How to tune your inner voice | Rhonda Ross, Daniel Alexander Jones

March 21, 2026·22 min·1 clip

During a miscarriage, Rhonda learned from Viney Burroughs that she could choose how to translate devastating circumstances.

Host Elise Hu introduces Rhonda Ross as a singer, actress, and mindset coach who has developed a practice around emotional sovereignty through decades of personal and professional experience. Ross's conversation partner is Daniel Alexander Jones, a scholar and TED Fellow who frames the discussion within a tradition of artists pursuing freedom. Ross begins by describing a period of rapid success — a soap opera role, an Emmy nomination, marriage — followed by an equally rapid collapse: the show was canceled, the Emmy went to someone else, she was unemployed, physically separated from her husband, and struggling to conceive. She describes this as one of the darkest periods of her life, during which she blamed external circumstances and felt victimized and stuck. Through study and reading, Ross discovered research on the power of thought and concluded that between circumstances and feelings live our thoughts — an inner 'soundtrack on loop' — and that this soundtrack, not the circumstances themselves, determines emotional states. She named this insight emotional sovereignty and has spent 25 years teaching it through music, art, and coaching. Alexander Jones introduces the story of their shared mentor Viney Burroughs, a theater artist who began on Broadway in the 1950s, was limited by racial restrictions, created one of the first solo performance pieces, and performed over 6,000 times across her career. Burroughs's motto — 'Life is motion' — becomes a touchstone for the conversation. Ross then shares a deeply personal story: she was experiencing a miscarriage during rehearsals for Alexander Jones's play in Minneapolis, and Burroughs witnessed her distress, grabbed her, and offered a reframe that shifted her perspective. Ross also recounts a friend telling her during her third miscarriage that her body was 'getting ready for the one,' a reframe she chose to accept. She gives a more mundane but relatable example: a meltdown on 125th Street in Harlem when her son wasn't where his tracker said he was, and how she caught herself and applied her own practice in real time. Alexander Jones raises the story of Harriet Tubman waking before the Combahee River Raid and declaring 'My people are free' in the present tense, connecting it to the power of affirmation and narrative. Ross then walks through her four-step 'Tune Your Inner Voice' process: step one is acknowledging that an inner space exists and that you have agency in it; step two is sitting with and precisely naming your feeling; step three is identifying the automatic sabotaging thought driving the feeling; step four is replacing it with an intentionally nourishing thought, a customized affirmation. Because Ross comes from music, she adds a fifth element: attaching the affirmation to a melody to create a 'songtra,' a personalized mantra-song that loops in the mind. Alexander Jones acknowledges Ross's lineage — her parents Diana Ross and Berry Gordy, her years studying with jazz musician Abbey Lincoln, and her husband pianist Rodney Kendrick — and asks her to reflect on her place in a relay race of artists pursuing freedom. Ross responds by invoking Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk as models of making one's own music, and frames her work as her own continuation of that tradition. She closes by citing Eric Liu's reframe of sovereignty — not just 'get off my lawn' but 'I'm responsible for my lawn' — and argues that when individuals take responsibility for their own emotional states, they stop needing to control or victimize others. She scales this to a macro claim: that cruelty, inequity, and violence all stem from someone deciding another person must act a certain way for them to feel better, and that emotional sovereignty practiced at scale could end that cycle.

As heard by us

Ross on the gap between what happened and the story you build around it.

Rhonda Ross and scholar Daniel Alexander-Jones spend most of the hour on what Ross calls emotional sovereignty -- the idea that the stories you run in your head shape how you feel as much as anything that actually happened.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You've talked yourself into a panic before. This one is about talking yourself back out.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from TED Talks Daily