Here is the full text and summary of Stacey Flowers’s talk titled ‘The 5 People You Need To Be Happy’ at TEDxUNO conference. In this talk, Stacey speaker shares her personal experience of attending a Beyonce concert and realizing that true happiness comes from unleashing one’s talents to positively influence the world. She explains that happiness happens before success and can be learned. She also emphasizes the importance of relationships, stating that they have the deepest impact on our level of happiness. The speaker discusses the five key people we need in our lives to connect and catch happiness: a cheerleader, a mentor, a coach, a friend, and a peer.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
December 23rd, 2013, my life changed. This was the day that I got to attend my very first Beyonce concert. And I’ve been a fan of Beyonce’s work for quite some time, and it took me a while to attend the Beyonce concert, because truly, in the beginning of my life, my parents funded all of my experiences, and they just weren’t willing to invest in a Beyonce experience.
And then, when I was at an age where I could invest in my own experience, I was a graduate student at Loyola University, Chicago, and my grad student budget also was unwilling to let me invest in a Beyonce experience.
And I remember calling one of my friends, and I was quite sad about it. Not sad, just a few tears, just a few. And I was just really upset, and she said, ‘Stacey, I’m sure she’s going to do another concert again.’ And I said, you know what? You are right. I am going to start a Beyonce savings account today. And she was like, yeah, you should do that. And so that day, I started saving for my Beyonce experience.
Two and a half years later, Beyonce announced her Mrs. Carter World Tour. I immediately went to her site. I clicked all the way down to the bottom, and I purchased the priceless VIP package for $1,295. I knew that purchasing this priceless VIP package meant that I was going to get a front row seat. I was going to get an opportunity to rent the runway, and I was going to get an autograph from Beyonce. What I didn’t know is that I was going to get a VIP concierge. His name was Kelly.
And Kelly was going to meet me at the TD Ameritrade Center that holds over 24,000 people and say, ‘Well, you’re Stacey Flowers.’ And I was going to say, Yes, I’m Stacey Flowers. And he was going to say, well, your entrance is over here to the west. And I was going to say, my entrance is over here to the west.
And I would get to the west entrance, and he would give me all of these gifts, and then he would escort me to this VIP party where the DJ knew exactly what to play, Beyonce. And so I’m at this party, and shortly, Kelly comes back. And when Kelly comes back in, he’s like, Stacey, are you ready to go to your seat? And I’m like, yes, Kelly, I’m ready to go to my seat.
And so Kelly escorts me down to the ground floor, and he points out my seat. And when I calm down enough to sit down, I’m sitting in my seat, and with my hands stretched out like this, I am touching the stage. And in my mind, this translates into, Beyonce is going to be this far away from me. The lights go out, the lights come back on, and it is two and a half hours of the most mind-blowing experience I had ever witnessed in my entire life.
And there were like five seconds in what felt like 15 minutes where, Beyonce, she just reached her hand out like this towards me, and I just reached my hand out like this towards her. And we held hands, and I may have held on a little too long, because the security guard was like, ma’am, you need to stand over here, and I was like. But that wasn’t enough for Beyonce. She came back, and we started to sing a duet together, and she was like, Halo.
I was like, Halo! She was like, Halo! I was like, Halo! Halo! Halo! And we’re singing together. Rather, she was singing, and I was screaming. And as I’m screaming with her, I’m thinking to myself, I just cannot believe Beyonce is performing like this for me right now. I can’t believe she is performing for me like this.
And almost as suddenly as I had that thought, I had another thought. And that thought was, she did this yesterday, and I wasn’t here. And she actually did this the day before yesterday, and for 365 days, and I wasn’t here either. And so with those thoughts, I started to tumble back down to earth. And when my feet finally touched the ground, I realized that this was not a personalized concert from Beyonce to me, and I realized that in that particular moment, while I thought I was coming to have my priceless VIP Beyonce experience, what I was really experiencing in that particular moment was happiness.
Now, let’s get one thing straight, because happiness isn’t all dancing unicorns and smiley faces. It’s not uninterrupted moments of pleasure. It isn’t even the accumulation of many things. True, bona fide, authentic happiness is about unleashing your God-given talents to positively influence this world.
And that night, inside of that Beyonce experience, that’s what I was witnessing. And just like that, over a decade of research on success and happiness finally clicked, because what I had been obsessed with during this time is figuring out how we human beings miss happiness. We get into the college, we get the grades, we get the car, we get the spouse, we get the house, we have the kids, we are met with these once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, yet we continue to remain unhappy.
What I found in my studies is that happiness happens before success.
In American culture, we have been taught the backwards of this formula. We have been taught that if we can somehow capture success, if we look underneath it, we will find our happiness. But Harvard researcher Dr. Shawn found that this is incorrect.
I also found that optimism can be learned, which really means that every single person in this room has the capacity to hold an acorn in the palm of your hand, but believe, protect — and believe in the idea of the force that it may one day become, which really means that each of us in this room can be taught the skill of seeing possibility before we point out problems.
And this third thing that I found, which is really when the light bulb came on for me, and that is that relationships have the deepest, richest impact on our level of happiness more so than any other factor combined. Now, I only have 18 minutes, so I cannot fix every relationship in your life.
But what I can do is tell you about the five key people that you need in your life in order for you to connect and catch happiness. Jim Rome says it this way, you are the average of the five people that you choose to associate with the most. I happen to agree with him. And I believe that those five people need to be: your cheerleader, your mentor, your coach, a friend, and a peer.
Now let me tell you how I caught happiness, because I really want you to catch hold of what I’m telling you today. And the way that I caught happiness, it was sort of very early in my life, so we’ll go back a little bit, because what you know about me now is that I completely adore Beyonce. Yes, you know that.
You also know that I earned my master’s degree from Loyola University Chicago, and for those of you who have read my bio, you know that I’m a professional speaker, and I travel around the world inspiring people to live happy. But what most people don’t know about me is that I became a mom when I was 17 years old and a senior in high school.
And for me, when that happened, my biggest stress in life went from, am I going to make the cheerleading team, to where am I going to get the $3.16 that I need so I can buy a can of formula to feed my unborn child. And that was bad, but truly, it wasn’t as bad as what they had to say about me, and they would say a lot of things about me.
They would say things like, you know, Stacey, only one out of every 10 teen parents graduates from high school with a chance at being able to go to college, so you will become an uneducated mother. They would say things to me like, you know, Stacey, children born to teen parents are 80% more likely to live on welfare, end up on poverty, and wind up in prison.
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I heard that last statistic, there was something in my 17-year-old heart that said, no, Stacey, you will not be a statistic. You will be a success. And in an effort to expedite my success, I dropped out of high school, and I happened to go to this high school where in order to withdraw, I had to sign my name to papers.
And so one afternoon, after signing these papers, I find myself in my high school, and I’m walking through the corridor, and out of my right eye, I can see my friends studying French, and out of my left eye, I can hear my friends playing in the cafeteria, arguing over who got the highest AP score.
And when I finally make it to my guidance counselor’s office, I open the door, and I shout at her, Miss Serialist, I’m dropping out of high school because I’m pregnant. And Miss Serialist looks at me, and she says, well, you can do that, or you can go to college.
And with those words, Miss Serialist took the papers from my hands to withdraw from high school, and gave me an application to the College of St. Mary, where I went on to apply, and I began my first day of classes when my son was just three and a half weeks old. Because you see, Miss Serialist was my very first cheerleader.
And when I could not believe in myself, she believed in me. And when I was finally on the right path, and I’m in school, and my son is this young human being hanging out on the front, and I have a backpack on my back, and I’m trying to go to school, and they are still telling me that I will be uneducated, and it’s not going to happen, Miss Serialist rooted for me.
So folks, I am not telling you what I think. I am telling you what I know. In order for you to catch happiness, you need to connect with these five key people, starting with a cheerleader, because one cheerleader changed the trajectory of my entire life.
The next person that you need to connect with is a mentor, and a mentor is someone who will be in your life, and their primary role is to point you in the right direction. Recently, I was at the barbershop, and well, okay, every week I’m at the barbershop, but on this particular time, I was at the barbershop. And there was a gentleman who was in the chair, and he had overheard me talking to my barber about how excited I was about doing a TED talk, and he said, oh, what’s your talk going to be about?
And I was like, happiness, and he was like, oh, okay, and I was like, no, no, no, I’m going to tell people about the five key people that they need to connect with in order to be happy: a cheerleader, a mentor, a coach, a friend, and a peer. And he said, oh, really, you know, I’ve been meaning to talk to someone about mentors, like how do you actually ask someone to be your mentor? How do you do that?
And so I said to him, you know, don’t get caught up in whether or not the mentor is formal or informal. Don’t get caught up in asking someone to be your mentor, because your mentor’s role is only to point you in the right direction, so you’re looking for two key things, someone who has a willingness to share information, and then someone with the capacity to point you in the direction that you want to go.
You’ll know this person because they’ll have information for you to consume, podcasts, books, articles, blogs, et cetera, and he said, oh, okay, well, then I probably have like four or five mentors, because there’s this one guy I’m following, and then there’s this other guy. And I was like, yeah, you probably do have about four or five cyber mentors, but you’re also probably really confused and frustrated, and he was like, I am, how do you know that?
And I was like, because a mentor’s job is to point you in the right direction, and you have about five people pointing you in different directions. Yeah, that same light bulb that came on for you guys went on for him, too.
The next person that you need is a mentor. You need a mentor, and what I’m doing here with my fingers, it’s an anchor, because I really want you to forever remember the five people that you need to connect with. And this next person that you’re going to need is a coach.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you need a coach, and the coach is by design on this finger, because he is meant to make you a little bit uncomfortable so that you can maximize your potential and make things happen. I remember when my son was much younger than he is now. He’s now 13 years old, going on 33, about 5’8″, taller than me, it’s super weird. But I remember when he was much younger, and when he was younger, he would always ask me, Mom, can I play football?
And I would say, no. He was like, Mom, can I play? No. And the truth is, I really just didn’t want my son to be hit. And when I was in the thick of my research, I decided to test my hypothesis that happiness was really about unleashing your God-given talent to positively influence the world. So I went to my son, and I said, you know, son, what is one thing Mom can do to increase your level of happiness? And because he’s the only child, we do converse like this.
And he said, well, Mom, you know, I really, no, no, never mind, Mom, I won’t. I was like, no, no, no, tell me, please, tell Mom, and he’s like, no, no, no, Mom, I’m not going to, I was like, son, just please tell me, if I can do it, I will do it. And he looks at me, and he says, you know, Mom, I really just want to be part of a team, and I was like, like a basketball team, or, and he was like, no, Mom, a football team.
And so the next week, I signed him up for a football team, he hits the football field, he’s out there, he’s throwing the ball around with the coach, the coach comes up to us, and he says, hey, how long has your son been playing football? And I was like, oh, this is his first time. And he’s just like, oh, he has a really strong arm and great perspective on the game, he’s going to make a great quarterback.
And I was like, that’s a really important role on the team, and he was just like, yeah, so we get excited, and then we’re in the car, and I’m telling my son, I’m like, yeah, the coach wants you to play quarterback. And my son is in the backseat, and he’s a little bit disappointed, and he’s like, Mom, I really didn’t want to play the quarterback position, I really wanted to play this other position, running back.
And so we’re in the car, and eventually, my son warms up to the idea of playing quarterback, and as he warms up to the idea of playing quarterback, his game gets better and stronger and stronger still. But that was only because he yielded to the perspective of his coach, because your coach will say, okay, I get it, I get it, you want to be in this particular position, but the team needs you over here. And I must make you a little bit uncomfortable in order for you to be able to make things happen. So the third person that you’re going to need is a coach.
The fourth person that you’re going to need is a friend, and your friend is right here on this ring finger, because I’m told it’s connected to your heart. And you need this person in your life, that one person who actually knows your truest heart’s desire. So I’m not talking about your 5,000 friends on Facebook, I’m talking about that one.
And the fifth person that you’re going to need is a peer, who is right here on this pinky. Your peer is the one who helps you out in those social situations, because imagine how much we couldn’t do if we didn’t have this pinky, like drink tea and espresso properly. And oftentimes, when I’m giving this example, people get really confused between these two, so I tell the story together.
And I remember when I was making up the anchor, my friend was with me, and she was just like, well, I mean, who am I to you, I mean, your friend, am I your peer. And I was like, calm down, you are my friend, and I was like, you’re my friend in this particular anchor, because we are not in the same industry. For a living, I travel around the world and inspire people to live happy, for a living, you repair people from catastrophes, you can’t support me as a peer.
And what that looks like is occasionally on her lunch break, she’ll call me, and what she has to do for 14 hours a day is climb up on roofs and assess hail damage and wind damage. And so she’ll be on the phone with me, and she’ll be like, what do you think this is, what do you think, and I’ll be like, you know, I’m really trying to figure out if this work makes you happy.
So I’m not really supporting her, because as a friend, I’m limited in being able to understand what she’s experiencing. But if she had a peer who did that same work that she did, that peer would be able to keep her head in the game. So as you’re thinking about these two people, keep in mind that your friend will always be connected to your truest heart’s desire, and your peer will always keep your head in the game.
These are the five people that you need to connect with in order to be happy. So my question to you is this, how many of you are missing out on life’s greatest moments, because you are paralyzed by some devastating experience that occurred, and you don’t have a cheerleader to help you get unstuck?
How many of you are stepping away from your Beyonce experience because you don’t have a true friend to tell you to save up and buy a ticket? How many of you aren’t unleashing your God-given talent to positively influence this world, because you don’t have a mentor pointing you in the right direction, you don’t have a peer to lick your wounds with, and you don’t have a coach kicking you out of your comfort zone?
Folks, this is what I know for sure: most of us can’t catch happiness because we are not connected to the right people to inspire us to go after it and get it. So if you are sitting in this room, and you are trying to overcome something devastating in your life, or you are on the other side of the coin, and you simply want to move from good to great, you must connect with your factor five: your cheerleader, your mentor, your coach, your friend, and your peer. And let them help you catch happiness.
Thank you.
SUMMARY OF THIS TALK:
Stacey Flowers delivered a compelling talk titled ‘The 5 People You Need To Be Happy,’ where she shared personal experiences and valuable insights on happiness and success. Here is a summary of her talk’s key takeaway points:
Stacey Flowers begins her talk by recounting her journey to attend her first Beyonce concert, highlighting her determination to save up for the experience. She vividly describes the moment she held hands with Beyonce during the concert, emphasizing the intense happiness she felt in that moment.
However, as the concert progressed, Stacey had a realization: true happiness isn’t just about fleeting moments of pleasure or accumulating material possessions. Instead, it’s about unleashing one’s God-given talents to positively influence the world.
Stacey then delves into her extensive research on happiness and success, challenging the conventional belief that success leads to happiness. She references Harvard researcher Dr. Shawn Achor’s findings, which suggest that happiness actually precedes success.
Furthermore, Stacey emphasizes the importance of optimism as a learned skill. She encourages individuals to cultivate a mindset that sees possibilities rather than dwelling on problems.
The heart of Stacey’s talk centers on the profound impact of relationships on happiness. She asserts that relationships have the deepest influence on happiness, more than any other factor. She believes that the five key people in one’s life can significantly impact their happiness and success.
Stacey identifies these five key people as follows:
1. CHEERLEADER: Stacey shares her personal story of a high school counselor who became her first cheerleader. This person believed in her even when she struggled to believe in herself, ultimately changing the course of her life.
2. MENTOR: A mentor is someone who guides and directs you in the right direction. Stacey emphasizes the importance of seeking mentors who willingly share information and can guide you toward your goals.
3. COACH: Stacey describes a coach as someone who challenges you, making you slightly uncomfortable to help you reach your full potential. Coaches play a vital role in pushing individuals beyond their comfort zones.
4. FRIEND: Your truest heart’s desire is understood by your friend. Stacey emphasizes the significance of having a close friend who knows your deepest aspirations and supports you in pursuing them.
5. PEER: The peer is the one who keeps your head in the game, especially in social or professional contexts. Stacey differentiates between a friend and a peer, noting that a peer understands the nuances of your field and helps you stay focused.
In closing, Stacey challenges her audience to reflect on whether they are missing out on life’s greatest moments due to a lack of the right people in their lives. She emphasizes that connecting with the “Factor Five” – the cheerleader, mentor, coach, friend, and peer – can help individuals overcome obstacles, achieve their goals, and ultimately catch happiness.
Stacey’s talk serves as a powerful reminder that happiness is not a solitary pursuit but a journey enriched by the connections we make with the people who support and guide us along the way.
