Monica Lewinsky: The Price of Shame. Filmed March 2015

I found this speech on Ted Talks.  Ms Lewinsky has become a very articulate, confident women.  I was very impressed with her talk.  She began by giving just enough of her history for us to gain understanding into her topic.  Today is a different world than her world of 1998, when the scandal first broke.  She was able to articulate her experience in a way that we have never heard before, although somewhere deep inside we knew it existed.  This experience happened in-between the world of the internet and social media, one being new and the other not in existence yet.  Her description of personal shame, humiliation, and struggle grabs the audience by the heart strings and draws us into her world.

Ms Lewinsky then states her motivation for the candid talk by saying, "when this happened to me 17 years ago, there was no name for it. Now we call it cyberbullying and online harassment. Today, I want to share some of my experience with you, talk about how that experience has helped shape my cultural observations, and how I hope my past experience can lead to a change that results in less suffering for others."  Her motivation, in Dr. Fogg terms, is central to all human experience; to replace pain with pleasure, fear with hope, and rejection with acceptance.  She is trying to help raise awareness of this issue to prevent others from being humiliated to death.  She gives some statistics that are shocking and help elevate our motivation to put a stop to this public shaming and humiliation.  She gives recent examples of the prevalence of this issue in today's society.  All of this information creates understanding and helps the audience share in her motivation to be part of a change.

Ms. Lewinsky then talks about our ability, as a society, to change this destructive behavior.  She says, "the shift begins with something simple, but it's not easy. We need to return to a long-held value of compassion -- compassion and empathy.  Shame cannot survive empathy."  This part of her talk follows Dr. Fogg's theory by being simple, requiring no money, no physical effort, little time other than a shift in attitude, and no shift from routine.   She makes it sound simple and do-able to turn this negativity around.  She reinforces this action with her own experience of how empathy from others saved her and helped her rebuild her self-esteem and eventually her life.  She also names several organizations around the world that are engaged in trying to change this destructive trend of cyberbullying, which helps the audience feel that they are not alone in this effort but have support and acceptance from others across the globe.

Ms. Lewinsky ends with the third part of Dr. Fogg's theory, the trigger or call to action.  She invites us all to help create a safer and better world with more compassion online and in our everyday lives. This taps into our basic human need to be safe and to be accepted in society.  She received a standing ovation and exited the stage having let a powerful message behind.