Belonging in a World Built to Exclude

Jon Clifton:
[0:05] Tim, thank you for being here with me today.

Timothy Shriver:
[0:08] Thanks for having me.

Jon Clifton:
[0:09] Tim, of your top five CliftonStrengths, which of them would you say helped drive you throughout your entire career?

Timothy Shriver:
[0:17] Well, you know, when you see yourself on paper, when you see yourself in a distilled set of insights, it's almost hard to separate parts of yourself, one from the other. The strength that surfaces as the highest for me is the strength of being an Includer. And of course, when I read this initially, I was sort of proud and thinking to myself, oh, that's good. That reinforces the message I try to give. And then I thought to myself, yeah, but it's such a pain in the neck. And you're making process. You're always trying to find more people to include. And you're always trying to engage. And one more question, one more discussion, one more stakeholder community. So I sort of almost started to see myself, both the strength and the weakness of it, and get sort of tangled up.

But in the end of the day, I think that my willingness or my desire, honestly, to see problems from different perspectives, which is, I think, what an Includer does, to understand that the perspective one has from birth, from life, from culture, from experience, from employment, from family, that those experiences are so unique for each of us and so precious and that in each one there is something magical that could be added to the mix. I feel like probably somehow intuitively that's helped me the most to come across gems and to discover something that maybe others might miss because they rely too much on a singular point of view.

Jon Clifton:
[1:50] Now, Includers have an unusual gift to make sure that no one feels left out. And one of the things that you've done throughout your career is make sure that people don't feel left out at scale. How did you accomplish that?

Timothy Shriver:
[2:04] Well, I was given great opportunities. I mean, I trained first as a teacher. And a teacher, the first lesson you really come to understand as a teacher is you're going to have 15 or 20 or 30 or even 40 children sitting in front of you. You often don't pick them. Most of the time you don't. You often don't have the chance to separate them into this type and that type or this level and that level. You're invited to see every one of them as a person of potential without any choice in the matter.

So you start to learn very quickly that everything you want to impart to people depends on your capacity to make it magical to each individual person in often a very individual way. So I learned that in teaching that, you know, you don't sort, you distill, you translate, you include always with new perspectives. I went from teaching into the Special Olympics movement, and Special Olympics was, you know, a lot of people see it as a sports organization. I saw it as a classroom. I saw it as a giant global classroom with hundreds of thousands of people, people with and without intellectual challenges, volunteers and coaches, athletes, family members, young people of all ability levels. I saw them all as coming to the Special Olympics gym or the swimming pool or the playing field, hungering to learn ultimately how to be an Includer. That's the way I saw it. And so I just kept trying to figure out ways to make those experiences more powerful for each person who came so that everyone would have their eyes open. Each person, even if you just chanced into the gym on a Saturday morning and you saw a Special Olympics basketball game, you'd walk out, even if it was just 20 minutes later, having seen a gift or an ability you didn't expect, having become a little bit more inclusive yourself. That is my hope still to this day.

Jon Clifton:
[3:57] If a young person took CliftonStrengths and found that they had Includer in their top five, what advice would you have for them?

Timothy Shriver:
[4:04] Ride it, baby. I mean, I don't want to sound arrogant, but I think it's a good one. I think it's what the world needs. I think the biggest problem in the world as we get more and more people on a smaller and smaller planet is learning how to overcome the fear of difference. It's always been there, but maybe historically, you know, people in France could hate people in Germany or people in China could hate people in Japan or people in the United States could hate people in Mexico or Canada or wherever it is. And we could build our walls, metaphorical, religious, cultural, and leave them to their life and leave us to ours. It doesn't work anymore. Dead end. Can't live. We're not going to make it hating people in other places, not to mention each other. Can't make it. We won't survive if our fear of difference results in violence and exclusion of those who are different. Can't make it. Can't make it. Won't work. Practically. I'm not saying this out of religious faith, although I do say it out of religious faith. I'm saying it practically. So the biggest challenge we have is to learn how, when we encounter difference, to choose to include.

Jon Clifton:
[5:08] So you have Significance in your top five. And people that have Significance are often powered by the idea that they want to change the world. You did. What fueled that?

Timothy Shriver:
[5:21] I mean, I don't know. Like there's sometimes with this stuff, I can't understand how anyone would not have that. I know people don't, so that's an arrogance on my part. But I guess I just feel like if we open our eyes, how can you not want to help? I mean, you don't need to read the news to want to help. You just need to look in the eye of your neighbor to know that someone's hungering for meaning, for purpose, for belonging. It feels somehow to me against all evidence that the world is starving to get better. That we're, as a species, still believe that we can make the world better. And people can be skeptical and say, that's ridiculous, and look at the evidence, and they had their point. But I think deep in the human heart is a conviction, is a desire, I guess I should say, that if we try, if we really try, if we really give ourselves to it, we can make a difference.

Jon Clifton:
[6:28] Of all the influential people in your life, there's one that you talk about in Fully Alive in the opening chapters, which is a name that maybe many people haven't heard of. In fact, you say that she may have been the one that actually influenced the very famous statement by President Kennedy, Ask Not. Can you talk a little bit more about her and the influence that she had on your life?

Timothy Shriver:
[6:49] Yeah, my Aunt Rosemary. I mean, my mother was one of nine. Nine children, big Irish Catholic family. My grandfather, her dad, was very successful in business in the early part of the 20th century, made a lot of money, was very successful in politics, had a lot of influence. But I think their most influential decision was when my Aunt Rosemary was born. She was diagnosed almost immediately with an intellectual disability. And in those days, in the 1920s in this country, the normal choice, particularly for parents who had means, was to put that child away, put that child in an institution. They chose to raise her at home. And there was no school. There was no healthcare. There was no medical support. There was no early intervention. There was no therapeutic support. There was no occupational therapy or speech and language therapy. There was nothing. My mother would always say, you know, grandma, talking about my grandmother, would be calling people, calling people and asking, is there something for Rosemary? Can I do this for Rosemary? Is there a program for Rosemary? And she'd hang up the phone, my mom would say, and say, there's nothing for Rosemary, nothing. And her voice would trail off.

But that person for whom the world offered nothing, this family offered love. And my mom and her three brothers who became senators and attorneys general and a president of the United States, they all grew up loving someone that the world couldn't see, the world didn't understand, the world didn't love. So my view is that Rosemary simply by her presence, by her joyfulness, by the love she had for her brothers and sisters, taught them that the judgments of the world are often quite off, they're not right. You know those kids had to 7, 8, my mom 9, 10 years old think of the mind of a 7-year-old looking at her sister who she loves who she plays with and then seeing the whole world pointing at her, labeling her, excluding her, closing the door to her, laughing at her, humiliating her. And she's playing with her. That's my sister.

Now there's a fierceness that comes from that. And there's a, you talk about Self-Assurance. All the experts say hopeless. You know they're wrong. You don't have to be taught they're wrong. You know, you know your sister is beautiful. You know she's wonderful. You know she's funny. You know she's joyful. You know she's got skills. The world is telling you that's not true. They're wrong. And so my conviction is that maybe unconscious, but that a gigantic engine of ambition and desire to soften, heal, serve the world came to President Kennedy and came to my uncle, Senator Robert Kennedy, and came to my uncle, Ted Kennedy, and came to my mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, through the eyes and heart and soul and joy that Rosemary brought them. And that somehow they knew that when you give, when they gave to Rosemary, they got something beautiful back. They got their best selves back. That's my view.

Jon Clifton:
[10:08] Now, you put in strengths philosophy all throughout Special Olympics. What inspired you to do that, and what did it look like to have that sort of strengths philosophy ingrained all throughout Special Olympics?

Timothy Shriver:
[10:20] Well, you know, our athletes taught me this before strengths taught me, and I think maybe we were, as organizations, on the same wavelength going back 30 and 40 years, even before the strengths for leaders was distilled. Our athletes taught me that what they valued in the Special Olympics movement was being seen for what they could do, not for what they couldn't do. A person with Down Syndrome might live most of their life being pointed at, being told what their limitations are, being reminded of what their disabilities are. And then they walk into the gym and they're a point guard. Or they get into the pool and they're swimming breaststroke, or they get onto the playing field and they're a striker or a goalkeeper. The identity shift from a deficit to a skill, from a weakness to a strength, was just pouring out of our athletes, the starvation for, the demand to be seen for their strengths and not their challenges, just had kind of seeped into my, I guess, my heart, really. And when I came over here to Gallup and met the Clifton team, and you were pioneering, really, in the days when I first came over, pioneering the strengths work, I thought to myself, oh my God, this is the science. The Special Olympics athletes are the art. Let's put these together and see if we can make this statement even more bold and more powerful, not just for our athletes, but so that they can communicate their message to the rest of the world.

Jon Clifton:
[11:59] I think one of the greatest demonstrations of the combination of your Includer, your Strategic, and your Significance is what you pulled off in, I believe, 1996, which was in Yale Stadium when even President Clinton was there to talk to all the athletes of Special Olympics, which I believe came in from over 150 countries at that time. Can you talk about how you used your top three strengths in order to pull off such an incredible event?

Timothy Shriver:
[12:24] Well, you know, in those days, the Special Olympics World Games coming to a state or a city seemed important, but maybe not. So one of the things we did with those games was we decided to send all the athletes, each country, out to a different town in Connecticut. So we called it the Host Town Program. So before they came to New Haven, before they came to their dorms and their athletic facilities, they went all over the state. So every town in the state got a chance to host Namibia or Peru or Indonesia or Germany or France or Russia or Mexico. I think that was probably my Includer. You know, like we can't just have an event. We have to have an experience for everyone. And so then we had parades and town hall meetings and potluck suppers and teach-ins and schools and flag ceremonies and, you know, green, all the greens of the state of Connecticut were covered with the countries that were now. And so that was a big part of the Includer thing.

New Haven was a small town. Yale Bowl, where we had the opening ceremonies, was almost 100 years old already. So over that now, I believe. So a lot of people thought that you can't pull this off in a little town like this. It's not going to work. And I think my Self-Assurance kept me going and talking to the university presidents and talking to the cops and the firemen and the teachers. And, you know, come on, we can do this. You know, people count us out, but we can pull it off. I hope my strategic thinking helped to create what we did on those games. We called it the Games of Inclusion. So it wasn't just an event. It was an attempt to have everyone who came see us as on the front edge of a strategic mission, to create cultures, communities, organizations, families, faith-based institutions that put inclusion at the center of who they were. That the host town idea, that we host people from all over the world, people with intellectual disabilities, that, yes, it was a three-day event, but we want to make it an everyday event. Like, that was our strategic vision.

Jon Clifton:
[14:34] You have Strategic number two. You and I have joked about how you use your Strategic with your family, but how do you use it personally and how do you use it professionally?

Timothy Shriver:
[14:44] Well, I wish I knew how I developed that. I guess my desire always is to see the bigger picture. In other words, if we're facing a challenge at Special Olympics, we faced a challenge, for instance, around trying to convince people that a sports movement and a community-based movement promoted the health of the movement. And we tell people, and they'd say, well, you're not a health movement, you're a sports movement. I'd say, well, this is how we do it. It was frustrating to me. And I'd say, well, yeah, but it gets people, helps them lose weight and builds cardiovascular strength and reduces the chance of diabetes and strengthens bones and improves mental health and emotional health and stuff like that. You're a sports organization. So I'm constantly looking for how do we craft a new narrative that fits. Maybe we just need one little piece.

So about 20 years ago, we decided we were going to create a new program called Healthy Athletes that brought an explicit health dimension, brought health screenings to our games. So we do 100,000 health screenings with doctors, health professionals, dentists at our games. I mention it because ... I was looking for a way strategically to strengthen the underlying value proposition of Special Olympics without dismantling or in any way reducing the focus on the mission. We still have the athlete at the center of our experience. We just add a little bit of health. It strategically enhances the entire value proposition, drives new value for the athlete and their family, actually drives great new value for health practitioners because they get to learn and see and be around people with intellectual challenges. But strategically for the movement, it shifts the focus of funders, governments, families, and allows them to see that sport and health actually go together.

Jon Clifton:
[16:42] Your number five strength is Activator. And people with Activator have an unusual ability to push. Was there ever a time when you really had to exert your Activator in order to push an agenda, maybe in a tough part of the world, or maybe even here in order to accomplish ...?

Timothy Shriver:
[16:58] Well, you know, we, I tried a couple of years ago, right at the beginning of COVID, I decided with a small group, my colleague, Misha Robinson from here in Washington, she said, we should do, we had this little formative nonprofit called Unite. And she said, we should do a 25 hour live stream or 24 hour live stream with getting everybody to talk about how we should work together in the face of the pandemic. And I was like, oh, that's a great idea. Let's do that next week. And then I thought to myself, that's ridiculous, 24 hours. We can't do that. We have no YouTube channel. We have no nothing. Anyway, eight weeks later, we opened the 25 hour call to Unite. It ended up having everyone from Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama to Oprah Winfrey and George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. We had 25 hours on air of people really just answering one question. How can we unite? What's your story? Julia Roberts, I want to unite the world by reading to children. I mean, it just went on and on. There were times in that eight week period between the idea and the airing where the producers, we had no money. You know, we had no production capability. And there were nights where I just would go to bed thinking, what the heck have I gotten us into? What are we? This is a hopeless case.

And I think that's the Activator just stays at it, right? That's the person who just stays at it. And when the wall, you know, that was one of those experiences where as you got closer to your goal, it seemed further away. When we started, I thought, oh, we can pull this off. And then after a week, I thought, hmm, this is going to be hard. And then after two weeks, I thought, this is not going to work. And then I thought, this is impossible. And we get closer and closer and it'd get harder and harder. But, you know, I guess maybe this gift or this quality. You just, you know, when all that noise comes in on you, I think sometimes one feels like it can just crush you. But I think Activators go, okay, the noise is coming in. You just, you just, you don't stop, man. You put another foot in front of that foot and you keep going. And so I wouldn't say the success of that event was attributed to me, but I think the quality I brought to it was a determination to stay the course and not relent to making it happen one way or the other, no matter what.

Jon Clifton:
[19:31] Now, one of the most famous stories about your family are the races in the backyard. Competition was very serious in your upbringing. Did it surprise you that you didn't have Competition in your top 10?

Timothy Shriver:
[19:43] Well, it would surprise people that know me, but I think that's because I don't take competition as a dead-end game. I am competitive. And, you know, if you and I talked long enough, I'd find something that we could compete in. I'd look forward to trying it. But I don't see it as a zero-sum game. I see it as a way of ... it's almost play to me. The competition I grew up with, I think, became for me more about play than about the necessity of winning. Don't get me wrong. I was very competitive with my brothers in particular, my sister. Growing up, I remained competitive with my peers. But I think maybe this Includer thing led me to see competition as a way of getting closer and connected to people and having fun with people rather than, you know, winning so that I could prove to somebody in the world that I was better than them. It kind of lost its edge a little bit.

Jon Clifton:
[20:49] Now, all leaders have to overcome obstacles at some point in their life. What are a few of the obstacles, maybe even tragedy, that you experienced in your life? And what strengths did you use to overcome them?

Timothy Shriver:
[21:01] Well, in the Special Olympics movement, the obstacle is sadly omnipresent. It's negative attitudes. They're everywhere. You know, I knock on a hundred doors for every one that opens. The no's mean people don't get healthcare. It means that during the pandemic, they're six times more likely to die of COVID than a person who doesn't have an intellectual disability. It means that people with intellectual disabilities die 20 years younger than their non-disabled peers for preventable reasons. So these are big obstacles. My God, how do you change an attitude that's everywhere? I mean, you can easily give up. But as one mom said, you know, I wouldn't change my son for the world, but I'd change the world for my son. And when I hear that, it just, it's a little of that anger. A little anger well-channeled helps. Self-Assurance helps a lot. Because when the world tries to defeat you, in the end of the day, it wears us down with negatives. And if when you've worn down and all the resources you've got, just no, no, no, no, no, then all you're left with is yourself. And do I believe this? Am I willing to try again no matter what? Am I convinced that as ominous as the odds may be, I can do this.

So I think my Self-Assurance, for better or for worse, has helped me. I think being an Includer helps a huge amount when you hit obstacles because you all of a sudden have lots of places to go for help and for new ideas. And I feel like different times when I've, you know, I'm working now on this issue of toxic polarization in the country, and if there's something that everybody agrees is a disaster, it seems to be that, and if there's something that most people think there's nothing they can do about, it seems to be that. That's a bad challenge when everybody thinks there's a problem and no one thinks they can solve it. But I call every, you know, I call thousands of people. You must know. You must have an idea. There must be a strategy. There must be a way to solve this. So being an Includer also helps when you hit your obstacles.

Jon Clifton:
[23:41] How is it that you identify the strengths in people and work with them on it?

Timothy Shriver:
[23:47] I mean, I don't know if that's just a decision you make. Like, can you just sort of, can we turn off the judgment? Can we just flip the switch and when you walk down the street or when you sit at the restaurant or when you get on the bus or when you go to work, can we just pause the judge, the labeler, the sorter, the excluder, the tyrant within us that's always wanting to put someone else down or put ourselves down, and just see the gift? I mean for me that's been very important in my mental, spiritual, professional health, learning how to see when you stop the judgment brain, which is always looking for what's wrong with you. If we can suspend that part of our experience a little bit, just reduce it a little bit, the strengths start to pour out, I think. And it's a beautiful thing. I mean, the reason I think people stick with, once they learn strengths, they stick with them is because it reveals a whole side of the world that's a lot more fun and joyful to be around.

Jon Clifton:
[24:54] One of the single biggest demands of leadership is hope and creating inspiration, especially when times get tough. What strengths do you pull from when you need to create hope, especially at your time with Special Olympics?

Timothy Shriver:
[25:06] Yeah, well, I think, look, I think if you can remind people of their significance, I think that's an enormous builder. I like to say that leadership, I use, you know, I don't have all the great scientists that you guys have here at CliftonStrengths. So I've distilled my leadership to-dos into three things. You have to give people roles, you have to give people goals, and you have to remind people of the importance of their souls. The soul message sounds kind of, you know, woo-woo. But what the soul is, is that part of you that's sort of looking for ultimate meaning and purpose. And I don't care what your job is. You come to that job in the morning hoping somehow that you will have some purpose, that your purpose matters, that you matter in the world.

I think it's really important for leaders to speak to the soul level of their colleagues, especially when times are tough. Because when times are tough and you're doing cuts or your product's not selling or your fundraising isn't working or your event didn't go well, whatever it is, you know, your job, you didn't get a promotion. I think to remind people that in the choppiness of life, the energy of your soul will sustain you because you matter. The work matters. Tough times, as one of my mentors says, you know, tough times come and go, but tough people last. The rockiness of today will not be here in six months or a year or two years or three years or five. But your toughness, your significance will.

Jon Clifton:
[26:46] I think there is a hope deficit all over the planet. What would fix it?

Timothy Shriver:
[26:51] Um, I think leadership matters, but I think empowering people to see their own and act upon their own hope and believe that they can make a difference. I think when people feel powerless, it's a tremendous drain. I was at a school two weeks ago, Jon, and I was talking to the third, fourth, and fifth graders of the assembly. And the one thing I said was to the fifth graders, I said, you know, if you have a kid with special needs in your school,  I'm going to ask you a question. Who can make a fifth grader feel included? I said can the parents? No. Can a bus driver make a fifth grader in the lunchroom feel included? No. Can the teachers? No. Administrators? No. The only person who can make a fifth grader feel included is a fifth grader. So there's a person hungering for a chance, and there's only one person who can make that chance come to life. That's a fifth grader. That's you. Not your parents, not your mayor, not your teachers, not the person on TV, not somebody famous like Beyonce or Taylor Swift. No, only you can do this. Be an agent of inclusion and change the course of a life.

I think we all need to hear that. Maybe I was saying that to that fifth grader because I needed to hear it myself. No one else. Don't wait. There's somebody in your building, there's somebody on your street, there's somebody on the bus you're on this morning, there's somebody in the metro, there's somebody in the field, somebody starving to be seen and to be welcomed.

Transcript autogenerated using AI.