The difference between healthy and unhealthy love
So when you think about a child, a close friend, or a romantic partner, the word "love" probably comes to mind, and instantly other emotions rush in: joy and hope, excitement, trust and security, and yes, sometimes sadness and disappointment. There might not be a word in the dictionary that more of us are connected to than love.
Yet, given its central importance in our lives, isn't it interesting that we're never explicitly taught how to love? We build friendships, navigate early romantic relationships, get married and bring babies home from the hospital with the expectation that we'll figure it out. But the truth is, we often harm and disrespect the ones we love. It can be subtle things like guilting a friend into spending time with you or sneaking a peak at your partner's texts or shaming a child for their lack of effort at school. 100 percent of us will be on the receiving end of unhealthy relationship behaviors and 100 percent of us will do unhealthy things. It's part of being human. In its worst form, the harm we inflict on loved ones shows up as abuse and violence, and relationship abuse is something that one in three women and one in four men will experience in their lifetime. Now, if you're like most people, when you hear those stats, you'll go, "Oh, no, no, no, that would never happen to me." It's instinctual to move away from the words "abuse" and "violence," to think that they happen to someone else somewhere else. But the truth is, unhealthy relationships and abuse are all around us. We just call them different things and ignore the connection. Abuse sneaks up on us disguised in unhealthy love.
I work for an organization called One Love started by a family whose daughter Yeardley was killed by her ex-boyfriend. This was a tragedy no one saw coming, but when they looked back, they realized the warning signs were there just no one understood what they were seeing. Called crazy or drama or too much drinking, his actions weren't understood to be what they really were, which was clear signs of danger. Her family realized that if anyone had been educated about these signs, her death could have been prevented. So today we're on a mission to make sure that others have the information that Yeardley and her friends didn't. We have three main goals: give all of us a language for talking about a subject that's quite awkward and uncomfortable to discuss; empower a whole front line, namely friends, to help; and, in the process, improve all of our ability to love better.
To do this, it's always important to start by illuminating the unhealthy signs that we frequently miss, and our work really focuses on creating content to start conversations with young people. As you'd expect, most of our content is pretty serious, given the subject at hand, but today I'm going to use one of our more light-hearted yet still thought-provoking pieces, "The Couplets," to illuminate five markers of unhealthy love.
The first is intensity.
Katie Hood: Anybody recognize that? I don't know. I do. Abusive relationships don't start out abusive. They start out exciting and exhilarating. There's an intensity of affection and emotion, a rush. It feels really good. You feel so lucky, like you've hit the jackpot. But in unhealthy love, these feelings shift over time from exciting to overwhelming and maybe a little bit suffocating. You feel it in your gut. Maybe it's when your new boyfriend or girlfriend says "I love you" faster than you were ready for or starts showing up everywhere, texting and calling a lot. Maybe they're impatient when you're slow to respond, even though they know you had other things going on that day. It's important to remember that it's not how a relationship starts that matters, it's how it evolves. It's important in the early days of a new relationship to pay attention to how you're feeling. Are you comfortable with the pace of intimacy? Do you feel like you have space and room to breathe? It's also really important to start practicing using your voice to talk about your own needs. Are your requests respected?
A second marker is isolation. If you ask me, isolation is one of the most frequently missed and misunderstood signs of unhealthy love. Why? Because every new relationship starts out with this intense desire to spend time together, it's easy to miss when something shifts. Isolation creeps in when your new boyfriend or girlfriend starts pulling you away from your friends and family, your support system, and tethering you more tightly to them. They might say things like, "Why do you hang out with them? They're such losers" about your best friends, or, "They want us to break up. They're totally against us" about your family. Isolation is about sowing seeds of doubt about everyone from your prerelationship life. Healthy love includes independence, two people who love spending time together but who stay connected to the people and activities they cared about before. While at first you might spend every waking minute together, over time maintaining independence is key. You do this by making plans with friends and sticking to them and encouraging your partner to do the same.
A third marker of unhealthy love is extreme jealousy.As the honeymoon period begins to fade, extreme jealousy can creep in. Your partner might become more demanding, needing to know where you are and who you're with all the time, or they might start following you everywhere, online and off. Extreme jealousy also brings with it possessiveness and mistrust, frequent accusations of flirting with other people or cheating, and refusal to listen to you when you tell them they have nothing to worry about and that you only love them. Jealousy is a part of any human relationship, but extreme jealousy is different. There's a threatening, desperate and angry edge to it. Love shouldn't feel like this.
A fourth marker is belittling. Yeah, hmm. In unhealthy love, words are used as weapons. Conversations that used to be fun and lighthearted turn mean and embarrassing. Maybe your partner makes fun of you in a way that hurts, or maybe they tell stories and jokes for laughs at your expense. When you try to explain that your feelings have been hurt, they shut you down and accuse you of overreacting. "Why are you so sensitive? What's your problem. Give me a break." You are silenced by these words. It seems pretty obvious, but your partner should have your back. Their words should build you up, not break you down. They should keep your secrets and be loyal. They should make you feel more confident, not less.
Finally, a fifth marker: volatility.
Frequent breakups and makeups, high highs and low lows: as tension rises, so does volatility. Tearful, frustrated fights followed by emotional makeups, hateful and hurtful comments like, "You're worthless, I'm not even sure why I'm with you!" followed quickly by apologies and promises it will never happen again. By this point, you've been so conditioned to this relationship roller coaster that you may not realize how unhealthy and maybe even dangerous your relationship has become.
It can be really hard to see when unhealthy love turns towards abuse, but it's fair to say that the more of these markers your relationship might have, the more unhealthy and maybe dangerous your relationship could be. And if your instinct is to break up and leave, which is advice so many of us give our friends when they're in unhealthy relationships, that's not always the best advice. Time of breakup can be a real trigger for violence. If you fear you might be headed towards abuse or in abuse, you need to consult with experts to get the advice on how to leave safely.
But it's not just about romantic relationships and it's not just about violence. Understanding the signs of unhealthy love can help you audit and understand nearly every relationship in your life. For the first time, you might understand why you're disappointed in a friendship or why every interaction with a certain family member leaves you discouraged and anxious. You might even begin to see how your own intensity and jealousy is causing problems with colleagues at work. Understanding is the first step to improving, and while you can't make every unhealthy relationship healthy some you're going to have to leave behind you can do your part every day to do relationships better. And here's the exciting news: it's actually not rocket science. Open communication, mutual respect, kindness, patience we can practice these things every day.
And while practice will definitely make you better, I have to promise you it's also not going to make you perfect. I do this for a living and every day I think and talk about healthy relationships, and still I do unhealthy things. Just the other day as I was trying to shuttle my four kids out the door amidst quarreling, squabbling and complaints about breakfast, I completely lost it. With an intentionally angry edge, I screamed, "Everybody just shut up and do what I say! You are the worst! I am going to take away screen time and dessert and anything else you could possibly ever enjoy in life!"
Anybody been there?Volatility, belittling. My oldest son turned around and looked at me, and said, "Mom, that's not love." For a minute, I really wanted to kill him for calling me out. Trust me. But then I gathered myself and I thought, you know what, I'm actually proud. I'm proud that he has a language to make me pause. I want all of my kids to understand what the bar should be for how they're treated and to have a language and a voice to use when that bar is not met versus just accepting it. For too long, we've treated relationships as a soft topic, when relationship skills are one of the most important and hard to build things in life. Not only can understanding unhealthy signs help you avoid the rabbit hole that leads to unhealthy love, but understanding and practicing the art of being healthy can improve nearly every aspect of your life. I'm completely convinced that while love is an instinct and an emotion, the ability to love better is a skill we can all build and improve on over time.
This could be why you're depressed or anxious
For a really long time, I had two mysteries that were hanging over me. I didn't understand them and, to be honest, I was quite afraid to look into them. The first mystery was, I'm 40 years old, and all throughout my lifetime, year after year, serious depression and anxiety have risen, in the United States, in Britain, and across the Western world. And I wanted to understand why. Why is this happening to us? Why is it that with each year that passes, more and more of us are finding it harder to get through the day? And I wanted to understand this because of a more personal mystery.
When I was a teenager, I remember going to my doctor and explaining that I had this feeling, like pain was leaking out of me. I couldn't control it, I didn't understand why it was happening, I felt quite ashamed of it. And my doctor told me a story that I now realize was well-intentioned, but quite oversimplified. Not totally wrong. My doctor said, "We know why people get like this. Some people just naturally get a chemical imbalance in their heads you're clearly one of them. All we need to do is give you some drugs, it will get your chemical balance back to normal."
So I started taking a drug called Paxil or Seroxat, it's the same thing with different names in different countries. And I felt much better, I got a real boost. But not very long afterwards, this feeling of pain started to come back. So I was given higher and higher doses until, for 13 years, I was taking the maximum possible dose that you're legally allowed to take. And for a lot of those 13 years, and pretty much all the time by the end, I was still in a lot of pain. And I started asking myself, "What's going on here? Because you're doing everything you're told to do by the story that's dominating the culture why do you still feel like this?"
So to get to the bottom of these two mysteries, for a book that I've written I ended up going on a big journey all over the world, I traveled over 40,000 miles. I wanted to sit with the leading experts in the world about what causes depression and anxiety and crucially, what solves them, and people who have come through depression and anxiety and out the other side in all sorts of ways. And I learned a huge amount from the amazing people I got to know along the way.
But I think at the heart of what I learned is, so far, we have scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety. Two of them are indeed in our biology. Your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems, though they don't write your destiny. And there are real brain changes that can happen when you become depressed that can make it harder to get out. But most of the factors that have been proven to cause depression and anxiety are not in our biology. They are factors in the way we live. And once you understand them, it opens up a very different set of solutions that should be offered to people alongside the option of chemical antidepressants.
For example, if you're lonely, you're more likely to become depressed. If, when you go to work, you don't have any control over your job, you've just got to do what you're told, you're more likely to become depressed. If you very rarely get out into the natural world, you're more likely to become depressed.
And one thing unites a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that I learned about. Not all of them, but a lot of them. Everyone here knows you've all got natural physical needs, right? Obviously. You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took those things away from you, you'd all be in real trouble, real fast. But at the same time, every human being has natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And this culture we built is good at lots of things. And many things are better than in the past I'm glad to be alive today. But we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep, underlying psychological needs. And it's not the only thing that's going on, but I think it's the key reason why this crisis keeps rising and rising. And I found this really hard to absorb. I really wrestled with the idea of shifting from thinking of my depression as just a problem in my brain, to one with many causes, including many in the way we're living.
And it only really began to fall into place for me when one day, I went to interview a South African psychiatrist named Dr. Derek Summerfield. He's a great guy. And Dr. Summerfield happened to be in Cambodia in 2001, when they first introduced chemical antidepressants for people in that country. And the local doctors, the Cambodians, had never heard of these drugs, so they were like, what are they? And he explained. And they said to him, "We don't need them, we've already got antidepressants." And he was like, "What do you mean?" He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy, like St. John's Wort, ginkgo biloba, something like that. Instead, they told him a story.
There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields. And one day, he stood on a land mine left over from the war with the United States, and he got his leg blown off. So they him an artificial leg, and after a while, he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently, it's super painful to work under water when you've got an artificial limb, and I'm guessing it was pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where he got blown up. The guy started to cry all day, he refused to get out of bed, he developed all the symptoms of classic depression. The Cambodian doctor said, "This is when we gave him an antidepressant." And Dr. Summerfield said, "What was it?" They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense it was hard for him to see it in the throes of his depression, but actually, it had perfectly understandable causes in his life. One of the doctors, talking to the people in the community, figured, "You know, if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer, he wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much, he wouldn't have to go and work in the rice fields." So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped, within a month, his depression was gone. They said to doctor Summerfield, "So you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant, that's what you mean, right?"
If you'd been raised to think about depression the way I was, and most of the people here were, that sounds like a bad joke, right? "I went to my doctor for an antidepressant, she gave me a cow." But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively, based on this individual, unscientific anecdote, is what the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years, based on the best scientific evidence.
If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not, in the main, a machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs. And it's just as important to think here about what those Cambodian doctors and the World Health Organization are not saying. They did not say to this farmer, "Hey, buddy, you need to pull yourself together. It's your job to figure out and fix this problem on your own." On the contrary, what they said is, "We're here as a group to pull together with you, so together, we can figure out and fix this problem." This is what every depressed person needs, and it's what every depressed person deserves.
This is why one of the leading doctors at the United Nations, in their official statement for World Health Day, couple of years back in 2017, said we need to talk less about chemical imbalances and more about the imbalances in the way we live. Drugs give real relief to some people they gave relief to me for a while but precisely because this problem goes deeper than their biology, the solutions need to go much deeper, too.
But when I first learned that, I remember thinking, "OK, I could see all the scientific evidence, I read a huge number of studies, I interviewed a huge number of the experts who were explaining this," but I kept thinking, "How can we possibly do that?" The things that are making us depressed are in most cases more complex than what was going on with this Cambodian farmer. Where do we even begin with that insight?
But then, in the long journey for my book, all over the world, I kept meeting people who were doing exactly that, from Sydney, to San Francisco, to São Paulo. I kept meeting people who were understanding the deeper causes of depression and anxiety and, as groups, fixing them. Obviously, I can't tell you about all the amazing people I got to know and wrote about, or all of the nine causes of depression and anxiety that I learned about, because they won't let me give a 10-hour TED Talk you can complain about that to them.
But I want to focus on two of the causes and two of the solutions that emerge from them, if that's alright. Here's the first. We are the loneliest society in human history. There was a recent study that asked Americans, "Do you feel like you're no longer close to anyone?" And 39 percent of people said that described them. "No longer close to anyone." In the international measurements of loneliness, Britain and the rest of Europe are just behind the US, in case anyone here is feeling smug.
I spent a lot of time discussing this with the leading expert in the world on loneliness, an incredible man named professor John Cacioppo, who was at Chicago, and I thought a lot about one question his work poses to us. Professor Cacioppo asked, "Why do we exist? Why are we here, why are we alive?" One key reason is that our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They weren't bigger than the animals they took down a lot of the time, they weren't faster than the animals they took down a lot of the time, but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating. This was our superpower as a species we band together, just like bees evolved to live in a hive, humans evolved to live in a tribe. And we are the first humans ever to disband our tribes. And it is making us feel awful. But it doesn't have to be this way.
One of the heroes in my book, and in fact, in my life, is a doctor named Sam Everington. He's a general practitioner in a poor part of East London, where I lived for many years. And Sam was really uncomfortable, because he had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety. And like me, he's not opposed to chemical antidepressants, he thinks they give some relief to some people. But he could see two things. Firstly, his patients were depressed and anxious a lot of the time for totally understandable reasons, like loneliness. And secondly, although the drugs were giving some relief to some people, for many people, they didn't solve the problem. The underlying problem. One day, Sam decided to pioneer a different approach. A woman came to his center, his medical center, called Lisa Cunningham. I got to know Lisa later. And Lisa had been shut away in her home with crippling depression and anxiety for seven years. And when she came to Sam's center, she was told, "Don't worry, we'll carry on giving you these drugs, but we're also going to prescribe something else. We're going to prescribe for you to come here to this center twice a week to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people, not to talk about how miserable you are, but to figure out something meaningful you can all do together so you won't be lonely and you won't feel like life is pointless."
The first time this group met, Lisa literally started vomiting with anxiety, it was so overwhelming for her. But people rubbed her back, the group started talking, they were like, "What could we do?" These are inner-city, East London people like me, they didn't know anything about gardening. They were like, "Why don't we learn gardening?" There was an area behind the doctors' offices that was just scrubland. "Why don't we make this into a garden?" They started to take books out of the library, started to watch YouTube clips. They started to get their fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. There's a lot of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a really powerful antidepressant. But they started to do something even more important. They started to form a tribe. They started to form a group. They started to care about each other. If one of them didn't show up, the others would go looking for them "Are you OK?" Help them figure out what was troubling them that day. The way Lisa put it to me, "As the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom."
This approach is called social prescribing, it's spreading all over Europe. And there's a small, but growing body of evidence suggesting it can produce real and meaningful falls in depression and anxiety.
And one day, I remember standing in the garden that Lisa and her once-depressed friends had built it's a really beautiful garden and having this thought, it's very much inspired by a guy called professor Hugh Mackay in Australia. I was thinking, so often when people feel down in this culture, what we say to them I'm sure everyone here said it, I have we say, "You just need to be you, be yourself." And I've realized, actually, what we should say to people is, "Don't be you. Don't be yourself. Be us, be we. Be part of a group."
The solution to these problems does not lie in drawing more and more on your resources as an isolated individual that's partly what got us in this crisis. It lies on reconnecting with something bigger than you.
And that really connects to one of the other causes of depression and anxiety that I wanted to talk to you about. So everyone knows junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick. I don't say that with any sense of superiority, I literally came to give this talk from McDonald's. I saw all of you eating that healthy TED breakfast, I was like no way. But just like junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. For thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money, and status and showing off, you're going to feel like crap. That's not an exact quote from Schopenhauer, but that is the gist of what he said.
But weirdly, hardy anyone had scientifically investigated this, until a truly extraordinary person I got to know, named professor Tim Kasser, who's at Knox College in Illinois, and he's been researching this for about 30 years now. And his research suggests several really important things. Firstly, the more you believe you can buy and display your way out of sadness, and into a good life, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious. And secondly, as a society, we have become much more driven by these beliefs. All throughout my lifetime, under the weight of advertising and Instagram and everything like them.
And as I thought about this, I realized it's like we've all been fed since birth, a kind of KFC for the soul. We've been trained to look for happiness in all the wrong places, and just like junk food doesn't meet your nutritional needs and actually makes you feel terrible, junk values don't meet your psychological needs, and they take you away from a good life. But when I first spent time with professor Kasser and I was learning all this, I felt a really weird mixture of emotions. Because on the one hand, I found this really challenging. I could see how often in my own life, when I felt down, I tried to remedy it with some kind of show-offy, grand external solution. And I could see why that did not work well for me. I also thought, isn't this kind of obvious? Isn't this almost like banal, right? If I said to everyone here, none of you are going to lie on your deathbed and think about all the shoes you bought and all the retweets you got, you're going to think about moments of love, meaning and connection in your life. I think that seems almost like a cliché. But I kept talking to professor Kasser and saying, "Why am I feeling this strange doubleness?" And he said, "At some level, we all know these things. But in this culture, we don't live by them." We know them so well they've become clichés, but we don't live by them. I kept asking why, why would we know something so profound, but not live by it? And after a while, professor Kasser said to me, "Because we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life." I had to really think about that. "Because we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life."
And professor Kasser wanted to figure out if we can disrupt that machine. He's done loads of research into this; I'll tell you about one example, and I really urge everyone here to try this with their friends and family. With a guy called Nathan Dungan, he got a group of teenagers and adults to come together for a series of sessions over a period of time, to meet up. And part of the point of the group was to get people to think about a moment in their life they had actually found meaning and purpose. For different people, it was different things. For some people, it was playing music, writing, helping someone I'm sure everyone here can picture something, right? And part of the point of the group was to get people to ask, "OK, how could you dedicate more of your life to pursuing these moments of meaning and purpose, and less to, I don't know, buying crap you don't need, putting it on social media and trying to get people to go, 'OMG, so jealous!'"
And what they found was, just having these meetings, it was like a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for consumerism, right? Getting people to have these meetings, articulate these values, determine to act on them and check in with each other, led to a marked shift in people's values. It took them away from this hurricane of depression-generating messages training us to seek happiness in the wrong places, and towards more meaningful and nourishing values that lift us out of depression.
But with all the solutions that I saw and have written about, and many I can't talk about here, I kept thinking, you know: Why did it take me so long to see these insights? Because when you explain them to people some of them are more complicated, but not all when you explain this to people, it's not like rocket science, right? At some level, we already know these things. Why do we find it so hard to understand? I think there's many reasons. But I think one reason is that we have to change our understanding of what depression and anxiety actually are. There are very real biological contributions to depression and anxiety. But if we allow the biology to become the whole picture, as I did for so long, as I would argue our culture has done pretty much most of my life, what we're implicitly saying to people is, and this isn't anyone's intention, but what we're implicitly saying to people is, "Your pain doesn't mean anything. It's just a malfunction. It's like a glitch in a computer program, it's just a wiring problem in your head." But I was only able to start changing my life when I realized your depression is not a malfunction. It's a signal. Your depression is a signal. It's telling you something.
We feel this way for reasons, and they can be hard to see in the throes of depression I understand that really well from personal experience. But with the right help, we can understand these problems and we can fix these problems together. But to do that, the very first step is we have to stop insulting these signals by saying they're a sign of weakness, or madness or purely biological, except for a tiny number of people. We need to start listening to these signals, because they're telling us something we really need to hear. It's only when we truly listen to these signals, and we honor these signals and respect these signals, that we're going to begin to see the liberating, nourishing, deeper solutions. The cows that are waiting all around us.
How to build your confidence and spark it in others
So when I was a little girl, a book sat on the coffee table in our living room, just steps from our front door. And the living room is a first impression. Ours had white carpet and a curio of my mother's most treasured collectibles. That room represented the sacrifices of generations gone by who, by poverty or by policy, couldn't afford a curio of collectibles let alone a middle class house to put them in. That room had to stay perfect. But I would risk messing up that perfect room every day just to see that book. On the cover sat a woman named Septima Clark. She sat in perfect profile with her face raised to the sky. She had perfect salt-and-pepper cornrows platted down the sides of her head, and pride and wisdom just emanated from her dark skin.
Septima Clark was an activist and an educator, a woman after whom I'd eventually model my own career. But more than all the words she ever spoke, that single portrait of Septima Clark, it defined confidence for me before I ever even knew the word.
It may sound simple, but confidence is something that we underestimate the importance of. We treat it like a nice-to-have instead of a must-have. We place value on knowledge and resources above what we deem to be the soft skill of confidence. But by most measures, we have more knowledge and more resources now than at any other point in history, and still injustice abounds and challenges persist. If knowledge and resources were all that we needed, we wouldn't still be here. And I believe that confidence is one of the main things missing from the equation.
I'm completely obsessed with confidence. It's been the most important journey of my life, a journey that, to be honest, I'm still on. Confidence is the necessary spark before everything that follows. Confidence is the difference between being inspired and actually getting started, between trying and doing until it's done. Confidence helps us keep going even when we failed. The name of the book on that coffee table was "I Dream A World," and today I dream a world where revolutionary confidence helps bring about our most ambitious dreams into reality.
That's exactly the kind of world that I wanted to create in my classroom when I was a teacher, like a Willy Wonka world of pure imagination, but make it scholarly. All of my students were black or brown. All of them were growing up in a low-income circumstance. Some of them were immigrants, some of them were disabled, but all of them were the very last people this world invites to be confident. That's why it was so important that my classroom be a place where my students could build the muscle of confidence, where they could learn to face each day with the confidence you need to redesign the world in the image of your own dreams. After all, what are academic skills without the confidence to use those skills to go out and change the world.
Now is when I should tell you about two of my students, Jamal and Regina. Now, I've changed their names, but their stories remain the same. Jamal was brilliant, but unfocused. He would squirm in his chair during independent work, and he would never stay still for more than three or four minutes. Students like Jamal can perplex brand new teachers because they're not quite sure how to support young people like him. I took a direct approach. I negotiated with Jamal. If he could give me focused work, then he could do it from anywhere in the classroom, from our classroom rug, from behind my desk, from inside his classroom locker, which turned out to be his favorite place. Jamal's least favorite subject was writing, and he never wanted to read what he had written out loud in class, but we were still making progress. One day, I decided to host a mock 2008 presidential election in my classroom. My third graders had to research and write a stump speech for their chosen candidate: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or John McCain. The heavy favorites were obvious, but one student chose John McCain. It was Jamal. Jamal finally decided to read something that he had written out loud in class, and sure enough, Jamal stunned all of us with his brilliance. Just like Jamal's dad, John McCain was a veteran, and just like Jamal's dad protected him, Jamal believed that John McCain would protect the entire country. And he wasn't my candidate of choice, but it didn't matter, because the entire class erupted into applause, a standing ovation for our brave friend Jamal who finally showed up as his most confident self for the first time that year.
And then there was Regina. Regina was equally as brilliant, but active. She'd inevitably finish her work early, and then she'd get on about the business of distracting other students.
Walking, talking, passing those notes that teachers hate but kids love. You look like you passed a lot of them.
Despite my high ideals for our classroom, I would too often default to my baser instincts, and I would choose compliance over confidence. Regina was a glitch in my intended system. A good teacher can correct misbehavior but still remain a student's champion. But on one day in particular, I just plain old chose control. I snapped, and my approach didn't communicate to Regina that she was being a distraction. My approach communicated to Regina that she herself was a distraction. I watched the light go out from her eyes, and that light sparked joy in our classroom. I had just extinguished it. The entire class became irritable, and we didn't recover for the rest of the day.
I think about the day often, and I have literally prayed that I did not do irreparable harm, because as a woman who used to be a little girl just like Regina, I know that I could have started the process of killing her confidence forever.
A lack of confidence pulls us down from the bottom and weighs us down from the top, crushing us between a flurry of can'ts, won'ts and impossibles. Without confidence, we get stuck, and when we get stuck, we can't even get started. Instead of getting mired in what can get in our way, confidence invites us to perform with certainty. We all operate a little differently when we're sure we can win versus if we just hope we will. Now, this can be a helpful check. If you don't have enough confidence, it could be because you need to readjust your goal. If you have too much confidence, it could be because you're not rooted in something real. Not everyone lacks confidence. We make it easier in this society for some people to gain confidence because they fit our preferred archetype of leadership. We reward confidence in some people and we punish confidence in others, and all the while far too many people are walking around every single day without it. For some of us, confidence is a revolutionary choice, and it would be our greatest shame to see our best ideas go unrealized and our brightest dreams go unreached all because we lacked the engine of confidence. That's not a risk I'm willing to take.
So how do we crack the code on confidence? In my estimation, it takes at least three things: permission, community and curiosity. Permission births confidence, community nurtures it and curiosity affirms it. In education, we've got a saying, that you can't be what you can't see. When I was a little girl, I couldn't show confidence until someone showed me.
My family used to do everything together, including the mundane things, like buying a new car, and every time we did this, I'd watch my parents put on the exact same performance. We'd enter the dealership, and my dad would sit while my mom shopped. When my mom found a car that she liked, they'd go in and meet with the dealer, and inevitably, every time the dealer would turn his attention and his body to my dad, assuming that he controlled the purse strings and therefore this negotiation. "Rev. Packnett," they'd say, "how do we get you into this car today?" My dad would inevitably respond the same way. He'd slowly and silently gesture toward my mother and then put his hands right back in his lap. It might have been the complete shock of negotiating finances with a black woman in the '80s, but whatever it was, I'd watch my mother work these car dealers over until they were basically giving the car away for free.
She would never crack a smile. She would never be afraid to walk away. I know my mom just thought she was getting a good deal on a minivan, but what she was actually doing was giving me permission to defy expectations and to show up confidently in my skill no matter who doubts me.
Confidence needs permission to exist and community is the safest place to try confidence on. I traveled to Kenya this year to learn about women's empowerment among Maasai women. There I met a group of young women called Team Lioness, among Kenya's first all-female community ranger groups. These eight brave young women were making history in just their teenage years, and I asked Purity, the most verbose young ranger among them, "Do you ever get scared?" I swear to you, I want to tattoo her response all over my entire body. She said, "Of course I do, but I call on my sisters. They remind me that we will be better than these men and that we will not fail." Purity's confidence to chase down lions and catch poachers, it didn't come from her athletic ability or even just her faith. Her confidence was propped up by sisterhood, by community. What she was basically saying was that if I am ever in doubt, I need you to be there to restore my hope and to rebuild my certainty.
In community, I can find my confidence and your curiosity can affirm it. Early in my career, I led a large-scale event that did not go exactly as planned. I'm lying to you. It was terrible. And when I debriefed the event with my manager, I just knew that she was going to run down the list of every mistake I had ever made, probably from birth. But instead, she opened with a question: What was your intention? I was surprised but relieved. She knew that I was already beating myself up, and that question invited me to learn from my own mistakes instead of damage my already fragile confidence. Curiosity invites people to be in charge of their own learning. That exchange, it helped me approach my next project with the expectation of success. Permission, community, curiosity: all of these are the things that we will need to breed the confidence that we'll absolutely need to solve our greatest challenges and to build the world we dream, a world where inequity is ended and where justice is real, a world where we can be free on the outside and free on the inside because we know that none of us are free until all of us are free. A world that isn't intimidated by confidence when it shows up as a woman or in black skin or in anything other than our preferred archetypes of leadership. A world that knows that that kind of confidence is exactly the key we need to unlock the future that we want.
I have enough confidence to believe that that world will indeed come to pass, and that we are the ones to make it so.
3 ways to measure your adaptability and how to improve it
I met 273 start-up founders last year. And each one was looking for money. As a tech investor, my goal was to sort through everyone that I met and make a quick determination about which ones had the potential to make something really big.
But what makes a great founder? This is a question I ask myself daily. Some venture capitalists place bets based on a founder's previous background. Did they go to an Ivy League school? Have they worked at a blue-chip company? Have they built out a big vision before? Effectively, how smart is this person?
Other VCs asses a founder's emotional quotient, or EQ. How well will this person build teams and build rapport across customers and clients?
I have a different methodology to assess start-up founders, though, and it's not complicated. I look for signs of one specific trait. Not IQ, not EQ. It's adaptability: how well a person reacts to the inevitability of change, and lots of it. That's the single most important determinant for me. I subscribe to the belief that adaptability itself is a form of intelligence, and our adaptability quotient, or AQ, is something that can be measured, tested and improved.
AQ isn't just useful for start-up founders, however. I think it's increasingly important for all of us. Because the world is speeding up. We know that the rate of technological change is accelerating, which is forcing our brains to react. Whether you're navigating changing job conditions brought on by automation, shifting geopolitics in a more globalized world, or simply changing family dynamics and personal relationships. Each of us, as individuals, groups, corporations and even governments are being forced to grapple with more change than ever before in human history.
So, how do we assess our adaptability? I use three tricks when meeting with founders. Here's the first. Think back to your most recent job interview. What kind of questions were you asked? Probably some variation of, "Tell me about a time when," right? Instead, to interview for adaptability, I like to ask "what if" questions. What if your main revenue stream were to dry up overnight? What if a heat wave prevented every single customer from being able to visit your store? Asking "what if," instead of asking about the past, forces the brain to simulate. To picture multiple possible versions of the future. The strength of that vision, as well as how many distinct scenarios someone can conjure, tells me a lot.
Practicing simulations is a sort of safe testing ground for improving adaptability. Instead of testing how you take in and retain information, like an IQ test might, it tests how you manipulate information, given a constraint, in order to achieve a specific goal.
The second trick that I use to assess adaptability in founders is to look for signs of unlearning. Active unlearners seek to challenge what they presume to already know, and instead, override that data with new information. Kind of like a computer running a disk cleanup. Take the example of Destin Sandlin, who programed his bicycle to turn left when he steered it right and vice versa. He called this his Backwards Brain Bike, and it took him nearly eight months just to learn how to ride it kind of, sort of normally. The fact that Destin was able to unlearn his regular bike in favor of a new one, though, signals something awesome about our adaptability. It's not fixed. Instead, each of us has the capacity to improve it, through dedication and hard work.
On the last page of Gandhi's autobiography, he wrote, "I must reduce myself to zero." At many points in his very full life, he was still seeking to return to a beginner's mindset, to zero. To unlearn. In this way, I think it's pretty safe to say Gandhi had a high AQ score.
The third and final trick that I use to assess a founder's adaptability is to look for people who infuse exploration into their life and their business. There's a sort of natural tension between exploration and exploitation. And collectively, all of us tend to overvalue exploitation. Here's what I mean. In the year 2000, a man finagled his way into a meeting with John Antioco, the CEO of Blockbuster, and proposed a partnership to manage Blockbuster's fledgling online business. The CEO John laughed him out of the room, saying, "I have millions of existing customers and thousands of successful retail stores. I really need to focus on the money."
The other man in the meeting, however, turned out to be Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix. In 2018, Netflix brought in 15.8 billion dollars, while Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010, directly 10 years after that meeting. The Blockbuster CEO was too focused on exploiting his already successful business model, so much so that he couldn't see around the next corner. In that way, his previous success became the enemy of his adaptability potential.
For the founders that I work with, I frame exploration as a state of constant seeking. To never fall too far in love with your wins but rather continue to proactively seek out what might kill you next. When I first started exploring adaptability, the thing I found most exciting is that we can improve it. Each of us has the capacity to become more adaptable. But think of it like a muscle: it's got to be exercised. And don't get discouraged if it takes a while. Remember Destin Sandlin? It took him eight months just to learn how to ride a bike.
Over time, using the tricks that I use on founders asking "what if" questions, actively unlearning and prioritizing exploration over exploitation can put you in the driver's seat so that the next time something big changes, you're already prepared.
We're entering a future where IQ and EQ both matter way less than how fast you're able to adapt. So I hope that these tools help you to raise your own AQ.
What almost dying taught me about living
It was the spring of 2011, and as they like to say in commencement speeches, I was getting ready to enter the real world. I had recently graduated from college and moved to Paris to start my first job. My dream was to become a war correspondent, but the real world that I found took me into a really different kind of conflict zone.
At 22 years old, I was diagnosed with leukemia. The doctors told me and my parents, point-blank, that I had about a 35 percent chance of long-term survival. I couldn't wrap my head around what that prognosis meant. But I understood that the reality and the life I'd imagined for myself had shattered. Overnight, I lost my job, my apartment, my independence, and I became patient number 5624.
Over the next four years of chemo, a clinical trial and a bone marrow transplant, the hospital became my home, my bed, the place I lived 24/7. Since it was unlikely that I'd ever get better, I had to accept my new reality. And I adapted. I became fluent in medicalese, made friends with a group of other young cancer patients, built a vast collection of neon wigs and learned to use my rolling IV pole as a skateboard. I even achieved my dream of becoming a war correspondent, although not in the way I'd expected. It started with a blog, reporting from the front lines of my hospital bed, and it morphed into a column I wrote for the New York Times, called "Life, Interrupted."
But above all else, my focus was on surviving. And spoiler alert --I did survive, yeah. Thanks to an army of supportive humans, I'm not just still here, I am cured of my cancer.So, when you go through a traumatic experience like this, people treat you differently. They start telling you how much of an inspiration you are. They say you're a warrior. They call you a hero, someone who's lived the mythical hero's journey, who's endured impossible trials and, against the odds, lived to tell the tale, returning better and braver for what you're been through. And this definitely lines up with my experience.
Cancer totally transformed my life. I left the hospital knowing exactly who I was and what I wanted to do in the world. And now, every day as the sun rises, I drink a big glass of celery juice, and I follow this up with 90 minutes of yoga. Then, I write down 50 things I'm grateful for onto a scroll of paper that I fold into an origami crane and send sailing out my window.
Are you seriously believing any of this? I don't do any of these things.I hate yoga, and I have no idea how to fold an origami crane. The truth is that for me, the hardest part of my cancer experience began once the cancer was gone. That heroic journey of the survivor we see in movies and watch play out on Instagram it's a myth. It isn't just untrue, it's dangerous, because it erases the very real challenges of recovery.
Now, don't get me wrong I am incredibly grateful to be alive, and I am painfully aware that this struggle is a privilege that many don't get to experience. But it's important that I tell you what this projection of heroism and expectation of constant gratitude does to people who are trying to recover. Because being cured is not where the work of healing ends. It's where it begins.
I'll never forget the day I was discharged from the hospital, finally done with treatment. Those four years of chemo had taken a toll on my relationship with my longtime boyfriend, and he'd recently moved out. And when I walked into my apartment, it was quiet. Eerily so. The person I wanted to call in this moment, the person who I knew would understand everything, was my friend Melissa. She was a fellow cancer patient, but she had died three weeks earlier. As I stood there in the doorway of my apartment, I wanted to cry. But I was too tired to cry. The adrenaline was gone. I had felt as if the inner scaffolding that had held me together since my diagnosis had suddenly crumbled. I had spent the past 1,500 days working tirelessly to achieve one goal: to survive. And now that I'd done so, I realized I had absolutely no idea how to live.
On paper, of course, I was better: I didn't have leukemia, my blood counts were back to normal, and the disability checks soon stopped coming. To the outside world, I clearly didn't belong in the kingdom of the sick anymore. But in reality, I never felt further from being well. All that chemo had taken a permanent physical toll on my body. I wondered, "What kind of job can I hold when I need to nap for four hours in the middle of the day? When my misfiring immune system still sends me to the ER on a regular basis?" And then there were the invisible, psychological imprints my illness had left behind: the fears of relapse, the unprocessed grief, the demons of PTSD that descended upon me for days, sometimes weeks.
See, we talk about reentry in the context of war and incarceration. But we don't talk about it as much in the context of other kinds of traumatic experiences, like an illness. Because no one had warned me of the challenges of reentry, I thought something must be wrong with me. I felt ashamed, and with great guilt, I kept reminding myself of how lucky I was to be alive at all, when so many people like my friend Melissa were not. But on most days, I woke up feeling so sad and lost, I could barely breathe. Sometimes, I even fantasized about getting sick again. And let me tell you, there are so many better things to fantasize about when you're in your twenties and recently single.
But I missed the hospital's ecosystem. Like me, everyone in there was broken. But out here, among the living, I felt like an impostor, overwhelmed and unable to function. I also missed the sense of clarity I'd felt at my sickest. Staring your mortality straight in the eye has a way of simplifying things, of rerouting your focus to what really matters. And when I was sick, I vowed that if I survived, it had to be for something. It had to be to live a good life, an adventurous life, a meaningful one. But the question, once I was cured, became: How? I was 27 years old with no job, no partner, no structure. And this time, I didn't have treatment protocols or discharge instructions to help guide my way forward.
But what I did have was an in-box full of internet messages from strangers. Over the years, people from all over the world had read my column, and they'd responded with letters, comments and emails. It was a mix, as is often the case, for writers. I got a lot of unsolicited advice about how to cure my cancer with things like essential oils. I got some questions about my bra size. But mostly --
mostly, I heard from people who, in their own different way, understood what it was that I was going through.
I heard from a teenage girl in Florida who, like me, was coming out of chemo and wrote me a message composed largely of emojis. I heard from a retired art history professor in Ohio named Howard, who'd spent most of his life struggling with a mysterious, debilitating health condition that he'd had from the time he was a young man. I heard from an inmate on death row in Texas by the name of Little GQ short for "Gangster Quinn." He'd never been sick a day in his life. He does 1,000 push-ups to start off each morning. But he related to what I described in one column as my "incanceration," and to the experience of being confined to a tiny fluorescent room. "I know that our situations are different," he wrote to me, "But the threat of death lurks in both of our shadows." In those lonely first weeks and months of my recovery, these strangers and their words became lifelines, dispatches from people of so many different backgrounds, with so many different experiences, all showing me the same thing: you can be held hostage by the worst thing that's ever happened to you and allow it to hijack your remaining days, or you can find a way forward.
I knew I needed to make some kind of change. I wanted to be in motion again to figure out how to unstuck myself and to get back out into the world. And so I decided to go on a real journey not the bullshit cancer one or the mythical hero's journey that everyone thought I should be on, but a real, pack-your-bags kind of journey. I put everything I owned into storage, rented out my apartment, borrowed a car and talked a very a dear but somewhat smelly friend into joining me.
Together, my dog Oscar and I embarked on a 15,000-mile road trip around the United States. Along the way, we visited some of those strangers who'd written to me. I needed their advice, also to say to them, I went to Ohio and stayed with Howard, the retired professor. When you've suffered a loss or a trauma, the impulse can be to guard your heart. But Howard urged me to open myself up to uncertainty, to the possibilities of new love, new loss. Howard will never be cured of illness. And as a young man, he had no way of predicting how long he'd live. But that didn't stop him from getting married. Howard has grandkids now, and takes weekly ballroom dancing lessons with his wife. When I visited them, they’d recently celebrated their 50th anniversary. In his letter to me, he'd written, "Meaning is not found in the material realm; it's not in dinner, jazz, cocktails or conversation. Meaning is what's left when everything else is stripped away."
I went to Texas, and I visited Little GQ on death row. He asked me what I did to pass all that time I'd spent in a hospital room. When I told him that I got really, really good at Scrabble, he said, "Me, too!" and explained how, even though he spends most of his days in solitary confinement, he and his neighboring prisoners make board games out of paper and call out their plays through their meal slots a testament to the incredible tenacity of the human spirit and our ability to adapt with creativity.
And my last stop was in Florida, to see that teenage girl who'd sent me all those emojis. Her name is Unique, which is perfect, because she's the most luminous, curious person I've ever met. I asked her what she wants to do next and she said, "I want to go to college and travel and eat weird foods like octopus that I've never tasted before and come visit you in New York and go camping, but I'm scared of bugs, but I still want to go camping." I was in awe of her, that she could be so optimistic and so full of plans for the future, given everything she'd been through. But as Unique showed me, it is far more radical and dangerous to have hope than to live hemmed in by fear.
But the most important thing I learned on that road trip is that the divide between the sick and the well it doesn't exist. The border is porous. As we live longer and longer, surviving illnesses and injuries that would have killed our grandparents, even our parents, the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms, spending much of our lives somewhere between the two. These are the terms of our existence.
Now, I wish I could say that since coming home from my road trip, I feel fully healed. I don't. But once I stopped expecting myself to return to the person I'd been pre-diagnosis, once I learned to accept my body and its limitations, I actually did start to feel better. And in the end, I think that's the trick: to stop seeing our health as binary, between sick and healthy, well and unwell, whole and broken; to stop thinking that there's some beautiful, perfect state of wellness to strive for; and to quit living in a state of constant dissatisfaction until we reach it.
Every single one of us will have our life interrupted, whether it's by the rip cord of a diagnosis or some other kind of heartbreak or trauma that brings us to the floor. We need to find ways to live in the in-between place, managing whatever body and mind we currently have. Sometimes, all it takes is the ingenuity of a handmade game of Scrabble or finding that stripped-down kind of meaning in the love of family and a night on the ballroom dance floor, or that radical, dangerous hope that I'm guessing will someday lead a teenage girl terrified of bugs to go camping.
If you're able to do that, then you've taken the real hero's journey. You've achieved what it means to actually be well, which is to say: alive, in the messiest, richest, most whole sense.
Thank you, that's all I've got.