Brené Brown: 'it will not be on your terms and it will not be on your timeline,' University of Texas - 2020

Thank you. Graduates, I again, I wish I was with you. I wish we were together. I wish we were in front of that tower, and I know that we will be in short order. Tonight, we're going to do this virtually. Got some words I've put together for you. I'm going to read it to you. I'm going to look at you. I'm going to give you some weird Zoom eye along the way, probably as I go back and forth. But this is for you.

I believe that what starts at UT changes the world. I know it's true because I've lived it. I also know that this is not how you and your family wanted to spend commencement. The best way I can honor you and everything that you've accomplished at UT during your time is to be very honest and tell you about the hard and wonderful and windy path of building a life and work that has the power to actually change the world.

What starts here changes the world, but it will not be on your terms and it will not be on your timeline. As we can see right now more than ever, the world does not ready itself for our plans. Your ability to live a life that's full of love and meaning, to make the world a braver and kinder place, to disrupt and reshape the future, has very little to do with the greatness of your plan. It depends completely on your ability to get back up and begin again when your plan fails. What starts here changes the world if you're committed to getting back up and beginning again, the exact same number of times that you fall, trip, and get pushed down.

When we see people myself included, when we see people that have achieved great things, who have set big goals and met them, we're often too quick to jump into comparison. Their path was easier. Their job was different. Everything was a lot less difficult. Fewer obstacles. We also make up stories about their efforts and obstacles that mostly highlight our fears and the worries we have about our own self-worth. Who am I to dream this? Who am I to believe I can change the world? Who am I to think I can overcome the challenges in front of me? Even the ones right now in May of 2020, in this world, in this pandemic.

I want to tell you who I think you are, who we all are by sharing a little bit more of who I am and my story. Two of my prize possessions growing up were a Bevo rug and a Bevo metal trash can. I loved these two things so much, wherever we moved, they went with me. There was no question in my mind that I would be a Longhorn. In 1982, my fall semester, senior year, I was accepted into the University of Texas and I got actually a room assigned to Kinsolving. And that was exactly how I had planned it. What I had not planned for was my family falling apart. My parents, after 20 years of marriage were on the brink of a divorce, and my father had taken early retirement from the company where he had spent his career and invested everything we had in an oil-related construction company.

Again, 1982, that was a huge crisis, oil glut crisis. And we lost everything. Paying for college came off the table, the divorce was imminent and I took my rage and grief and disillusionment and confusion and got as far away from Houston as I could get. I spent six months hitchhiking through Europe, came back to Texas, moved to San Antonio and spent several years in and out of college, doing every odd job you can imagine, including cleaning houses. It was the first and only job I've ever been fired from. I thought I made this table in their dining room really shiny, with some spray stuff and so I decided to pledge all the hardwood floors. But it turns out that wasn't a good idea because the owner came home and slid seven or eight feet through the entryway and then did a triple gainer and seriously injured their tailbone. And then I was, I guess what we would call today, gently coached out of that profession.

I finally settled into a full-time job at AT&T, it was going to be the perfect job for me because I could go to school during the day and this job was from 4:00 PM to 1:00 AM. The only tricky part was that I had to take all the calls in Spanish. Now, I had four years of high school French behind me, and two years of severe telenovela addiction. I'd watched two or three telenovelas with my roommates in San Antonio for two years. So I thought that would be enough. I actually did okay. I kind of winged it as I went.

The only problem I had were technical terms. Back then your telephone would plug into the wall in a jack and my first kind of full day out of training, I got a call from a woman who was panicked because she thought her phone was broken and we were trying to figure out whether it was the phone or the jack. And I didn't really know how to say jack, but I thought, well, Jack's a nickname for John and John and Spanish is Juan. So I told her to plug her phone into Juan, which happened to be her husband's name, which got really confusing. It turns out that telephone jack in Spanish isn't [inaudible 00:06:35] I loved my work at AT&T and to this day, I will tell you that it remains probably the most diverse, inclusive organization that I've ever been inside of.

I was led, mentored and coached by people who looked different than me, were raised different than me, thought different than me. I learned to trust people that were different from me. And I learned to be trusted by people who were different from me. I learned how to listen and believe people's stories, even though they didn't resonate or match my story. It was an incredible experience. About a year in I was offered a promotion. I took it. About six months later I was offered another promotion and I took it. This time I became a trainer, which is when I fell in love with teaching. I flew all over the country training people for AT&T. And then I received another promotion. And this promotion was kind of, I had to go to headquarters. I had to go to New Jersey. And I was so tempted because I loved my work and I would be close to New York and it sound incredible, but I couldn't stop thinking about the trash can and the hook rug with Bevo's picture.

So I went into my boss and said, "I'm turning down the promotion and I'm going to resign from the company." And she looked at me and said, "Are you going to be a VJ on MTV, on Headbangers Ball?" Which had been apparently not so secretive an ambition, but it turned out I did not get a job offer from MTV to be a VJ on Headbangers Ball. And I said, "No." And she said, "Are you going back to school full-time? Are you going to UT?" And I said, "I am." I wasn't too worried about the 1.1 GPA that I had accumulated over the years past, because that was a long time ago and I'd had a successful career at AT&T for several years. I had a lot of recommendations, I had a lot of confidence. And I went to the Dean of Students office at Admissions and I said, "Here's my story, and I'd love to come here and I've done this great work." And UT would have no part of it.

I don't remember his name, but he was in either to the Dean of Students or our admissions, maybe somewhere between. And he said, "I'll need to see two semesters of really good grades from you at a community college before I consider letting you into the University of Texas." And I said, "Okay." I moved to Houston. I had not been back since my parents had divorced. I lived with my mom, her new husband, my 16 year old twin sisters. And I got a job waiting tables at Pappadeaux. And I went to community college. A year later, I had taken 27 hours of transferable credit, I had a 4.0, and I sat in the waiting room of the same guy's office at UT. I was puffy and proud and ready. He looked at my transcript and he congratulated me on my grades and said, "I'm sorry. I'll need to see another semester of strong grades before I can let you into the University of Texas."

And I just remember bursting into tears and walking down 26th Street. I don't think it was called Dean Keeton then, but walking down 26th Street toward where my car was parked. And there used to be a convenience station there. And I found the quarters and called my mom on the payphone and told her, "They said no. They said no. They won't let me in." And as she assured me that I could come back to Houston and take more classes, I looked across the street at my car. I think it was probably illegally parked. And it was filled to the very top of the ceiling of that car. Because I had packed all my belongings. Because I wasn't coming home. This was it. This was my time.

So I took a deep breath and I cried for a couple more days. I called my mom 500 times during those two days. I wasn't sure I could do it. Wasn't what I had planned. It wasn't my timeline. It wasn't what I wanted. But I registered at ACC. I stayed in Austin. I transferred to the Pappadeaux on 35. And I made the grades and I went back and I thought to myself the same thing I still think to myself today when things are hard, and when I fall, because I still fall. Get back up, begin again. I will never forget the day that I took my transcripts back to this guy's office. He looked at them and he stood up and he looked across his big oak desk at me and said, "Welcome to the University of Texas at Austin." And like this, I started crying and I don't know what came over me because it was like I was in bootcamp and he was a drill sergeant because the only thing I could think to say at the time was "Hook them horns, sir." I think I startled him a little bit.

I married Steve who had just graduated from UT. He started medical school in San Antonio at UT Medical School. I worked in a residential treatment facility in the Hill Country between San Antonio and Austin. I kept waiting tables. I worked on my bachelor's degree in Social Work at UT. I did an internship at the state hospital and another internship at child protective services. And I graduated. I went straight into my MSW. Steve and I ended up in Houston. I started my PhD program at the University of Houston. I was 32 or 33 at the time. We were ready to have a baby. I got pregnant. I remember coming to school and letting people know, and some people were happy for me. And I think some people were, one person said to me, "God we really thought you'd have a career." And I said, "Look, it's a baby, not a lobotomy. We're good."

It turned out I had Hyperemesis and I got really sick and I had to take a leave of absence from school for a semester. Get back up, begin again. I got out and graduated with my PhD. I wrote a book and I was really excited about it. It was rejected from every single person. I could wallpaper [inaudible 00:13:01] with rejection letters. Get back up, begin again. Borrowed money from my parents. Self-published. The self-published book was a big hit. Penguin, big, proper publisher bought it. That book failed. Get back up, begin again. This is the rhythm of my life. And these are the seasons of every single person I know who has actually changed the world. I've collected over 400,000 pieces of data over 20 years. And I've never seen a single person who's built a life, a family or a career that did not have to scratch their way up from a fall and begin again a hundred times.

What starts here changes the world, but it will not be on your terms and it will not be on your timeline. The world will not ready itself for our plans. What starts here will change the world but it'll take your commitment to get back up and begin again the exact same number of times you fall, trip or get pushed down. So what's the key to getting back up and beginning again? Vulnerability. Now you all didn't think I was going to get through this whole thing without mentioning vulnerability, right? Come on. You knew it was coming. Getting back up and beginning again are risky. They both require courage and curiosity and courage and curiosity are born of vulnerability. Are you willing to show up and be all in when you don't know how it's going to end? The definition of vulnerability is simple. It's uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. We're raised to believe that vulnerability is weakness, but that's the greatest myth of all. It is not. It is actually the most accurate way to measure courage.

We've asked tens of thousands of people around the world, from special forces soldiers to professional athletes, to students and teachers, "Give me a single example. One example of courage in your life or in the life of someone else that did not require vulnerability. A single example of courage that did not require uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure." No one can. One day I found myself on base, military base in the Midwest talking to troops. I asked this question, "Give me an example of courage that didn't require vulnerability." There was silence. People buried their head in their hands. And finally, one young man stood up and said, "Three tours ma'am. There is no courage without vulnerability." A week later, I was with the CLC Hawks, asked them the same question, "No, not on the field or off. There is no courage without vulnerability."

If you can't manage, own, and lean into your vulnerability, you can't change the world. To get back up from a fall, to get back up from a setback, to get back up from what we're in right now, you have to acknowledge you're down, that you've fallen, failed, made a mistake. You have to be brave enough to acknowledge that you're hurting. That you're sad, disappointed, grieving, feeling shame, whatever feeling you're in, you have to own it. You cannot, we cannot begin again when we're dragging unspoken and unexplored emotions behind us. We have to be brave and curious and to dig into the feelings of a fall. And that's hard when[inaudible 00:16:35].

Emotional stoicism is not tough. Pretending that you don't have feelings isn't strength. Self-awareness is power. Acknowledging emotion and feeling doesn't give emotion and feeling power. It gives you power. You own the emotions or they own you. You own your hurt or your hurt owns you and you end up working it out on other people, or you take it out on your own self-worth. Once you get back up and acknowledge your hurt, that's when we're free to begin again. But beginning again also takes curiosity and courage. What have I learned from this fall that I can take with me as I begin again? And, does beginning again mean that there's a possibility of falling again? Yeah, it does. That's why they call it courage.

As I wrap up, let me tell you about the secret gift of being forced off the path, falling, getting back up and beginning again. Nothing wasted, muscles built. What I feared would be a shaming return home to Houston to go to community college, turned out to be an incredible opportunity to reconnect with my family. It was that Hill Country residential treatment facility that I worked in while I was working my way through UT, where I learned about the concept of shame. That defined my career. My falls have taught me a hundred times more about who I am than any of my achievements ever have, ever could, or ever will. I owe a hundred percent of my accomplishments to taking smart risks and trusting myself. While every fall is different and every learning is new, I'm not afraid to fall anymore because I've built the skills to get back up.

I've learned more about being human, how we think, feel, and behave from bartending and waiting tables and my weird odd jobs than I ever could in a classroom. Not a minute of that time was wasted. Not a minute. I learned more about the issues that are important to me like inclusion and diversity and leadership, living into those principles at a job that I never in a million years was a part of my plan. So what happens in the classroom, when I was a student or where I teach, that's where we learn to think critically. That's where we learn to connect the dots of our seemingly unconnected experiences. That's where we learn how to make meaning, how we learn to understand what struggle means and why we can't have anything without it. That's where we build muscles on top of muscles.

I spend 90% of my time working with leaders inside the organizations where many of you want to work. Three, six, 12 months from now when the job market is back and it will be back, my guess is that you'll end up being asked this question during one of your interviews. "I see you're a 2020 graduate. That was tough. How did you handle it? What did you do that summer for those six months after graduation?" My suggestion and my hope for you is that you do whatever it takes to be able to honestly say, "It was tough and disappointing. But it taught me about the importance of resetting. It taught me how to get back up and begin again. I spent the summer driving a truck for my dad's company. I volunteered. I took an online course. I got experience in this area. I got back up and began again."

It will not be on your terms or on your timeline. The world does not ready itself for our plans. But make no mistake. What starts at the University of Texas changes the world. And for every individual person listening to this, I'm not talking to your class right now. I'm talking to you. Hearts open, curiosity and courage on, horns up. You've done it.

Michelle Obama: 'Over these last couple of months our foundations has been shaken', virtual commencement speech - 2020

9 June 2020, Washington DC, USA

Hey everybody. It is an honor to be here with you to help celebrate this amazing milestone in your lives. Graduation from college or high school is a culmination of years of hard work. So please enjoy this moment. You deserve this celebration. Congratulations. This is an important time of transition in light of the current state of our country. I struggled to find the right words of wisdom for you today. So I am here today to talk to you, not as the former first lady, but as a real life person, a mother, a mentor, a citizen concerned about your future and the future of our country. Because right now, all that superficial stuff of titles and positions, all of that has been stripped away.

A lot of us are reckoning with the most basic essence of who we are. Over these past couple of months, our foundation has been shaken, not just by a pandemic that stole too many of our loved ones, up ended our daily lives and sent tens of millions into unemployment. But also by the rumbling of the age old fault lines that our country was built on the lines of race and power that are now once again. So nakedly exposed for all of us to grapple with.

So if any of you are scared or confused or angry or just plain overwhelmed by it all, if you feel you’re searching for lifeline just to steady yourself, you are not alone. I am feeling all of that too. I think we all are. So I want you to know that it’s okay to be confused. It’s okay if you don’t understand exactly what you’re feeling, we’re all sorting through this in real time. But here’s the thing, while this period is certainly unprecedented, it is not a complete anomaly, simply some random coincidence to be dismissed. Now what’s happening right now is the direct result of decades of unaddressed, prejudice, and inequality. The truth is when it comes to all those tiny stories of hard work and self determination that we’d like to tell ourselves about America.

Well, the reality is a lot more complicated than that because for too many people in this country, no matter how hard they work, there are structural barriers working against them that just make the road longer and rockier. And sometimes it’s almost impossible to move upward at all, because if you’re required to work during a pandemic, but don’t have enough protective equipment or health insurance from your employer or paid sick leave, what is more essential, your work or your life. If you don’t feel safe driving your own car in your own neighborhood or going for a jog or buying some candy at 7-eleven or bird watching. If you can’t even approach the police without fearing for your life. Well, then how do you begin to chart your own course?

And as so often as the case, these questions compound upon themselves, see if you’re struggling already just to keep your head above water. If you’re living in a constant state of fear, how much farther behind will you be after months in quarantine and without a job. These are uncomfortable questions, questions that have dogged this country for generations, but are now staring us in the face. Every time we look at our phones or hear helicopters circling our neighborhoods. The tough part is nobody has all the answers. If my generation did trust me, we’d have fixed the whole of this long time ago, but that doesn’t mean we should feel hopeless. Just the opposite, because what we finally do have is focus. We see what’s happening in stark relief. We see how these inequalities are playing out on our streets, and it’s not just the communities most affected by these challenges that see it now.

It’s folks all across the country who for too long have had the luxury and privilege of looking away. We all have no choice, but to see what has been staring us in the face for years, for centuries. So the question is, how will we respond? Like I said before, I don’t have any easy answers for you, but I do have some lessons I want to share about how to move forward in these tumultuous times. The first is this life will always be uncertain. It is a lesson that most of us get the chance to learn over the course of years and years, even decades, but one that you’re learning right now. This is a time in your life when it feels like everything is turned upside down and perhaps you’re wishing that things could just go back to the way they were. Look, I’ve been there many times in my life.

I felt it most profoundly when my father and my best friend died within a year of each other. I was in my late 20s. Oh and it felt like my whole world was collapsing in on itself. I would have given anything, anything to bring them back. But that experience gave me a kind of clarity with everything and pieces around me, I had to forge a new path. A path, fortunately, more focused on meaning and service. So graduates, I hope that what you’re going through right now can be your wake up call that it pushes you, not just to think about what kind of career you want to build. What kind of person do you want to be? Here’s the thing, you have the opportunity to learn these valuable lessons faster than the generations before you. You can learn them together as a cohort of young people ready to take on the world, no matter how tumultuous it may be.

That leads me to my second lesson, in an uncertain world time tested values like honesty and integrity, empathy and compassion. That’s the only real currency in life. Treating people right will never ever fail you. Now, I’m not naive. I know that you can climb a long way up the ladder selling falsehoods and blaming others for your own shortcomings, shunning those with less privilege and advantage. But that is a heavy way to live. It deadens your spirit and it hardens your heart may seem like a winning strategy in the short run. But trust me, graduates that kind of life catches up to you. You rob yourself of the things that matter most. Deep and loving connections with others, honest work that leads to lasting contributions to your community. The vibrancy that comes from a diversity of ideas and perspectives, the chance to leave this world a little better than you found it.

Don’t deprive yourselves of all that. There is no substitute for it. Instead, make a decision to use your privilege and your voice for the things that really matter, which is my third lesson today, to share that voice with the rest of the world. For those of you who feel invisible, please know that your story matters, your ideas matter, your experiences matter, your vision for what our world can and should be matters. So don’t ever, ever let anyone tell you that you’re too angry or that you should keep your mouth shut. There will always be those who want to keep you silent. To have you be seen, but not heard. Maybe they don’t even want to see you at all, but those people don’t know your story. If you listen to them, then nothing will ever change. So it’s up to you to speak up when you or someone, you know isn’t being heard, it’s up to you to speak out against cruelty, dishonesty, bigotry, all of it. It’s up to you to march hand in hand with your allies to stand peacefully with dignity and purpose on the front lines, in the fight for justice.

Here’s the last part. It’s up to you to couple every protest with plans and policies, with organizing and mobilizing and voting and that’s my final piece of advice. Graduates, anger is a powerful force. It can be a useful force, but left on its own it will only corrode and destroy and sow chaos on the inside and out. But when anger is focused, when it’s channeled into something more, oh, that is the stuff that changes history. Dr. King was angry. Sojourner Truth was angry. Lucretia Mott, Cesar Chavez, the folks at Stonewall, they were all angry, but those folks were also driven by compassion, by principle, by hope.

So they took advantage of whatever resources they had in their own time, thundering from the pulpit and the convention floor, penning letters from a jail cell, standing up for their rights in the face of police violence. They built coalitions with folks like them and different from them. They got fluent in the language of power. They sat down with leaders they disagreed with because they knew that if they wanted their vision to be made real, it needed to be made law. It needed to be voiced, not just on the streets, but in the halls of power. It needed to be carried, not just by the housekeeper and the shift worker, but by the senator and the congresswoman and yes the President of the United States.

So graduates, it is your time now and look, our democracy isn’t perfect. But I have traveled the world and seeing the governments and people in so many other countries. I can tell you that our democracy is sturdy and yes, it still works, but it doesn’t work if you silence yourselves. It does not work if you disengage from the process. We’re seeing the consequences of that right now. But if you hold strong with the same faith that carried all of those giants before you toward real measurable progress, you will change the course of history. So what does that mean for your time? It starts where change always starts in your own home, in your own social circles, in your own neighborhoods, at your own dinner tables. Sometimes it’s easy to stand with strangers that are protests than it is to challenge someone in your own backyard.

So if you hear people expressing bigoted views or talking down to those people, it is up to you to call them out because we won’t solve anything. If we’re only willing to do what’s easiest, we’ve got to make hard choices and sacrifices in our own lives. So if you’re spending a lot of time, just hashtaging and posting right now that’s useful, especially during a pandemic, but it’s only a beginning. Go further, send all your friends a link to register to vote, text everybody you know to join you in exercising, their constitutional right to protest. Ask yourself, do you know where your polling place is? Do you know when your primary elections are held? Do you know how to request a mail in ballot? Who are the incumbents and the candidates at every level of government, not just president, but state representative, city council, prosecutors, sheriff.

And don’t just ask yourselves these questions. Ask your friends, your family, ask everyone you see in your neighborhood. And while we’re reaching out, please let’s give everyone who’s working toward progress space to be themselves. Everybody has got to vote when the time comes, but the activism that leads up to that day comes in many forms. Some want to march right up in front, others prefer to stay back, some kneel in the pews, others on the street corner, some canvas their neighborhoods, others run for office. Some do an honest day’s work and raise good kids. Others choose to focus on their education and use that degree to address these issues and build a better life for themselves and those around them. Graduates, it’s all important and we need every bit of it. So we cannot allow our hurt and our frustration to turn us against each other, to cancel somebody else’s point of view. If we don’t agree with every last bit of their approach.

That kind of thinking only divides us and distracts us from our higher calling, it is the gum in the wheel of progress. Graduates this is how you can finish the work that the generations before you have started, by staying open and hopeful, even in the tough times. By channeling that discomfort you feel into activism and a democracy that was designed to respond to those who vote. Here’s the thing, I know you can do it because over these many years, I’ve seen exactly who you are. I’ve seen your creativity and your talent and your resourcefulness. I’ve seen you speaking out in gun violence and fight climate change. I’ve seen you gathering donations for those in need during this pandemic.

I’ve seen you marching with peace and with purpose and that is why even in tough times like these, you continue to be what gives me hope. Graduates, you all are exactly what we need right now and for the years and decades to come, you’re learning so much so quickly. I know that not only can you do better than those who came before you, you will. So it’s your time. I love you all. I believe in you all. I want you to be safe and I can’t wait to see you take the reins. Congratulations again on your graduation. God bless you.