The gift of your flaws: why this makes you extraordinary | Kalyani Pardeshi | TEDxHEC Montréal

Kalyani Pardeshi opens by asking the audience to recall the labels they were given early in life—too sensitive, too emotional, a know-it-all—and argues that for many people, these labels were treated as flaws requiring correction. She shares a personal story from her own culture, where sensitivity was viewed as a liability. Her mother briefly considered a brutal initiation ritual in which a person walks through thorns without crying, the silence of pain being seen as strength. Though the ritual was never carried out, Pardeshi spent decades suppressing her authentic self, trying to 'fix' her sensitivity and be 'normal.'

She then introduces a framework called 'intangible drivers,' developed by Floss, which she describes as the intrinsic motivation that energizes a person regardless of context. Using the analogy of two people buying identical cars that diverge over time based on how each driver uses them, she explains that the 'driver' is one's core motivational identity. The framework identifies seven intangible drivers; she names three: perceivers, teachers, and compassionators. Each person operates through a combination of two drivers—one governing intention (the effect one wants to have on others) and one governing action (how one brings about that effect). Pardeshi identifies her own drivers as 'compassion server,' meaning she gains energy by bearing others' emotional pain and helping them grow. This insight explains her burnout as a CPA: numbers feel no pain and cannot grow emotionally, leaving her unable to access her energy source.

Pardeshi then describes taking this framework into a young offender center in September 2024, where she ran a mental wellness program called Instant Impact. She focuses on a 17-year-old she calls Leo, whose assessment revealed he was a 'server giver'—someone motivated to offer ideas, solutions, or gifts to fill a need. Incarcerated and without an outlet for giving, Leo had shut down completely, punctuating every session with 'I don't give an f.' Pardeshi used her understanding of his drivers to reframe his attitude not as indifference but as a trauma response: the world had repeatedly rejected his attempts to give, so he stopped. This realization visibly cracked Leo's emotional armor. When she later challenged him—'If life was so good at 13, what are you doing here?'—he called her annoying, but she recognized that as progress. She told him the greatest gift he could give her was caring. By the final session, Leo was asking substantive questions, engaging with guards, and at a later mentoring event, he spent an hour patiently teaching her a board game—even suggesting moves that would make him lose. His personality had not changed; the conditions had changed to allow his natural driver to express itself safely.

Pardeshi then presents quantitative data from Floss's work with school staff supporting students with emotional and behavioral disorders. A middle school counselor implemented intangible drivers in an EBD classroom. In the 2016–17 and 2017–18 school years, fewer than 10 students generated up to 48 seclusions and 21 restraints annually. After staff began engaging students through their intangible drivers, seclusions and restraints dropped to zero by 2018–19 and remained at zero through 2021–22. Suspensions, which had ranged from 20–28 incidents and 47–66 suspension days, dropped by over 60% in suspension days by 2019–20 and were nearly eliminated by 2021–22. One specific student had been physically restrained 88 times in the first three months of school—nearly once every school day—but after staff understood his drivers, restraints fell to zero over the following six months.

Pardeshi closes by returning to her personal narrative, noting that the very sensitivity her mother tried to eliminate was the only tool capable of reaching Leo. Had she become the 'tough, unfeeling woman' her culture prescribed, she would have seen an offender rather than a server giver in an unhealthy environment. She reframes the audience's perceived flaws—sharp observation, a tendency to teach, deep sensitivity—as potential superpowers, and invites them to reconsider whether what they have been trying to fix is actually what makes them extraordinary.