Episode 13 | How to Be Graceful (Even When You’re Mad as H*ll) November 14, 2021

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GUEST: Kirsten Powers, CNN Senior Political Analyst, former Fox News Analyst

Grace: it’s a virtue one doesn’t often see during divisive on-air political debates. Our guest, Kirsten Powers, a former political commentator for Fox News and current political analyst for CNN, knows this world well and has something to say about it. She believes in the transformative power of grace when it comes to fostering more civil discourse. In this episode, we talk with her about her new book, Saving Grace: Speak Your Truth, Stay Centered and Learn to Coexist with People Who Drive You Nuts, and the new template she proposes for more civil and compassionate political engagement.

GUEST BIO:

Kirsten Powers is a political analyst, bestselling author, a USA Today columnist, and frequent contributor to many other media outlets. Previously a political analyst for Fox News, she’s been the senior political analyst at CNN since 2016, where she appears regularly on Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, and The Lead with Jake Tapper. A graduate of the University of Maryland-College Park, she started her career working in the Clinton administration, handling media strategy for the U.S. trade representative. She moved on to AOL, where she was vice president for international communications, overseeing the day-to-day communications of AOL businesses outside the United States. She grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, and currently resides in Washington, D.C.

LINKS:

Saving Grace: Speak Your Truth, Stay Centered, and Learn to Coexist with People Who Drive You Nuts

Full Transcript

BRAD PHILLIPS, HOST, THE SPEAK GOOD PODCAST:

In 2010, I started writing the now retired Mr. Media Training blog. I was really proud that over time it became the world’s most-visited media training website.

Some of my posts were rather straightforward – tips about becoming a more effective media spokesperson or public speaker. But occasionally, someone would commit some kind of embarrassing or humiliating gaffe during an interview or speech and I would write about those incidents, too – sometimes referring to them as one of the worst media disasters of the month.

For example, there was that business executive who hid from the press behind milk crates in the service corridor of a hotel. There was the press secretary for a local town council member who aggressively covered a local news crew’s camera with her hand.

Highlighting those stories as examples of what not to do seems fair enough. But too often, my posts lacked compassion for the targets. I didn’t call those people dumb – at least not in so many words – but my tone absolutely implied it. But what if that business executive or press secretary had been in the midst of a mental health crisis? What if their spouse or partner had just been diagnosed with a terrible illness? Or what if they were just overwhelmed with the everyday demands of work and family, and the latest stressor they encountered just put them over the top? If I had known those things, I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have written those pieces the same way. But the truth is, I never stopped to ask whether I should trade being judgmental for being more compassionate. And frankly, judgmental posts got more clicks.

You’ve heard that old expression – one that actually dates to the French Revolution but is often attributed to Spiderman – the so-called Peter Parker principal: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Now, I never had “great power,” but with more than 50,000 website visits per month, I certainly had enough power to make somebody’s day a little bit worse.

At some point a few years into writing the blog, I came across a clip from the former host of CBS’s Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. The clip came from February 2007, around the time Britney Spears shaved her head and attacked paparazzi with an umbrella. Ferguson made jokes about Britney Spears on his late-night show, as other comics did. But, after reflecting on his jokes over the weekend, Ferguson had a change of heart.

As you’ll hear in this clip, the audience laughed during his monologue. They didn’t recognize, at least not at first, that Ferguson wasn’t doing a bit.

(CRAIG FERGUSON SOUND BITE)

The CBS Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson: “For me, comedy should have a certain amount of joy in it. It should be about us attacking the powerful people, attacking the politicians, and the Trumps, and the blowhards. Go after them. We shouldn’t be attacking the vulnerable people. And, I think, this is totally a mea culpa, this is just for me, I think my aim’s been off a bit recently. I want to change that a bit. So tonight, no Britney Spears jokes, and here’s why – this is exactly why. Britney Spears, no, no, no, this is true, I’m not doing a bit. Listen, the kind of weekend she had, she was checking in and out of rehab. She was shaving her head and getting tattoos, that’s what she was doing this weekend. This Sunday, I was 15 years sober. So, I looked at her weekend and I looked at my own weekend, and I thought, ‘You know, I’d rather have my weekend.”

(CRAIG FERGUSON SOUND BITE ENDS)

For several more minutes, in painful detail, he described his own rock bottom with alcohol. Then, he turned his focus back to Ms. Spears.

(SECOND CRAIG FERGUSON SOUND BITE BEGINS)

“I threw in the towel with alcoholism 15 years ago and I’ve been trying for the past 15 years to get pieces of it back. And it looks to me a little bit that Britney Spears has a similar problem going on with alcohol. This woman has two kids. She’s 25 years old. She’s a baby herself. She’s a baby.”

(CRAIG FERGUSON SOUND BITE ENDS)

Those posts? The ones that I wrote that occasionally punched down? After considering Ferguson’s monologue, I stopped writing them. On social media, too. I stopped retweeting or commenting on a post if it seemed like it would be punching down to an undeserving or potentially vulnerable target. I’ll admit that I may not perfect at that today. I am sure I am not. But I’m a whole lot closer to it than I used to be.

Like Craig Ferguson, I’ll still call out bad behavior from powerful targets. Political leaders, business executives, Hollywood moguls, and others who abuse their power should be called out. But that person whose name you didn’t even know two minutes ago? Maybe something’s going on with them. Perhaps it’s worth considering that they may have something going on that wasn’t – and couldn’t be – immediately visible to you.

And that brings me to my guest. You might recognize the name Kirsten Powers. If you don’t, there’s a good chance you’d recognize her. If you watched Fox News several years ago, you might remember her as the left-leaning political analyst who took on Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Megyn Kelly. Today, she’s a CNN political analyst and columnist for USA Today. Before her media career, she served as Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Public Affairs in the Clinton Administration she was the Vice President for International Communications at America Online from 1998-2002.

In our conversation, we’ll talk about her new book, Saving Grace: Speak Your Truth, Stay Centered, and Learn to Coexist with People Who Drive You Nuts. In her book, she describes a similar transformation to the one I experienced after I watched Craig Ferguson, in terms of how she thinks about and interacts with people of different viewpoints – and how she talks about them on cable news. As she writes, “Grace radically changed the way I see the world and what is possible for us.”

(MUSIC PLAYS)

PHILLIPS:

I will tell you, I read your book.

KIRSTEN POWERS:

I’m so glad.

PHILLIPS:

I read every word of your book. It resonated with me deeply. In the open to the podcast, I shared my own story about not really having the tone that I wanted to have and having a moment where Craig Ferguson did a monologue in 2007 about Britney Spears, saying that he realized he was punching down and that she wasn’t the target he should be going after that. It really resonated with me and changed how I communicated on our website and on social. So that’s why your book resonated with me so much. And I really look forward to getting into that conversation with you.

POWERS:

Oh good. I’m so glad to hear that. That means a lot to me.

PHILLIPS:

So, maybe we could begin with your television life at Fox News, when you were – on a regular basis — going up against some pretty well-known names, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Megan Kelly. As someone who occasionally would catch those segments and some of them went viral, it always looked like you were tough as nails and had the witty quick retort. And so, when reading your book, it was interesting to hear your own inner experience was very different from what people perceived on the outside.

POWERS:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

Could you start there and just talk about what you were experiencing?

POWERS:

Yeah. Sometimes I would walk off of the set and I would usually call one of my friends or my boyfriend, he’s now my fiancé, and I would say was I just completely out of control because I was so angry (LAUGHS). And, they’d be like, no, you looked completely calm. And I was like, because I’m raging on the inside. I am filled with so much hatred and contempt right now. And, honestly, I really believed that I had screamed and yelled because that’s what was happening inside of me. And it was only when I was working on this book and, we’ll probably get into this, but one of the things I discovered early on that a big barrier for me with grace was binary thinking. Really thinking in black and white and I realized that a lot of that was trauma-based, some childhood trauma and some things that happened to me in my adult life.

And when I went back through and was working through those issues with the therapist, I started to see that time differently. And I realized, I thought I was offering grace. I thought I was being very graceful because that’s what it looked like. People would often say that you operate with such grace, but really it was a trauma response. And the way I respond to stress basically, or being under attack is sometimes I fight, but mostly I flight. So, most people have probably heard of fight, flight, freeze. And that means that I disassociate. So, I actually sort of remove myself from the situation and I’m able to stay kind of like this on the facts, but all my emotions are gone. And so, as I’m experiencing it, I’m not really experiencing my emotions. And so, I sort of say it’s an important thing to know that behavior is not what grace is about, because we can often act like we’re acting with grace, but internally we’re just like, oh my gosh, I despise/hate this person. I hold them in such contempt. And so, I think that when I looked back at it as a healthier person, I saw it differently. I saw it actually as being quite a dysfunctional environment for me. (LAUGHS)

PHILLIPS:

Yeah. I mean, you do talk a lot about that binary thinking, that everything is black or white, but you also, I thought, were very open about how trauma informed that and that it was in many ways a survival instinct for you to retreat into binary thinking. As much as you’re comfortable doing, are you comfortable giving a sense of what that trauma was or what you were experienced?

POWERS:

I talk about in the book, how around the time that I started really into the world of being on TV and being a public person, because I had had a previous career working in politics and also working in the communications and the private sector, it coincided with a series of deaths in my family that were very unexpected and very traumatic for me. My father died at 61, just boom, from a heart attack. I was in my mid-thirties. My grandmother, who was the most important person in my life, died a year later and I wasn’t able to be with her. Then my stepfather was diagnosed with cancer, and he was dead within a couple of years, a close family friend died, some of this isn’t even the book, a close family friend committed suicide. It  just was my system was under just an assault and I did not have the tools or the maturity to deal with it.

Death is hard to deal with at any point, death of parents, death of grandparents, at any time it’s hard to deal with. But, when you’re older, you have a little more capacity and you’re also around other people who are losing their parents. I was in my mid-thirties, and I’d lost my stepfather and my father and my grandmother. I have a little family. It was very traumatizing for me. And I didn’t really know how to process that grief. And so, I didn’t, and it manifested in a lot of ways. And then the childhood trauma was just my parents getting divorced when I was five and all of my abandonment issues that I think the deaths really triggered.

PHILLIPS:

You also wrote very movingly that you had a lot of emotions that your parents seem to be more stoic and wanted you to kind of bottle that up. So, you didn’t have an opportunity to let that stuff out.

POWERS:

Well, I don’t know if I’d say they were stoic. They actually work … well, my mother is not a yeller, but my dad was a yeller. And I am from an Irish American family. Emotions were fine, as long as they were in this kind of we’re battling it out and fighting it out over issues thing. But emotions about, I feel sad (LAUGHS), not so much. Yeah. It was a little bit like, OK, delicate flower. They just weren’t into talking about feelings. They were very uncomfortable with it. My grandparents were just the best people in the world. And yet my grandfather never told my mother, he loved her until he was on his death bed. It just was this very Irish kind of, you know, very reserved kind of feeling like there’s no question how much he loved her, but expressing those kinds of feelings was definitely really frowned upon. So, I was this very sensitive little child with all these feelings, and nobody wanted to hear it. So, I had to create this personality that was in response to my trauma, which is by the way, what we all do. My personality that I created was I would meet might with might. I would come back at you, like as hard as you’re coming back at me.

PHILLIPS:

You described yourself as a more Joan of Arc.

POWERS:

Yes. But in it, feelings just went out the window because I couldn’t handle them. And you can’t run from your feelings. It’s kind of a cliche, but they’re always going to catch up with you. And they did catch up with me. I mean, they caught up with me in all sorts of dysfunctional behavior. I got physically ill with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, anxiety, depression, all the things. And so eventually you’re going to have to deal with it.

PHILLIPS:

I want to get into the grace piece, but  one thing I thought about when you wrote: “One week, I was so desperate to die that I stuck my head in my oven. The next week I was being interviewed for a profile in Elle magazine and named a power punk in the New York Observer. So one of the things I was thinking about – first of all, that forces you to put on this mask, which we already kind of talked about, that you were more successful at doing that than you thought you were actually being – but it also occurred to me that you were at such a high profile on let’s say the O’Reilly Factor. You are being named a power punk of the New York Observer. I’m wondering if it wasn’t so high profile, would you have reached the point of really realizing you needed to even examine these things in the first place?

POWERS:

I hope that I would have. The interesting thing about me is that there were a couple things that forced me in that, in that place. But the main thing that forced me was my own misery. And I was physically ill and there was nothing … I was told I had chronic Lyme. I was told I had Epstein-Barr. I was told I had these things, but I was like, I don’t really think that’s what it is. And I couldn’t really get to the root of it until I really figured out that it was psychosomatic, and it was rooted in grief and stress and unprocessed emotions. My body actually is what forced me down this road. Without that, I don’t know what would have happened.

I was desperate. I couldn’t get out of bed. That’s what really forced me to say, I’ve got to get to the bottom of this. On a little more of a conscious level. I would say the point where I had this feeling that I have to change my behavior, and I wasn’t connecting it necessarily to what was happening in my body yet, was just when I realized that my behavior sometimes, and certainly what was happening inside my head, was not aligned with what I say I believed. So, I can’t go out and say, I’m a Christian, and say this is a central part of my life and just completely ignore that I’m supposed to love my enemies.

PHILLIPS:

Right.

POWERS:

I was so far removed from that, that I didn’t even want to. I wasn’t even like, love your enemies? Well, not these enemies. So, I realized on some level that I had to get into alignment and that I couldn’t live my life this way, that this is not who I wanted to be. That’s when I made the really conscious turning point.

PHILLIPS:

You spent a fair amount of time in the book defining what you did and didn’t mean by the word, grace. And I kind of appreciated that you said you don’t have to ditch your dry sarcasm or devastating wit, because that’s almost like—these are my words – almost like a performative grace, not an authentic one. So can you, maybe in your own words, define what you do mean by the term grace and maybe what you don’t.

POWERS:

Yeah, I do use the Christian paradigm of grace being unmerited favor, but we always think of that in terms of God giving us grace, but it’s us  extending this to each other. And when we extend this to each other, what that means is that nobody has to earn it. Nobody earns the right to have grace from you. And this is very hard for us in this culture, where everything has to be earned. And so, a lot of times people will say, well, I’ll have grace for people who I’m basically agree with, and they screw up, but I’m not going to have grace with these people because they’re horrible. Then it’s not grace, because grace is not earned. And so, it’s something that’s given freely because you see the humanity in the person.

If you’re a believer, you see God in them, you see the divine spark in them. You see all of these things. You see the possibility in them. In practical terms, the way I describe it is it’s allowing other people to not be you. So, it’s saying you cannot be me without me demonizing and dehumanizing you. It’s sort of creating a space between what’s yours and what belongs to other people. And it doesn’t mean people aren’t held accountable. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t consequences for our behavior. Of course, there are. But grace-infused accountability looks very different than the punitive kind of accountability that we often see in our culture. And our criminal justice system would be Exhibit A of that. It’s the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. It’s completely inhumane. Brace in that circumstance would be like, look, you broke the law and you’re probably going to have to go to jail, but we’re going to treat you humanely. And we’re going to see you as more than the thing that you did. And we’re going to see the possibility of you coming out of this as a better person, right?

PHILLIPS:

You talked about practicing grace protects your energy, so you can put it towards something more beneficial than typing mean tweets, which I love that. Because, even in 2015, 2016, as Trump was running for president and saying things that I found really offensive, I would send out my very clever retorts to everything that Trump had just said. At some point I realized, okay, first of all, I’m screaming into a void. The people who agree with me are retweeting and sharing it. The people who don’t agree with me have probably muted, blocked, or unfollowed me by, by this point, anyway. And I was not convinced I was actually doing anything useful in the world. Something that felt good in the moment, that dopamine burst you alluded to in the book, but didn’t do much. You gave an example of, and I think this was a fictional example, I don’t think you were talking about yourself. Maybe you were. But you were talking about how let’s say there’s a progressive daughter and her Laura Ingraham-loving father. And you gave some examples of what grace might look like from the daughter to her father in that type of scenario. Could you walk through kind of that concrete example of what it looks like around that dining room table.

POWERS:

Yeah. And I have to say, my family agrees on everything on politics. So, I’m actually lucky in that regard.

PHILLIPS:

So, it was fictional.

POWERS:

What it was fictional-ish. I have a lot of friends who are in that situation. I hear about this a lot. And so, I do think the first thing that you have to do is remember that your mom is more than the things she’s saying. She is more than her problematic views. And so, if you’re going to confront her, I would do it in a way of always reminding her of why this is upsetting to you. So, this is upsetting to you because you know your mom and your mom’s a good person. And so to say that, say, hey mom, when I was growing up, you taught me to love our neighbors and love the least among us. And, you’ve always been so generous and always so giving and loving to people. And then I hear you saying these things about undocumented immigrants.

And I just can’t square that with the woman that I know. That’s going to open up a very different conversation than, “I can’t believe that. You need to stop watching Fox News, blah, blah, blah, all the things that you want to say. And don’t bombard her with facts, have a conversation. And then, it really depends in that situation, because, again, I have a lot of friends who were in this situation. Their parents run the gamut of all the sort of different kinds of personalities. There are some people you can say that too, and they can get engaged in healthy conflict with you, which I have a lot in the book about. There are some people who, it doesn’t matter how you say it, doesn’t matter how nice you say it, they just want to fight.

They’re just sort of addicted to the conflict. They have their issues to work out. And that’s the point that you have to decide to use boundaries. You have to say, look, every time we talk about this, it just devolves. Can we just talk about other things? Let’s not talk about this. Or, if you want to talk about it, can we set up some boundaries around it? How we’ll talk about it? You can’t call me a liberal elite and, and those kinds of things. Can we just agree that there’ll be no name calling? That there’ll be no contempt. That there’ll be no yelling. There are different tools that you can use. Sometimes you just can’t have the conversation. And sometimes you just have to say, for my own emotional safety and sanity, I can’t have this conversation with you.

I’m a no to this, but what are you a yes to? So, in that situation I just gave, she’s saying something about undocumented immigrants that she heard from a leader, who’s giving her bad information, getting her all ginned up. What can you do to help that situation? There are tons of organizations you could give money to. You could volunteer. You could write a Facebook post that’s not incendiary, that’s just telling people, Hey, I found this place that helps undocumented immigrants. Maybe you could donate to them. If you’re me, you can write a column. So, there are a lot of things we could be doing. Like you were saying, you were tweeting out and you realized wait, is this changing anything? And that doesn’t mean that social media never changes anything. Of course, it does. Black Lives Matter wouldn’t have existed without social media. Me too wouldn’t have existed. There is a place and a time. I’m not saying it’s all bad. I’m not saying that it doesn’t work. It’s just that most of what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis is just spewing stuff out into the world versus doing the actual work of changing the world.

PHILLIPS:

I try to think about all the time, when I see those clips that are going viral about somebody who acted badly or did this bad thing, I always try to ask myself the question, is it possible this person is experiencing mental health challenges right now. And if they were, would it change the way I respond to this person or whether I would even make a comment at all. And I think asking that question changes my behavior. I try to, in my way, exhibit grace. There is one type of person who drives me absolutely crazy.

POWERS:

We all have that, do don’t worry about it.

PHILLIPS:

I wanted to give you a specific example. To me, punching down drives me nuts. It incites something to me. There was an example of a sportscaster for a national sports network. She went viral a few years ago. She, and I invoke her looks only because it was relevant to the story as it played out, she’s a very good-looking woman physically. She berates a parking attendant for not being as privileged as she was.

POWERS:

I saw that.

PHILLIPS:

And her quote was, “Do you feel good about your job? So, I could be a college dropout and do the same thing. Maybe if I was missing some teeth, they would hire me. Huh?” And so, maybe I’m asking you for free therapy right now, but how would I, in that moment when I’m so angry at her punching down, respond, even if it’s just internally and not publicly with grace.

POWERS:

Well, first of all, anger is great. I’m not anti-anger. Anger lets us know something’s wrong. In that case, it’s letting you know that somebody is bullying somebody and harming another person. I think a lot of times we think about grace – it’s interesting. I see this all the time – we immediately go, how do I have grace for the person who’s causing the harm versus like, how do I have grace for the person who’s being harmed? Because, in that case, the person who is being harmed actually did behave very calmly. But sometimes they don’t. And then the whole story becomes about how the person who complained about racism, wasn’t complaining in the right way. It’s like, wait, so let’s remember grace is for everybody. It’s not just for powerful people who harm other people.

But I think in that instance, you don’t demonize her. And it’s very hard. That’s a really good example of one that’s really hard. And because of everything I said earlier, I am very pro feeling your feelings. Feel your feelings. If you feel that about her. I would say I’m not a therapist, but I would say, probably, if it’s really triggering you, there’s something deeper. Like you were bullied, or you were a bully or there’s something else. Maybe that needs to be unpacked. But I think it’s completely healthy to look at that and feel angry

PHILLIPS:

That’s an insightful analysis and probably true, which may even be the motivator for why I started The Speak Good Podcast.

POWERS:

Yeah. A lot of these things are tips to us. There’s the discernment. How would I look at that today, because I had the same reaction you had? But today, if I saw it, I would look at it and I would discerningly see this is really bad. This woman is harming this other person and she should be held accountable for that. Now what does accountability look like? I would also say this woman is a very troubled person. There is something very dark going on in her life. You do not treat people that way, unless something has happened to you or you’re not processing things that are happening to you. That does not mean you’re not held accountable. That’s not what I’m saying. But I would have to actually have compassion for her.

Now I still think she should be held accountable, and I would have compassion for the person who was being harmed. And I would probably care more about that person if I’m being honest. But I wouldn’t go down the road of demonizing. I wouldn’t go down the road of judging. I wouldn’t go down the road of like what an awful, horrible human being. Because the minute you do that, you are now intertwined with that person. You’re marinating in it. You are filled with contempt. You’re talking to your friends about it. You’re just like, Ooh, all your issues are coming up versus just being very clear, like, wow, this is not okay. And this, this needs to be fixed.

PHILLIPS:

I love the way you talk about that. In your book, you wrote you don’t know what’s going on in people’s lives and you will never really go wrong approaching a situation with a portion of Grace. And that’s really what you’re talking about there.

POWERS:

Yeah. If I was talking to that woman, if I was there, I would be like, what’s going on with you? She’s completely unconscious. I guarantee it. …. She probably walked away from that. I just know as a person who lived a lot of my life unconscious, where you’re just going through the motions, doing things, and you’re just completely unaware of what you’re doing, and you haven’t taken time to examine it.

PHILLIPS:

I I’d like to end by giving you credit for something else that you’ve done. You may remember back in the day, I think of the late nineties, there was this magazine called Brill’s Content and it was a journalism magazine. They had a feature in every issue that I really liked, which was the pundit scorecard, looking at how well the Bob Novak’s of the day were doing at their predictions. And so, there was a measure of accountability. And I think that there is really very little accountability with punditry today. People make a bad prediction, have a bad insight, and they’re rarely called out.

POWERS:

Totally.

PHILLIPS:

You didn’t have an external person. You did it yourself. You called out your own work, including a book that you wrote about free speech on college campuses. I wouldn’t say you disavowed it, but you disavowed about pieces of it.

POWERS:

For sure.

PHILLIPS:

And I think that requires a whole lot of bravery. And I’m just curious what your motivators were and to whom you felt you owed an apology.

POWERS:

I felt I owed an apology to marginalized people, that I had not really appreciated the privilege that I had, nor had I appreciated how I had responded to my own trauma. Because a lot of people that you see on college campuses, doing some of the things I talk about in the speech, I think are traumatized people. But that the way I responded to my trauma, by having no feelings, I would say, well, okay, so someone’s coming on campus and they’re challenging, sexual assault statistics. Well, I was sexually assaulted. I can go and talk to them, and I can confront them. But, that’s because that’s how I reacted to my trauma. It’s not how they reacted to their trauma. And also, by the way, it’s totally unhealthy. So, you know, it’s like for me to sit there and tell them how they should be responding, just completely lacks empathy.

And in some cases, if it’s involving somebody who is a gay person or somebody who is a person of color, like what do I know about that? How can I say how you should respond and why should you have to go? Because my argument was kind of worst speech will solve the problem of bad speech. And, but why should you have to go and argue for your humanity? Aren’t we a little past that? I really lacked empathy and I lacked the ability to put myself in another person’s shoes. I lacked humility. My motivation, actually, when I first realized something was wrong, I just felt like I’m contributing in a way that I’m not proud of.

I need to really look at, I need to sit down and like do an audit, basically. And so, that’s what I did. And it was horrible. It was a horrible experience. There’s a reason people don’t do it. It’s very shame inducing. I had to really come to terms with the fact that I often had not behaved very well. Now, a lot of people would say, and I wrote a column about this, and people would say to me, Kirsten, you’re being too hard on yourself. You’re the voice of reason. You’re so grounded. You’re so this or that. And I said, yeah, most of the time I am. And sometimes I’m totally toxic. It’s like both things can be true. And so, because I’m often, or mostly this way, doesn’t make this stuff okay. And I have to take responsibility for that. If you’re in the public eye and you’re a leader, you have to model that behavior. You can’t ask other people to hold themselves accountable or accept consequences when you’re not willing to do that. I really felt like in the Christian faith, like repentance is such a major, major tenet, and yet we still really see it.

PHILLIPS:

Well, thank you for exhibiting it and creating a template of sorts for people to use.

POWERS:

I hope.

PHILLIPS:

There is so much we didn’t get to, and I’ll drive people to your book to get those pieces. Things like how you see cancel culture. You have this phrase, I loved rhetorical, dope peddler. These are all things I will encourage people to get your book to read. And I think anybody that’s doing any level of self-reflection will see parts of themselves reflected in the book and how we react. And I think also in those binary, as you pointed out, how, when we find ourselves in those moments of binary thinking, we could encourage ourselves to think more broadly. And, as a result of doing so, maybe see the world a little bit more accurately.

POWERS:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

Kirsten. Thank you so, so much for joining The Speak Good Podcast.

POWERS:

Thank you so much for having me. It was a great conversation.

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• Britney Spears
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• Saving Grace