The Power of Truth Telling: Christine Carter (Full Transcript)

Full text of sociologist Christine Carter’s talk: The Power of Truth Telling at TEDxThacherSchool conference. In this talk, she shares the surprising secret to feeling fulfilled. Especially a talk to share with teens and anyone addicted to social media.

Best quote from this talk:

We can only really be happy, truly happy when we live in total integrity with ourselves, when we’re really open and honest and transparent. And this is because we human beings need the truth like we need food.

Listen to the MP3 audio here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Christine Carter – Sociologist

Thank you so much. It’s fun to be here.

So I was what we would now call a highly sensitive child. I was so shy and so emotional. I cried every single day at school. I would cry if I was a little bit frustrated. I would cry if I was frightened. I would definitely have cried if you looked at me funny. I cried all the time. I didn’t think about it at all; I just kind of wore my emotions on my sleeve.

Until one day in second grade, a girl named Katherine who was my friend and my neighbor informed me that I was no longer allowed to play at her house after school anymore. Because her mom didn’t want to deal with it if I started to cry.

So for the first time in my life, I started to care what other people thought of me. I was so embarrassed and so ashamed that I had been banned from a neighborhood house because I was crying all the time. That I made a commitment to myself to start hiding what I was feeling.

And that one little instant, I began what would become a long career in people-pleasing.

Now people-pleasing in my extensive personal experience is a process by which we assess what will make people think more highly of us and then we mold our behavior accordingly. It’s very subtle; it’s usually very unconscious… thing that we do to influence others or even to manipulate what they think of us.

And the problem with people-pleasing is that it means that we’re putting out all this energy towards influencing what other people think of us rather than authentically expressing ourselves. And when we make that trade-off, we end up really out of alignment, really out of integrity with ourselves.

And that integrity thing is where we often end up in trouble in my experience.

So I’m a sociologist. I’ve studied the sociology of happiness for well over a decade now. And so as you might imagine, people are always asking me what the secret to happiness is. And it’s fun question, right? I love to answer this question. My answer has evolved quite a lot over the last ten or fifteen years.

I think 10 years ago, I would have definitely told you that the key to happiness was gratitude. Having a regular gratitude practice.

And five years ago, I probably would have added something about a spirit of generosity and kindness being key to a really happy life.

But a few years ago, I came to see that the only path to true joy is one where we don’t lie at all. Only when we don’t ever pretend to think or feel or be something that we’re not can we truly be happy.

We can only really be happy, truly happy when we live in total integrity with ourselves, when we’re really open and honest and transparent. And this is because we human beings need the truth like we need food. And we are starving for the truth.

In this age of Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram and personal brands, we are starving to tell the truth… our truth… to show the world who we really are and know that they still love us.