Brené Brown: Listening to shame

Shame is an unspoken epidemic, the secret behind many forms of broken behavior. Brené Brown, whose earlier talk on vulnerability became a viral hit, explores what can happen when people confront their shame head-on. Her own humor, humanity and vulnerability shine through every word.

Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability

Brené Brown studies human connection — our ability to empathize, belong, love. In a poignant, funny talk, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity. A talk to share.

Why you should listen

Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. She spent the first five years of her decade-long study focusing on shame and empathy, and is now using that work to explore a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness. She poses the questions:

How do we learn to embrace our vulnerabilities and imperfections so that we can engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to recognize that we are enough – that we are worthy of love, belonging, and joy?

Read the TED Blog's Q&A with Brené Brown >>

What others say

“Brené Brown is an absolute legend. This is groundbreaking - not in terms of peoples awareness of these subjects and what they mean... But in these messages enhanced communication made accessible to a wider audience on this level. I have a jumbled up jigsaw in front of me with pieces I've been putting together my whole life- and Brene Brown has just connected so many pieces. This makes so much sense on so many levels. Really awesome stuff. I will watch this a few times and recommend it to people!” — jakesandersonaudio on YouTube

3 Dangerous Myths about Innovators and Creators

There are three specific myths that surround our most beloved creators, and if you model yourself on those myths, you're setting yourself up for failure. The myths are (1) the lone wolf inventor; (2) the eureka moment; (3) the myth of the expert. From new theories of physics and revolutionary patents to Toy Story and the iPhone, creators depend on their ability marshal the talent of large teams of people. Yet despite the readily available evidence that we tend to romanticize innovation, myths persist because we love telling stories in narrative form.

The Secret to Gaining the Upper Hand in Negotiations, with a Former FBI Negotiator

Negotiating is hard, and it’s even harder when there is something you reallywant. The stakes are higher, and you may not know how to get the upper hand. Negotiating takes skill, it's something that a person needs to hone over time through practice, so they can carefully judge when to swoop in for a win and when to hold back. It’s a delicate, instinctual art. But it can definitely be learned.

According to Chris Voss (former FBI crisis negotiator, and founder and CEO of the Black Swan Group), the key to mastering the art of negotiation is empathy. Specifically, it is making the other person empathize with you.

By making someone look at things from your point of view, they have to see what position they’re putting you in. All it takes is one golden question, “How am I supposed to do that?”

As Voss states, these could be the most important seven words you ever say in a negotiation. This is going to throw the ball in your opponent’s court. They will call the next shot -- while subconsciously seeing the situation from your side of the argument. It's sly genius. They have to understand what you’re thinking, and ask themselves if you can actually reasonably do what they expect of you. If they can’t come up with an answer or the answer is ‘I don’t know’ - even better. It highlights their unreasonable request, and gives you the chance to speak and gain valuable ground.

This question also gives your negotiating opponent the illusion of control. Many times, especially dealing with employers, people have the need to be in absolute control. Without the Boss in Charge feeling, they will focus on getting the upper hand, which can make them difficult and stubborn. So instead, give them control by appearing submissive, and asking a question that defers to them for wisdom on how you are supposed to do said thing. It’s a very simple strategy to get people to see multiple points of view, and force them to empathize with who they are negotiating. Once they empathize, it’s harder to ignore your requests.

Chris Voss's book is Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended On It.

A mind for greatness: Will smith

Will smith breaks down on how he uses is mind to find greatness in this universe. The audio is broken down from several of Will Smith Interview.

The Mindset of a Winner

The Mindset of a Winner featuring Seth Godin, Author and Speaker

Leila Hoteit: 3 lessons on success from an Arab businesswoman

Professional Arab women juggle more responsibilities than their male counterparts, and they face more cultural rigidity than Western women. What can their success teach us about tenacity, competition, priorities and progress? Tracing her career as an engineer, advocate and mother in Abu Dhabi, Leila Hoteit shares three lessons for thriving in the modern world.

Let's Do Learning Differently with On-Demand Education

People learn in a variety of ways, explains educational pioneer Kelly Palmer. At LinkedIn, she's helped build a platform that offers on-demand learning to adults building their careers. To her, three things distinguish the next stage of learning from the current one: curated content, personalized content, and incorporated social features. LinkedIn's acquisition of Lynda, the hard-skill online learning platform, strongly indicates the direction of continuing education services, worker training, and on-demand education that meets everyone's needs.

Kelly Palmer is a thought leader on the future of learning and career development. Kelly recently joined the executive team at Degreed as Chief Learning Officer where the mission is to help people embrace lifelong learning and discover and track personalized career development and all learning wherever it happens. Kelly was formerly the Chief Learning Officer of LinkedIn where she was helping employees transform the trajectory of their careers through learning and development, driving the employee experience strategy, as well as leading Inclusion & Diversity for the company. Prior to LinkedIn, Kelly was VP of Learning at Yahoo! and also held executive positions in learning, M&A, and product development at Sun Microsystems. Kelly holds a BA in English/Communications and an MS in Instructional & Performance Technology AND is always learning.

Millennials Will Be 70 Percent of the Global Workforce

Workers' Revolution? By 2020, Millennials Will Be 70 Percent of the Global Workforce

Kelly Palmer is a thought leader on the future of learning and career development. Kelly recently joined the executive team at Degreed as Chief Learning Officer where the mission is to help people embrace lifelong learning and discover and track personalized career development and all learning wherever it happens. Kelly was formerly the Chief Learning Officer of LinkedIn where she was helping employees transform the trajectory of their careers through learning and development, driving the employee experience strategy, as well as leading Inclusion & Diversity for the company. Prior to LinkedIn, Kelly was VP of Learning at Yahoo! and also held executive positions in learning, M&A, and product development at Sun Microsystems. Kelly holds a BA in English/Communications and an MS in Instructional & Performance Technology AND is always learning.

It was not so long ago that a person would work at one job, one company, for decades at a time until retirement. But in today's economy, where industries and individual companies rise and fall more quickly than ever before, job markets are less stable. As a result, the millennial generation has become known for staying at one job for just a few years before moving on to better and brighter opportunities. Millennials are now beginning to saturate the workforce, graduating from college and starting their careers. Kelly Palmer, former Chief Learning Officer of LinkedIn, says that millennials will make up half the US workforce, and 70 percent of the global workforce, by 2020. Many will look for companies to employ them, and those companies will likewise recruit talented employees. Retaining the talent they hire, however, has become a challenge as millennials want more from their job than a steady paycheck. They want education, flexibility, and meaning. As Palmer explains, rather than feel abandoned by a millennial who goes looking for new work, a company should have an honest conversation with their young employees about what their expectations are for employment. She calls this talking about "tours of duty," wherein an employee knows precisely what to expect, and how the company will invest in him or her over two or three years. After that "tour" is up, they can decide whether to continue their engagement. So instead of planning for ten years down the line, they can work together planning just a few years, and then coming back together to plan for another few years if all goes well. And this can help make the future for both hands a little bit more safe and comfortable. It’s not that millennials want Facebook breaks at work or time to tweet. Instead, what a work place can do is respect their incoming employees, give them time to learn the ropes, and help prepare them for a future in the workforce. Millennials tend to have a jaded expectation of the future, raised with one of the biggest generational debts in American history, and with the knowledge only a recession can offer.

Michael Norton: How to buy happiness

Michael I. Norton is a professor of business administration in the marketing unit at the Harvard Business School. He holds a B.A. in Psychology and English from Williams and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton. Prior to joining HBS, Professor Norton was a Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His work has been published in a number of leading academic journals, including Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and the Annual Review of Psychology, and has been covered in media outlets such as the Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
His research has twice been featured in the New York Times Magazine Year in Ideas issue, in 2007 (Ambiguity Promotes Liking) and 2009 (The Counterfeit Self). His “The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love” was featured in Harvard Business Review‘s Breakthrough Ideas for 2009.

The power of believing that you can improve

Carol Dweck researches “growth mindset” — the idea that we can grow our brain's capacity to learn and to solve problems. In this talk, she describes two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve. Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet? A great introduction to this influential field.

How To Command an Audience: Tips From a Spoken-Word Poet

There are a number of myths surrounding public performance that spoken-word poet and co-founder of Project Voice Sarah Kay helps to dispel. Perhaps the chief myth is that you can't both be nervous and enjoy the experience of public speaking. In reality, being nervous is an inevitable part of the experience, but understanding why the audience came to see you — they just want to have fun — can help conquer your fear. Kay has plenty of tips and tricks that will make you feel more comfortable on stage and in the process of preparing your performance or speech.

Some artists try to zone out while they’re performing. Perhaps because it is strange to be the spectacle, to know that everyone in the room has their eyes on them, ears on them, hoping they’ll be great but squinting hard to catch mistakes. It’s easier to go through a speech imagining all the audience in their underwear, just as embarrassed and ashamed. But it's not better.

Button Poetry alumni Jesse Parent and Neil Hilborn stay similarly attuned to their audience. They can tell when the audience is getting sucked in. Jesse Parent listens to the laughter in the audience, and holds off on continuing his poetry until it dies down, reacting to the whoops and cheers of the people listening.

It’s such moments that capture something deeply mesmerizing: honesty. Kay thinks those unplanned moments are when the truth comes out. When an accident happens on stage, it’s the most authentic and real thing about the whole show. That’s the moment of connection between the watcher and the speaker. It’s the speaker’s job to create an experience for every member in the audience, and while this can be incredibly hard, especially as Kay recalls performing for 3000 people, it isn’t impossible. But to do it, you can’t imagine your audience isn’t there, and can’t pretend they’re too busy being humiliated in their underwear to be paying attention. They are looking at you. Face it. Smile back.

Kay refines her performances by listening and paying attention to every person in the audience. As Jesse Parent holds up his hand to acknowledge the people in the audience, Kay remarks on the person in the red sweater and jokes on their surroundings or the news of the day to show everyone that this is a moment, not just a speech.

Scott Dinsmore: How to find work you love

Scott Dinsmore quit a job that made him miserable, and spent the next four years wondering how to find work that was joyful and meaningful. He shares what he learned in this deceptively simple talk about finding out what matters to you — and then getting started doing it.

So Why Don't You Have Your Dream Job Yet?

It is incredibly difficult to get a job these days. Everyone is looking, feels like few are hiring. College graduates coming out in the next few years are the children of the recession, who know full well that no job is guaranteed and no job is forever. So these graduates are likely to work at at approximately 15-20 companies, rather than just one, over the course of the years.

According to Jim Citrin (senior director of Spencer Stuart's North American Board & CEO Practice and author of six books), there are three main points to look at while job hunting – and they’re all in reference to which place would make you happier.

The first thing to consider is the job quality. Is this the kind of job that will be creative, active, meaningful, and does it have room to grow? The work you do could actually lead to a more fulfilling life. Or it could not, instead leading to that last-thought-before-bed panic, dreading the carbon copy torture that you’ll re-live all over again tomorrow.

The second thing to consider is the job’s pay. This kind of thing can sometimes be at odds with whether or not the job is fulfilling. Sometimes meaningful work doesn’t pay well, and conversely soul sucking positions come with a nice salary. That’s a line every person needs to draw for themselves – what is good for their lifestyle versus what is good for their sense of purpose.

Finally, a person needs to consider what kind of lifestyle they want to live. Do you want to drop everything at 5:30pm and go home, or would you be okay working a 90-hour week? Do you get vacation, benefits, sick leave, time with your family or friends? Can you deal with constant stress? Maybe you thrive under that kind of mission? Someone may be willing to perform less idealistic work with better pay to have the lifestyle they want. Others, if they want a more fulfilling job that aligns with their worldview are willing to forego the fancy vacations.

Jim Citrin calls it the job triangle, and throughout your career and all your various jobs, you can probably have one of those things – satisfaction, money, lifestyle – you can maybe even have two, but three is a big and rare dream to pull off. That’s not to say it’s not possible, reach for the stars, of coure, but according to Citrin the key to achieving balance and happiness is awareness of your situation, and knowing that perhaps not much money is okay now, but your priorities and needs with shift later, and you may have to forgo meaningful work for money. You can have it all, he says, but you can’t have it all at once.

Jim (James) Citrin's book isThe Career Playbook.

The 15 Characteristics of Effective Entrepreneurs

Why you have to fail to have a great career: Michael Litt at TEDxUW TEDx Talks TEDx Talks

ome people start their careers slowly, while others start with a bang. Michael Litt's case is definitely the latter: the serial entrepreneur's first venture comprising the import and re-sale of firecrackers to his fifth-grade classmates. But if the story were to be told from beginning to end, Litt would be the first to admit that his path has actually involved a number of "bangs" -- including some which didn't quite work out in his favour -- a fair number of nervous moments, and lot of plain, old-fashioned hard work.

Early in his university career, Michael looked to be heading down a path familiar to many Waterloo engineers, securing co-op placements at Research in Motion -- but it's what he accomplished after his first couple of years that made him stand out as a talented entrepreneur. After a spell as a day- trader, an aborted attempt at running a biodiesel refinery (during which he once used a bathroom hand dryer to un-freeze a jar of biodiesel minutes before a sales pitch), and an anonymous stint publishing a highlytrafficked blog which featured teardowns of new phones, Litt was focused on building revenue and he knew he wanted to start a business.

Fortunately, one of Litt's trades had put a little money in his pocket, and, with a little help from the subprime mortgage market, he was able to purchase a house and fill it with other budding entrepreneurs. This environment, now known as Batavia House, fostered the drive and motivation he needed to take the next step, and it wasn't long before he founded his current company, Vidyard, an organization helping businesses and individuals easily and effectively host videos on their websites.

A Waterloo native, Michael believes in the region's ability to attract and retain talent, and believes the local tech industry will only continue to grow. As it grows, Litt will continue to be an interested observer, albeit one with the experience to back up his words. "It's really interesting to see how things are developing," he says, "especially since my failures have defined my career and current position." It's an outlook that's bound to be part of any discussion about the future -- a discussion that Litt hopes to be a part of at TEDxUW.

THE KEY TO SUCCESS: GRIT

Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn't the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of "grit" as a predictor of success.

The Science of Creativity: How Imagination and Intelligence Work Together in the Brain

The great myth of the left brain versus right brain personality types has been popular for years. Even comedian Bo Burnham has turned this classic cliché into a successful song for his tour. As the story goes, the left brain is reserved for logic, analytics, and other brow-furrowing things, while the right brain is all about being creative. So a person who was very creative would say, oh, I’m right-brained, while someone who is more into scheduling would say, I’m left-brained.

Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D. and scientific director of the Imagination Institute, has put his foot down on the myth, and called it just that. In fact, he claims you can’t harness one side without enlisting the help of the other. It takes creativity to invent, and make something new, and it takes a certain calculated-ness to schedule long hours, trying to figure out how to make the invention work. For example, Leonardo da Vinci, one of the most famous artists in the world was also a brilliant inventor. His sketches of his flying machines, and fetuses developing in the womb are beautiful to look at, with expressive detail, but they’re also brilliantly designed.

The brain is interwoven, with no committed left side or right side usage. Parts are connected through various brain networks that criss-cross the brain to communicate and get the best function of the brain in various situations. One of these is the Executive Attention Network. This is what allows you to hold onto many pieces of information at once. When a person is studying for a test, this network allows them to remember what they’re studying, why they’re studying, the methods used to study, and when they need to finish. When it comes to creativity, the Executive Attention Network is also responsible for inhibiting the most obvious ideas that spring to mind, and instead it digs deeper to see what a second or third idea might bring - these are usually the more creatively developed versions of an idea, and it's something improv artists are usually very good at.

Then there's the Default Mode Network, which Kaufman prefers to call the Imagination Network, because it's the inwardly focused network that kicks in when the immediate environment surrounding us is not stimulating or engaging enough. This is the network responsible for daydreaming, tuning out, and also a lot of creative musing.

Furthermore, it takes creativity to be sympathetic for another person. The ability to imagine oneself in another person’s shoes is important to interpersonal relations, and allows us to be empathetic. This is imagination and creativity. While schools tend to prize science and math over creative skills, these things are important. It’s how we daydream, and how we improvise. Perhaps it’s time to invest in our imagination networks.

5 Unusual Lessons In Leadership: Malcolm Scovil at TEDx Hult International Business School LND

1. Love Everyone
2. Find the Go Go GIRL or the Go Go BOY (Find within you the person that wants to dance)
3. Hang out with the whatifs !!
4. Work like everyone is watching you
5. Hold on !! Do not give up !!!!!!!!!!