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Home » How to Build Your Confidence – And Spark It in Others: Brittany Packnett (Transcript)

How to Build Your Confidence – And Spark It in Others: Brittany Packnett (Transcript)

Brittany Packnett at TED Talks

Following is the full text and audio of educator and activist Brittany Packnett’s talk titled “How to Build Your Confidence – And Spark It in Others.” In this talk, she shares three ways to crack the code of confidence — and her dream for a world where revolutionary confidence helps turn our most ambitious dreams into reality.

Listen to the MP3 Audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

So when I was a little girl, a book sat on the coffee table in our living room, just steps from our front door. And the living room is a first impression. Ours had white carpet and a curio of my mother’s most treasured collectibles.

That room represented the sacrifices of generations gone by who, by poverty or by policy, couldn’t afford a curio of collectibles let alone a middle class house to put them in. That room had to stay perfect.

But I would risk messing up that perfect room every day just to see that book. On the cover sat a woman named Septima Clark. She sat in perfect profile with her face raised to the sky. She had perfect salt-and-pepper cornrows platted down the sides of her head, and pride and wisdom just emanated from her dark skin.

Septima Clark was an activist and an educator, a woman after whom I’d eventually model my own career. But more than all the words she ever spoke, that single portrait of Septima Clark, it defined confidence for me before I ever even knew the word.

It may sound simple, but confidence is something that we underestimate the importance of. We treat it like a nice-to-have instead of a must-have. We place value on knowledge and resources above what we deem to be the soft skill of confidence.

But by most measures, we have more knowledge and more resources now than at any other point in history, and still injustice abounds and challenges persist.

If knowledge and resources were all that we needed, we wouldn’t still be here.