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I'm your host, Elise Hugh. It's an English phrase that many of us have heard or said to each other in moments of doubt or struggle.

Fake it till you make it.

It means to act with confidence even if you don't feel that way initially

in the hope that it will eventually become your reality.

But the question is, how do we find the confidence to act?

In this inspiring archive talk from 2019,

educator and activist Brittany Packnet Cunningham,

shares three ways to crack the code of finding, developing, and embodying what she calls

revolutionary confidence to turn your most ambitious dreams into reality.

So when I was a little girl, a book sat on the coffee table in our living room, just steps from our front door.

And the living room is a first impression. Ours had white carpet and a curio of my mother's most treasured collectibles. That room represented the sacrifices of

generations gone by, who by poverty or by policy couldn't afford a curio of collectibles,

let alone a middle-class house to put them in. That room had to stay perfect, but I would risk messing up that perfect room every day

just to see that book. On the cover sat a woman named Septima Clark. She sat in perfect profile

with her face raised to the sky. She had perfect salt and pepper cornrows platted down the sides of her head,

and pride and wisdom just emanated from her dark skin. September Clark was an activist and an educator,

a woman after whom I'd eventually model my own career. But more than all the words she ever spoke,

that single portrait of Septima Clark,

it defined confidence for me before I ever even knew the word.

It may sound simple, but confidence is something

that we underestimate the importance of.

...