How Saying Yes Can Change A Life, Change The World: Bruce Deel (Transcript)

Read here the full transcript of Bruce Deel’s talk titled “How Saying Yes Can Change A Life, Change The World” at TEDxAlexanderPark 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Power of Yes

Yes, what a powerful word “yes” is. If I asked you today if you’d like to see more love in our world, I think your answer would be yes. I think if I asked you if you wanted to see more hope and more peace in our world, that your answer would be yes. Those are easy questions to say yes to, but I think there are a lot of other questions and challenges and opportunities to which we should be saying yes, but far too often we are choosing to say no.

There’s this unbelievable multiplying power that comes with the use of the word yes. Saying yes means that we get to do more, we get to live more, we get to create more. When we say yes to environments and situations, we are speaking in agreement and affirmation and in a willingness to move forward. Just the word itself, yes, carries this power that can only be released when we choose to use the word, and even more so when we choose to use the word in scenarios and situations and environments that would most often and most likely elicit the use of the word no.

The Journey Begins

I began to understand more clearly the multiplying power of the word yes from 27 years ago when I was invited to take the leadership of a little struggling small church in downtown Atlanta and I chose to say yes to that. That yes came with the presumption that I would serve that role for six months and I would oversee the closing of the church and the selling of the property, and then I would return to my safe, secure, upwardly mobile position in the suburbs.

Saying yes didn’t seem to bear any real risk, there didn’t seem to be any danger associated with saying yes. I certainly didn’t think saying yes would change the directory of my life.

But about six weeks into that six-month yes, a young lady walked into our meeting space one day, engaged me in conversation, and at one point she looked at me and simply said, “I’ve been hooking and stripping 14 years, can you help me get out of the life?”

Now at that moment, I was confronted with a moral dilemma. I could say no to her request and relegate her back to the environment from which she came, an environment that was obviously causing her much pain and struggle, or I could say yes to her request that we would help while fully acknowledging that I had zero experience in helping someone leave the sex trade industry. But I had a decision to make and the desperation on her face and her eyes caused me to just look at her and say yes.

I didn’t know what it meant, but that week we helped her with some resources and some provisions and it turns out we helped to change the direction of her life. And saying yes to that individual opened the door for many more individuals to show up at our little campus. They came in with questions and challenges and opportunities. I vividly remember walking into our meeting space one Sunday morning and there seemed to be a hundred individuals there from all the margins of society, drug addicts, alcoholics, the homeless, those that were being trafficked, the mentally ill, the criminal.

They had all gathered uninvited to our space and they were looking at me respectfully and dignified. No one was demanding anything. And there seemed to almost be this palpable sense of hope and optimism in the room. They were looking for us to say yes.

The Fear of Saying Yes

They had been said no to in so many spaces. They just wanted a yes. And in moments like this, it seems easy to say no, comfortable, almost easy. A study finds a London-based research firm that recently completed a project where they discovered that more than 50% of adults suffer from something called FOSY, the fear of saying yes.

More than 50% of adults they interviewed and surveyed said that in most environments where they have the opportunity to say yes to relationship, to opportunity, to adventure, they choose to say no because they’re afraid what yes might lead to. And as they dug deeper into the research, they discovered that past failures and rejection and an unbelief in an individual’s own abilities led them to say no when they really wanted to say yes. And as a result of saying no, relationships were never developed. Opportunity was never accepted. Joy and exhilaration that could come from an adventure was forfeited.

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At that moment, I had to decide as I looked at this group of individuals whether we would say yes or no. And again, the desperation in their eyes caused us just to say yes. Now, I’m not pretending that 100 people saw their lives changed that day and every problem was solved and solutions were given to every issue they were facing. But I am saying that because we said yes, pathways of opportunity were created for them. And if they would engage in the resources that we offered them, there was a significant chance that their tomorrow would be much better than their yesterday. We simply had to say yes.

The Ripple Effect of Yes

And as a result of us saying yes to those who kept showing up on our campus, the community and the city began to say yes as well. Volunteers began to say yes to opportunities to mentor and tutor and walk alongside those living on our campus. Donors, we call them investors, began to say yes when we inquired of them if they might like to share their financial resources to help us in our efforts to bring light, hope, and transformation. Businesses and corporations started saying yes when we had conversation with them and invited them to start employing individuals who had obstacles to employment and to give those individuals a second, a third, or maybe a twelfth chance.

An incredibly generous donor said yes when we asked him if he would donate eight acres of land with five acres under roof in one of the worst zip codes in all of Georgia in the west end of Atlanta. And when he said yes, that meant that he had to go to the bank and pay off the mortgage on the building so he could donate it free and clear to us. When he said yes to the donation of the property and the building, that allowed us to say yes to this dream that was living in our heart.

This dream was that we would be able to build a collaborative, collective impact, one-stop shop for those in crisis. Where every resource someone needed coming out of incarceration or addiction or homelessness or PTSD or domestic violence or sex trafficking could show up on our campus and we would be able to say yes to what they needed.

Building a Network of Yes

And we realized that we could not do that on our own, so we started to invite best-in-class partners in medical and mental health and vocational to come to our campus and they enthusiastically said yes because we understood that as we say yes to each other, it gives us greater power when we choose to say yes to those that are in crisis. We understood as we looked at the research that if you are born into poverty in the city limits of Atlanta, there is only a 4% chance that you will never not live in poverty. Ninety-six out of every hundred individuals born into poverty in our city will live every day of their life and die in that same poverty environment.

And we had discovered over the number of years before we were donated the property that there are four absolutes we believe have to be addressed for an individual or a family to be able to leave poverty and potentially make it to middle class at some point in their life. Those four areas are safe and affordable housing, quality educational opportunities, health and wellness, and a livable wage earning opportunity.

If someone can live in a safe environment with the ability to pay whatever the mortgage or rent might be that month, if they have their children the opportunity to spend time in at least an average performing school, and there’s adult literacy for those in the household that didn’t graduate from high school, if they have access to fresh and nutritious food and access to medical, mental health, dental, and vision environments, and if they’re making enough money at their employment place that they can pay their monthly obligations without stress or struggle, the possibility of them leaving poverty increases dramatically.

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We said if we’re really going to be effective with our Yes, we have to provide all of those things. And so we did. And as a result of providing those things for a couple of decades, the work began to expand and grow, and it moved to ten locations around the country, and we’ve been able to say yes to more than 50,000 individuals that find themselves in a place of crisis. And the Yes has produced incredible results as a result of the work we do.

The Heartbreak of Yes

But now lest I lead you to believe that saying yes will always result in great victory and great success and great joy, let me mention that sometimes yes will break your heart. And sometimes yes will suck the oxygen right out of your lungs. Sometimes yes will make you not want to get up tomorrow morning. We said yes to Harold. He was also known as Jamaica in our neighborhood, and we said yes to Harold for a number of years with food and clothing and provision and all the life essentials that he needed. And we said yes to Harold until one day in a fit of rage, he pulled a gun out of his pocket, shot one of our friends between the eyes, and killed him instantly.

We said yes to Savannah, who’d been sexually abused by her stepfather and then forced into sex trafficking for most of her life, who had fallen prey to addiction as a way to cope with her pain and suffering. We said yes to Savannah for 12 months with food and clothing and shelter, with love and care and compassion, with trauma-informed care and mental health and case management. We employed her. We said yes for 12 months, and for 12 months Savannah said yes to everything we offered.

She said yes to her healing and to spiritual formation and to family reconciliation. She said yes for a year, and it was a great story and going to be one of our long-time testaments to the good work we were doing. And she said yes to one Friday night when the ghost of her past trauma enveloped her mind and she left campus unexpectedly. And for the next seven days we pursued her with all that we had, but on that seventh day the sheriff of a county north of Atlanta called me to tell me that Savannah had been found dead, sitting in the middle of a bed, cross-legged, with the needle still stuck in her arm.

It was a little bit harder to say yes the next day. We said yes to Robbie for seven years. We met him when he was 10, after-school program, homework, help, tutoring, Christmas gifts, summer camp, retreats, trips. We said yes over and over for seven years until one day Robbie said yes to two friends and they carjacked multiple people in Atlanta, were arrested, tried, sent to prison and spent the next 10 years.

The Resilience of Yes

If you’re not careful and you lose sight of why you say yes, the results of yes will cause you to want to say no again. But if we choose to default to no after yes has caused us pain, we will miss the opportunities for joy and exhilaration and celebration that do come with the yeses in our life. We decided to rise up again and to take a deep breath and to exhale after the pain of losing Harold, after the pain of losing Savannah, and after the pain of losing Robbie. We decided we have to keep saying yes, so we said yes to Ryan.

When Ryan was 12, his stepfather physically abused him, broke his shoulder and his collarbone. Ryan ran away from home. He was recruited into the 6th Ward Gangster Disciples out of Cleveland, Ohio and for the next 14 years traveled the country as part of a robbery crew, fell into addiction, abused people along the way, caught seven felonies as a result of his crime, spent time in and out of jail. When Ryan staggered onto our property 16 years ago, he was weary and worn out and tired and frustrated and the only thing he asked was if we would help him to turn the page in the story of his life and start writing a new script.

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And we just said yes. And now 16 years later, Ryan is clean and sober, his record has been expunged, he restored his relationship with his children, his oldest daughter graduated college last year with a degree in criminal justice and now works in the sex crime division of the FBI. Ryan started his own security company where he now employs men and women that are coming from the same environment he came from because we said yes to Ryan 16 years ago, he continues today to say yes to those that most people would say no to.

We said yes to Ava who was forced into sex trafficking at a major hotel chain in metro Atlanta that all of you would know. For years she was abused sexually, physically, forced into addiction because her trafficker was also her dealer and when she got to us after the abuse and the trauma she had suffered, her only request was would you become my family because my family is the one that introduced me to the life that has cost me so much.

And we just said yes, we didn’t know what all that meant but we were willing to walk the journey and now three years later, Ava is clean and sober, she lives in her own environment, she has a job with a livable wage income, she has a family and she smiles more today than she’s ever smiled in her life all because we just simply said yes.

The Call to Yes

And so when the opportunity presented itself for me to stand on this stage and talk a little bit about our yes and our story of yes, my immediate inclination was to say no. I’m not a professional speaker, I don’t have a speaking coach, I don’t have someone to write a story for me somewhere along the way. I thought no, I’ll just keep doing yes and I’ll let somebody else stand on the stage. But almost immediately my mind flipped and I said no, I have to tell the story. Not for any self-serving purpose, not because we have said yes and a ton of lives have been transformed, I have to say yes because there’s a chance. There’s a chance that one or two or ten of you.

There’s a chance that a hundred or two hundred or five hundred people who hear this story or see this video, there’s a chance somebody’s going to say yes to something that yesterday they said no to. There’s a chance that somebody is going to engage in somebody’s life that in the past they would have turned away from. There is a chance. There’s a possibility.

Maybe you’ll meet your Ryan today or this week or next month. And maybe you’ll say yes to their story, yes to their plight, and maybe as the broken pieces of their life are put back together, something that was broken in your life will be put back together. Maybe you will say yes to your Ava that comes along in your life. And maybe as you help Ava find her freedom, there will be something that is set free in your life as well.

I believe we all would say yes to love, hope, and peace in our world. And I believe that starts when we say yes to one individual who finds themselves looking for affirmation and love and acceptance from somebody because of the rejection they have experienced. So today, you and I have another opportunity, we have another chance, we have another option. Today we get to say yes, and by saying yes, we might change somebody’s life, and ultimately we might change the world.

Let’s just say yes.