Caroline McHugh on The Art of Being Yourself (Full Transcript)

Caroline McHugh at TEDxMiltonKeynesWomen

Here is the full text and summary of Caroline McHugh’s talk titled “The Art of Being Yourself“ at TEDxMiltonKeynesWomen conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Caroline McHugh – CEO of IDOLOGY

So, the chances are you’ve looked in at least one mirror today. You’ve had a shave, or you combed your hair, or maybe you checked your teeth for spinach after lunch. But what you didn’t know is that the face looking back at you isn’t the face that everybody else sees. It’s a kind of reversed, distorted, back-to-front image.

So some years ago, I was on a flight to New York and I read an article in the FT, and it was an article about a phenomenon called a True Mirror, and for the Americans listening, that’s a mirror.

So the True Mirror was actually invented by a brother and sister team in New York called John and Catherine Walters, and what they discovered was that if you take two mirrors and you put them together at right angles and you take the seam away the images bounce off each other. And what you see when you look in a True Mirror is exactly what other people see when they look at you.

So I land in New York and I phone John up and ask him if I can go and see him, and I end up in his gallery in Brooklyn, and it was like being at a sideshow in the circus. There were True Mirrors full length, face sized, all over this gallery. And when I walked over to the True Mirror for the first time and I looked in the mirror, it was one of the most disorientating experiences I’ve ever had in my life.