How to Tune Your Inner Voice | Rhonda Ross, Daniel Alexander Jones | TED

0:03 Daniel Alexander Jones: My friend.

0:05 It's good to see you, let's do it.

0:07 So first of all, yours is truly,

0:09 and I can attest to this,

0:10 it's a liberatory practice.

0:13 And I witness you as part of, really,

0:15 a grand tradition of artists

0:18 who focused on capital-F Freedom in everything that they did.

0:23 So here we are in a time of tectonic upheaval,

0:27 of assaults on body and soul

0:31 and exponential demands on our attention.

0:36 In the midst of all this, you make offering to us.

0:39 Can you please tell us all about your work with mindset

0:43 and where in your life journey it comes from?

0:46 Rhonda Ross: Yes, well, my goodness.

0:49 I’m so happy to be here,

0:50 and I’m so happy to be here with you,

0:52 after all these years of having these types of conversations.

0:57 So...

1:01 I’m a singer-songwriter, I'm a performer, I'm an actress.

1:05 And when I graduated Brown,

1:07 I went on to do work in that field,

1:13 and it went really great.

1:16 DAJ: Yeah, right.

1:17 RR: And I got on a soap opera, and I got an Emmy nomination.

1:22 And I met and married my husband,

1:25 and everything was really good.

1:28 And I was really happy.

1:30 Until things weren't good.

1:33 And then I wasn't happy.

1:35 And all of a sudden, the Emmy went to somebody else,

1:39 the soap opera I was on was canceled,

1:43 my husband and I were—

1:45 he's here, by the way.

1:46 (Laughter) My husband and I were physically separated

1:52 because I had moved to LA,

1:53 and he hates LA.

1:56 And so I was out there trying to work,

1:58 and he was in New York.

2:00 We were trying to get pregnant.

2:02 You can't get pregnant 3,000 miles away from each other.

2:06 DAJ: Haven't figured that out yet.

2:07 RR: And I went in—

2:08 and I was unemployed, I wasn't working—

2:11 and I went into...

2:14 really one of the darkest times of my life.

2:17 And I remember in the moment thinking,

2:21 "What just happened?

2:23 Just a few years ago, everything was great."

2:27 Like what just happened?

2:28 And I started blaming my circumstances.

2:32 The agents, you know, all the things,

2:34 all the circumstances in my life.

2:38 And because none of those were under my control,

2:41 I felt victimized, and I felt stuck

2:43 and I felt like, you know,

2:46 the world was against me.

2:48 DAJ: Yeah.

2:49 RR: And after weeks and months

2:53 of really being in my darkest place,

2:55 I recognized that I couldn't stay there.

2:58 I had to figure out a way out of that,

3:01 even if I couldn't change my circumstances.

3:04 And I started to study and read

3:07 and come to find out there's all of this information

3:10 about the power of thought

3:12 and this idea that between our circumstances

3:16 and the way we feel about our circumstances,

3:19 live our thoughts, what I call our soundtrack that's on loop in our mind,

3:27 and our inner voice.

3:29 And it's what's coming out of that space that determines how we feel,

3:33 not the circumstances.

3:35 But we spend so much time blaming the circumstances,

3:38 feeling victimized by the circumstances,

3:41 and then trying to manipulate and control

3:43 and do what we can do with these circumstances.

3:47 When the truth is, the power to feel better,

3:50 to feel optimistic and at peace and empowered

3:53 and all of those things, is actually within ourselves.

3:57 And that's what I call emotional sovereignty.

3:59 So that's what I've been practicing

4:02 and then teaching for the last 25 years,

4:08 through my music, through my art,

4:10 through my mindset coaching and all of that.

4:12 DAJ: I love that.

4:13 And part of, you know, in our journey, one of the things is,

4:16 we work in a field where it's an intergenerational field.

4:20 So we had the great honor, both of us, of sharing a mentor later,

4:25 who passed away a couple years ago at 99 years old.

4:29 Her name was Vinie Burrows.

4:30 She was a great lady of the American theater.

4:33 And I'm thinking about what you're talking about,

4:35 about blaming circumstances versus doing something else.

4:38 And I know with Vinie, right, that she started on Broadway in the 1950s,

4:42 and like many Black actors of that time,

4:44 she was limited in what they would allow her to play.

4:48 And she was so profoundly frustrated by it.

4:51 And then she dropped into her own agency,

4:54 and she created one of the first solo performance pieces

4:59 that we now are very familiar with that kind of work

5:02 in the 1960s and '70s,

5:04 and by the end of her life,

5:05 she had performed over 6,000 performances all over the world, right?

5:11 And so one day, I was walking down in the Lower East Side where she was,

5:15 you know, and we can kind of picture her in our mind.

5:18 And I saw her at a distance and you know,

5:20 you always say hello to your elder.

5:22 So I said I was going to go say, "Hey, Miss Vinie."

5:24 And she came up to me,

5:26 grabbed me by the hand, shook me,

5:29 and she had a grip.

5:31 And she said, "Life is motion.

5:35 Life is motion!

5:37 Life is motion!" And she walked away.

5:41 (Laughter) And so I'm curious if you can talk,

5:46 because I think even today, we've heard so much

5:48 about how we deal with all of these stresses

5:51 as we're in motion, as we're in our lives.

5:53 Can you talk about how your practice has helped you harness life in motion?

6:00 RR: I wasn't going to tell this story, but I'm going to tell it.

6:04 I'm so glad you mentioned Vinie.

6:08 And yes, the work that I do

6:10 is something that has helped me as life is lifing, right?

6:16 Because I’m constantly being reminded that there is this space,

6:21 and there’s this soundtrack, and I can shift it.

6:24 And the story I’m going to tell:

6:27 we were in Minneapolis

6:29 and I was doing your play, "Phoenix Fabrik."

6:31 And Vinie was in the play.

6:33 And this might be a little TMI.

6:35 DAJ: OK.

6:36 RR: Sorry.

6:38 But I was having a miscarriage.

6:41 And I had just found out that I was having a miscarriage.

6:44 And so I went to rehearsal,

6:46 and I was on the phone outside, pacing,

6:49 talking to my husband on the phone,

6:51 and Vinie was watching me through the windows.

6:53 And when I came in, she said, "What is it?

6:56 What is it?" She was very dramatic.

6:58 And I said, "I'm having a miscarriage."

7:01 And she said, "No!"

7:03 And she grabbed me and she said,

7:05 "It's the end of the world."

7:08 And I said, "Yes."

7:10 And she said, "But it isn't."

7:12 (Laughter) I'll never forget that.

7:15 And so it's perspective,

7:19 it's reframing, it's taking these circumstances

7:23 and looking at them in all the different ways.

7:27 And we assume this thing happens.

7:30 I'm having a miscarriage, I must be devastated,

7:32 I must be all of the things.

7:34 But there is a space where you get to decide

7:39 how you're going to translate that circumstance.

7:41 How are you going to do it?

7:43 I had another friend of mine say—

7:47 during my third miscarriage—

7:49 say to me, "Your body's getting ready for the one."

7:53 And I remember taking that.

7:56 Instead of giving up and all of that, I said,

7:58 "Oh I'm getting ready for the one."

8:01 Yeah.

8:02 And so, all to say,

8:05 this work is...

8:09 is about recognizing the agency that we have.

8:15 We have so much more power than we give ourselves credit for,

8:19 because life is going to life, right?

8:22 Things are going to happen.

8:24 And it doesn’t mean you’ve got to like what those things are

8:27 or choose them or want them, but they're happening anyway.

8:29 So how can you take that and use it to empower you,

8:34 to lift you up

8:36 instead of letting it knock you down, right?

8:40 So that's the work.

8:41 And I was going to tell another story, but I'm going to skip it.

8:45 But I've got lots of stories.

8:46 But how I tried to work this into my life as I'm moving through it.

8:53 Even to this day,

8:55 I've been doing this work for over 20 years, 25 years,

8:59 and still I have to do it.

9:03 I had a meltdown on 125th Street two weeks ago.

9:05 (Laughter) Because my son wasn't where he said he was going to be.

9:10 And even though we track him,

9:12 the tracker said he was here, and he wasn’t there.

9:15 And I'm literally standing there on 125th Street,

9:17 "Raif, Raif!" looking, like, I couldn't figure it out

9:22 because I had skipped this part.

9:26 And it wasn’t until I grabbed hold of “wait a second,

9:30 cool out.” Yes, here are the circumstances,

9:33 he's not where he's supposed to be.

9:35 But you can decide how you frame that.

9:39 You can decide whether that terrifies you,

9:42 or whether it cools you out,

9:44 or whether you know he's OK.

9:46 Whether you give it some time.

9:49 Because real talk, it was only like five minutes.

9:52 Do I have parents out here?

9:54 (Laughter) DAJ: But what I love about this is

9:58 this gives me a concrete example of something.

10:01 I imagine many of us in this room engage,

10:04 which is we can think of things in these very macrocosmic big-picture ways.

10:09 But it's hard sometimes to translate down to the microcosm,

10:12 to the subtle things, the everyday choices,

10:16 and vice versa.

10:17 Something can be a storm inside of you

10:20 that can totally take you down,

10:23 and no one else will know about it.

10:24 And how do you navigate the flow of the world outside?

10:28 So it's very powerful.

10:30 And I want to call your beautiful son's name Raif Kendrick—

10:33 RR: Raif-Henok Emmanuel Kendrick.

10:36 DAJ: Call his name, he's a beautiful human being.

10:38 Like really radiant human being.

10:40 And I feel like I see in him you and your husband Rodney's love.

10:46 But also this work,

10:47 he's a mature young man from that process.

10:53 And thinking also about this idea,

10:56 I want to move us into a conversation about connection, continuum

10:59 and generation, right?

11:01 And a dear friend of mine, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a great scholar,

11:05 once was talking about Harriet Tubman.

11:08 And she said, on the night before the Combahee River raid,

11:11 where Harriet Tubman freed, I believe, over 700 enslaved folk,

11:16 she woke from a vision that she had—

11:18 and many of you know, she had had an injury,

11:20 and she would go into these states of vision.

11:23 And she woke and said,

11:25 "My people are free."

11:28 Not "going to be free."

11:30 They are free.

11:32 Present tense, right?

11:34 And so I think that's a story that you carry in

11:39 that changes the outcome of something.

11:42 The stories we tell ourselves and we give ourselves

11:46 versus the stories that are told about us,

11:50 the stories that are told to us

11:52 and the expectations that others have

11:53 of how we're going to move in the world.

11:55 So I'm curious about, you know,

11:58 purpose and freedom, present tense for you and wherever you want to take that.

12:05 RR: Oh, my God.

12:07 DAJ: Yeah, that's how we roll.

12:08 RR: That's how we roll.

12:12 So I just want to go back to what you said

12:15 about "my people are free."

12:18 This idea of affirmation.

12:21 So, the program, the process that I have,

12:26 I called it "tune your inner voice."

12:29 Tune your inner voice.

12:31 And there's a few different steps to it.

12:35 So step one, I call it the crucial first step,

12:39 is to acknowledge that there's this space

12:42 and acknowledge that you have agency in this space,

12:44 and acknowledge that it's your thoughts that determine how you feel

12:48 and you are the thinker of your thoughts.

12:50 So you have the ability and the power.

12:51 So that's the crucial first step.

12:53 You can't move anywhere beyond until you do that.

12:56 The next one, and Jessica mentioned it,

12:59 is to really investigate what you're feeling.

13:02 What is happening inside of you?

13:07 Sit with it.

13:08 We gaslight ourselves, right?

13:10 "I shouldn't feel that."

13:12 "Oh, I can't be feeling that."

13:13 You know, all of that.

13:14 But sit with it, name it.

13:16 There's science behind naming a feeling

13:20 and how already the feeling starts to kind of dissipate when you can name it.

13:24 And in my process, I have people really, really name it.

13:28 Like not just, "Oh, I'm upset," but like, what is it?

13:32 Is it anxiety?

13:34 Is it terror?

13:35 Like what is it?

13:37 So we sit with that for a while.

13:39 That's step two.

13:40 Step three is to find the thought that is really triggering that feeling, right?

13:47 Not the circumstance, the thought.

13:49 And I call it an automatic screwy thought

13:52 or an automatic sabotaging thought, an AST.

13:56 And so you find that thought and again, you name it and identify it,

14:01 and then you're like,

14:02 nobody could feel good with a thought like that,

14:05 because usually it's a thought like, you know,

14:07 "I'm a piece of"— whatever, right?

14:09 You know, and you say,

14:10 "No wonder I've been feeling"

14:11 like, "That's what's been going on in my mind?"

14:14 You know, so really looking for the thought.

14:16 And then we shift the thought

14:18 into what I call an INT,

14:21 an intentionally nourishing thought.

14:24 And that is like an affirmation.

14:27 But because it's come through this process,

14:30 it's your customized affirmation.

14:34 Because, we talked about this,

14:36 you can't free yourself through somebody else's stuff.

14:41 You've got to have done it for yourself.

14:43 And so this INT becomes...

14:48 The words that work for you,

14:51 the words that cool you out

14:55 that allow you to breathe.

14:57 So you find those words, the affirmation,

15:00 the INT or a mantra that you can have in your mind.

15:05 And then, because I come from music and I understand the power of it,

15:11 we then take that INT and attach it to a melody,

15:15 make it a song.

15:16 So I call it a songtra.

15:17 That's what you mentioned earlier,

15:19 songtra for emotional sovereignty.

15:22 Songtra is now your personalized affirmation,

15:26 your personalized mantra, to a melody that can stick in your head,

15:30 because that's what music does.

15:32 And so I want to speak to—

15:35 when you have an affirmation,

15:38 a mantra that becomes your soundtrack and it's on loop in your mind,

15:44 it changes everything.

15:47 It changes the lens that you are seeing the world.

15:50 And whether you use that songtra in advance, in preparation,

15:56 just walking through the world, which I use my songstras like that,

15:59 you could also use them in the middle of crisis.

16:02 DAJ: That is fantastic.

16:03 RR: The thing happens and you think, "Wait."

16:05 And you sing your mantra to yourself.

16:07 You cool yourself out.

16:09 DAJ: One thing that I know you emphasize a great deal

16:14 is that this can work for everyone, right?

16:16 One does not need to be a musician.

16:18 You don't need to have any particular background.

16:20 It's a process by which we share a resource, right?

16:25 You know, I always use this quote,

16:27 one of my favorite quotes is from the great Grace Lee Boggs, activist.

16:31 And she said, at the end of her life, and she lived to be 100,

16:34 she said, you know,

16:35 "I stopped thinking of things in terms of decades,

16:38 and I started thinking of them in terms of centuries."

16:40 And I do want to just take time to acknowledge

16:43 that you belong to tradition, right?

16:45 And of course, your incredible parents, Diana Ross and Berry Gordy,

16:48 who were way makers, and they broke molds.

16:51 And also your years of study with Abbey Lincoln,

16:55 the great jazz musician,

16:57 the music we call jazz, right?

16:59 And all of these other artists that you've collaborated with.

17:02 But I'm thinking about, you know,

17:05 I think of this all as a relay race.

17:08 That we get from our ancestors

17:10 something that we should not set down,

17:12 but we must carry forward, but in our way.

17:15 Coming back to your thing of your voice, your particular inflection.

17:19 And I just, in our closing moments,

17:21 I'd like for you to reflect on how you have walked with lineage

17:25 and/or what you think that idea of a relay race says to you.

17:29 What are you doing in your leg of the race?

17:31 RR: Lord.

17:32 How much time do we have?

17:34 DAJ: You've got two minutes.

17:35 RR: I can do this.

17:36 DAJ: You can, I know you can.

17:39 RR: Whew.

17:40 You said so much.

17:43 I do come out of jazz.

17:48 My husband, Rodney Kendrick,

17:49 I want to say his name,

17:50 he's an incredible pianist.

17:52 And he taught me so much, with Abbey Lincoln,

17:55 about making your own music.

18:00 That there is no such thing as jazz.

18:02 That Duke Ellington made Duke Ellington’s music,

18:06 and Thelonious Monk made his music.

18:08 So to that idea,

18:12 yes, I'm making my own continuation.

18:17 And what I want to say is, this is personal work.

18:22 It's individualized work.

18:24 But when you do it, it reverberates out.

18:28 And Eric Liu, he's going to speak here later,

18:34 he said this morning, when I told him what emotional sovereignty was,

18:37 he said, "Oh, I love that,

18:39 because sovereignty is not just 'get off my lawn.'

18:42 Sovereignty is also 'I'm responsible for my lawn.'"

18:45 DAJ: Thank you.

18:47 RR: And I said, "I'm going to say it later."

18:49 And so I say that to say

18:51 when we are responsible for our own lawns

18:54 and our own selves and our own mindset

18:55 and our own feelings, that reverberates.

18:58 We're no longer victimized

19:01 by what other people do in our circumstances,

19:03 but we also don't become the victimizers.

19:07 We don't have to be out there controlling and manipulating

19:10 and making people do the things.

19:12 Thank you.

19:13 Making people do the things.

19:15 DAJ: Yes.

19:16 RR: And I think at scale, it's big.

19:19 I think when we look at all the unkindness,

19:24 all the inequities, all the violence,

19:29 all the cruelty, all the genocide,

19:32 it is because somebody has decided that somebody else has to do something

19:35 for them to feel better.

19:37 And the minute we stop that, it ends.

19:39 DAJ: Thank you.

19:40 (Applause) That's right.

19:44 That's beautiful.

19:46 Perfect answer, right?

19:48 So you see what I tell you?

19:50 She's the truth.

19:51 Yes, indeed.

19:52 Thank you.

19:53 (Applause)