And if the jar gets filled up, there’s a celebration for the class.Īnd so, she said, “It was one of the worst moments in my life. If they’re making not great choices, the teacher takes out marbles. And by the time we got back into the classroom, everyone in my class knew what had happened, and they were laughing and pointing at me and calling me names.” And it was so bad, and the kids were being so disruptive, that her teacher even had to take marbles out of this marble jar.Īnd the marble jar in the classroom is a jar where if the kids are making great choices together, the teacher adds marbles. And of course I was … It scared me, and I said, “What’s wrong Ellen? What happened? What happened?”Īnd she pulled herself together enough to say, “Something really hard happened to me today at school, and I shared it with a couple of my friends during recess.

And the minute we closed the front door, she literally just started sobbing and slid down the door until she was just kind of a heap of crying on the floor. One day, my daughter, Ellen, came home from school. But there’s a very personal reason I jumped to trust early in my research career, and it was a personal experience. But I get to dig into the stuff that I think matters in my life and the life of the people around me.Īnd the topic of trust is something I think I probably would have eventually started to look at closely because I study shame and vulnerability. One of my least favorite parts of my job is I normally come up with findings that kicked me in the butt and make me change my entire life. I’m going to talk about trust and I’m going to start by saying this: One of my favorite parts of my job is that I get to research topics that mean something to me. I feel like I have a relationship with many of you on social media, and you were like, “T-minus two days.” I’m like, “It’s coming! We’re going to be together.” So I’m so grateful to be here with you. Oh, it just feels like an incredible understatement to say how grateful I am to be here with all of you. This speech was originally delivered at UCLA’s Royce Hall in 2015. Brené Brown is a professor and social scientist.

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