Preloading

How Embracing Our Brokenness Cultivates Compassion

Season 6 Episode 621
Aired on 11/01/2015 | CC tv-14
The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world. Attorney Bryan Stevenson has made it his life's mission to address this issue and bring to light the deep inequalities that plague our justice system. He believes we are all broken by injustice—not just the condemned—and we can begin our healing by extending empathy, compassion and mercy to all.

Bryan says experiencing his clients' brokenness has permitted him to see his own brokenness, and, ultimately, to learn the power of hope. "You learn that you have to believe things that you haven't seen if you really want to change the world," Bryan tells Oprah in their Super Soul Sunday interview.

"I also learned that I wasn't going to actually make a difference if the ideas in my mind weren't fueled by some conviction in my heart," he adds. "And so you learn to kind of trust what your heart tells you about what you have to do. You learn to stand when everybody else is sitting. You learn to speak when other people are quiet, because you have to do the thing that advances justice, that advances what you believe in."

In the video above, Bryan shares why he's become a more driven, compassionate person once he began working with the unjustly condemned.