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How to Tune Your Inner Voice | Rhonda Ross, Daniel Alexander Jones | TED - Video học tiếng Anh
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How to Tune Your Inner Voice | Rhonda Ross, Daniel Alexander Jones | TED
How to Tune Your Inner Voice | Rhonda Ross, Daniel Alexander Jones | TED
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0:03
Daniel Alexander Jones: My friend.
0:05
It's good to see you, let's do it.
0:07
So first of all, yours is truly,
0:09
and I can attest to this,
0:10
it's a liberatory practice.
0:13
And I witness you as part of, really,
0:15
a grand tradition of artists
0:18
who focused on capital-F Freedom in everything that they did.
0:23
So here we are in a time of tectonic upheaval,
0:27
of assaults on body and soul
0:31
and exponential demands on our attention.
0:36
In the midst of all this, you make offering to us.
0:39
Can you please tell us all about your work with mindset
0:43
and where in your life journey it comes from?
0:46
Rhonda Ross: Yes, well, my goodness.
0:49
I’m so happy to be here,
0:50
and I’m so happy to be here with you,
0:52
after all these years of having these types of conversations.
0:57
So ...
1:01
I’m a singer-songwriter,
1:02
I'm a performer, I'm an actress.
1:05
And when I graduated Brown,
1:07
I went on to do work in that field,
1:13
and it went really great.
1:16
DAJ: Yeah, right.
1:17
RR: And I got on a soap opera, and I got an Emmy nomination.
1:22
And I met and married my husband,
1:25
and everything was really good.
1:28
And I was really happy.
1:30
Until things weren't good.
1:33
And then I wasn't happy.
1:35
And all of a sudden, the Emmy went to somebody else,
1:39
the soap opera I was on was canceled,
1:43
my husband and I were --
1:45
he's here, by the way.
1:46
(Laughter)
1:48
My husband and I were physically separated
1:52
because I had moved to LA,
1:53
and he hates LA.
1:56
And so I was out there trying to work,
1:58
and he was in New York.
2:00
We were trying to get pregnant.
2:02
You can't get pregnant 3,000 miles away from each other.
2:06
DAJ: Haven't figured that out yet.
2:07
RR: And I went in --
2:08
and I was unemployed, I wasn't working --
2:11
and I went into ...
2:14
really one of the darkest times of my life.
2:17
And I remember in the moment thinking,
2:21
"What just happened?
2:23
Just a few years ago, everything was great."
2:27
Like what just happened?
2:28
And I started blaming my circumstances.
2:32
The agents, you know, all the things,
2:34
all the circumstances in my life.
2:38
And because none of those were under my control,
2:41
I felt victimized, and I felt stuck
2:43
and I felt like, you know,
2:46
the world was against me.
2:48
DAJ: Yeah.
2:49
RR: And after weeks and months
2:53
of really being in my darkest place,
2:55
I recognized that I couldn't stay there.
2:58
I had to figure out a way out of that,
3:01
even if I couldn't change my circumstances.
3:04
And I started to study and read
3:07
and come to find out there's all of this information
3:10
about the power of thought
3:12
and this idea that between our circumstances
3:16
and the way we feel about our circumstances,
3:19
live our thoughts,
3:22
what I call our soundtrack that's on loop in our mind,
3:27
and our inner voice.
3:29
And it's what's coming out of that space that determines how we feel,
3:33
not the circumstances.
3:35
But we spend so much time blaming the circumstances,
3:38
feeling victimized by the circumstances,
3:41
and then trying to manipulate and control
3:43
and do what we can do with these circumstances.
3:47
When the truth is, the power to feel better,
3:50
to feel optimistic and at peace and empowered
3:53
and all of those things, is actually within ourselves.
3:57
And that's what I call emotional sovereignty.
3:59
So that's what I've been practicing
4:02
and then teaching for the last 25 years,
4:08
through my music, through my art,
4:10
through my mindset coaching and all of that.
4:12
DAJ: I love that.
4:13
And part of, you know, in our journey, one of the things is,
4:16
we work in a field where it's an intergenerational field.
4:20
So we had the great honor, both of us, of sharing a mentor later,
4:25
who passed away a couple years ago at 99 years old.
4:29
Her name was Vinie Burrows.
4:30
She was a great lady of the American theater.
4:33
And I'm thinking about what you're talking about,
4:35
about blaming circumstances versus doing something else.
4:38
And I know with Vinie, right, that she started on Broadway in the 1950s,
4:42
and like many Black actors of that time,
4:44
she was limited in what they would allow her to play.
4:48
And she was so profoundly frustrated by it.
4:51
And then she dropped into her own agency,
4:54
and she created one of the first solo performance pieces
4:59
that we now are very familiar with that kind of work
5:02
in the 1960s and '70s,
5:04
and by the end of her life,
5:05
she had performed over 6,000 performances all over the world, right?
5:11
And so one day, I was walking down in the Lower East Side where she was,
5:15
you know, and we can kind of picture her in our mind.
5:18
And I saw her at a distance and you know,
5:20
you always say hello to your elder.
5:22
So I said I was going to go say, "Hey, Miss Vinie."
5:24
And she came up to me,
5:26
grabbed me by the hand, shook me,
5:29
and she had a grip.
5:31
And she said, "Life is motion.
5:35
Life is motion! Life is motion!"
5:40
And she walked away.
5:41
(Laughter)
5:43
And so I'm curious if you can talk,
5:46
because I think even today, we've heard so much
5:48
about how we deal with all of these stresses
5:51
as we're in motion, as we're in our lives.
5:53
Can you talk about how your practice has helped you harness life in motion?
6:00
RR: I wasn't going to tell this story, but I'm going to tell it.
6:04
I'm so glad you mentioned Vinie.
6:08
And yes, the work that I do
6:10
is something that has helped me as life is lifing, right?
6:16
Because I’m constantly being reminded that there is this space,
6:21
and there’s this soundtrack, and I can shift it.
6:24
And the story I’m going to tell:
6:27
we were in Minneapolis
6:29
and I was doing your play, "Phoenix Fabrik."
6:31
And Vinie was in the play.
6:33
And this might be a little TMI.
6:35
DAJ: OK.
6:36
RR: Sorry.
6:38
But I was having a miscarriage.
6:41
And I had just found out that I was having a miscarriage.
6:44
And so I went to rehearsal,
6:46
and I was on the phone outside, pacing,
6:49
talking to my husband on the phone,
6:51
and Vinie was watching me through the windows.
6:53
And when I came in, she said, "What is it? What is it?"
6:57
She was very dramatic.
6:58
And I said, "I'm having a miscarriage."
7:01
And she said, "No!"
7:03
And she grabbed me and she said,
7:05
"It's the end of the world."
7:08
And I said, "Yes."
7:10
And she said, "But it isn't."
7:12
(Laughter)
7:13
I'll never forget that.
7:15
And so it's perspective,
7:19
it's reframing,
7:21
it's taking these circumstances
7:23
and looking at them in all the different ways.
7:27
And we assume this thing happens.
7:30
I'm having a miscarriage, I must be devastated,
7:32
I must be all of the things.
7:34
But there is a space where you get to decide
7:39
how you're going to translate that circumstance.
7:41
How are you going to do it?
7:43
I had another friend of mine say --
7:47
during my third miscarriage --
7:49
say to me, "Your body's getting ready for the one."
7:53
And I remember taking that.
7:56
Instead of giving up and all of that, I said,
7:58
"Oh I'm getting ready for the one."
8:01
Yeah.
8:02
And so, all to say,
8:05
this work is ...
8:09
is about recognizing the agency that we have.
8:15
We have so much more power than we give ourselves credit for,
8:19
because life is going to life, right?
8:22
Things are going to happen.
8:24
And it doesn’t mean you’ve got to like what those things are
8:27
or choose them or want them, but they're happening anyway.
8:29
So how can you take that and use it to empower you,
8:34
to lift you up
8:36
instead of letting it knock you down, right?
8:40
So that's the work.
8:41
And I was going to tell another story, but I'm going to skip it.
8:45
But I've got lots of stories.
8:46
But how I tried to work this into my life as I'm moving through it.
8:53
Even to this day,
8:55
I've been doing this work for over 20 years, 25 years,
8:59
and still I have to do it.
9:03
I had a meltdown on 125th Street two weeks ago.
9:05
(Laughter)
9:07
Because my son wasn't where he said he was going to be.
9:10
And even though we track him,
9:12
the tracker said he was here, and he wasn’t there.
9:15
And I'm literally standing there on 125th Street,
9:17
"Raif, Raif!"
9:19
looking, like, I couldn't figure it out
9:22
because I had skipped this part.
9:26
And it wasn’t until I grabbed hold of “wait a second,
9:30
cool out.”
9:32
Yes, here are the circumstances,
9:33
he's not where he's supposed to be.
9:35
But you can decide how you frame that.
9:39
You can decide whether that terrifies you,
9:42
or whether it cools you out,
9:44
or whether you know he's OK.
9:46
Whether you give it some time.
9:49
Because real talk, it was only like five minutes.
9:52
Do I have parents out here?
9:54
(Laughter)
9:56
DAJ: But what I love about this is
9:58
this gives me a concrete example of something.
10:01
I imagine many of us in this room engage,
10:04
which is we can think of things in these very macrocosmic big-picture ways.
10:09
But it's hard sometimes to translate down to the microcosm,
10:12
to the subtle things, the everyday choices,
10:16
and vice versa.
10:17
Something can be a storm inside of you
10:20
that can totally take you down,
10:23
and no one else will know about it.
10:24
And how do you navigate the flow of the world outside?
10:28
So it's very powerful.
10:30
And I want to call your beautiful son's name Raif Kendrick --
10:33
RR: Raif-Henok Emmanuel Kendrick.
10:36
DAJ: Call his name, he's a beautiful human being.
10:38
Like really radiant human being.
10:40
And I feel like I see in him you and your husband Rodney's love.
10:46
But also this work,
10:47
he's a mature young man from that process.
10:53
And thinking also about this idea,
10:56
I want to move us into a conversation about connection, continuum
10:59
and generation, right?
11:01
And a dear friend of mine, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a great scholar,
11:05
once was talking about Harriet Tubman.
11:08
And she said, on the night before the Combahee River raid,
11:11
where Harriet Tubman freed, I believe, over 700 enslaved folk,
11:16
she woke from a vision that she had --
11:18
and many of you know, she had had an injury,
11:20
and she would go into these states of vision.
11:23
And she woke and said,
11:25
"My people are free."
11:28
Not "going to be free."
11:30
They are free.
11:32
Present tense, right?
11:34
And so I think that's a story that you carry in
11:39
that changes the outcome of something.
11:42
The stories we tell ourselves and we give ourselves
11:46
versus the stories that are told about us,
11:50
the stories that are told to us
11:52
and the expectations that others have
11:53
of how we're going to move in the world.
11:55
So I'm curious about, you know,
11:58
purpose and freedom,
12:00
present tense for you and wherever you want to take that.
12:05
RR: Oh, my God.
12:07
DAJ: Yeah, that's how we roll.
12:08
RR: That's how we roll.
12:12
So I just want to go back to what you said
12:15
about "my people are free."
12:18
This idea of affirmation.
12:21
So, the program, the process that I have,
12:26
I called it "tune your inner voice."
12:29
Tune your inner voice.
12:31
And there's a few different steps to it.
12:35
So step one, I call it the crucial first step,
12:39
is to acknowledge that there's this space
12:42
and acknowledge that you have agency in this space,
12:44
and acknowledge that it's your thoughts that determine how you feel
12:48
and you are the thinker of your thoughts.
12:50
So you have the ability and the power.
12:51
So that's the crucial first step.
12:53
You can't move anywhere beyond until you do that.
12:56
The next one, and Jessica mentioned it,
12:59
is to really investigate what you're feeling.
13:02
What is happening inside of you?
13:07
Sit with it.
13:08
We gaslight ourselves, right?
13:10
"I shouldn't feel that."
13:12
"Oh, I can't be feeling that."
13:13
You know, all of that.
13:14
But sit with it, name it.
13:16
There's science behind naming a feeling
13:20
and how already the feeling starts to kind of dissipate when you can name it.
13:24
And in my process, I have people really, really name it.
13:28
Like not just, "Oh, I'm upset," but like, what is it?
13:32
Is it anxiety?
13:34
Is it terror?
13:35
Like what is it?
13:37
So we sit with that for a while.
13:39
That's step two.
13:40
Step three
13:41
is to find the thought that is really triggering that feeling, right?
13:47
Not the circumstance, the thought.
13:49
And I call it an automatic screwy thought
13:52
or an automatic sabotaging thought, an AST.
13:56
And so you find that thought and again, you name it and identify it,
14:01
and then you're like,
14:02
nobody could feel good with a thought like that,
14:05
because usually it's a thought like, you know,
14:07
"I'm a piece of" -- whatever, right?
14:09
You know, and you say,
14:10
"No wonder I've been feeling"
14:11
like, "That's what's been going on in my mind?"
14:14
You know, so really looking for the thought.
14:16
And then we shift the thought
14:18
into what I call an INT,
14:21
an intentionally nourishing thought.
14:24
And that is like an affirmation.
14:27
But because it's come through this process,
14:30
it's your customized affirmation.
14:34
Because, we talked about this,
14:36
you can't free yourself through somebody else's stuff.
14:41
You've got to have done it for yourself.
14:43
And so this INT becomes ...
14:48
The words that work for you,
14:51
the words that cool you out
14:55
that allow you to breathe.
14:57
So you find those words, the affirmation,
15:00
the INT or a mantra that you can have in your mind.
15:05
And then, because I come from music and I understand the power of it,
15:11
we then take that INT and attach it to a melody,
15:15
make it a song.
15:16
So I call it a songtra.
15:17
That's what you mentioned earlier,
15:19
songtra for emotional sovereignty.
15:22
Songtra is now your personalized affirmation,
15:26
your personalized mantra,
15:28
to a melody that can stick in your head,
15:30
because that's what music does.
15:32
And so I want to speak to --
15:35
when you have an affirmation,
15:38
a mantra that becomes your soundtrack and it's on loop in your mind,
15:44
it changes everything.
15:47
It changes the lens that you are seeing the world.
15:50
And whether you use that songtra in advance, in preparation,
15:56
just walking through the world, which I use my songstras like that,
15:59
you could also use them in the middle of crisis.
16:02
DAJ: That is fantastic.
16:03
RR: The thing happens and you think, "Wait."
16:05
And you sing your mantra to yourself.
16:07
You cool yourself out.
16:09
DAJ: One thing that I know you emphasize a great deal
16:14
is that this can work for everyone, right?
16:16
One does not need to be a musician.
16:18
You don't need to have any particular background.
16:20
It's a process by which we share a resource, right?
16:25
You know, I always use this quote,
16:27
one of my favorite quotes is from the great Grace Lee Boggs, activist.
16:31
And she said, at the end of her life, and she lived to be 100,
16:34
she said, you know,
16:35
"I stopped thinking of things in terms of decades,
16:38
and I started thinking of them in terms of centuries."
16:40
And I do want to just take time to acknowledge
16:43
that you belong to tradition, right?
16:45
And of course, your incredible parents, Diana Ross and Berry Gordy,
16:48
who were way makers, and they broke molds.
16:51
And also your years of study with Abbey Lincoln,
16:55
the great jazz musician,
16:57
the music we call jazz, right?
16:59
And all of these other artists that you've collaborated with.
17:02
But I'm thinking about, you know,
17:05
I think of this all as a relay race.
17:08
That we get from our ancestors
17:10
something that we should not set down,
17:12
but we must carry forward, but in our way.
17:15
Coming back to your thing of your voice, your particular inflection.
17:19
And I just, in our closing moments,
17:21
I'd like for you to reflect on how you have walked with lineage
17:25
and/or what you think that idea of a relay race says to you.
17:29
What are you doing in your leg of the race?
17:31
RR: Lord.
17:32
How much time do we have?
17:34
DAJ: You've got two minutes.
17:35
RR: I can do this.
17:36
DAJ: You can, I know you can.
17:39
RR: Whew. You said so much.
17:43
I do come out of jazz.
17:48
My husband, Rodney Kendrick,
17:49
I want to say his name,
17:50
he's an incredible pianist.
17:52
And he taught me so much, with Abbey Lincoln,
17:55
about making your own music.
18:00
That there is no such thing as jazz.
18:02
That Duke Ellington made Duke Ellington’s music,
18:06
and Thelonious Monk made his music.
18:08
So to that idea,
18:12
yes, I'm making my own continuation.
18:17
And what I want to say is, this is personal work.
18:22
It's individualized work.
18:24
But when you do it, it reverberates out.
18:28
And Eric Liu, he's going to speak here later,
18:34
he said this morning, when I told him what emotional sovereignty was,
18:37
he said, "Oh, I love that,
18:39
because sovereignty is not just 'get off my lawn.'
18:42
Sovereignty is also 'I'm responsible for my lawn.'"
18:45
DAJ: Thank you.
18:47
RR: And I said, "I'm going to say it later."
18:49
And so I say that to say
18:51
when we are responsible for our own lawns
18:54
and our own selves and our own mindset
18:55
and our own feelings, that reverberates.
18:58
We're no longer victimized
19:01
by what other people do in our circumstances,
19:03
but we also don't become the victimizers.
19:07
We don't have to be out there controlling and manipulating
19:10
and making people do the things.
19:12
Thank you.
19:13
Making people do the things.
19:15
DAJ: Yes.
19:16
RR: And I think at scale, it's big.
19:19
I think when we look at all the unkindness,
19:24
all the inequities, all the violence,
19:29
all the cruelty, all the genocide,
19:32
it is because somebody has decided that somebody else has to do something
19:35
for them to feel better.
19:37
And the minute we stop that, it ends.
19:39
DAJ: Thank you.
19:40
(Applause)
19:42
That's right.
19:44
That's beautiful.
19:46
Perfect answer, right?
19:48
So you see what I tell you?
19:50
She's the truth.
19:51
Yes, indeed.
19:52
Thank you.
19:53
(Applause)
