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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.

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