TED Talks
Being vulnerable isn’t easy. I think it would be easier to stand outside naked for a moment of mocking than to unveil the inner-self to others for a lifetime of judgment. However, I recently heard theTED Talk below by Brene Brown on her years of study on the subject of vulnerability.
What she discovered moved me to the core.
Brene states that in order for us to connect we have to allow ourselves to be SEEN. This is scary for the shy and the outspoken because we all think the same thing — “Is there something about me that if people knew they would withdraw?”.
Every soul cries: “Am I worthy of connection?” We then allow the mass public to tell us the answer to that. Please note: that unstable analysis can never end well no matter how popular one may seem. This leads us to live in shame of who we are in which Brown describes shame as “the fear of connection.”
I believe I can state truthfully that we live in a world of people full of shame. We’re scared to death of each other!
Hands of a prisoner | BortN66, Shutterstock.com.
Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of Equal Justice Initiative, shares stories about America's justice system and illustrates the imbalance of justice along racial lines.
"One of out three black men between the ages of 18 and 30 is in jail, in prison, on probation or parole," Stevenson said in his talk. "... We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes."
Half the Sky by Sheryl WuDunn
As part of International Women’s Day, take a moment and watch author Sheryl WuDunn’s TED Talk: Our Century’s Greatest Injustice.
Her best-selling book Half the Sky has touched and inspired millions across the globe, and here’s the 10 minute version.
Richard Wilkinson on TED.com: How economic inequality harms societies
We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust.
Watch Wilkinson's TED talk inside the blog...
“You may not agree with religion, but at the end of the day, religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they're for all of us.” — Alain de Botton in his "Atheism 2.0" TED Talk
Watch de Botton's "Atheism 2.0" talk inside the blog ...