0:00 Transcriber: Phuong Tuyen Nguyen CTU Reviewer: Doris Pop Good evening.
0:03 Good evening.
0:04 Today I want to share with you a fundamental truth about life.
0:08 A truth that you already know.
0:11 But I want to share it with you in a way so you would actually know it, and so you could use it in your lives.
0:17 Now I want to start it off with the exact opposite that I want to talk about.
0:23 I want to start it off with a story about avoidance.
0:27 Growing up, everyone in my family did some kind of sport, whether it was badminton, beach volleyball, tennis.
0:36 Everyone did. And then there was me.
0:40 Whenever someone tried to get me into sports, this was my reaction.
0:47 You see, sometimes in life we are just like my five year old self on that photo. We avoid things that we know we should face, and we smile because we think.
0:57 We think we're being clever.
1:00 But when I turned 15 years old, those years of avoidance were weighing down on me heavily.
1:08 I knew that I had to start some sport that I could not live in avoidance.
1:14 And so I chose a particular martial art called jiu jitsu.
1:19 Brazilian jiu jitsu. Just by show of hands, how many of you in the room are familiar with the sport?
1:25 Okay, okay, okay. Pretty much.
1:27 All right. For those of you who are not Brazilian, jiu jitsu can be a little scary.
1:32 You see videos online of people getting choked up using arms, using legs.
1:37 It's, as you can see, like I was at the time, second guessing my decision.
1:44 And so I did what most people do.
1:46 I procrastinated going to that first class for weeks until I realized that the real opponent was not awaiting me on those mats.
1:54 The real opponent was on the inside and that there could be nothing worse than the avoidance that I was getting from myself. And so I had to make a bold decision that I would go to that first class no matter what would happen.
2:09 And so I did, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions that I've ever made in my life.
2:15 This is a recent photo of me competing at Westlake High School.
2:19 It's a sport that I do to this day.
2:21 But it started with that one bold decision of going to that class.
2:25 I wasn't sure what was going to happen.
2:30 There's a quote by Robert Frost that sums up this story.
2:34 Freedom lies in being bold.
2:38 You see, over my life I've seen that bold decisions start the upward spiral.
2:44 They can do things that we are not expecting in our lives.
2:47 Over the years, I've made many other bold decisions, but all of them were leading to probably the boldest decision that I've ever made.
2:54 This is a photo of me standing at the Prague International Airport.
2:59 It's a photo my dad took as I was waving goodbye to my family.
3:03 I was leaving for an entire year to study in this unknown place called the United States.
3:08 You may know it, right?
3:10 But I could only make that decision because I no longer saw just the boogeyman standing in the door.
3:16 Not me, but the other challenges, but the world that lay beyond it.
3:23 And so that's why I got on that plane.
3:26 And that's why I'm standing here today giving you this TEDx talk.
3:30 I wanted to dive deeper into the nature of that decision that has brought me here.
3:36 And to see why has boldness had such positive impacts on my life and the lives of other people?
3:42 And I think one of the reasons is because it helps us to confront our fears.
3:48 Now, here's a fun little question.
3:53 What do you think is the most common fear for an adult in the United States.
3:59 Speaking.
4:01 Nice. Thank you. Okay.
4:02 Perfect. Yes. Yes, it can be a little scary, but it is true.
4:09 All across this country and across the world, people are scared of talking in front of other people.
4:16 Now I have a grandmother, and every year we're trying to get her to do the toast for us at our Christmas dinner with absolutely no avail.
4:26 She will. She will flee from the room.
4:28 And it's not uncommon.
4:30 It's called glossophobia.
4:32 But the interesting thing is that we're not born with this fear.
4:36 Scientists have proven that a person is only born with two fears the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises.
4:45 Which means that every other fear we adopt in some way usually is through personal experience or observation.
4:53 Now there are fears that are completely logical in our lives, but the problem is that sometimes we adopt fears that are not.
5:02 We adopt them little or no personal experience.
5:06 So let's imagine that I was the first speaker of the night and I completely messed up my speech.
5:11 Right? And you wouldn't get to see the five other amazing speakers do their job.
5:15 Well, of course you would leave if that was your first experience with public speaking.
5:21 Of course, you would leave the show thinking that public speaking is messy, difficult, and possibly embarrassing.
5:30 See, the problem with that and boldness allows us to, and this is a weird way to frame it, but give our fears a second chance to reconsider them.
5:42 In psychology, this is called exposure therapy.
5:45 I want you to take a look at these two images.
5:47 What you see on the left there is an encounter with an anxiety provoking stimulus.
5:53 a person encounters the thing that they fear and in response, anxiety increases. So they choose the flight response or they hide removing themselves from that stimulus.
6:04 And in response, again, anxiety decreases.
6:08 The problem is that we learn nothing, especially with our logical fears.
6:13 Sometimes we learn nothing.
6:14 And so the next time we encounter that fear, anxiety increases again.
6:19 What do you do in exposure therapy?
6:22 And for example, this is what we do in our lives.
6:25 I remember when I was nine years old, there was this angry dog that lived up the street, and every time I would go back from school, it would jump at the fence and start barking at me.
6:37 Now, of course, I'm nine years old, so I get completely frightened. But every time I would run away, nothing would change.
6:43 That fear would remain.
6:45 What you do in exposure therapy is that you tackle only a small dose of that fear enough so you could handle it.
6:53 And when you do that and you sit there, as you can see on the right, anxiety decreases because your brain is forming new memory of you being in the presence of that fear, but not being scared.
7:04 I remember one day again, I ran away from the dog, but I wanted to see what was it that I was actually scared of.
7:11 So I approached the fence.
7:13 It was barking at me and I locked eyes with it and I stared at it for a few seconds.
7:18 Right. Um, and what happened was that my anxiety decreased.
7:25 So you see, this is how we can tackle our fears in our lives.
7:29 Now, in this Ted talk, I'm not here to sell you the commercialized version of boldness that you sometimes see on social media that is based on the truth, that virtue, that boldness is a virtue that we should pursue.
7:42 But sometimes what you see on social media is also not true.
7:45 It's the the claim that boldness has to be this big and dramatic, like Climbing without a rope or running ultramarathons.
7:54 As if that was the only definition of boldness.
7:57 Sometimes I feel like those social media influencers would have me hop over the fence and start petting the dog.
8:04 That probably wouldn't go so well for me.
8:06 Now I want to tell you that boldness is actually a choice.
8:10 It's a tool that we can use in our lives, and also it's a necessary attribute.
8:14 And if we lack it, not only that, we will not get rid of, get rid of some of those fears, but we will pay for it down the road.
8:23 Um, John Gilovich and Victoria Medvetz to social psychologists, they studied the nature of how we experience regret.
8:32 And what they found out is that in the short term, we regret the things that we did do, like the failing.
8:39 Failing a test or the occasional embarrassing ourselves somewhere.
8:44 That's the things that we regret in the short term.
8:46 But as you may know from your lives and the long term, we usually regret the things that we didn't do because those are the ones that are bugging us.
8:56 It's the missed opportunities.
8:58 It's the unused talents, the unrealized ideas.
9:02 And boldness is like that silent voice in the back of our heads just saying, just do it right.
9:10 Daniel H. Pink. He wrote the book The Power of Regret, an amazing book, and he examined over 16,000 people, and he was able to sort through all their regrets and summon them into four categories.
9:24 The first one being foundational regrets, moral regrets, confessional regrets, and finally, boldness.
9:31 Regrets. Foundational are the building blocks of our lives.
9:35 It's the if only I worked harder in college.
9:39 If only I chose a different job.
9:43 Moral regrets are pretty self-explanatory.
9:46 It's the. If only I'd done the right thing.
9:49 Connections are about relationships and friendships that dissipated over time.
9:55 If only I reached out.
9:58 And finally, boldness regrets.
10:00 Daniel H. Pink describes them in the book as not taking more chances in life, not risking more.
10:09 But what I want to tell you is that boldness is actually contained and causes some of the other regrets in the other types.
10:18 It takes an incredible amount of courage to switch jobs.
10:22 It takes an incredible amount of courage sometimes to do the right thing, to reach out to a friend that you haven't talked to in a long time.
10:30 Are they going to remember me? Will they want to talk to me?
10:33 All of these things take courage, boldness.
10:36 And each time we lack it, we're just adding one more to the list.
10:40 And so I want to challenge you today.
10:42 What is your biggest fear?
10:45 Maybe one that isn't that logical or something that you could actually battle against.
10:51 And I want you to think about it and make a list, maybe.
10:56 And also, I would challenge you to make a list of your regrets.
10:59 It's a powerful exercise because if you're doing it, we also find out what we value the most in our lives.
11:06 And when you do that, you will have a game plan.
11:08 These are the things that you should be more bold about.
11:11 Now I want to go back to this photo.
11:15 I believe I have developed a lot since that photo was taken.
11:18 If not, then I'm in serious trouble.
11:21 But even though I've made some bold decisions in my life, I still struggle making them.
11:28 And I wondered why? Why is it that now that I have the knowledge about fear and regret, that I can reason out why boldness.
11:38 Choosing bold decisions is probably the most logical option.
11:42 Why is it that I struggle with them?
11:45 Right? that you would think that if you could reason all of these things out and make a logical decision about it, that making bold decisions would be easy.
11:54 But it's not, and we know it.
11:59 We know that it's not because sometimes we make pros and cons list of everything in a moment, and then we still choose the easy way out.
12:08 And so I wonder why. Why is it?
12:11 Why is it that from the bottom of our souls, we know that something is good for us and yet we choose to avoid it?
12:19 And then it hit me with the easiest truth about boldness.
12:23 It is that it is hard.
12:26 It is difficult. There is a reason why we value it so much in our society, in all the books about our heroes, right?
12:33 If it was just a logical decision, then we could reason out that we want to be heroes and we would just become them.
12:41 But sometimes in life, we're not the heroes that we want to be because it's not a logical decision.
12:46 And so how do we come?
12:48 How do we actually become bold?
12:50 And I think it starts with reframing how we think of boldness.
12:54 I think sometimes we think of boldness as this innate characteristic trait that a person is born with, like IQ, introversion, or neuroticism, that you're just born with it.
13:05 But that's not how boldness works.
13:07 I'm sure you know from your own life that you can have a bold streak, be really bold at one point in your life and then completely lose it.
13:15 That’s not what usually happens with characteristics like IQ or introversion.
13:20 And so I want to challenge us to think of boldness more as a skill.
13:25 And if we do that, it changes completely the way that we approach it.
13:29 Skills are something you can develop.
13:31 Skills are something you can practice habits.
13:34 Also a good way to think about it. Habits you can develop and practice.
13:38 And I'm sure that there is a way how you can practice boldness every day.
13:41 Now boldness may mean something different to each one of you.
13:45 It may mean removing yourself from social media, not seeking validation from other people, or it may mean reaching out to that friend that you haven't talked to in a long time.
13:56 It means something different to each one of us.
13:59 But there's a way how you can practice it.
14:01 I want to share with you one more story.
14:05 While I didn't do a lot of sports growing up, I always loved music.
14:08 I played guitar and piano since a very early age, and I liked singing, but I was always afraid of singing because even though my parents told me that, I have a beautiful voice.
14:21 And that makes it true, right?
14:24 Right. Exactly. No. I was convinced that for the rest of my life, I would only sing in the shower and no one would hear my voice, ever.
14:31 Right? But then I began to play a lot more in my dad's band.
14:34 My dad has a rock band, and I. And I found out that I have a passion for singing and that either I will have to hide my voice my entire life, or I would have to face my fears.
14:45 And you know how difficult that may be, right?
14:47 When you're at a karaoke party and someone sticks a microphone in front of your face, that's even worse than public speaking, right?
14:56 Right. If there's one thing that is worse, I don't know why it's on that list, but that's worse than public speaking.
15:03 Anyway, so I made a bold decision.
15:06 Okay. Small but bold.
15:08 That I would accompany my dad on a song with the band.
15:12 And then I remember the first time that I sang a song alone on the mic. It was in the bar.
15:18 There was a band. And it was magical for me, because it was the first time that I let anyone outside my family hear my voice.
15:25 I want to show you a photo.
15:28 This is me and my buddy Harrison rocking it out in the busiest square, busiest city square in my country.
15:35 Over 20,000 people pass this place every day.
15:39 Now, that's as if we sold out a Metallica concert.
15:43 But as you can see, we didn't make that much money, as Metallica does.
15:48 But for all those people going to and back from work, we were the main source of entertainment.
15:56 And that's the joke. Two people, one of which at one point could not even sing in front of his parents.
16:04 That's the power of boldness.
16:06 You make one decision.
16:08 You don't know where it leads, but it surely is an adventure.
16:11 And I found that it starts that upward spiral.
16:15 And I think we need more of it in this world.
16:17 I think we need more voices.
16:20 And I think boldness is a good way of awakening those voices, those true beings inside of us, those unrealized talents and dreams.
16:30 Freedom lies in being bold. Thank you.
