Sawubona.

In South Africa, where I come from,

"sawubona" is the Zulu word for "hello."

There's a beautiful and powerful intention behind the word

because "sawubona" literally translated means,

"I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being."

So beautiful, imagine being greeted like that.

But what does it take in the way we see ourselves?

Our thoughts, our emotions and our stories

that help us to thrive

in an increasingly complex and fraught world?

This crucial question has been at the center of my life's work.

Because how we deal with our inner world drives everything.

Every aspect of how we love, how we live,

how we parent and how we lead.

The conventional view of emotions as good or bad,

positive or negative,

is rigid.

And rigidity in the face of complexity is toxic.

We need greater levels of emotional agility

for true resilience and thriving.

My journey with this calling

began not in the hallowed halls of a university,

but in the messy, tender business of life.

I grew up in the white suburbs of apartheid South Africa,

a country and community committed to not seeing.

To denial.

It's denial that makes 50 years of racist legislation possible

while people convince themselves that they are doing nothing wrong.

And yet, I first learned of the destructive power of denial

at a personal level,

before I understood what it was doing to the country of my birth.

My father died on a Friday.

He was 42 years old and I was 15.

My mother whispered to me to go and say goodbye to my father

before I went to school.

So I put my backpack down and walked the passage that ran through

to where the heart of our home my father lay dying of cancer.

His eyes were closed, but he knew I was there.

In his presence, I had always felt seen.

I told him I loved him,

said goodbye and headed off for my day.

At school, I drifted from science to mathematics to history to biology,

as my father slipped from the world.

From May to July to September to November,

I went about with my usual smile.

I didn't drop a single grade.

When asked how I was doing, I would shrug and say, "OK."

I was praised for being strong.

I was the master of being OK.

But back home, we struggled --

my father hadn't been able to keep his small business going

during his illness.

And my mother, alone, was grieving the love of her life

trying to raise three children,

and the creditors were knocking.

We felt, as a family, financially and emotionally ravaged.

And I began to spiral down, isolated, fast.

I started to use food to numb my pain.

Binging and purging.

Refusing to accept the full weight of my grief.

No one knew, and in a culture that values relentless positivity,

I thought that no one wanted to know.

But one person did not buy into my story of triumph over grief.

My eighth-grade English teacher fixed me with burning blue eyes

as she handed out blank notebooks.

She said, "Write what you're feeling.

Tell the truth.

Write like nobody's reading."

And just like that,

I was invited to show up authentically to my grief and pain.

It was a simple act

but nothing short of a revolution for me.

It was this revolution that started in this blank notebook

30 years ago

that shaped my life's work.

The secret, silent correspondence with myself.

Like a gymnast,

I started to move beyond the rigidity of denial

into what I've now come to call

emotional agility.

Life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility.

We are young until we are not.

We walk down the streets sexy

until one day we realize that we are unseen.

We nag our children and one day realize

that there is silence where that child once was,

now making his or her way in the world.

We are healthy until a diagnosis brings us to our knees.

The only certainty is uncertainty,

and yet we are not navigating this frailty successfully or sustainably.

The World Health Organization tells us that depression

is now the single leading cause of disability globally --

outstripping cancer,

outstripping heart disease.

And at a time of greater complexity,

unprecedented technological, political and economic change,

we are seeing how people's tendency

is more and more to lock down into rigid responses to their emotions.

On the one hand we might obsessively brood on our feelings.

Getting stuck inside our heads.

Hooked on being right.

Or victimized by our news feed.

On the other, we might bottle our emotions,

pushing them aside

and permitting only those emotions deemed legitimate.

In a survey I recently conducted with over 70,000 people,

I found that a third of us --

a third --

either judge ourselves for having so-called "bad emotions,"

like sadness,

anger or even grief.

Or actively try to push aside these feelings.

We do this not only to ourselves,

but also to people we love, like our children --

we may inadvertently shame them out of emotions seen as negative,

jump to a solution,

and fail to help them

to see these emotions as inherently valuable.

Normal, natural emotions are now seen as good or bad.

And being positive has become a new form of moral correctness.

People with cancer are automatically told to just stay positive.

Women, to stop being so angry.

And the list goes on.

It's a tyranny.

It's a tyranny of positivity.

And it's cruel.

Unkind.

And ineffective.

And we do it to ourselves,

and we do it to others.

If there's one common feature

of brooding, bottling or false positivity, it's this:

they are all rigid responses.

And if there's a single lesson we can learn

from the inevitable fall of apartheid

it is that rigid denial doesn't work.

It's unsustainable.

For individuals, for families,

for societies.

And as we watch the ice caps melt,

it is unsustainable for our planet.

Research on emotional suppression shows

that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored,

they get stronger.

Psychologists call this amplification.

Like that delicious chocolate cake in the refrigerator --

the more you try to ignore it ...

(Laughter)

the greater its hold on you.

You might think you're in control of unwanted emotions when you ignore them,

but in fact they control you.

Internal pain always comes out.

Always.

And who pays the price?

We do.

Our children,

our colleagues,

our communities.

Now, don't get me wrong.

I'm not anti-happiness.

I like being happy.

I'm a pretty happy person.

But when we push aside normal emotions to embrace false positivity,

we lose our capacity to develop skills to deal with the world as it is,

not as we wish it to be.

I've had hundreds of people tell me what they don't want to feel.

They say things like,

"I don't want to try because I don't want to feel disappointed."

Or, "I just want this feeling to go away."

"I understand," I say to them.

"But you have dead people's goals."

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Only dead people

never get unwanted or inconvenienced by their feelings.

(Laughter)