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Like many of us singer, actress and mindset coach, Rhonda Ross has experienced the most amazing highs and horrible lows in her life.
Over time, she's learned that, regardless of what we're experiencing, we must first calm the storm inside our minds.
To do that, we have to understand it.
In this conversation with scholar and TED fellow Daniel Alexander-Jones, Rhonda shares her theory of emotional sovereignty, the idea that your feelings aren't shaped just by your circumstances, but by the thoughts running in a loop in your head.
I felt victimized and I felt stuck and I felt like, you know, the world was against me.
And after weeks and months of really being in my darkest place, I recognized that I couldn't stay there.
I had to figure out a way out of that, even if I couldn't change my circumstances.
Rhonda, who comes out of the jazz and theater traditions, introduces a unique music-rooted practice for taking control of your narrative and finding an unexpected sense of freedom.
That's coming up right after a short break.
And now our conversation of the day.
My friend.
Yes, yes, yes.
It's good to see you.
Let's do it.
All right, let's do it.
So first of all, yours is truly, and I can attest to this, it's a liberatory practice.
And I witness you as part of really a grand tradition of artists who focused on capital F freedom in everything that they did.
So here we are in a time of tectonic upheaval, of assaults on body and soul and exponential demands on our attention.
In the midst of all this, you make offering to us.
Can you please tell us all about your work with mindset and where in your life journey it comes from?
Yes.
Oh, my goodness.
I'm so happy to be here and I'm so happy to be here with you after all these years of having these types of conversations.
So, I'm a singer-songwriter, I'm a performer, I'm an actress.
And when I graduated Brown, I went on to do work in that field.
And it went really great.
And I got on a soap opera, and I got an Emmy nomination.
Yes, you did.
And I met and married my husband.
And everything was really good.
And I was really happy until things weren't good.
And then I wasn't happy.
And all of a sudden, the Emmy went to somebody else.
The soap opera I was on was canceled.
My husband and I were.
He's here, by the way.
My husband and I were physically separated because i had moved to la and he hates la and so um.
So i was out there trying to work and and he was in new york, we were trying to get pregnant.
You can't get pregnant 3 000 miles away from you.
Can't do that.
Haven't figured that out yet.
And i was.
I went in and i and i was unemployed, i wasn't working and i went into um, really one of the darkest times of my life And I remember in the moment, thinking what just happened.
Just a few years ago, everything was great.
Like, what just happened?
And I started blaming my circumstances, the agents, all the things, all the circumstances in my life.
And because none of those were under my control, I felt victimized and I felt stuck and I felt, like you know, the world was against me.
And after weeks and months of really being in my darkest place, I recognized that I couldn't stay there.
I had to figure out a way out of that, even if i couldn't change my circumstances, and i started to study and read and come to find out.
There's all of this information about the power of thought and this idea that between our circumstances and the way we feel about our circumstances live our thoughts, what I call our soundtrack, that's on loop in our mind and our inner voice.
And it's what's coming out of that space that determines how we feel, not the circumstances.
But we spend so much time blaming the circumstances, feeling victimized by the circumstances, and then trying to manipulate and control and do what we can do with these circumstances, when the truth is the power to feel better, to feel optimistic and at peace and empowered, and all of those things is actually within ourselves.
And that's what I call emotional sovereignty.
Beautiful.
So that's what I've been practicing and then teaching for the last...
25 years through my music, through my art, through my mindset coaching and all of that.
I love that.
And part of you know in our journey.
One of the things is you know we work in field where it's an intergenerational field.
So we had the great honor, both of us, of sharing a mentor later who passed away a couple years ago at 99 years old.
Her name was Viney Burroughs.
She was a great lady of the American theater.
And I'm thinking about what you're talking about, about blaming circumstances versus doing something else.
And I know with Viney, right, that she started on Broadway in the 1950s.
And like many black actors of that time, she was limited in what they would allow her to play.
And she was so profoundly frustrated by it.
And then she dropped into her own agency and she created one of the first solo performance pieces that we now are very familiar with that kind of work in the 1960s and 70s.
And by the end of her life she had performed over six thousand performances all over the world right.
And so one day I was walking down in the Lower East Side, where she was, you know, and we can kind of picture her in our mind.
And I saw her at a distance and I said, you know, you always say hello to y'all.
So I said, I was going to go say, hey, Miss Viney.
And she came up to me, grabbed me by the hand, shook me, And she had a grip.
And she said, life is motion.
Life is motion.
Life is motion.
And she walked away.
Right?
And so I'm curious if you can talk, because I think even today we've heard so much about how we deal with all of these stresses individually.
As we're in motion, as we're in our lives.
Can you talk about how your practice has helped you harness life in motion?
I wasn't going to tell this story, but I'm going to tell it.
I'm so glad you mentioned Viney.
And yes, the work that I do is something that has helped me as life is lifing, right?
Because I'm constantly being reminded that there is this space and there's this soundtrack and I can shift it.
And the story I'm going to tell.
We were in Minneapolis and I was doing your play Phoenix, Fabrique and Viney was in the play.
And this might be a little TMI.
Okay sorry um, but i was having a miscarriage and i had just found out that i was having a miscarriage and um.
So i went to rehearsal and i was on the phone outside pacing, talking to my husband on the phone and viney was watching me through the windows and when i came in, she said what is it?
What is it?
She was very dramatic yes, and i said um, And she said no.
And she grabbed me and she said, it's the end of the world.
And I said, yes.
And she said, but it isn't.
I'll never forget that.
And so it's perspective.
It's reframing.
It's taking these circumstances and looking at them in all the different ways.
And we assume this thing happens.
I'm having a miscarriage.
I must be devastated.
I must be all of the things.
But there is a space where you get to decide how you're going to translate that circumstance.
How are you going to do it?
I had another friend of mine say during my third miscarriage say to me, your body's getting ready for the one.
And I remember taking that.
Instead of giving up and all of that, I said, oh, I'm getting ready for the one.
And so, all to say, this work is about recognizing the agency that we have.
We have so much more power than we give ourselves credit for, because life is going to life.
Things are going to happen.
It doesn't mean you have to like what those things are or choose them or want them, but they're happening anyway.
How can you take that and use it to empower you to lift you up instead of letting it knock you down, right?
So that's the work.
And I was going to tell another story, but I'm going to skip it.
But I got lots of stories.
But how I try to work this into my life as I'm moving through it.
Even to this day, I've been doing this work for over 20 years, 25 years, and still I have to do it.
And now back to the episode.
I had a meltdown on 125th Street two weeks ago, right?
Because my son wasn't where he said he was going to be.
And even though we track him, the tracker said he was here and he wasn't there.
And I'm literally standing there on 125th Street, Raif Raif, looking like I couldn't figure it out because I had skipped this part.
And it wasn't until I grabbed hold of, wait a second, cool out.
Yes, here are the circumstances.
He's not where he's supposed to be.
But you can decide how you frame that.
You can decide whether that terrifies you or whether it cools you out, whether you know he's okay, whether you give it some time.
Because real talk, it was only like five minutes.
It was like five minutes.
Do I have parents out here?
Like.
But what I love about this is this gives me a concrete example of something I think that I imagine many of us in this room engage, which is we can think of things in these very macrocosmic, big-picture ways, but it's hard sometimes to translate down to the microcosm, to the subtle things, the everyday choices, and vice versa.
Something can be a storm inside of you that can totally take you down and no one else will know about it.
And how do you navigate the flow of the world outside?
So that is very powerful.
And I want to call your beautiful son's name, Raif Kendrick.
Raif Hanak Emmanuel Kendrick.
Call his name.
He's a beautiful human being, like one of really radiant human being.
And I feel like I see in him you and your husband Rodney's love, but also this work.
He's a mature young man from that process.
And thinking also about this idea, I want to move us into a conversation about connection, continuum and generation right.
And a dear friend of mine, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a great scholar once, was talking about Harriet Tubman right.
And she said, on the night before the Combahee River raid, right where Harriet Tubman freed, I believe, over 700 enslaved folk, she woke from a vision that she had.
And many of you know she had had an injury and she would go into these states of vision.
And she woke and said, my people are free.
Yes.
Not going to be free.
They are free.
Present tense, right?
And so...
I think that's a story that you carry in that changes the outcome of something.
The stories we tell ourselves and we give ourselves, versus the stories that are told about us, the stories that are told to us and the expectations that others have of how we're gonna move in the world.
So I'm curious about you know purpose and freedom present tense for you and wherever you want to take that?
Oh, my God.
Yeah, yeah.
That's how we roll.
That's how we roll.
So I just want to go back to what you said about my people are free, this idea of affirmation.
So the program, the process that I have, I called it tune your inner voice.
Tune your inner voice.
And there's a few different steps to it.
So step one, I call it, the crucial first step is to acknowledge that there's this space and acknowledge that you have agency in this space, and acknowledge that it's your thoughts that determine how you feel, and you are the thinker of your thoughts.
So you have the ability and the power.
So that's the crucial first step.
You can't move anywhere beyond until you do that.
The next one is to really investigate what you're feeling, what is happening inside of you.
Sit with it.
We gaslight ourselves, right?
I shouldn't feel that.
Oh, I can't be feeling that.
You know, all of that.
But really sit with it.
Name it.
There's science behind naming a feeling and how already the feeling starts to kind of dissipate when you can name it.
And in my process, I have people really, really name it.
Like, not just, oh, I'm upset, but like, what is it?
Is it anxiety?
Is it terror?
Is it like, what is it?
So we sit with that for a while.
That's step two.
Step three is to find the thought that is really triggering that feeling, right?
Not the circumstance, the thought.
And I call it an automatic screwy thought or an automatic sabotaging thought, an AST.
And so you find that thought and again, you name it and identify it.
And then you're like, nobody could feel good with a thought like that.
Because usually it's a thought like, you know, I'm a piece of whatever, right?
And you know, and you say, no wonder I've been feeling like that's what's been going on in my mind.
So really looking for the thought.
And then we shift the thought into what I call an INT, an intentionally nourishing thought.
And that is like an affirmation.
But because it's come through this process, it's your customized affirmation.
Because we talked about this.
You can't free yourself through somebody else's affirmation.
No stuff you can, you gotta have done it for yourself.
That's right.
And so this int becomes the, the words that work for you, the words that that that, that that cool you out, that allow you to breathe.
So you find those words, the affirmation, the int, or a mantra that you can have in your mind.
And then, because I come from music and I understand the power of it, we then take that INT and attach it to a melody, make it a song.
So I call it a songtra.
That's what you mentioned earlier, songtra for emotional sovereignty.
Songtra is now your personalized affirmation, your personalized mantra to a melody that can stick in your head, because that's what music does.
That's beautiful.
And so I want to speak to.
When you have an affirmation, a mantra that is becomes your soundtrack and it's on loop in your mind, it changes everything.
It changes the lens that you are seeing the world.
And whether you use that songtra in advance in preparation, just walking through the world, which I use my songtras like, that you could also use them in the middle of crisis.
The thing happens and you think, wait, and you sing your mantra to yourself.
You cool yourself out.
One thing that I know you're very, very you emphasize a great deal is that this can work for everyone, right?
One does not need to be a musician.
You don't need to have any particular background.
It's a process by which we share a resource, right?
Yes.
What you know, I always use this quote.
One of my favorite quotes is from the great Grace Lee Boggs, activist.
And she said at the end of her life, and she lived to be 100.
She said, you know, I stopped thinking of things in terms of decades.
I started thinking of them in terms of centuries.
And I do want to just take time to acknowledge that you belong to tradition, right?
And, of course, your incredible parents, Diana Ross and Barry Gordy, who were waymakers and they broke molds.
And also your years of study with Abby Lincoln, right?
The great jazz musician, the music we call jazz, right?
And all of these other artists that you've collaborated with.
But I'm thinking about...
You know, I think of this all as a relay race that we get from our ancestors, something that we should not set down.
But we must carry forward, but in our way, coming back to your thing, of your voice, your particular inflection.
And I, just in our closing moments, I'd like for you to reflect on how you have walked with lineage and or what you think that idea of a relay race says to you.
What are you doing in your leg of the race?
Lord.
How much time do we have?
We don't have a lot.
You got two minutes.
Okay, I got it.
And change.
I can do this.
You can.
I know you can.
You said so much.
I do come out of jazz.
My husband, Rodney Kendrick, I want to say his name is an incredible pianist and he taught me so much with Abbey Lincoln about making your own music that there is no such thing as jazz, that Duke Ellington made Duke Ellington's music and Thelonious Monk made his music.
So to that... into that idea.
Yes, I'm making my own continuation.
And what I want to say is, this is personal work.
It's individualized work.
But when you do it, it reverberates out.
Beautiful.
And Eric Liu.
He said this morning, when I told him what emotional sovereignty was, he said oh, I love that, because sovereignty is not just get off my lawn.
Sovereignty is also I'm responsible for my lawn.
And I said, I'm going to say it later.
And so I say that to say when we are responsible for our own lawns and our own selves and our own mindset and our own feelings, that reverberates.
We're no longer victimized by what other people do in our circumstances, but we also don't become the victimizers.
We don't have to be out there controlling and manipulating and making people do the things.
Thank you.
Making people do the things.
Yes.
And I think at scale, it's big.
I think, when we look at all the, all the inequities, all the violence, all the cruelty, all the genocide,
It is because somebody has decided that somebody else has to do something for them to feel better.
Thank you.
And the minute we stop that, it ends.
Thank you.
Yeah, thank you.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's right.
That's beautiful.
Yes.
Perfect answer, right?
So you see what I tell you?
She's the truth.
Yes, indeed.
Thank you.
That was Rhonda Ross in conversation with Daniel Alexander Jones at TED Next 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong.
This episode was mixed by Lucy Little.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hu.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
Alex Rosenthal has aphantasia, meaning he can't visualize things like memories or even his daughter's face.
I can sometimes get like a tiny flash for like a fraction of a microsecond and then it's gone.
And for some people, it's just total blank slate.
That's next time on the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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