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So when I was a little girl,
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a book sat on the coffee table
in our living room,
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just steps from our front door.
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And the living room is a first impression.
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Ours had white carpet
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and a curio of my mother's
most treasured collectibles.
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That room represented the sacrifices
of generations gone by
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who, by poverty or by policy,
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couldn't afford a curio of collectibles
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let alone a middle class house
to put them in.
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That room had to stay perfect.
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But I would risk messing up
that perfect room every day
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just to see that book.
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On the cover sat a woman
named Septima Clark.
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She sat in perfect profile
with her face raised to the sky.
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She had perfect salt-and-pepper cornrows
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platted down the sides of her head,
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and pride and wisdom
just emanated from her dark skin.
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Septima Clark was an activist
and an educator,
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a woman after whom I'd eventually
model my own career.
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But more than all the words
she ever spoke,
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that single portrait of Septima Clark,
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it defined confidence for me
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before I ever even knew the word.
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It may sound simple,
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but confidence is something
that we underestimate the importance of.
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We treat it like a nice-to-have
instead of a must-have.
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We place value on knowledge and resources
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above what we deem to be
the soft skill of confidence.
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But by most measures,
we have more knowledge
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and more resources now
than at any other point in history,
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and still injustice abounds
and challenges persist.
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If knowledge and resources
were all that we needed,
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we wouldn't still be here.
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And I believe that confidence
is one of the main things
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missing from the equation.
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I'm completely obsessed with confidence.
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It's been the most important
journey of my life,
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a journey that,
to be honest, I'm still on.
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Confidence is the necessary spark
before everything that follows.
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Confidence is the difference
between being inspired
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and actually getting started,
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between trying and doing until it's done.
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Confidence helps us keep going
even when we failed.
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The name of the book on that coffee table
was "I Dream A World,"
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and today I dream a world
where revolutionary confidence
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helps bring about our
most ambitious dreams into reality.
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That's exactly the kind of world
that I wanted to create in my classroom
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when I was a teacher,
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like a Willy Wonka world
of pure imagination,
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but make it scholarly.
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All of my students were black or brown.
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All of them were growing up
in a low-income circumstance.
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Some of them were immigrants,
some of them were disabled,
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but all of them were the very last people
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this world invites to be confident.
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That's why it was so important
that my classroom be a place
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where my students could build
the muscle of confidence,
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where they could learn to face each day
with the confidence you need
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to redesign the world
in the image of your own dreams.
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After all, what are academic skills
without the confidence to use those skills
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to go out and change the world.
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Now is when I should tell you about
two of my students, Jamal and Regina.
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Now, I've changed their names,
but their stories remain the same.
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Jamal was brilliant, but unfocused.
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He would squirm in his chair
during independent work,
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and he would never stay still
for more than three or four minutes.
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Students like Jamal
can perplex brand new teachers
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because they're not quite sure
how to support young people like him.
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I took a direct approach.
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I negotiated with Jamal.
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If he could give me focused work,
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then he could do it
from anywhere in the classroom,
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from our classroom rug,
from behind my desk,
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from inside his classroom locker,
which turned out to be his favorite place.
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Jamal's least favorite
subject was writing,
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and he never wanted to read
what he had written out loud in class,
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but we were still making progress.
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One day, I decided to host
a mock 2008 presidential election
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in my classroom.
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My third graders had to research
and write a stump speech
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for their chosen candidate:
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Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton
or John McCain.
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The heavy favorites were obvious,
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but one student chose John McCain.
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It was Jamal.
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Jamal finally decided to read something
that he had written out loud in class,
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and sure enough, Jamal stunned
all of us with his brilliance.
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Just like Jamal's dad,
John McCain was a veteran,
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and just like Jamal's dad protected him,
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Jamal believed that John McCain
would protect the entire country.
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And he wasn't my candidate of choice,
but it didn't matter,
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because the entire class
erupted into applause,
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a standing ovation
for our brave friend Jamal
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who finally showed up
as his most confident self
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for the first time that year.
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And then there was Regina.
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Regina was equally
as brilliant, but active.
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She'd inevitably finish her work early,
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and then she'd get on about the business
of distracting other students.
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(Laughter)
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Walking, talking,
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passing those notes
that teachers hate but kids love.
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You look like you passed a lot of them.
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(Laughter)
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Despite my high ideals for our classroom,
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I would too often default
to my baser instincts,
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and I would choose
compliance over confidence.
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Regina was a glitch in my intended system.
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A good teacher can correct misbehavior
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but still remain a student's champion.
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But on one day in particular,
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I just plain old chose control.
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I snapped,
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and my approach
didn't communicate to Regina
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that she was being a distraction.
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My approach communicated to Regina
that she herself was a distraction.
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I watched the light go out from her eyes,
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and that light sparked joy
in our classroom.
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I had just extinguished it.
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The entire class became irritable,
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and we didn't recover
for the rest of the day.
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I think about the day often,
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and I have literally prayed
that I did not do irreparable harm,
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because as a woman who used to be
a little girl just like Regina,
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I know that I could have started
the process of killing her confidence
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forever.
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A lack of confidence
pulls us down from the bottom
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and weighs us down from the top,
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crushing us between a flurry
of can'ts, won'ts and impossibles.
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Without confidence, we get stuck,
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and when we get stuck,
we can't even get started.
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Instead of getting mired
in what can get in our way,
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confidence invites us
to perform with certainty.
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We all operate a little differently
when we're sure we can win
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versus if we just hope we will.
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Now, this can be a helpful check.
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If you don't have enough confidence,
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it could be because you need
to readjust your goal.
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If you have too much confidence,
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it could be because
you're not rooted in something real.
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Not everyone lacks confidence.
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We make it easier in this society
for some people to gain confidence
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because they fit our preferred
archetype of leadership.
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We reward confidence in some people
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and we punish confidence in others,
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and all the while far too many people
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are walking around
every single day without it.
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For some of us,
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confidence is a revolutionary choice,
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and it would be our greatest shame
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to see our best ideas go unrealized
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and our brightest dreams go unreached
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all because we lacked
the engine of confidence.
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That's not a risk I'm willing to take.
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So how do we crack the code on confidence?
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In my estimation,
it takes at least three things:
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permission, community and curiosity.
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Permission births confidence,
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community nurtures it
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and curiosity affirms it.
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In education, we've got a saying,
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that you can't be what you can't see.
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When I was a little girl,
I couldn't show confidence
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until someone showed me.
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My family used to do everything together,
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including the mundane things,
like buying a new car,
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and every time we did this,
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I'd watch my parents
put on the exact same performance.
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We'd enter the dealership,
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and my dad would sit
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while my mom shopped.
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When my mom found a car that she liked,
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they'd go in and meet with the dealer,
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and inevitably, every time
the dealer would turn his attention
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and his body to my dad,
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assuming that he
controlled the purse strings
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and therefore this negotiation.
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"Rev. Packnett," they'd say,
"how do we get you into this car today?"
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My dad would inevitably
respond the same way.
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He'd slowly and silently
gesture toward my mother
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and then put his hands
right back in his lap.
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It might have been the complete shock
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of negotiating finances
with a black woman in the '80s,
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but whatever it was,
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I'd watch my mother
work these car dealers over
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until they were basically
giving the car away for free.
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(Laughter)
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She would never crack a smile.
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She would never be afraid to walk away.
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I know my mom just thought
she was getting a good deal on a minivan,
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but what she was actually doing
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was giving me permission
to defy expectations
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and to show up confidently in my skill
no matter who doubts me.
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Confidence needs permission to exist
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and community is the safest place
to try confidence on.
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I traveled to Kenya this year
to learn about women's empowerment
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among Maasai women.
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There I met a group of young women
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called Team Lioness,
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among Kenya's first all-female
community ranger groups.
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These eight brave young women
were making history
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in just their teenage years,
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and I asked Purity, the most verbose
young ranger among them,
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"Do you ever get scared?"
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I swear to you, I want to tattoo
her response all over my entire body.
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She said, "Of course I do,
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but I call on my sisters.
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They remind me that we
will be better than these men
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and that we will not fail."
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Purity's confidence to chase down
lions and catch poachers,
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it didn't come from her athletic ability
or even just her faith.
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Her confidence was
propped up by sisterhood,
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by community.
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What she was basically saying
was that if I am ever in doubt,
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I need you to be there
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to restore my hope
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and to rebuild my certainty.
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In community, I can find my confidence
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and your curiosity can affirm it.
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Early in my career,
I led a large-scale event
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that did not go exactly as planned.
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I'm lying to you. It was terrible.
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And when I debriefed the event
with my manager,
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I just knew that she
was going to run down the list
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of every mistake I had ever made,
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probably from birth.
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But instead, she opened with a question:
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What was your intention?
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I was surprised but relieved.
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She knew that I was already
beating myself up,
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and that question invited me
to learn from my own mistakes
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instead of damage
my already fragile confidence.
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Curiosity invites people
to be in charge of their own learning.
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That exchange, it helped me
approach my next project
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with the expectation of success.
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Permission, community, curiosity:
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all of these are the things that we
will need to breed the confidence
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that we'll absolutely need
to solve our greatest challenges
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and to build the world we dream,
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a world where inequity is ended
and where justice is real,
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a world where we can be free
on the outside and free on the inside
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because we know that none of us are free
until all of us are free.
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A world that isn't
intimidated by confidence
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when it shows up as a woman
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or in black skin
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or in anything other than
our preferred archetypes of leadership.
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A world that knows
that that kind of confidence
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is exactly the key we need
to unlock the future that we want.
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I have enough confidence
to believe that that world
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will indeed come to pass,
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and that we are the ones to make it so.
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Thank you so much.
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(Applause)
