Mikel Jollett

Mikel Jollett Speaking Topics

• TRAUMA AND CREATIVITY: HOW YOUR EXPERIENCE BECOMES YOUR PURPOSE

  Despite our successes, we all carry trauma. Even if we haven’t used that word to describe our experiences, we each bear the burden of shame and guilt. And by simply being human, we all endure grief over those we’ve lost. Inside the highly-curated personas we’ve built, we have constructed monuments to this grief. These monuments lurk in our hearts and minds, unseen by our co-workers, friends, family and community. They may not even be apparent to ourselves. Yet these monuments make us into the people we are today. 90% of the art in the world is an external manifestation of these internal monuments. And our stories, even the ones we don’t want to tell – especially the ones we don’t want to tell – are a gift. Healing from these scars, while harnessing their power, enables us to offer our true value to the world: as artists, as creators, as leaders, and as people. With his sharp wit and extraordinary vulnerability, Mikel constructs a road map that allows listeners to transform even the most challenging life experiences into opportunities for growth. Audiences will emerge with a greater capacity for creativity and productivity.

• UNDERSTANDING AND SURVIVING NARCISSISM

  Narcissistic Personality Disorder affects 1-2% of the population worldwide and is often overrepresented at the leadership level of government and business. NPD hews to predictable patterns, yet we do not have a common language for it, as we do with other mental illnesses like depression, addiction, or schizophrenia. In this highly engaging talk, Mikel Jollett recounts his life raised by a deeply narcissistic mother, who as a result of her mental illness, subjected him to violence, severe neglect, malnutrition, and a childhood without empathy. It is the goal of the narcissist to turn others into mirrors which reflect their fabricated worlds back on themselves. Jollett understood from an early age that was his role. After several of her mental breakdowns, Jollett finally begins to understand his mother’s emotional disorder and how to protect himself from it. Armed with the knowledge of therapy and deep research, he takes an entertaining scalpel to the narcissist as parent, the horrible choices they make, and the predictable roles they force their children into.

  By examining his personal narrative, he is able to pull the lens back on the global impact; examining the narcissist as political leader who gains the power to drag an entire society into his madness. In doing so, Mikel arms listeners with tools to name narcissistic tendencies; to understand them; and ultimately to resist them so that we might as a society find a better way to live our lives.

GRIEF AND OTHER DREAMSCAPES: HOW WHAT WE LOST COMES TO DEFINE WHAT WE LOVE

Grieving is art. It exists outside the bounds of our waking world. Somewhere, in a parallel dimension, it reveals a place both stranger and larger than the place we live in on a day to day basis. Our daily existence is a space too small for the enormity of the loss we feel. It’s not that grieving is an art to be mastered, rather, it is best understood as portal through which we walk to become the new people we must become having suffered the loss we’ve suffered. The process makes us new people who can accept the loss, because we changed forever the day we lost the one we loved. In this touching and funny talk, based on Mikel Jollett’s viral piece on NPR’s All Things Considered, he recounts his unusual relationship with his heroine-addicted, ex-con father, who despite his many flaws, is steadfast in his love for his son. It is that very love that ends up saving Jollett’s life.

Upon his father’s death, Jollett realizes his entire world has been set aflame and he wanders the dreamscape of deep depression and grief. In his striving to become the person who can grasp the enormity of the loss, he discovers the gift his father gave him: the love of family and a steadfast commitment to his newborn children.

CULTS OF THE MIND, CULTS OF THE HEART, CULTS OF THE REAL WORLD

It’s popular to think of the world of cults as a strange outpost of human civilization, a kind of carnival freak show of human behavior that we watch with rapt attention. But the truth is that cult psychology — that of total devotion to a leader, information control and violence — exists on a spectrum. Not limited to the fringes of society, the organizations and ideologies we interact wtih every day can all have these cult-like elements. These are alway bad, always toxic and counterproductive, whether it is a religious organization, a family, a political movement, or even a Fortune 500 company.

In this riveting and hilarious talk, Mikel Jollett tells the story of escaping the Church of Synanon Cult as a child, how he and his family lived on the run from its violence for years, and eventually came to understand its devastating consequences. As a student at Stanford University, Jollett discovers the scholarship of mind control and cults and begins a lifelong journey to understand and ultimately deconstruct the forces at work on his parents and their peers. Through empathy and curiosity, he is able to recognize how they came to be so devoted to an abusive ideology, how that devotion hurt their children, and how they ultimately were able to become free from its grasp. He then applies these ideas to the cults of the mind and heart all around us. From destructive organizations, relationships, and political movements (including the rise of fascism in the United States), the goal is to understand, identify and equip ourselves to resist and dismantle these toxic forces at every level.