[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt1NxBcp5p8[/embedyt]

Each year the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) is a huge event. Singers from different genres come together to celebrate each other and it seems as though there is always something that happens that is blowing up Twitter, Facebook and articles everywhere. This year you can see many articles on Taylor Swift’s new music video premiere, how people dressed, who sang better than the next person, but what I think is the most important piece of all of it is that Pink took her platform to share a story to help everyone out there.

I get chills because celebrities have so many chances to create impact through their voice and their platform and many choose to not use it in a bright way. During Pink’s acceptance speech while winning the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, she shared a personal story in the hope to share the importance of loving yourself. Pink shared that her daughter recently told her that she was the ugliest person she knew. “I look like a boy with long hair,” she said. In response, Pink made her a PowerPoint presentation, and filled it with pictures of Prince and David Bowie and Annie Lennox and Janis Joplin: “androgynous rock stars,” she said, “and artists that live their truth, are probably made fun of every day of their lives, and carry on, and wave their flag, and inspire the rest of us.”

Pink shared that when people have made fun of her that they say she looks like a boy, is too strong, has too many opinions or is too masculine. So she told us as well as her daughter that we shouldn’t change but we take the gravel and shell and make a pearl. 

Her speech is a reminder that women of all ages faces this issue of trying to fit in with beauty, and meeting the standards of society. She has faced it, her daughter has faced it, I have faced it and so have you!

So what are we going to do about it to change it? Here are the 5 things I took away that we can now use to create impact:

  1. Use your life to empower others. Use your voice to create impact.

  2. You are beautiful 

  3. We don’t change. We take the gravel and the shell and make a pearl. But we help other people see that there many kinds of beauty

  4. Be you. It will inspire others.

  5. When someone says they are ugly or need to change. Get a powerpoint presentation together and show them just how beautiful they really are (inside and out) 

Let’s use what Pink taught us and showed us to go make an even bigger impact on the world.