When Mara Gleason was made fun of in college, she realized she had a superpower which could deflect the insults thrown at her. Speaker: Mara Gleason, taken from a talk she gave to high school students at the Peace Summit in south side Chicago for One Solution Global
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00:00And he looked at me and he goes, gross, cellulite.
00:03And I have this moment of like, ow, that's not nice.
00:09That's mean.
00:11And my guy friends sitting next to me
00:12was all like, oh, hell no.
00:15That was wrong.
00:16Like, I want to chase that kid down,
00:17tell that scrawny little crap what he's made of old.
00:20And I was like, no, no, sit down, sit down, sit down.
00:23Don't go do that.
00:25We were having a really good time.
00:28Let's keep having a good time.
00:29And he kind of looked at me like,
00:31you're just going to let him say that to you?
00:33I was like, why do I care?
00:35It's his thinking that he has to live with, not me.
00:40He has to walk around and whatever
00:42that kind of thinking about humanity feels like.
00:46And so I literally had a split second
00:48where I had a little thought storm in my head of,
00:50oh, that's messed up.
00:51He said that to me, and I feel bad.
00:53And then I realized, nah, I don't want to.
00:58Because I don't have to.
01:01I don't have to.
01:03I don't have to believe what you think.
01:05I don't have to believe what you say.
01:08I'll give you another example.
01:10So I travel the world, and I share an understanding
01:14of how the mind only works inside out.
01:16It doesn't work outside it.
01:17That's a short version of what I do.
01:19And I do that in all different capacities.
01:21And for the first 10 years of my career,
01:23I worked with a lot of leadership teams at businesses.
01:26I worked with physicists.
01:27I worked with engineers and scientists.
01:29I found myself at 23, 24, or 25 years old
01:33sitting in rooms of people who were three times my age
01:37with degrees that were way fancier than my degrees.
01:41They were men.
01:43They seemed powerful.
01:44And I remember for the first year or so of doing this work,
01:48I had a lot of thinking about being young and being a girl.
01:53And I thought, in my own mind, that
01:55meant I had to work harder.
01:58I thought, I made up in my own head
02:01that because I was a woman and because I was young,
02:04I had to work harder than other people
02:06in order to gain respect.
02:08I had a conversation with one of my colleagues.
02:11And he said, you know, Mara, that's only real
02:14if you're thinking about it.
02:16And if you're thinking about it, it gets really, really real,
02:19and it looks like a really big deal.
02:22And you notice that's true.
02:23That's how the mind works, is that a thought can't bother you
02:27if you don't keep thinking about it.
02:29And what I want you to realize is it's not me.
02:31I'm not special.
02:32You have the same exact superpower
02:34because your mind works the same exact way.
02:37Your mind is yours.
02:39Nobody outside of you can tell you to think
02:41something about yourself.
02:43The truth is, I'm a human.
02:45So some days, I'm insecure.
02:47Some days, I'm in a crappy mood.
02:49Some days, I don't feel like I'm good enough.
02:51But since discovering my own superpower
02:53was different for me as I realized,
02:55that's just me having a crappy thinking day.
02:58There's nothing in the world out there.
03:01Notice that every thought you've ever had eventually,
03:03eventually passes.
03:06When you realize that your mind is your own,
03:10you can't blame anybody else.
03:13And when you can't blame anybody else,
03:15you can't be angry at the world.
03:18In order to boldly embrace your superpower
03:21and your freedom of mind, you have to be a rebel.
03:25You have to be a rebel because this is not the story that's
03:28being told in the world right now.
03:30The opposite story is being told.
03:33You need this in order to feel good.
03:34Buy this stupid product in order to feel better about yourself.
03:38Oh, I'm pissed because the world is this.
03:40But you're going to have to boldly stand up and say,
03:42you know what?
03:43Screw that.
03:44I'm going to go against the grain.
03:45I'm not going to go with the mainstream.
03:47I'm not buying it.
03:48Why?
03:49Because I know that my mind is free.