Dont Worry About Finding Yourself Youre Already Found
[Music]
[Music]
[Applause]
we are
all born whole
we’re born confident in who we are and
we’re born knowing
we belong here from the first
breath we take our parents celebrate us
they celebrate our first step our first
word
our first face plant into the mud
they tell us that we’re special because
we’re different and we’re individual
and we’re nuanced when we’re little
the thing that makes us the most
important thing in the world
is that there’s only one of us a single
one of us we learn about the world
and we carry the weight of the world as
we move through it but when we’re small
the only weight we carry is hunger every
once in a while or maybe a dirty diaper
in fact if anybody was going to go for a
nudie run on a beach
in the middle of summer it’s a toddler
right or
maybe my ex-husband
rugby boys right
reason that we can walk through the
world knowing ourselves as small people
is because we are born whole
and imperfect when i was four years old
my mom and dad signed me up to play
softball in our local softball league
with five-year-olds
not only because i was taller but i
should tell you all that my dad played
professional baseball for the los
angeles dodgers
so before i could even put one foot in
front of the other i could throw a ball
catch a pop fly
and swing a bat like nobody’s business
throughout the first season i can
remember how scared i was before it
started
and that fear dissipated because i
wasn’t afraid of learning the rules of
the game of softball
i didn’t know the rules of the game of
life yet and how to interact with people
what i found was pretty darn cool i was
amazed
i was just stuck in curiosity and
wonderment
in watching my friends play some of my
friends were so fast it was ridiculous
me i would stand up to the plate and
every single time regardless of whether
i made contact or not
there were a lot of whiffs i would just
swing for the back i would swing for the
fences
and after an entire season i won an
award i won the entire
league’s award as the youngest person as
the little slugger
long live the little slugger hi socks
short shorts
really bad california tan really bad
california dan
bruce shins skinned knees and i could
outpace most of the boys
man i was comfortable in my own skin
the world was my oyster it was fantastic
through school primary middle school
high school
i started to dig into what it was that i
was
so fascinated with in this world about
others and it always came back to that
sense it was our confidence it was our
inbuilt light me personally
beyond sports i learned to love music
and in fact i fell in love with elton
john
it’s crazy it’s crazy but it’s true
and i learned to play a lot of different
instruments because of it i learned to
write lyrics
and i learned to dive deep into who i
was
when i left high school i left the home
i’d spent every single night of my
childhood and
my parents threw all of my stuff in a
car they drove me four hours north to
santa barbara
they dropped me in a dorm room that was
empty
and bare and they said have attic kid
the world’s your oyster for four years
i learned from nobel laureates and
tenured professors
and i doubt i go very deep into the
things
that really really captured my attention
and so did the people around me
even at 18 19 20 years old
we were curiously confident we walked
through the world as if we knew
who we were fast forward to graduation
my mom’s family from missouri flew out
to california to celebrate
and my dad’s family from l.a drove up
the two hours to santa barbara and i
remember
two parts of graduation day
first of all one thing you should know
about me i remember my entire life
through the food i ate
so the first thing i remember is we were
at a sushi restaurant
called something’s fishy
none of us had the sashimi
[Music]
the second thing i remember is that
instead of people
coming up to me and saying
congratulations kid the world’s your
oyster
it was a different conversation this
time it was as if the world had stopped
and pivoted and the door had opened
instead of congratulations the world
your oyster kid it was hey
welcome to adulthood i didn’t know what
that meant
when i was told when we’re all told when
we’re young that the world is our oyster
we go out we think if we work hard
enough and we do the mahi
we’ll be able to reap the rewards but
what i found out
very very quickly was that to be
successful in the adult world
meant we had to be somebody that wasn’t
the person we were
we had to live up to ideals and
expectations
of other people’s building we had to
play by rules that we didn’t write
we all play by rules we didn’t write
i was told that if i was going to be
successful i needed to eye up
a few milestones i needed to put a foot
on the rung of the proverbial ladder and
i needed to climb
no faster than anyone else no skipping a
rung
this is how we did it this is how our
grandparents did it
this is how their parents did it before
then it’s just how things are done
that is not what i wanted to do my plan
with life
was to get a really good job to have a
career
i wanted to play tambourine for elton
john
i mean rocking with the rocket man
shaking what my mama gave me
and shaking the tambourine it’s a thing
but instead i got married very young 23
i got married at 24 i had a baby and at
25 i moved to new
zealand we had rent to pay and we had a
mouth to feed
so i played the game i played that game
i straightened my curly hair
i left my doc martens at home
i put on heels
instead of going out into the world
without makeup i started to put on
a little bit of war paint and when i was
told to be quiet
i waited until i was spoken to and i was
told there was a boys night out
i quietly went back as the girl to the
office
and i played the game for 10 years and i
climbed that ladder the way i was
supposed to i
ticked all the bloody boxes
but i wasn’t happy i wasn’t happy at all
after building my career for 10 years
and kind of cultivating a pretty cool
little personal brand
while this thing called social media
grew and was born and bubbled away
i landed my dream job my dream job if
there was a pinnacle
i’d reached it at least in my own head
what i’d become in my own head was an
inextricable version of my title
i couldn’t separate who i was from words
on a piece of paper that someone else
had written
i see that now but i didn’t then when i
walked into said dream job it only took
a week for me to be hauled into
somebody’s office
a senior leader who sat across from the
table from me and said so
this personal brand this public speaking
this
twittering it’s a risk
you are a risk holy
everything i’d done ever in my life was
built on a foundation of kindness
and of giving and i’m at my my this is
the echelon for me
and i’m a risk so i said okay what do i
need to do
and they said stop stop tweeting
stop writing stop having any kind of
creative outlet in public
stop talking to people who could be in
the media stop
so i stopped i stopped all of it and in
the intervening
year and a half or so i stopped being
myself
my first marriage fell apart it crumbled
14 years down the drain i can’t just
blame the job but it was hard and it was
stressful
i got sick my kid got sick we were
stressed
and in the end there’s a few corporate
folks in here i’m sure
we had one of those lovely lovely things
where we restructured
at the time i was restructured out and
my soul was crushed
i spent two days i am a tea total i
spent two days
drinking one percent beer in fear and
solid fearing feeling sorry for myself
i don’t think i was drunk but i was
really sorry at the bottom
my now wife picked me up and she said
i think we need to go see somebody if it
wasn’t for her
the game that i’d played the game that
i’d been a willing participant in
would have won but instead i went and
spent almost
all of my next paycheck for the next
year
on therapy long-lived millennial
breakdowns
and i worked through who i was
and who i wanted to be
when i started to find purpose for
myself and i started to find beauty in
the world again
i started to see purpose and i started
to see beauty
i started to realize that there were big
gigantor
global companies out there that were
doing the right thing they weren’t
putting people in boxes
they weren’t counting head counts they
were counting heart
counts i looked at businesses like nike
and patagonia
and the way that their people from all
different places
could share and talk and create
and curate information any way they
wanted to
i felt like i know the beating i felt
like i knew the beating heart
of these businesses more than i knew the
beating heart of small businesses
right here in new zealand
as i moved on and started to find other
people
that really really inspired me i met a
woman called mary rodriguez
i don’t know if you guys know mario
rodriguez she speaks all over the world
she’s a human ray of sunshine she’s a
storyteller
she is a digital evangelist she’s a mama
she’s a feminist she is everything that
most of us
would love to be and love to be friends
with
mary also happens to work for microsoft
microsoft i mean i left california 17
years ago but when i think microsoft
today
i think of a big you know boating
business for boating business i don’t
think of humans and that was until i met
mary because through getting to know her
and through
her stories i’ve seen firsthand how
microsoft
invests in her she’s written a book
she’s gone back to school
and at every part of her journey
microsoft was there
the people of the business were there
saying hey
the better a person miri is the more
comfortable she is in her skin and let
me tell you
this woman will dance on tables she
doesn’t even need tequila
the better she is and the more
comfortable she is and the more
the more at home she is being vulnerable
the better microsoft is
so i have a much different view of that
business
another business in portland
called wild fang so the fang of a wolf
and the wildness of our souls kind of
put together
is co-founded and ceoed led by a woman
called emma mcelroy
if you don’t know who she is after
tonight look her up she is a badass
in a word a badass she and a friend were
out shopping one day and realized that
there weren’t
any clothes for women and non-binary
people
who wanted to dress in a more kind of
masculine
formal buttoned up way so she created
wild fang
but at the heart of her brand wasn’t
just the insight that women wanted to
walk through the world
comfortably but that activism mattered
more now than ever
so whether somebody in her business is a
cashier
or they sit next to her in a boardroom
table she extrapolates out
kindness and activism at scale
she allows people to shout and holler
when they need to or
whisper and cry and i just think that’s
the most beautiful
way of doing business we must change the
way we do business
the world has never been more connected
we can’t log
off yet we’re so disconnected from who
we are
who’s booked a trip to bali to go find
their inner
chakras i have not but i’d
love to there’s nothing more satisfying
than not having wi-fi but then
oh my god there’s no wi-fi
the fear of 10 minutes away from your
phone and 80 new emails
is real we are stressed we’re
dying from the stress we’re medicated
because we’re depressed
it’s hard to be alive and to be positive
right now in the working culture we have
which is why i wanted to talk about
work-life balance
i’m not gonna sit here and tell you what
it means because i think we all know
we’ve read the six million google hits
and we understand
it’s something that we’re told we need
to aspire to
i think work life balance in and of
itself is at
best an illusion and at worst it’s it’s
a
bad fallacy i call on work-life
balance
i believe in something and i hope you do
too that’s more like life life balance
we could probably just call it life or
balance but
let’s call it life life balance
i don’t know about you but i’ve got 24
hours in the day
and that’s it i don’t start and end at
the threshold
of my office building i don’t drop my
kid off
at school singing at the top of our
lungs
to park in a parking lot and walk
through doors
and become staid and quiet and shrinking
and small i’m really lucky that i work
in a business right now where i can walk
in
rocking double denim a backwards ball
cap big superman socks
and have rainbows blaring and people
still let me sit at the table
they make space and they say cass tell
me
more it’s on all of us these days
not just to find who we want to be but
to go back
to who we were in the beginning when an
old
annuity run on the beach wasn’t anything
we worried about we just wanted the sun
on our skin and to fill the salt water
on our toes
it’s time for all of us to take
to take note and to take stock and to
really understand who
who it is that you are and who you’ve
always been
i know with me right here the little
slugger
man i put her aside for 20 years i can
remember my mom and i we got pretty
drunk in california the last time we
were together
it’s a story for another ted talk
but mom after her seventh tequila said
to me
cass i lost you for 18 years
i lost you but you’re back
and i hope and pray for all of us in
this room that there’ll be a time
where if you feel like you’ve lost
yourself if you feel you can’t be who
you are
you come back i hope you find your
little slugger
i hope she swings for the goddamn fences
and i know you’ll connect
thank you
[Applause]
you