Jacinda Ardern on leading with empathy and overcoming self-doubt
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If you feel things deeply and you have experiences that are riddled with crisis and with grief, then you are going to pay a price, but a one that you're willing to pay. Hey everyone, it's Adam Graham. Welcome back to Rethinking, my TED podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Dame Jacinda Ardern. She was the Prime Minister of New Zealand. She's the author of the new book, A Different Kind of Power. And she also has a new documentary out called Prime Minister. I'm excited to talk with her about empathetic leadership, why kindness is not weakness but strength, how she managed imposter syndrome, and what she's rethought when it comes to leading through COVID. ♪

I rebel against the idea of optimism as naivety. It is a choice, and not only is it a choice, it implies actually something that is required in difficult circumstances in order to succeed. Dame Jacinda Ardern, welcome to Rethinking. Or should I say Kia ora? You should say Kia ora, and you should also just say Jacinda. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Welcome. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I've studied your leadership from a distance for years.

Half a decade now. Which is a very aging thing to say, but thank you. I appreciate it. Well, we're the same age, so I don't feel that way at all. But I have so many things I'm curious to talk to you about. But I want to start with the dedication of your book. It was so unusual. So are you saying you're a crier and a hugger and a worrier too? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I'd add a few things to that list. But yeah, I'd noticed that anyone who had listened to my departure speech from the New Zealand Parliament said,

would from time to time come up and behind a closed hand would whisper either that they themselves were a bit of a crier or a bit of a hugger, as if it was some kind of secret society. And so it occurred to me that there is perhaps this group of people who exclude themselves potentially from leadership because they see themselves in that way and because we're so attuned to seeing those character traits as being

inconsistent with leadership. And so I really wanted to speak to

those who whisper behind a closed hand. And so that was the dedication for me. You know, I feel like I have nothing to lose by talking about that. I talk about imposter syndrome as well, or people who have a confidence gap, because I think it's wrong to assume these things are incompatible with leadership. I think so too. In fact, Bistema 2Fix research suggests that imposter thoughts are more common among people who are extremely high achievers. Well, I see. I have no evidence to back up these assumptions, but I have...

from the conversations that perhaps I've been more inclined to have because I've talked openly about this, that some of the people that I really respect and admire fall into that category themselves. And in fact...

You know, it was one of my favorite teachers in high school who first introduced this concept to me. And because the first person who talked about it was someone that I thought couldn't possibly suffer from this and who was so incredible that it created this mindset for me that, you know, sometimes great people doubt themselves. We don't talk about it a lot. Maybe we should.

Well, let's. So I think there's a difference between debilitating doubt, which is, you know, I'm a fraud. It's only a matter of minutes until everyone finds out. And maybe more motivating doubt, which is, I wonder if I'm as good as other people think I am. I wonder if I'm up to this challenge. I totally agree with you. It's clearly a spectrum. And, you know, as much as I talk about the fact that

what I describe as a confidence gap, that idea that if someone suggests to you, you should step up to something, your immediate thought is all of the reasons why you're not capable of doing something of that nature. And that can lend itself to excluding yourself from those opportunities. However, those same things that might

cause you to hold back or worry that, you know, you might not have enough information to do a role competently are the same things that can drive you to better prepare, to bring in advice and to bring in experts. And I think that there's some advantage to that in leadership. But again, you're right, there's a spectrum there. And

I think we have to really be careful that it doesn't tip into a space where it's so overwhelming that you can't possibly move beyond it. Well, so I want to understand from you how. You became prime minister at age 37, which makes me feel like, what am I doing with my life?

But so young to be, I think at the time you were the youngest female head of state in the world. Yes. Soon overtaken by Santa Maren, but at that time, yeah. I mean, it's just, it's so hard to imagine being that young and being in such a high position of power and status. So what were the imposter thoughts and feelings like then? And how did you manage them? Yeah, in a way they were both exacerbated and also simultaneously overcome by circumstance because...

It wasn't the case that I pursued that level of higher office. In fact, you know, to give a little bit of background, I was the deputy leader in our party. And that doesn't mean that you're necessarily next in line. It just means that I was a good, loyal foot soldier who was in support of the leader. But there I was in this role. I'd only been in there since March of 2017.

And we were coming into another election and we'd been in opposition for nine years when our polling really wasn't looking good. And so the latest poll came in and my leader privately said to me, I don't know if I can do it. I tried to encourage him to stay.

for all the reasons that I've discussed. So in lots of ways, it did really feel like the decision flipped from being one that I proactively could pursue or would pursue to just simply being a question of responsibility. Leadership and a sense of responsibility to take on something if asked can sometimes override self-doubt.

And maybe that's not a bad push and pull. Yeah, I think that's actually a really healthy attitude. It tracks with what in psychology we would distinguish between seeing leadership as an opportunity versus a responsibility. Yeah. I am interested, though, in those circumstances, what does it mean for them leaving at a healthy point if you feel a burden of responsibility? How long does that carry through?

I think people who are in it for somewhat self-serving reasons, they're very eager to claim the identity and the title of leadership, and they're very hesitant to loosen their grip on it. And I think your instincts are right that the opposite might be true for people who are more reluctant. And certainly in political leadership, you can't really canvas widely the decision to leave because it is something that if it's found out or heard, the decision gets taken out of your hands.

So that was challenging, and the departure was a lonely decision for that reason. Well, I want to talk more about that before we get there, though. I've jumped straight to leaving. I mean, eagerly, right? I think one thing that's really interesting about how you narrated your own feelings of being an imposter is you called yourself a loyal foot soldier.

Yes. And that says to me that your identity was follower, not leader. That's certainly how I viewed myself. It is an interesting, I think, practice, though, that in politics, there's an assumption that if you go into it, you must be motivated by a level of personal ambition. And that's really borne out by the fact that so many people ask you, oh, so when are you going to be prime minister or when are you going to be leader?

assuming that everyone who goes into it must have that ambition, whereas I can't think of many examples where that would be the case, say, in the private sector. So that is a...

burden that politics carries, that that is the motivating factor, when actually there's plenty of people that that is not the case. That's not why they're there. That's not what motivates them. So your boss quits and you assume you're going to lose at that point, right? Certainly, even if it was unspoken, the assumption was try not to lose too badly. And so maybe that lessened the pressure. Yeah.

But that unfortunately was not the position throughout the campaign. It shifted. Okay. And then at some point you realized this is happening. Yes. What did that do to the feeling of being an imposter?

As soon as I became leader, there was no time to dwell on that confidence gap because the sense of responsibility completely took over. And I knew that I just had to lead with confidence, that I had to focus on the job that I had and that anything else just felt self-indulgent. You know, I just needed to move forward, put it away in a box.

The issue, though, became that the pressure really increased. In my mind, not to sound too grandiose, but when you're in politics because you think that you can make a difference, you know, suddenly you're thinking about people's well-being, whether you're going to have the opportunity to do something on housing and climate and child poverty. And those are big issues to feel a weight of responsibility around. But up against that,

My little personal confidence gap just needed to sit in a corner for a while. Just lock it away. Lock it away. So it's interesting, though, that you said the responsibility that you felt just took over. Yeah. Because one impression I got from reading the book was that in some ways that sense of responsibility got you in trouble when you were younger. Yeah.

Which is a little counterintuitive, but you talk about how the desire to be useful was sometimes problematic. Yeah, yeah. So tell me about that and how it then played into life as a new prime minister. So interesting because there's some things that you don't necessarily see the through lines on in your life until you write them down. And suddenly you're like, oh, there it is. You know, just writing about just a little day-to-day things of childhood and

you know, for example, out on an orchard owned by my grandparents and I would have only been about four and I just loved going into the old cool store sheds and seeing the way that the conveyors with all of the fruit worked and the packing house and

bringing the bins in and out. And I was up there trying to, you know, figure out what I could do in that little space when I found one of the machines for packing boxes and had a little play with it and ended up slicing my face. I have a little scar down my nose to this day.

I was always there trying to be a bit older than I was, you know, thinking that I was being useful and all of the things that I remember about those early conversations being really chuffed whenever I felt like I'd done something that was beyond my age or stronger than I was meant to be.

So yeah, I guess it manifested early and not through politics. Yeah, I mean, this is something I feel like I've done a really poor job capturing in the work that I've done on givers versus takers, where I've found lots of benefits of being somebody who enjoys helping others without strings attached and many long-term costs of being someone who...

is all about me. But there is this sense in which no good deed goes unpunished. And people say that the road to hell is sometimes paved with good intentions. So how did you manage that as prime minister early on?

You know, I think that in writing about how it feels to lead when you're driven by empathy and compassion and a sense of duty, you know, it meant sharing a little bit of insight as to the toll that that takes. But there's a privilege to that as well. Even in the hardest moments, I think you never lose sight of the fact that you have that proximity to grief because of the role that you have.

And unlike many other experiences where you feel, oh, you know, this is such a horrific thing that's happened. What can I do? Suddenly you're in a place where you can do something about it. So yeah, maybe you do pay a price, but a one that you're willing to pay, if that makes sense. It does. It does. In psychology, we would say, let's not talk about compassion fatigue because it's not compassion that drains you. It's empathic distress. It's the feeling of hurting for someone else, but not being able to help.

Thank you for putting some language to it because I've never been able to fully explain it. That's literally all I can do. But it is so true. You know, I think about...

how horrific the grief around March 15 was. And my real sense in that moment from New Zealanders who just felt that grief so acutely was they wanted, in that moment, politics and leadership to do something. And so when people say, how, for instance, did you manage to change gun legislation so quickly because that law passed to ban military-style and semi-automatic weapons?

That law passed with 119 votes in favor and one opposed within 27 days of the attack. And I absolutely believe it was because of that strong desire to just channel that grief into a response. This episode is sponsored by Udemy. You've probably felt it, that sense that the pace of change at work is outpacing your skills.

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So when I think about your leadership on the world stage, certainly I think that mass shooting is a visible example. I think of you being...

in your late 30s and pregnant. That's another example that probably... They call that a geriatric pregnancy. I don't think that's a helpful framing for anyone. So I keep putting it out there in the hope that someone says, yeah, we should change that. How about a wise pregnancy? Yeah, that's what I said. Seasoned something. That works. I'd love to hear you talk...

both about what it meant for you to lead with kindness and then also what was it like to be welcoming a child at the same time that you're taking the helm of a country? Two very, very big questions. I think when we think about these ideas of kindness, you know, we often think about the manifestation of that in policy delivery. And sure, that was a big thing for us. But also, I wanted to change the way we did politics and the way that we governed, which I think is equally important. I don't think it's fair to say, well, we're going to

be a government of kindness, but I'm going to engage in the most horrific political attacks with my opponents you can imagine. And so we, from the outset, said, okay, I want us to be relentlessly positive and that I wasn't going to attack my opponents on personal matters. We were going to stick to the issues. And I tried to maintain that the entire time I was in office as well. And so, you know,

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Australia has spoken of this idea of conflict fatigue, and I think it's real. And I think the more that you hear conflict between politicians, the less you believe that politicians are focused on the things that are affecting you.

So for us, it was about what we did, but how we did it as well. And kindness for me was a good guiding principle in both. So I guess the other thing that surfaces for me is either you get rid of the fatigue factor or you create an adverse selection problem where the kinds of people who enjoy conflict, who are sometimes called conflict entrepreneurs, who are intensely disagreeable, who are Machiavellian, who might be narcissistic or sociopathic,

are the ones who are attracted to office. And I don't think we want that either. Exactly. And that's where this gets really interesting when people say, well, the idea of compassionate or empathetic leadership can't survive. Well, what is the alternative? And I think we do want people who have humility and value those traits to be in politics. And I do think we're in a period where good people are self-excluding because they see a very particular leadership style that

is not necessarily who we want in our representative politics. The flip side, however, which, you know, I think we also had to end up being mindful of, if you are within your team building an approach where you do want to do things differently, how do you still allow or create an environment where people are able to bring ideas that might be counter to others, that you are engaging still in respectful debate because you do run the risk of this kind of

consensus bias because you don't want to rock the boat of your friendly team environment. So that almost was what we had to be mindful of. I love on its face the idea of not engaging in personal attacks in politics. But I also see leaders on the world stage whose character needs to be attacked.

because they fail to stand for principles that I think you hold dear. Leaders who are not kind, leaders who are not humble, for example. There is a place to hold that to account because you're doing it every day and the way that's manifesting in the policy decisions someone's making, you absolutely contest that. But if I give you an example, it might be, for instance, that something's happened in someone's life that brings into question their personal behavior. If that was not a member of my team,

then I considered that to be an issue of discipline for that team and their leadership. So I wouldn't pile in on that. That was a leadership issue for them. And I was in charge of managing my own team's conduct and behavior. So that was the way I would draw a distinction. Got it. Okay, that's helpful. Okay, so now pregnancy. Okay.

Yeah, small matter. Tiny topic, but I'm so curious about the simultaneous experience of welcoming a child into the world and feeling that responsibility at the same time that you're responsible for a whole country. Feels very similar. Does it? It can do. It can do. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I...

I thought about this a lot and while it's not exactly the same thing, that push and pull of where you're meant to be and who you're meant to be with was very acute in that particular role.

But the timing of everything was probably, I mean, pretty poor on my part because whilst we were in coalition negotiations to find out would this minor party who had the balance of power, would they choose my party or would they choose the conservative party? And if they chose mine, I would become the prime minister. And we were close to the end of those negotiations when I found out I was pregnant. And of course, my immediate thought was, well, I mean...

This is one for the books, but also I can't share this because the pregnancy may not hold.

And also, gosh, what will people think? You know, well, they think that I wasn't prioritizing this role and there was so much more to it, but I couldn't say that at the time. Well, it won't surprise you. There's evidence that actually parents tend to be more focused and more productive than people who are single and childless because when you have a lot on your plate, you get really good at prioritizing. You've got that old saying. It also made me think, it's interesting because I remember when I had Niamh,

I really remember thinking, soul parents are superhuman. How do people do this on their own? How do they do it on their own? And so it definitely made me think about that individual human experience in much greater detail.

So I think you referenced the need both for humility and for dissent and debate earlier. And I want to talk more about that because I think nowhere was that more relevant than in the early days of COVID. That's for me the other iconic image of you is watching you on a video screen in a sweatshirt delivering an address to a nation. It's such an unfortunate association, a pandemic, but it is what it is. No, but I thought it stood out as a model of both humility

clear communication, but also caring leadership to show symbolically, hey, I'm in lockdown with you. I think when I think about the early days of COVID, I think about that as the kind of situation where I tell leaders they have to be both fast and slow at the same time, which is uniquely difficult, right? Because you're making decisions that are highly consequential. They're also irreversible. And so you have to get it right, but you also can't afford to delay. No.

And so I imagine you felt this tremendous tension between being decisive and also encouraging people to disagree and bring in different perspectives. Yeah. How did you manage that? I think this is where some of the old hangovers of things like self-doubt, you know, or your way of managing that for most people is to over-prepare. Just bring in as much information as you can. Try and become the subject expert so that you're not caught short. Stall, stall, stall. Yeah.

Well, I wouldn't necessarily see it as a stall, but rather just ensuring that you have a level of preparedness on an issue. And what I found helpful, therefore, was because I had that habit, it meant that when it came to decision making, I was probably more decisive because I had done as much preparatory work as I could on understanding this virus. And also, it was no hesitation to bring in experts. I wanted to speak to everyone that I could, but

When it came to the importance of trying to build consensus as much as you could at a time that was really scary for people, transparency was key. Just being really clear. We don't have all the answers, but this is everything we have.

And this is our plan in an imperfect decision-making environment. And I think in a way that built trust, and there's some of that interesting data around trust in government and institutions increasing for a period in 2020, certainly in our case it did.

But then I think the really interesting thing is it eaped away. I do want to highlight for me, your communication during that time was just, it was a masterclass in leading with what I've come to think of as confident humility. That on the one hand, you're saying, here is the best information I have, and we're going to formulate policy based on that. And at the same time, there's a lot of uncertainty. And as science evolves, our plans are going to evolve with it.

And I've watched so many leaders screw that up here in the US just saying like, "Vaccines are safe and effective and everyone needs to take them." I'm like, well, how safe and how effective and for whom? And being unwilling to acknowledge how many scientific questions were questions without answers.

How did you find the confidence to admit what you didn't know? In my mind, all of the questions that you have as a leader, you can assume are going to generally be the questions that others will have as well. And so share that, you know, use that as a bit of a guide. What are you worried about in terms of an information gap? Speak to that.

We falsely make the assumption that if we're only going to build confidence in leaders if we demonstrate absolute knowledge absolutely, but actually no human expects that. In fact, I think if you try and portray that or imply that, people immediately go, like, how do you know?

How do you know? And COVID was such a good example. It was so clear to people that we didn't know because if we did, we wouldn't have had such variation in people's responses globally. So speaking to what intuitively people felt, you don't have all the answers. So don't try and tell me you do.

I think it helped build trust and confidence. And it meant that when you did come out and say, based on what we have, we believe this is the best response at this time, then people I think could say, well, actually, I've been on this information journey with you and I think that it's the case too. It is interesting that that second phase of the pandemic was when things became really difficult. And so much of that was in correlation for the period of time when we had vaccine rollout.

And I leave it to experts to tell us and share with us what we should learn from that. But we weren't starting from a blank canvas. You know, we've had issues around vaccine hesitancy, which actually was the predominant issue, was hesitancy. But we saw equally other complicating factors at that time as well. There was fatigue with the whole COVID experience.

There was disinformation. There was even in some cases, you know, a bit of interference offshore with what was going on. So complex environment. And it got hard. It got really hard. So you captured, I think, three of my hunches about what was going on in terms of pre-existing vaccine hesitancy and misinformation or disinformation and then fatigue. Yeah.

If I could add three more to the table, I'd love to get your reaction. One that loomed large for me was psychological reactance, threats to the loss of freedom, the mandates in particular around vaccines, the mandates around lockdowns. There was at least a large, I would say, minority of people in many countries who said the government should not control my freedom. Yeah, yeah. And I think what was important for us was in the aftermath,

to ask experts to look at actually all of the tools because the really unfortunate issue we all face is that we had a horrific experience with a pandemic, but it's unlikely to be the only experience. And we need to try and learn from it so that we are better prepared to

My concern is that it was so horrific that people don't want to talk about it and they don't want to reflect on those experiences. And I understand that, but we need some people to. I'm wholeheartedly with you on that. And yeah,

I guess there's a part of me that wonders, you know, just thinking about that curve that you're describing of trust going up and then it falling dramatically. I think you were a distinctive victim of that, maybe in part because of a combination of the tall poppy syndrome issue, the cultural context in which nobody is allowed to stand out or get too big for their britches, which you alluded to earlier. And then also just the stereotypes and prejudice that still exist around women in leadership.

Because it's striking to me that you didn't bring either of them up. I didn't bring them up, I guess, for two reasons. One is because I never want to give the appearance that there's no issue to be looked at, you know, somehow everything else going on rather than my own personal leadership or decisions. I do think we should as politicians be held to account. And even though there was a bunch of circumstances going on at the time that made those decision making really hard, doesn't mean we shouldn't go back and look critically at them.

The other reason I think is that actually there was almost a universal theme to some of what we saw globally. And some of those cultures don't have the same issue with tall poppy and some of them had male leaders. And so there was something that happened in that time.

with everyone, not just for women in politics or women in leadership. And certainly, you know, not just for me, but I've never found much use in personalizing it, if that makes sense. It does. It does. But I have to say as a social scientist, when...

When I look at the data, you can see this at two levels. One is comparing countries around the world. The other is comparing states within the U.S. In the early phases of the pandemic, states and countries led by women had lower mortality rates. And that seems to be driven by clearer and more empathetic communication around policy.

And so we have the data, right? We know what's the counterfactual, how many more thousands of people would have died if you hadn't taken the action. 20,000. 20,000. We can document that, right? When you do have...

independent research that says we think that this approach saved 20,000 lives. It's very hard then to think about dispassionately, well, is there a way that we could have done that without some of these other things? The answer is I don't know, but I want to ask the question. That speaks to a distinction you make in the book between regret and remorse. Tell me about that. Regret has so much clarity. I regret X, Y, or Z. Remorse is I have sadness for some of the outcomes.

But please tell me what we should have done differently. I guess that's how I would express it. But am I unhappy we saved lives? No. No. And I'm guessing if, you know, back in 2019, if somebody had asked you, you have a choice. You can either unite people and lose more lives or you can save lives and country will be more divided. Yeah. You would have made the choice you made. Yeah. And in fact, there are micro moments where I knew that was the choice I was making, or at least I felt at that time that was the choice I was making. Some of the decisions that...

At that time, I thought there's so much fatigue. People are so tired. But, you know, we still held the belief that we needed to keep going while we were vaccinating people. I knew that those were unpopular choices. But, you know, I guess that's leadership.

So I want to bring this back then to tall poppy syndrome because... Is this a worldwide gender phrase? So it's very New Zealand. We know it very well. Australia and New Zealand is where I know the research at least. Yeah. I appreciate this so much about New Zealand. When you are in politics, you are there to serve. You are there to do a job on behalf of others. And it's a privilege. And at the same time, whilst you have that role...

Don't come above your station. Most New Zealanders will remember an MP who had a few other things going on, but actually the trigger for his resignation was that in a restaurant once he got into some kind of altercation and he responded, don't you know who I am? Or you do not. How dare you? You absolutely do not talk like that in New Zealand. And I appreciate that.

New Zealanders have that egalitarian sense that they expect humility. The flip side of that is this idea of if

New Zealanders do well or if they're achieving, we will be really proud of them. But there's an expectation that you don't ever get too big for your boots. And I guess that's where the tall poppy comes in. Yeah, very much so. Well, okay. So you were eager to talk about stepping down. Yes. The choice to resign. We're going to fast forward here. 12 months has passed. 12 months has passed. It's kind of important for me. It's not like COVID leave. There was time. Yeah, no, a lot of time. How did you decide to step down and when to step down?

I had a series of kind of micro moments and there wasn't just this one thing for me. I gave my reasoning, my rationale, my thinking when I left, you know, that...

Actually, I didn't have enough in the tank. I knew enough of disaster to know what you need to have in reserve. It wasn't the case that I was burnt out. You know, I wasn't in the fetal position in the corner. But I felt that same weight of responsibility to make sure that at any given moment I could step up a little bit further. And that was waning after five years and after 15 years in politics generally.

And so I just shared the micro moments going through that decision making. No one particularly supported my decision. So it did feel lonely, but it still felt like the right one for me. I also talk a little bit about how I did feel that there was a heightened sentiment. And some of this probably in the aftermath of COVID. Naturally, if you lead through something like that, you're going to carry some of the baggage of that. And I wanted to bring the temperature down.

And I thought perhaps if I sat at the center, my departure might do that. And that would be for the good of politics. It would be for the good of my party. It would be for the good of holding on to so many of the important things I felt we'd made progress on. So it sounds like in some ways it was a choice to be a lightning rod. I kind of describe it as being, you know, as you say, a flashpoint, maybe just being unfortunately just

symbolically representing a really hard time that everyone went through. I remember during COVID, because we by and large had a strategy that we lived without COVID, it meant that if we had one case, if we could not figure out where that case had come from, we might have to either lock down a particular part of the country or if it was particularly worrying the whole country for short periods of time. And I started to worry that when people saw me unexpectedly arrive on a podium, that I would suddenly become this trigger.

And even going through airport security, if they saw a particular kind of rush of us moving through to get to Wellington, I thought, oh, people are going to know. And I hated representing that for people. It was just part of the course. But there's probably a long-term effect for that. And so, yeah, I thought that was part of my thinking. Not in total, but it was part of my thinking, yeah.

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All right, so let's do a lightning round if you're ready for it. I hate those. You're not going to hate this one. Okay. Who is your dream dinner party guest that you haven't met? Could they be dead? Sure. Ernest Shackleton. Okay, going to be hard to arrange that one. Yeah, I know. But still, you asked for the dream guest, so there it is. I'll take it. What's the worst leadership advice you see given regularly?

Ooh, I see an absence of something. I think we should encourage sleep more because people martyr themselves, especially in leadership. Yep. Best advice for breaking a glass ceiling? Just think about the person that's following. Just gives you an extra motivation. You're carving a path for someone. Trailblazing. Trailblazing. What's something you've changed your mind about recently? Oh, I change my mind all the time. Well...

I changed my mind about writing a book. I was adamant, adamant I wasn't going to. And then I did. You seem to end up doing a lot of the things you really don't want to do. There's a pattern. And then what's a question you have for me?

What do you see most absent in political leadership? Oh my gosh. I mean, it's a series of deficits of character. I think our politics are dominated by narcissism and selfishness. And I think we should lead with generosity and humility. And if I could pick a third, integrity.

Do you think that's because people self-exclude or because there aren't incentives to behave like that and succeed? I think it has to be a combination of the two. I think there's a self-selection problem and a recruiting problem. But I think the incentives and norms need to be dramatically overhauled.

Do you think social media has been a democratizer or problematic for the health of democracy? I think it's been some of both, but my view has tilted more negative over time because we've seen more polarization. That was more than one lightning question for you, Jacinda. Okay, let me take the mic back here. I was told I was allowed to ask questions. I mean, you are, but I do want to ask you, when you step down on this very point,

You said you still believe that politics was a place where it was possible to drive positive change. Yeah. Do you still think that now? I do. Yep, I do. And what I hope is that people don't change their expectation of that as well. I speak to this a bit because for me, it's really important that in these moments, people maintain their own optimism, but also their expectation. Because the moment we have indifference, that is a hall pass to politicians, right?

So, you know, to anyone, if you have a particular expectation around the way that you believe politics should be done and, you know, what should be delivered, then don't let that standard drop. If anything, raise it. What is it that gives you that sense of confidence and hope? Just exposure, exposure to people.

proximity to young people. Inherently, we know that young people tend to be more cynical in their youth, but in amongst that cynicism, I still see an optimism. Well, I'm going to do X, Y, and Z in spite of the leadership I see around me. And so that's a cause. That's a cause for hope. The first time we met a few months ago, you said something that really stuck with me. You said optimism is an act of courage. Yes.

What do you mean by that? So I have long had a obsession with Antarctic exploration and Ernest Shackleton, who found himself stranded in Antarctica and keeping in mind this is, you know, during the period of the First World War. So technology and communications weren't great. And here he is suddenly responsible for his team on the ice when his ship has sunk. No one knows that they're stranded and his job is their survival.

And the fact that during that period, he also saw that survival was dependent on their mindset.

And he was the one that said, optimism is true moral courage. So, you know, in my mind, that actually undercuts this sentiment, at least, that you have some time that hope or optimism is naive. It is a choice. And not only is a choice, it implies actually something that is required in difficult circumstances and trying circumstances in order to succeed. Okay, last question for you to take us full circle.

We talked about empathy earlier and you referenced being somewhat thin-skinned. Yeah. And you said you don't want a thicker skin. No. Why don't you want one? Because really early on I learned that thicker skin might mean losing my empathy.

I'd rather have empathy because I think it's something as policymakers and decision makers makes us better at our job. And so if the price I pay is that sometimes the job hurts a little, so be it. Sometimes the people who feel things the most deeply are the ones who care the most deeply. And don't we want those people in leadership? I know I certainly do. Jacinda, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

My biggest takeaway from Jacinda is that we should frame leadership differently to the next generation. We should stop positioning it as an opportunity to seize power for yourself and start framing it as a responsibility to serve others. On that note, I loved her point that once you take the reins, the question of "can I do it?" is no longer relevant. The only question that matters is "how can I do it in a way that helps others?"

Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glazer. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winnick. And our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Heilash, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sungmanivong, and Whitney Pennington-Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Alison Leighton Brown.

It's a real pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, we're going to find out if that's true, won't we? Whether or not my name is Jacinda, I feel fairly certain on that. Shaq, we've got that best covered.

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