How to break through fear and become a leader | Valerie Montgomery Rice

TED Talks Daily

Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice shares her personal journey of overcoming professional devastation and using childhood lessons to build resilien

Key takeaways

• Dr. Rice experienced a major career setback when the president of her medical school asked her to step down from her dean position.
• Lesson one focuses on accepting loss without accepting defeat by practicing accountability and taking decisive action.

Main topics

• Resilient Leadership
• Overcoming Professional Failure

Notable quotes

You can still be afraid. And so you may not be able to cancel that fear out completely, but you can put it to sleep.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a powerful call to action for leaders to leverag

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Today's episode of TED Talks Daily is presented by Walmart Business. There's a particular kind of failure I think a lot of us know, the public kind, the kind that leaves you embarrassed, ashamed, and afraid you might not come back from it. I've had one of those. Maybe you have too. That fear of failing in a way everyone can see is something Valerie Montgomery Rice, physician and president of Morehouse School of Medicine, understands quite well. She was one of the youngest medical school deans in the country when a new president asked her to step down. I Speaker 1 (0:43) was devastated. I was embarrassed. I was ashamed. I was fearful. Fear was what I felt most of all. Speaker 2 (0:55) To find her way through, Valerie reached back to a little pink house in Renz, Georgia, her grandmother's home, where she first learned what resilience looked like by watching the women who raised her. In this talk from 2023, she shares three lessons on leadership. You can still be Speaker 1 (1:09) afraid. And so you may not be able to cancel that fear out. completely, but you can put it to sleep. You can learn how to lean into Speaker 2 (1:20) your fear. Valerie argues that great leaders aren't produced by the number of titles or degrees they hold, but by their life experiences, the distance traveled, the tables they sit at, and what they choose to do with what they've learned. That's coming up. Let Speaker 1 (1:41) me tell you how a little pink house prepared me for my first workplace termination. and set me on a path of resilience, grit and fearlessness. About two and a half hours south of Atlanta is a little town of Wrens, Georgia. About 2,000 people. My grandmother lived in Wrens, Georgia, in a pink house nested off a dirt road right off of East 88 Highway. It had a massive yard, the kind of yard that was made for little five-year-old girls who liked to make mud pies or run chicken races with their cousins to see who could run the fastest. The chickens are the cousins. Speaker 1 (2:35) That was summer at grandmother's house. And if I think about it, I can remember and feel that Georgia sun on my face. I can remember when I was just tall enough to jump off the bed, to use the pot next door to the bed, because the pink house didn't get indoor plumbing until 1968. Those are the memories. Speaker 1 (3:03) that serves my foundation. That's what helped me to become the woman that I am today. In the midst of those challenges, I can hear my grandmother's voice, laced with a little bit of sternness, when she said, Valerie, it's your time to go get the eggs out the chicken coop, or sometimes even select the chicken for that day, for dinner. I learned then that I would, I should and I could. Now, all of our memories are clearly not laced with warmth, because I can also remember when my family struggled, when my mother struggled. And I think about that pink house. That pink house was not only my classroom, but it was my mother's refuge. Speaker 1 (4:03) My mother was my sort of first view into leadership. And when I think about her and all the other women who went through challenges and