Transcriber: Translate TED Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
There is something that is holding us back.
It keeps us from things like applying to a job,
asking a person out on a date,
giving love, receiving love,
to expressing our spirit.
It causes us to experience incredible shame.
It's called a toxic voice.
But we do not have to be held back by the shame these toxic voices create.
We have the power to quiet them,
and when we do,
we will live our lives with more honor, more courage, more confidence.
I remember the day when I came face-to-face with my own toxic voices.
It was on a Friday morning in one of my flamenco classes.
Not flamingo like the bird, but flamenco, which is a traditional Spanish dance.
We had been studying a specific portion of the dance called the escobilla.
The escobilla is this moment
when the dancer gets to show off her footwork and her duende.
In flamenco, we refer to duende as the expression of your spirit and feelings.
It goes way beyond the technicality of the dance.
We were taking a break in class when my instructor, Wendy, announced
that she wanted us to each, individually, dance that escobilla by ourselves.
I dreaded this particular exercise.
I love dancing flamenco, but I don't like dancing flamenco in front of other people.
It always creates this feeling of vulnerability in me.
So, as I was waiting for my turn to dance,
I began to notice that my stomach was in knots,
my heart was pounding, the back of my throat was tight.
Perhaps you've felt like this before - before an interview,
before you're getting ready to speak up in a room.
That's how I was feeling.
So just before it was my turn to dance,
I took a deep breath to prepare myself
and waited for Wendy to mark the rhythm for me so that I could dance.
(Applause)
When it was finished, I felt so relieved, just like I was feeling right now.
I was so glad it was over,
but then Wendy said, "No, Margo, do it again,"
and so I did.
And then she said, "Do it again," and so I did.
We moved into this cycle where I danced the escobilla
and she had me repeat it over and over and over,
and I was becoming incredibly frustrated.
So I took a deep breath,
and it was in that moment when I heard what Wendy was really saying to me:
(Spanish) "Bailar sin vergüenza, Margo, bailar sin vergüenza!"
Wendy was saying to me,
"Dance without shame, Margo, dance without shame!"
Wendy didn't care if I had perfected the footwork;
she was looking for my duende, the expression of my spirit.
But it wasn't coming through.
It was hidden.
Instead,
my body and my face were expressing
the shame I was carrying from my toxic voices,
which were "I am not as good as everybody else,"
"I have to be perfect,"
"You're such a failure."
You see, dancing reveals a story through movement,
and that morning in my flamenco class,
my dance was revealing the stories of shame and fear
that I had emotionally inherited throughout my lifetime.
We've all emotionally inherited a toxic voice
that causes us to dance with shame, whether we realize it or not.
In addition to being a student of flamenco,
I'm also a psychotherapist.
In the last 25 years,
I've spent over 40,000 hours of studying and observing
how these toxic voices affect my clients and myself as well.
I have learned a toxic voice has the power to demean the human spirit.
They take root during a shame-producing moment in a person's life.
Like any other toxin,
they deplete our spirit and keep us from functioning at our best.
A toxic voice is different from that typical self-talk we have with ourselves,
for example, "I wonder if that guy likes me?"
or "I wonder if I will fit in that group?"
They are different because they're shame producing,
they're pervasive
and they create a persistent belief about yourself that is toxic.
I remember a client I worked with. I'll refer to him as Diego.
Diego was a brilliant violinist.
He had been playing since he was four years old
and was first chair for both his middle school and high school orchestra.
However, there was a tradition
where any student could challenge him to first chair,
but they had to compete with him on a musical play-off.
So one morning, Diego was sitting in class,
and a really good friend was seated next to him.
He leaned over to Diego and said, "Diego, I really want to be first chair."
So Diego raised his hand
to inform the orchestra leader that this student wanted to challenge him.
But then he said, "I don't want it. He can have it."
He took his violin, he packed it up in his beautiful old weathered case
and walked out the door.
You see, there was something that Diego saw in the excitement of his friend's face
that made him realize
he had not been enjoying playing violin for a really long time.
So, he headed home,
excited to share his epiphany with his family.
But his mom's response was very different from what he expected.
She was furious with Diego!
"Diego, do you know how much money I have invested in your lessons
and how much time I have spent?"
And it's in that moment that a toxic voice took root within Diego:
"You are only worthy if you perform."
40 years later, when I asked Diego,
"How is this playing out in your adult life?"
He was able to identify his toxic voice: "I am only worthy if I perform."
I asked him, "How's this playing out in your adult life?"
And he was able to realize
that he put a tremendous amount of pressure on himself to please others
and felt incredibly inadequate when he failed to do so.
Another client I worked with - I'll refer to her as Rebecca.
Rebecca was a brilliant, talented woman.
She's been an accountant and in the field for over a decade.
And like many of us women today,
she was trying to balance raising her kids with her career.
One morning, she's in the kitchen,
she's packing lunches,
she's looking for her daughter's permission slip,
while she's mentally preparing
for an appointment with her most difficult client.
Her husband, who's a high-powered attorney, walked into the room,
so Rebecca began to share the stress she was feeling, with him.
He grabbed his keys, turned to her and said,
"Rebecca, why do you even bother working?
I make more money in one month than you make all year."
Imagine what that voice did to Rebecca moving forward.
Imagine living with the notion
that you are only worthy if you make a lot of money.
When you inherit a toxic voice,
you're typically not aware that it's happened.
You are just left with this feeling of shame.
And like Rebecca, you move forward with your day
without realizing you've internalized this toxicity.
For 25 years, I've been studying, researching, and observing
how these toxic voices affect us.
We are all vulnerable.
However, in this research that I have done, I have found a pattern.
Women are often more vulnerable than men to inherit a toxic voice.
Why is this?
There's a fascinating research study by Adrianna Mendrek,
from the University of Montreal,
that sheds some really interesting scientific light
into this gender difference.
In her research study, she examined the brain scans of both men and women
while they were looking at distressing, emotional images,
for example, a car crash,
a child who is crying, a man weeping.
Additionally, her team interviewed each participant
regarding their own response to the emotional images.
After reviewing the brain scans and the content of the interviews,
she found that overall the women in her study reported being more sensitive
to those distressing emotional images.
Additionally, her research found that higher estrogen levels
predicted an increase in sensitivity to those images,
and higher testosterone levels predicted a lowered sensitivity
to those distressing emotional images.
Let me connect the dots.
When women experience a distressing emotional stimuli,
for example, a shame-producing moment,
we will experience it with greater sensitivity.
But why does this matter?
We need to honor that we are often more sensitive than our male counterparts
and quiet any shame or any toxic voice
that might exist regarding that gender difference.
It has many advantages for us;
it's a beautiful thing, and it helps us tap into our duende.
But as I mentioned earlier, we all have these toxic voices,
both men and women,
and we have the power to quiet them when we become more aware of them
and by taking a couple of steps.
First, begin to notice when a toxic voice shows up for you.
How do you do that? Check your body.
Shame,
which is the undercurrent of a toxic voice,
always shows up in the body first.
It might show up like tightness in your shoulders,
a nauseating feeling in your stomach,
rosy cheeks.
For example, that morning in my flamenco class,
my stomach was in knots,
my heart was beating.
That was shame, showing up in my body first.
Begin to connect how your body feels when you are experiencing shame.
Second step, once you identify these physical signs in your body,
try to identify your toxic voice.
Some of the most prevalent toxic voices I have heard in my clinical work
are "You are insignificant,"
"I am insignificant,"
"I am not good enough,"
"I am unlovable,"
"I am unworthy,"
"I am inadequate."
Do any of these resonate with you?
If so, perhaps you've just identified one or more of your toxic voices.
If you are even just a little bit more aware of the toxic voice
that has been causing you to feel shame,
then you are more empowered now than you were 10 minutes ago.
Second step: Now that you have identified your toxic voice, shed light on it.
There are many ways that you can do this.
I want you to imagine your toxic voice sitting in a dark corner of a room.
I want you to take it and move it into the light. Why?
It has the most power over you when it's in the dark, when it's hidden.
That's where shame thrives, in the dark.
Shed it, put it in the light, expose it,
and it will immediately begin to lose the power it has over you.
There are many ways that you can shed light on a toxic voice.
Write it down, look at it.
Ask yourself, "How is this affecting me as an adult?"
And then get rid of it.
It's a powerful and very effective way to begin to quiet your toxic voice
and shed light on it.
See if you can identify
that shame-producing moment when that toxic voice took root
and journal about it or talk to somebody about it.
Third, another way you can shed light on a toxic voice is to challenge it.
I shared a rather personal example earlier today
of what that might look like,
when I challenged my toxic voice that says "Margo, you need to be perfect,"
by dancing a good, but not a perfect escobilla.
Who cares? So what? It wasn't perfect.
By doing so, I challenged my toxic voice and shed some light on it.
All of these things,
beginning to connect how shame feels in your body,
identifying your toxic voice so that you can shed light on it
will lessen the power that a toxic voice has over you
so that you can live your life
with more honor and more courage and not be held back.
When I am learning a new flamenco dance,
I'm always waiting for that moment when it's finished,
when I'm done learning,
but it never arrives.
There's always one more thing that I can do to improve my dance.
Even a shift in my body will change the percussive sound of my feet.
The process of quieting a toxic voice is very similar.
There will always be one more step, one more shift, one more movement
that you can take,
but every shift will help you quiet that toxic voice.
So,
as my flamenco instructor inspired me,
I want to do the same for you.
(Spanish) Bailar sin vergüenza, bailar sin vergüenza!!
Dance without shame!
Live without shame!
Love without shame
so that you can express your beautiful duende.
Thank you!
Applause.