because that selfie I took when I first walked out here why did I do that just because I want a document later on my channels that I matter look at me so cool and I'm in a blazer and look at all these people at a TEDx talk and I'm just trying to establish myself right and this isn't an attack on selfies I take selfies you take selfies we all take selfies we love selfies but it is a metaphor at something that's a part of our culture we're all trying to establish a narrative we're all trying to establish and make a difference and create a mark and this is a good thing but if it's not taken care of and it's not fostered well it can easily become like my superhero complex where I just the narrative to be about me and I twist it to be so dark that I'll end up being dark and depressed and depleted and paralyzed and not actually able to make the difference that I set out to do but these kids they've taught me so much more about how not to do that to start off with they've taught me that we control the perspective sounds very simple but it's actually really hard to eval our kids have survived some of the gravest circumstances you could ever imagine survive civil wars that have taken their whole family and left them as orphans actually have survived starvation and not knowing when the next meal is going to come from they've been Street trafficked they've lived under bridges they've experienced horrific crimes they've seen some of the worst diseases lost people to diseases that we've had vaccines for for decades since before I was born they've lived some some tough stuff we have one student his name is Jean Marie he's pretty awesome he is a part of our project that we did in Baltimore Maryland with a refugee youth population and Jean Marie I'll never forget this kid he's telling me his story and he as a refugee from New Guinea he and his family were of great political stature very respected in the community very wealthy but as the political climate started to change it became very unsafe for his family to be there so unsafe he actually remembers running through the bushes the bush in Africa chased by machine-gun men with machine guns as a child and all of these stories so they basically pack up and leave overnight he doesn't get to say goodbye to his friends his schoolmates a lot of his family members they bounce around a few countries finally landing in Baltimore Maryland thinking that he's arrived into the Promised Land right but he doesn't realize that then it's going to be a whole process of assimilating he enrolls in school and the teachers are teaching in English she doesn't understand fluey English so he teaches himself fluent English later gets grade so high he makes the honor roll mind you deals with bullying Beals deals with being misunderstood deals with his family coming from one of being respected to his mother and father getting odd jobs around town wherever they can but what he tells me is in his photography he's really attracted to the idea of contrast because the darkness in his photos he says the darkness represents the bad things that have happened in his life the hard things the things that he wishes never happened and that he could forget but the light in his photography represents the good things the things he wants to remember and he said I always want to live in the light I always want to focus on the light and what he teaches me so profoundly in these words is that it's actually not our circumstances that have the power to control us or to affect us our circumstances really have no actual power to define anything about us or to shape us it's how we choose to respond it's how we choose to act and it's how we choose to interpret what happens to us that is what shapes us it's the only thing that has power to define who we are and these kids have taught me that if if we choose to the way that we respond to the hard things in life or the good things in life can help us live in a way that we can choose hope light joy and gratefulness secondly our students have taught me that choosing the positive perspective is not always easy we all know this is true it's not and I think what they've taught me is that the sooner that we can actually acknowledge that yes life is hard sometimes we've all gotten older by this time in our lives we've experienced a lot of disappointment a lot of hurt maybe betrayal we've maybe experienced a lot of loss some sort of suffering I think we all could agree that we have seen happen in our lives this is the reality the sooner that we can just stop trying to deny that that's the reality and accept it the sooner we can actually start to lean into what we can do about it and for example we did a project in Cuba and we know the situation in Cuba resources can be somewhat limited it's a complicated situation one of our students as we're walking through town during one of the classes is having a conversation with another one of our co-founders in Spanish and the conversation basically goes like this she says hey what happens in one of these cars break okay we all know the cars look old they look like they're straight out of the 1950s I Love Lucy show so they're probably a little hard to keep running so she says what happens when one of your cars breaks and he says we fix it cool well what happens when it breaks again and he says we fix it okay well what happens when it breaks again and you don't know if you can fix it we fix it okay what happens if it breaks and you don't have a part to fix it with he says we figure out how to build a new part to fix it and in that I realize is such a simple metaphor our students are so wise beyond their years that they're not trying to change the fact that something's broken they're not trying to deny that something is broken we live in a world of wars of pain of hate crimes what is it even about life is not as it should be we can all agree on that it can be broken what he does is he instead tries to focus on what he can do about it and what I've learned in that is that we have to just mourn the pain we can't silence it being positive doesn't mean that we just stay up here happy all the time it means we actually look the Lions in the eye that have made us realize that life isn't always easy life isn't always what I want it to be and the sooner we can acknowledge that the sooner we can actually do something to fix it finally students have taught me that a life load filled with positivity is built on the little instances it's the little things it's all the little instances that have happened in you and my life I think that was grammatically correct in our lives up till now that shape who we are right so then it's all of the little things that happen today tomorrow next week next year that are going to add up and shape our future self and this is the self that we have the power to create right now the past is the past we can mourn what hurt us we can celebrate what was beautiful but who we are today is because of all the lessons we learned from that but what we have the control to create is what happens in the future the future version of ourself we do this exercise in the field it's literally my favorite day of our whole courses and what we do in it is something called the mind map exercise and this is a simple process where we ask our students to chart their life rating every year up until their current year reading every year is either a high or a low then we ask them to go through and process and write down why did they label it a high and why did they label it a low and it's fascinating in all of our projects in so many different cultural backgrounds in India Cuba South Sudan New York City Baltimore etc in all of our projects it's fascinating the kids rate what is high in their life is something that I would think was really low you know it's they experienced some kind of loss they lost both of their parents but because it brought them to the children's home where they now have a family that loves them they rate it as a high out of gratefulness or they survived a civil war or they finally found food that year and they had a food supply things like that that actually point them to a high because of their perspective they took from it because of the posture of how they chose to respond what happened in their life they were able to look back and rate that year as a high that's mind-blowing to me and it's something that is also so very life-changing that how we choose to interpret what happens to us and the perspective we choose is ultimately what defines us you know the strength of our students yes they've taught me we can control the perspectives yes they've taught me that it's going to always be easy to do so to choose the positive perspective they've taught me that it's the little things that add up that's what creates the bigger picture no pun intended but they've also taught me their strength has taught me that it is my responsibility to choose this it is on me to choose this perspective choosing hope gratefulness joy is free and it is available to every human in the human race but it is up to me to choose that posture and so I ask you as I asked myself what would it do if we shifted our narrative what could we do as a collective unit in this room what impacts could we make if we all chose this power of perspective to choose positivity to choose hope to choose gratefulness to choose grace to choose joy what could we do as Margaret Mead has so famously said never doubt what a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can do to change the world indeed it is the only thing that ever has and so I asked you to consider what the kids of 100 cameras have taught me I ask you to invite that end and we can consider what change we could create together because it has to and it should start with us thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 79,754

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, Change, Communication, Community, Consciousness, Impact, Personal growth, Photography

Id: rtv8x__01iE

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 21 2016