Transcript

Accelerating Hope: The Power of the Witness | Anne Devereux-Mills | TEDxSouthLakeTahoe

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c97dC21kfM0
Video ID: c97dC21kfM0
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so what do you do when the world comes crashing down around you well as a society right now if you look at some of the things that we're facing you see global warming gun violence incredible poverty widening gaps between rich and poor real news and fake news what do you do when your world in a similar way feels to be crashing on you as an individual well I'm gonna flashback to when I was about 40 and I had been in a very very difficult marriage and I finally got the courage to leave and I was the mother of two young daughters and my career was beginning to build and I was diagnosed with cancer all at the same time so I'm I'm vying between Memorial sloan-kettering and the court and work and reading stories and it was very overwhelming and my world felt pretty heavy but one small thing one step at a time my girls and I got through it and we started to establish ourselves and as they grew my older daughter Lauren was heading off to college in LA my career was really blossoming I had at that time been a founding CEO of a number of advertising agencies my younger daughter was doing great in high school and I was asked to take a job instead of being an entrepreneur which I am and a startup person to be a CEO of a turnaround company now turning around agencies is really tough because it's about downsizing it's about right sizing it's about all these things that are unpleasant and it was the recession so to be doing a turnaround at a time of economic crisis was overwhelming and difficult and I was being interviewed by a reporter who had just come back doing research in Uganda about a small town where it was pretty much all kids parents had died of AIDS or malaria or they'd left or they were in jail and she and some other people wanted to break the cycle of poverty and I said you know that your story is way more interesting than a story about a turn around CEO during recession I would like to join you and I join her in this mission to start a school in Africa and it turned out to be great because my company could could rally behind and feel good during this tough time I had something to focus on that felt like it was giving back to community in a meaningful way and my oldest daughter who was sort of looking to get her legs grounded also came and was a teacher for the summer she was teaching math and English and it was just great for everybody until one day when I was visiting her at the school my cell phone rang and I saw that it was Memorial sloan-kettering calling and on the other end of the line was not the nurse who I always got calls from and she'd say you're doing fine we'll see you in three months or we'll see you in six months it was the oncologist now for any of you who have been involved with cancer you know you don't want a call from the oncologist and the news wasn't so great and he said you know and I'm sorry to tell you but the last biopsy showed your cancer is back it's accelerated you need to come home and we're gonna have to have some surgery so you know Pat a CEO I'm like okay we're gonna do this I can do this and I get on the plane and I fly home and I walk through Madison at Madison Avenue to tell my boss I'm gonna take a few weeks off I'm gonna have a surgery I'm gonna come back I'm gonna run the company and he said I'm gonna have someone else run the company and in that moment I lost my job my health and my last kid was about to go to college and that was my self-definition so if you're defined by what you do for a living or if you're defined by whose mother you are or whose daughter you are or whose wife you are and if you're the person who got up at 4:45 in the morning in New Jersey and drove into Manhattan and went to the gym and worked out and got to the office at 7:30 and ran the company and got home and listened to all of the important things that had happened during your daughter's days and you weren't that healthy person anymore either who are you and it was an incredibly difficult time and I call it the time of the space in between you probably know the space in between it's after what was everything that's familiar to you and before what will be that yet undefined thing it's painful I mean I had spent 40 plus years of my life doing and achieving instead of feeling but I had to live with that feeling now luckily I wasn't completely alone I had a long-distance boyfriend and the happy news is he's now my husband but I had a long-distance boyfriend who was super supportive came with me to the surgery he encouraged me and it's sort of in my nature to prove that I'm still alive so we walked into Central Park after I'd gotten out of the hospital and I sat on those hard park benches and watched Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice and he was fabulous and I felt alive and then I had to decide what do I do I mean my natural inclination would have been get back on that horse go get another job go run another company but David was incredibly prescient and he said it's kind of clear that this life you're leading is not the healthiest life for you he was a Californian I was in New Yorker but I had grown up in Seattle and so and he said why don't you think about starting again and let's move to San Francisco I said yes so now I'm 50 years old I'm jumping on a plane I'm dropping Kira off at Tulane and I'm heading to San Francisco to start a new life and when all of this was going on I realized that all that I had left behind of those thousands of people that I had worked with over the years would work for me who I had worked for when the going got tough when I was not in a position of power they were gone and I realized that all of these relationships had been transactional it had been based on what I could do for them or what someone could do for someone and I had maybe five close four who visited me in the hospital or who followed up to see how is going to have a lovely family there in Seattle they definitely checked in but in terms of what I was left with it was not those relationships and so I had to think about how do I start life again moving to a city where I didn't know a soul I was lucky enough in the course of my career to be a fellow of the Aspen Institute and a Henry Crowne fellow and what that meant was for a couple of years I was in a program with 19 other super high-performing young people and we talked about values based leadership but really what we did was we read the classics or we listened to a piece of music or we shared a common experience that then we could talk about and it brought us super close together so whether it was in the room a democrat or republican an American or a non-american a private-sector person a public sector person we all found common truths and safety and trust in each other and I thought yes I'm I'm missing that and in this space in between I also thought you know I'm one of three daughters I am the mother of two daughters and I went to Wellesley College where I spent four years with with women two thousand capable interesting women who lifted each other up I am missing that so I set about on an experiment and asked a few friends of friends do you know a few interesting women who might want to come over to my house I'm looking for four quarters not a hundred pennies I mean I want to develop some relationships that I can trust that nurture my soul that I can nurture and I want to talk about these feelings of being lost and isolated and Who am I going to talk about them with and sure enough friends of friends suggested people and I found myself with 12 women over in my home in San Francisco and we started talking Tamsin Smith who is a friend of mine distant friend now good friend then distant friend and is a poet and an artist she sort of led us in a discussion that was not so much about poetry but it was about beginning that common ground that allowed us to connect and at the end of the evening we all thought wow that was something incredibly deep and meaningful and I just talked about things that I haven't had a safe place to talk about this is before the days of me too before we were told to lean in this was a time when there was not a space for women to connect with women who were not like them and let me be clear when those first twelve men women were 20 years old to 80 years old there was racial diversity there was a wide range of levels and interests and life stages the one thing that we all had in common was that we were in some sort of transition in some sort of space in-between in fact we were parlaying one thing into another thing and I thought that word parlay that's a pretty cool word and in fact it's very much like the French word parlay which means to speak and here we are speaking really candidly really openly supportively of each other how wonderful and so I'm like I've got to own this word I've got to own this website some things don't change right so I'm looking and I Google parlayed calm and I find out that a parlay is a gambling term now you guys might know this better than than others being in a gambling state but a parlay means the bet is greater when multiple people are in it together and I thought this was this was meant to be and so at the end of our 12-person gathering we sort of said should we do it again next month I said I'd love to host and then we decided well I I have a couple friends I could bring I have a couple friends I could bring and the next month we had 40 and the next month we had 80 and before I knew what we had 3,000 women who were coming on a rotating basis to content based events in my home and it was an incredible feeling and what it really said to me is that there's this huge unmet need to invite strangers into your home to have the conversations that no one's having to do it in a Vegas like way what stays here what happens here stays here and it was magical and then I started hearing the stories that evenings were not stopping when everybody went home in fact there were huge cascades of things that started to take place so at that time that parlay had really blossomed and my kids were blossoming and everything was getting on solid ground I started to mentor this young woman who was in Cambodia survivor family survived genocide she was the first generation to go to college high-performing young woman in her in her school perfect national exam scores and she was trying to take the TOEFL exam which is English as a second language and my job as her mentor was to help her get a full scholarship the TOEFL was freaking her out things that she had no skills for coping with her anxiety and no way to deal with us and I thought all of this amazing hard work is for naught until I remembered a conversation I'd had at the last parler house event where I met Hannah Manfredi who's 27 and she is a mindfulness practitioner and she was telling me that she had recently created a program to teach mindfulness in inner-city schools to help kids who didn't have great coping mechanisms learn what to do with their anger learn what to do with their worry learn how to deal with some of this stuff in her life their lives and I thought oh god I wonder if Hannah could call us relax and just coach her through some basic things to do so that she can get through this exam that I knew she was completely capable of passing and she did and cyrillic got the scholarship and I thought okay that is an amazing cascade and then cyrillic arrived and what did she decide to do but use her skills in math to become a math tutor to help kids who like her were lacking a certain ability and with a little bit of coaching could achieve their potential and I thought oh my god this is an amazing chain reaction cascade of events what's happening here and then we parlay house expanded I was in New York and I think it was our second event in New York and we were having Joy Gordon who is the worldwide CEO of Dress for Success talk about her personal journey leading this global or and she was amazing and at the end of the the discussion one of the women who I didn't know in the audience said you know and I read about you when I was in prison and I thought when I get out of prison I want to be part of a safe community like this I want to lift other women and Here I am and you know I get choked up and thinking oh my god how could this be a thing this is absolutely amazing and then she continued and she said and joy when I got out of prison you helped me with my resume your team gave me the clothes to wear it is because women like you looked out for a woman like me that I'm here today her name is Ivey Wolfe Turk she went on to create an amazing organization called Project Reformation which is helping women who are returning to society after prison get their own sea legs back and I'm thinking oh my god this is incredible we've created a cascade where where one woman is doing one small thing and pulling another woman forward you know what what a miraculous truth and I was gonna write a book about it and then being a self doubter as we all are I thought you know I don't have science I'd this is just theoretical I know these stories you know I'm doubting myself and I decided I need to do some research so I found this incredible research professor dr. Serena Chen at Berkeley and together we conducted a quantitative study to track what I'm calling the parler effect and to see among strangers in an online survey what are people telling us and we we bucketed our survey into three groups the givers the people like Hannah like joy who had initiated cascades of events that were small that were something achievable by them because it was based on their natural ability their superpower and then we had a second group the receivers who could recount to us a time when someone did something for you that made you feel seen and what did you do with that information and then we had this group we thought what if nobody can tell us a story we don't want this research to fail so let's have this extra bucket of witnesses people who didn't necessarily generate anything or people who didn't necessarily remember receiving but they could tell you the story of somebody else and the data was fascinating the first part was the givers had found a way to see people in a way that they could coach them they could mentor them they could take someone at work who was struggling they could notice the woman down the street who needed a few extra groceries and bring them and it was very moving and what we saw in the receivers was they were so moved by being seen that they too became givers now you might cynically be saying yeah this is pay it forward but it wasn't just pay it forward because the third bucket was the kicker the third bucket of the witnesses would tell us a story like this I was sitting in my car at 7-eleven and the guy next to me went into 7-eleven there were some homeless people outside and when he came out he handed them an extra sandwich and the homeless people walked across the street and shared the sandwich with the other people and I was sitting in my car and I was watching that and I thought oh that was a pretty good thing to do I'm gonna go into 7-eleven and when I come out with my stuff I'm gonna buy a sandwich too and he did and this is what I call the power of the witness when you're in that space in your life where you feel you don't have enough to combat the weight that's around you and how are you as an individual person going to be able to make a change we now know it's not just pay it forward it's pay it outward I call it the parlay effect and it's a fan-like effect that says if I care and if I do something and if I act in an overt way I'm gonna create a cascade where other people follow me and together connected we have the potential to make the change that each of us as individuals we thought was impossible thank you so much [Applause]