My goal in these Intermittent Reinforcement emails is to help people deepen their understanding of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy to use it to better their lives. REBT is a well-woven system of ideas that Dr. Albert Ellis constructed by combining his vast knowledge of ancient and modern philosophy with his clinical experience working with patients over his 60 years of clinical practice. REBT is deceptive in that it may appear simple. A closer examination will reveal that it is a comprehensive system of ideas that applies in one way or another, deeply and powerfully, to all varieties of human adversity.
Mental health practitioners and consumers of psychological services should learn this system of ideas and strategies. It has distinct qualities and advantages, making it a powerful tool in facing life’s most difficult challenges. Albert was humble in so far as he referenced the many people he borrowed ideas from to integrate into what came to be known as REBT. At a banquet in his honor, I once heard him say, “I stood on the shoulders of other great thinkers.” Because these ideas go back thousands of years, it is not surprising that people may have encountered them in other contexts than from a REBT therapist or a REBT self-help book. It should not be surprising that highly accomplished individuals know, use, and model many of these ideas and strategies. REBT defines rational attitudes and ideas as those that work in the real world to help us get more of what we want and less of what we do not wish for. Rational attitudes are supported by evidence. They work to help us achieve our goals. Therefore, anyone like Taylor Swift, who has achieved great success in life, is likely, and not unsurprisingly, to use either the ideas of REBT or others consistent with them.
Ellis often used metaphors, parables, fables, stories from well-known people’s lives and his own life, witticisms, and humor to reach his patients and larger audiences. He aimed to show people how to survive and live happily despite adversity.
I inadvertently came across a 2022 commencement speech American popstar singer-songwriter Taylor Swift gave to the graduating students at New York University. Although I am not an expert on the life and career of Taylor Swift, judging from her speech, she appears to have been exposed to some of the highly practical ideas central to REBT. Upon listening and reflecting upon her speech, I was struck by how many REBT-consistent ideas she promulgated in her commencement address. This young woman has tremendous star power, and although very talented, she probably was forced to cultivate emotional skills that helped her along her journey to stardom. I believe that she has had to work tremendously hard over the years to lay the foundation for the success we currently are witnessing in her career. We can learn something from her.
Below is a transcript of her commencement speech, followed by my commentary on how her point aligns with REBT theory and practice. Sometimes I use it as a springboard to reinforce specific REBT ideas. First, read Taylor Swift’s transcripted statement in bold italics and my comments below each. In my remarks, I show how her point is consistent with what we teach in REBT. Then I suggest you listen to her address to enjoy her presentation and mannerisms. This review will help you to appreciate, better understand, remember, and then adopt some of these powerful attitudes of REBT to help you face your challenges. Enjoy the speech!
Taylor Swift’s 2022 Commencement Speech to the Graduates of New York University
Not a single one of us here today has done it alone. We are each a patchwork quilt of those who have loved us, those who have believed in our futures—those who showed us empathy and kindness—or told us the truth, even when it wasn’t easy to hear. Those who told us we could do it when there was absolutely no proof of that.
Here, Taylor Swift points out that we are social animals, and it is only fair to acknowledge humbly how others have helped us cultivate our potential. But she also points to her willingness to see and hear about life as it is, even when life differed from how she wanted it to be. Facing adversity with flexible and non-extreme attitudes that allow us to adapt and cope rather than avoid adversity is something that we encourage our patients to do. She alludes to another core concept in REBT – expending great effort and acting without a guarantee and calculated risk-taking regarding pursuing our goals and dreams.
Someone read stories to you. And taught you to dream. And offered up some moral code of right and wrong for you to try and live by. Someone tried their best to explain every concept in this insanely complex world to the child that was you, as you asked a bazillion questions like how does the moon work and why can we eat salad but not grass? And maybe they didn’t do it perfectly. No one ever can.
Here, Taylor shows awareness that all people, especially parents and teachers, are flawed. In REBT therapy, I teach that it is fair and emotionally self-helping to relinquish our angry criticisms of our parents’ shortcomings and give them the benefit of the doubt, which may go a long way to living harmoniously with them despite their past missteps and present inadequacies. In REBT, human fallibility is foundational to the related concepts of unconditional self and unconditional other acceptance.
Maybe they aren’t with us anymore. In that case, I hope you’ll remember them today. If they are in this stadium, I hope you’ll find your own way to express your gratitude for all the steps and missteps that have led us to this common destination.
Here Taylor emphasizes being grateful for all those people, especially the student’s parents, for their steps and missteps that facilitated the student’s academic achievement. Although REBT does not speak of gratitude a great deal, it certainly is not in the least opposed to the possession and expression of it. REBT does recognize our interconnectedness as a social species and the importance of social interest. The unconditional acceptance of others that REBT encourages people to adopt sets the stage for gratitude to all those who have helped us along the way.
I know that words are supposed to be my thing, but I will never be able to find the words to thank my Mom and Dad, my brother Austin, for the sacrifices they made every day so I could go from singing in coffee houses to standing up here with you all today because no words would ever be enough.
Here, Taylor models her gratitude for her parents and her brother Austin which she encourages the students to show their parents and family; Taylor acknowledges she has not achieved her great success on her own, as none of us do, and how her family has made it possible for her to succeed so that she can have the opportunity to stand before the students and impart her view on life. She is modeling humility and gratitude.
To all the incredible parents, family members, mentors, teachers, allies, friends and loved ones here today who have supported these students in their pursuit of educational enrichment. Let me say to you now. Welcome to New York. It’s been waiting for you.
Taylor shows enthusiasm and sincerity in welcoming those who have supported the students. Although we might not explicitly write about authenticity, REBT’s emphasis on all humans having equal human worth and unconditional self-acceptance is consistent with her display of enthusiasm and sincerity.
I’d like to thank NYU for making me, technically, on paper at least, a Doctor. Not the type of doctor you would want around in case of an emergency, unless your specific emergency was that you desperately needed to hear a song with a catchy hook and an intensely cathartic bridge section. Or if you’re emergency was that you needed a person who can name over 50 breeds of cats in one minute.
Again, this young woman with incredible professional success shows she does not take herself too seriously. Ellis argued that one way of thinking about emotional disturbance was taking yourself, others, and life too seriously or not seriously enough. She has the proper perspective on the professional skills she does possess and pokes fun at herself.
I never got to have a normal college experience, per se. I went to public high school until 10th grade. And then finish my education, doing home schoolwork on the floors of airport terminals. Then I went out on the road for radio tour, which sounds incredibly glamorous. But in reality, it consisted of a rental cars, motels and my mom and I, pretending to have loud mother-daughter fights with each other during boarding so no one would want the empty seat between us on Southwest.
Taylor shows more REBT consistent humility but adds a dose of reality – the radio tour was a sacrifice she made, with no guarantee it would pay off in the end, to get to where she dreamt of going. In REBT, we encourage people to become long-term hedonists. We encourage people to accept short-term sacrifices for long-term gains. We tie this to unconditional life acceptance that life does not have to be easy, with our most prized goals being able to be achieved sometimes only with enormous sacrifice. In REBT, we teach calculated risk-taking and personal responsibility, which one may assume she displayed as she pursued her career as a young teenager.
As a kid, I always thought I would go away to college, imagining the posters I would hang on the wall of my freshman dorm. I even set the ending of my music video for my song Love Story. At my fantasy imaginary college where I meet a male model reading a book on the grass, and with one single glance, we realized we had been in love in our past lives. Which is exactly what you guys all experienced at some point in the last four years, right?
She shows more perspective on her career and her songs. Consistent with REBT’s idea of not taking ourselves and what we do too seriously, she implies that her song and work should be taken with a grain of salt.
But I really can’t complain about not having a normal college experience to you because you went to NYU during a global pandemic. Being essentially locked into your dorms and having to do classes over Zoom. Everyone in college during normal times stresses about test scores, but on top of that, you also had to pass like 1000 COVID tests. I imagine the idea of a normal college experience was all you wanted too. But in this case, you and I both learned that you don’t always get all the things in the bag that you selected from the menu in the delivery service. That is life. You get what you get.
Here she makes a critical point I make in one way or another in nearly all my REBT sessions. No matter how badly we want something, we do not have to get what we want. Even with the most significant matters of life and love, great disappointment, unfulfilled desires, loss, and frustration are part of life. Sooner or later, we all will experience deprivation of one kind or another. No one is exempt from this pain.
And as I would like to say to you wholeheartedly, you should be very proud of what you’ve done with it.
Here she points out, as REBT does, the importance of taking the circumstances dealt to us by fate and making the best of those circumstances. REBT teaches that the best years of our lives are those we do not blame external factors but find ways to circumvent adversity and, when impossible, find alternative ways to be happy despite hardship.
Today you leave New York University and then go out into the world searching. What’s next? And so will I. So, as a rule, I try not to give anyone unsolicited advice. Unless they ask for it. I’ll go into this more later. I guess I have been officially solicited in this situation to impart whatever wisdom I might have to tell you things that have helped me so far in my life. Please bear in mind that I in no way feel qualified to tell you what to do. You’ve worked and struggled and sacrificed and studied and dreamed your way here today. And so you know what you’re doing.
Here again, Taylor shows more humility. Her demeanor is consistent with REBT as it discourages and warns of the emotional dangers of global ratings of ourselves, even when we rate ourselves highly. Ellis taught that self-esteem was a sickness, not a virtue, as other therapies might teach. REBT teaches that to rate oneself highly and to have high self-esteem is to overgeneralize and to set oneself up for depression and shame when we fall short in the future. Also, her words are consistent with REBT’s emphasis on work and practice to achieve our therapeutic goals as Taylor acknowledges the hard work the students have done and her human limitations in guiding them despite having achieved enormous success in her own life and career.
You’ll do things differently than I did them and for different reasons. So, I won’t tell you what to do because no one likes that. I will, however, give you some life hacks I wish I knew when I was starting out. My dreams of a career and navigating life, love, pressure, choices, shame, hope, and friendship.
The first of which is life can be heavy, especially if you try to carry it all at once. Part of growing up and moving into new chapters of your life is about catch and release. What I mean by that is knowing what things to keep and what things to release.
In this part of her speech, her demeanor is serious and shows empathy for the journey we all are on. Life is hard, and Taylor seems to know that. In REBT sessions, I regularly allude to the fact that life can sometimes be very challenging. In REBT, we regularly attack the idea that life must be easy, which permeates all human thinking at times in one way or the other. Holding the attitude life must be easy will make it harder to face the adversity that the hand of fate gives each of us to bear.
You can’t carry all things. All grudges. All updates on your ex. All enviable promotions your school bully got at the hedge fund his uncle started. Decide what is yours to hold. Let the rest go.
Taylor proposes accepting and letting go of self and other ratings that leave a person feeling inadequate, self-loathing, bitter, angry, and envious. As an REBT therapist, I target grudges as they are rooted in demanding that another person not insult or injure us, leading to self-defeating hurt, anger, and bitterness. The healthy individual will acknowledge how they have been wrongly treated by the other person, perhaps choose to end the relationship with the other, but will unconditionally accept that person as a fallible human.
Often times the good things in your life are lighter anyway, so there’s more room for them. One toxic relationship can outweigh so many wonderful, simple joys. You get to pick what your life has time and room for. Be discerning.
Here Taylor is suggesting, as we do in REBT, that we put ourselves first and others a close second. Interestingly, she encourages students to realize that some relationships are better left in the past than rehabilitated, remembered, and longed for incessantly, resulting in suffering that causes us to overlook the beautiful things which remain in our lives. She implies unconditional acceptance of self and life. REBT teaches us to relinquish the need for approval and to exit from relationships that may be unhealthy, even when that is challenging to do.
Secondly, learn to live alongside cringe. No matter how hard you try to avoid being cringe, you will look back on your life and cringe retrospectively. Cringe is unavoidable over a lifetime.
Taylor acknowledges that all of us will do and say things that, in hindsight, will fall short of our standards. Such behavior is part of being human, and it is inevitable. She implies acceptance of this part of our lives. Although she does not explicitly instruct the students to accept themselves unconditionally as REBT prescribes, she likely implies such self-acceptance.
Even the term cringe might someday be deemed cringe. I promise you, you’re probably doing or wearing something right now that you will look back on later and find revolting and hilarious. You can’t avoid it, so don’t try to.
Here she implicitly prescribes unconditional life acceptance and unconditional self-acceptance, two foundational ideas of REBT.
For example, I had a phase where for the entirety of 2012, I dressed like a 1950s house housewife. But you know what? I was having fun. Trends and phases are fun. Looking back and laughing is fun.
Here Taylor again shows she does not take life and herself too seriously and values laughing and having fun, all very consistent with the REBT philosophical position that it is best to live life to enjoy yourself and not prove yourself.
And while we’re talking about things that make us squirm, but really shouldn’t. I’d like to say I’m a big advocate for not hiding your enthusiasm for things. It seems to me that there is a false stigma around eagerness. In our culture of unbothered ambivalence. This outlook perpetuates the idea that it’s not cool to want it. The people who don’t try are fundamentally more chic than people who do. And I wouldn’t know because I’ve been a lot of things, but I’ve never been an expert on chic. But I’m the one who’s up here, so you have to listen to me when I say this.
Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth. The people who wanted it the least were the ones I wanted to date and be friends with, in high school. The people who want it the most are the people I now hire to work for my company.
Taylor is taking a strong stand against popular social trends and risking social disapproval, consistent with REBT. Today there is talk of “quiet quitting.” Going against the grain, she embraces the work ethic of a bygone era in America. She acknowledges the value of enthusiasm, eagerness for achievement, and the importance of not being concerned with social approval and looking cool.
I started writing songs when I was 12. And since then, it’s been the compass guiding my life, and in turn, my life guided my writing. Everything I do is just an extension of my writing, whether it’s direct directing, videos, or a short film, creating the visuals for a tour, or standing on stage performing. Everything is connected by my love of the craft. The thrill of working through ideas and narrowing them down, and polishing it all up in the end. Editing. Waking up in the middle of the night. Throwing out the old idea because you just thought of a newer, better one or a plot device that ties the whole thing together. There’s a reason they call it a hook. Sometimes a string of words just ensnares me, and I can’t focus on anything until it’s been recorded or written down.
People may think that Taylor’s success comes without effort and sweat, but she shamelessly reveals how hard she has had to work for her professional success. In REBT therapy and consistent with Ellis’s teaching, I often quote the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles who said, “There is no success without hardship.”
As a songwriter, I’ve never been able to sit still. Or stay in one creative place for too long? I’ve made and released 11 albums and, in the process switched genre from country to pop to alternative to folk. And this might sound like a very songwriter-centric line of discussion, but in a way, I really do think, we are all writers.
And most of us. Writing a different voice for different situations. You write right differently in your Instagram stories than you do your senior thesis. You send a different type of email to your boss, then you do your best friend from home. We are all literary chameleons and I think it’s fascinating. It’s just a continuation of the idea that we are so many things all the time.
Here Taylor conveys her appreciation of how language is integral to being human. She uses language and the chameleon metaphor to pivot to another critical idea of her speech – people are complex and in flux. In REBT, we encourage people to see that they are unique, complex, and in a state of constant change and evolution. Therefore, self-ratings rooted in definitions of the self are invalid but, more importantly, emotionally self-harming. She also displays her propensity for calculated risk-taking by writing music across different genres. She knows how to get out of her comfort zone to be creative, an idea REBT supports wholeheartedly.
And. I know it can be really overwhelming figuring out who to be and when. Who you are now. And how to act in order to get where you want to go.
Again, she expresses humility and reflects self-acceptance for humans’ uncertainty in living their lives and deciding which direction to go and what steps to take to achieve their goals and dreams.
I have some good news. It’s totally up to you. I have some terrifying news. It’s totally up to you.
Without saying it, she acknowledges the importance of responsibility for oneself, behavior, decisions, and life. REBT encourages people to embrace responsibility for all aspects of their lives, emotions, behaviors, and decisions. REBT teaches self-reliance and independent thought as the best way to pursue happiness and meaning in life.
I said to you earlier that I don’t ever offer advice unless someone asks me for it, and now I’ll tell you why. As a person who started my very public career at the age of 15, it came with a price. And that price? It was years of unsolicited advice. Being the youngest person in every room for over a decade meant that I was constantly being issued warnings from older members of the music industry, media, interviewers, executives and this advice. Often presented itself as thinly veiled warnings. See, I was a teenager. At a time when our society was absolutely obsessed with the idea of having perfect young female role models. It felt like every interview I did included slight barbs by the interviewer about me one day running off the rails. And that meant a different thing to every person who said it to me. So, I became a young adult while being fed the message that if I didn’t make any mistakes all the children of America would grow up to be perfect angels. However, if I did slip up. The entire earth would fall off its axis and the entirely my fault and I would go to pop star jail forever and ever.
It was all centered around the idea that mistakes equal failure and ultimately. the loss of any chance at a happy or rewarding life. This has not been my experience. My experience has been that my mistakes led to the best things in my life. And being embarrassed when you mess up, it’s part of the human experience. Getting back up. Dusting yourself off. And seeing who still wants to hang out with you afterward and laugh about it, that’s a gift.
Here Taylor points out the value of making mistakes and how they can be important stepping stones to success in the future. She normalizes humans’ negative feelings when we fall short of our standards. She highlights the necessity of getting up after a fall, dusting oneself, and laughing about it all rather than hiding those mistakes from others.
The times I was told no or wasn’t included, wasn’t chosen didn’t win didn’t make the cut — looking back, it really feels like those moments were as important, if not more crucial, than the moments I was told yes. Not being invited to the parties and sleepovers in my hometown made me feel hopelessly lonely, but because I felt alone, I would sit in my room and write the songs. That would get me a ticket somewhere else.
Here Taylor points to the fact that she was not always popular with others. She acknowledges the hurt she felt, but rather than down herself as worthless, she channeled her pain and used it to fuel effort at writing songs that would open doors for her in the future. She did not blame external factors for her plight but did what it took to overcome them. This response is what REBT encourages people to do when they are rejected, fail, lose, or otherwise do not achieve their goals.
Having label executives in Nashville tell me that only 35-year-old housewives listen to country music, and there was no place for a 13-year-old on their roster made me cry in the car on the way home. But then I post my songs on my Myspace. And yes, Myspace. And I would message with other teenagers like me who loved country music but just didn’t have anyone singing from their perspective.
Here Taylor finds a way to circumvent rejection and failure and to get her words and music out to those who will appreciate and benefit from it. She does not give up due to initial rejection by older, more experienced record executives who supposedly know better than her. She remains undeterred in the face of rejection. In REBT, we teach patients to cultivate a tough-minded attitude toward rejection and failure. Although she may have cried in the car on the way home after being rejected, she was able to come to accept herself despite her rejection and worked to do what she could to change what was changeable. When people bounce back like this, they likely have what REBT would call high discomfort, uncertainty tolerance and some degree of life acceptance. These three ideas are foundational in REBT.
Having journalists write in-depth, oftentimes write critical pieces about who they perceive me to be made me feel like I was living in some weird simulation. But it also made me look inward. To learn about who I actually am.
She implies she took the criticism, used it to her benefit, and discovered aspects of herself due to criticism. She did not allow others to define who she was as a person and did not devalue herself for the criticism the journalists produced about her and her work. This response is consistent with the philosophy of unconditional self-acceptance. REBT encourages all people to cultivate emotional well-being in part through nurturing their unconditional self-acceptance.
Having the world treat my love life like a spectator sport in which I lose every single game was not a great way to date in my teens and 20s. But it taught me to protect my private life fiercely. Being publicly humiliated over and over again at a young age was excruciatingly painful. But it forced me to devalue the ridiculous notion of minute-by-minute, ever-fluctuating social relevance and likability.
She returns to the importance of learning how to face “humialiation” through the development of unconditional self-acceptance and not being dependent upon the approval of others, as reflected in what is said about her on the Internet and in social media. Although she does not directly mention REBT’s unconditonal self-acceptance by coming to devalue minute-by-minute, ever-fluctuating social relevance and likability, she certainly implies she learned something about self-acceptance that was not tied to these mercurial things, which are largely beyond her direct control.
Getting canceled on the internet and nearly losing my career gave me an excellent knowledge of all the types of wine. I know I sound like a consummate optimist, but I’m really not. I lose perspective all the time. Sometimes everything just feels completely pointless.
Here Taylor shows humility and self-acceptance and how we all have down moments in our careers, in our lives, and sometimes do not soothe ourselves in the healthiest of ways. She acknowledges the ubiquity of depression among humans by acknowledging the cognitive side of depression when she says “Sometimes everything seems pointless.”
I know the pressure of living your life through the lens of perfectionism. And I know I’m talking to a group of perfectionists because you are here today, graduating from NYU. So, this might be hard for you to hear. In your life, you will inevitably misspeak, trust the wrong person, underreact, overreact, hurt the people who didn’t deserve it, overthink, not think at all, self-sabotage, create a reality where only your experience exists, ruin perfectly good moments for yourself and others, deny any wrongdoing, not take the steps to make it right, feel very guilty, let the guilt eat at you, hit rock bottom, finally address the pain you caused, and try to do better next time. Rinse, repeat.
This is my favorite part of her speech as she chronicles all the ways that humans will err in their lives and their relationships. She also acknowledges she has done these things and then has done them more than once. She models REBT’s core concept of unconditional self-acceptance, listing these things and implying she has done all of these “shameful” things on more than one occassion yet has is still living to tell the tale. She is making herself very vulnerable here and thereby clearly modeling and advocating for REBT’s notion of unconditional self-acceptance.
And I’m not going to lie. These mistakes will cause you to lose things. I’m trying to tell you that losing things, doesn’t just mean losing. A lot of the time, when we lose things, we’re getting things too.
Here Taylor teaches us that good can come from bad. In REBT, we argue that extreme attitudes like thinking that mistakes that lead to losing things are “awful” is self-defeating because good can come from bad. Taylor Swift is advocating for a healthy attitude consistent with the non-awfulizing that REBT advocates.
Now you leave the structure and framework of school. And chart your own path. Every choice you make leads to the next choice, which leads to the next, and I know it’s hard to know which path to take.
Taylor returns to the theme of personal responsibility for our choices and the consequences. She also acknowledges the difficulty and uncertainty surrounding identifying the best choice and path to go down. REBT advocates for personal responsibility, self-direction, uncertainty tolerance, and emotional responsibility, all suggested by her and previous statements.
There will be times in life where you need to stand up for yourself. Times when the right thing is actually to back down and apologize. Times when the right thing is to fight. The right thing is to turn and run.
She is going back and forth between two important REBT concepts, discomfort with tolerance leading to asserting yourself and unconditional self-acceptance with the acknowledgment and associated apology that we have misbehaved.
Times to hold on with all you have. Times to let go with grace. Sometimes the right thing to do is to throw out the old schools of thought in the name of progress and reform. Sometimes the right thing to do is to sit and listen to the wisdom of those who have come before us.
Here Taylor returns to the REBT concepts of discomfort tolerance in the service of holding on when the going gets tough and the concept of unconditional acceptance of self and life when it is time to let go of something.
How will you know? What the right choice is in these crucial moments? You won’t.
Taylor again highlights the importance of cultivating uncertainty tolerance as we move ahead with our decisions in life. REBT advocates accepting uncertainty and acting despite not having a guarantee that we are taking the path that will lead to our goals and dreams.
How do I give advice to this many people about their life choices? I won’t. The scary news is. You’re on your own now. But the cool news is. You’re on your own now.
Once again, she returns to the existential fact that we are all on our own in many ways and responsible for our decisions and making the most of our lives. The corresponding ideas in REBT would be the notion of self-direction and personal responsibility for trying to make our lives the way we would like them to be and doing this with unconditional self-acceptance.
I leave you with this. We are led by our gut instinct. Our intuition? Our desires and fears, our scars and our dreams. And you will screw it up sometimes. So will I. And when I do, you will most likely read about it on the Internet.
It is important to note that she keeps returning to human fallibility and making mistakes as we pursue our goals and dreams. She mixes in a bit of her sense of humor reflecting she seems not to take herself too seriously. REBT reminds us that we are all fallible humans, even the rich and famous! As REBT likes to say, there are no super-humans and no sub-humans just fallbile, screwed up humans.
Anyway, hard things will happen to us. We will recover. We will learn from it. We will grow more resilient because of it and as long as we are fortunate enough to be breathing.
Taylor has a point of view that REBT encourages patients to have. Life is hard. It is good to acknowledge that life is hard for all of us. No one gets a pass on life’s challenges no matter how often it may seem to us that others have it easier than we do. She also points to our capacity to adapt and recover from life’s tragedies. REBT advocates that we see life as a mix of good and bad times and cultivating unconditional self-acceptance and unconditional life acceptance will help us recover from the hard things that happen to us.
We will breathe in. Breathe through. Breathe deep. Breathe out. And I am a doctor now, so I know how breathing works.
Here she emphasizes the mental health benefits of monitoring our breathing and regulating it to regain emotional balance and focus. True to what appears to be her trait, she mixes in a bit of humor that borders on self-effacing humor. Given that she is standing in front of a capacity audience of thousands of people at Yankee Stadium it is likely a last chance to model unconditional self-acceptance.
I hope you know. How proud I am. To share this day with you. We’re doing this together, so let’s just keep dancing like we’re the class of 22.
She closes with more self-acceptance, putting her stardom aside, and highlighting her equal human worth with all the fallible humans sitting in their cap and gowns celebrating their academic achievement.
My Closing Thoughts:
Throughout this beautiful and inspirational speech this young popstar continually touches on core ideas of REBT. She does not ever mention human fallibility and unconditional self-acceptance, unconditional life acceptance, acceptance of uncertainty, discomfort tolerance, personal responsibility, self-direction, and emotional responsibility. She is a popstar not an REBT therapist. However, the gift she gives these graduating students is the REBT wisdom that she has fallen back on during her journey to success. Reader take note. What a beautiful speech from an inspiring young person!