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Key insights from
Daring Greatly
By
Brene Brown
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What you'll learn
Author Brené Brown humorously proclaims herself a
professional “vulnerability avoider.” In the safety of her research, she
spent 12 years studying everything there is to know about vulnerability and
its relationship to shame. With the data collected, she was confronted with
a choice: to dare greatly in the face of vulnerability, or to recoil in
shame. This book provides practical insight into the nature of
vulnerability and how it directly impacts the human experience.
Read on for key insights from Daring Greatly.
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1. To live is to
be vulnerable — there’s no avoiding it.
Being vulnerable is not a trait reserved for a certain
gender or the sentimental souls among us. Vulnerability is simply the
uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure inherent in life. We all face the
same choice: engage with life on its own terms or run and hide. The title
of this book was inspired by Theodore Roosevelt’s famous speech
“Citizenship in a Republic.” In his speech, Roosevelt imagines the good
life as an arena in which the man who enters must do so while, “daring
greatly.” Vulnerability is when you put yourself out there, engaging with
life in the arena rather than from the sidelines. Most often, we try to
avoid being vulnerable because we are afraid. We fear vulnerability because
we see it as weakness. The allure of building an invulnerable self is
seductive, but it doesn’t exist in the human experience. We must be willing
to engage with vulnerability, whether that be in a new relationship,
through a difficult conversation, or amidst the inevitable challenges of
parenting.
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2. Vulnerability
isn’t good or bad; it’s just a sign that you are able to feel things.
Vulnerability is often associated with dark emotions like
fear, shame, and sadness. We avoid feelings that we associate with
vulnerability because these “dark emotions” are precisely the ones that we
don’t want to express, even when they profoundly impact the way we parent,
love, and lead. Vulnerability is not the composite of dark emotions; it is
the core of all feeling. To feel anything at all is to be vulnerable. If we
choose to disengage from any emotion, whether it be dark or light, we exile
our emotional lives and risk numbing the center of all feeling—including
those feelings we all want, such as joy, love, and empathy.
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3. Allowing
yourself to be vulnerable is a sign of strength, not weakness.
The word vulnerable means “to wound” or “capable of being
wounded,” whereas weakness is defined as “the inability to withstand attack
or wounding.” From a purely linguistic perspective, one could make the
argument that weakness stems from a lack of vulnerability, for if ignored,
the risk of being hurt increases. If vulnerability is weakness, why does it
look like strength in others? We’re inspired when people face failure and
trials with raw honesty and openness, yet we shame ourselves when we feel
weak amidst similar challenges. The crux of the struggle is that we want to
see vulnerability in others but don’t want to be vulnerable ourselves. If
we want our children or a loved one to be vulnerable with us, we must
reject this double standard and enter the arena ourselves.
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4. Vulnerable
communication should be reserved for those who have earned your trust.
The world doesn’t need another awkward moment of
indiscriminate disclosure or celebrity information dumps. Vulnerability is
associated with over-sharing, but true vulnerability is communicated within
boundaries and is based on trust. Without trust, vulnerability is wasted on
those who have not earned the right to hear you. We won’t always have a one
hundred percent guarantee before we risk opening up with somebody, but
there is no reason to bare our souls with everyone we meet.
Without boundaries, vulnerable communication can lead to
disconnection and distrust. Just like any good thing, vulnerability can be
mishandled. This happens when people use vulnerability to deal with their
unmet emotional needs or simply to attract attention.
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5. The “never
enough” mantra of our culture tempers vulnerability and creates shame.
It doesn’t take much to be inspired by high and lofty
thoughts like “daring greatly,” but we may feel emotionally conflicted. On
the one hand, we desire to courageously make ourselves vulnerable, but on
the other hand we feel inadequate to actually do it. It takes more than a
spur of inspiration to be vulnerable because to do so challenges culture.
Our culture is saturated in fear. This fear creates a strong
drive for self-protection. Before we even get out of bed in the morning,
we’re plagued with thoughts about how we don’t have enough time, didn’t get
enough done, didn’t say the right words, didn’t eat the right foods, etc.
On an unconscious level, this scarcity mindset creates shame. Shame is
distinct from guilt. We feel guilty when our actions were not enough; we
feel ashamed when we believe that we are not enough. Thoughts of shame can
take root quickly, and before we know it we feel ashamed at just existing
because in some way or another, we’re never enough.
Scarcity doesn’t take hold of a culture overnight, but with
the expansion of media-driven comparison and unreasonable expectations for
what can be accomplished in a 24-hour day, there is deep shame. We’re not
ashamed of our collective identity as Americans, but because enough
individuals are struggling with the issue of worthiness, shame is silently
shaping our culture. Understanding shame, vulnerability, and our emotional
lives is not secondary to reforming the education system, meeting the needs
of the homeless, or any other worthy endeavor. The shame we carry directly
affects how we educate, advocate, and lead.
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6. The opposite of
scarcity is adequacy, not abundance.
A popular trend has emerged over the last decade of slapping
the label “narcissist” on anyone talking about worthiness or self-love.
Ironically, the first targets of this finger-pointing are those individuals
who have made their life’s work the expansion of shame-free and worthiness
language. Believing you are enough is not egotistical and labeling people
as such only exacerbates the problem by creating more self-protection and
shame. The attitude of being enough can be thought of as wholeheartedness,
of which two core tenets are intrinsic worthiness and vulnerability. It is
only when you can accept being enough that will you be able to dare greatly
in the face of the inevitable uncertainty, exposure, and emotional risks of
life.
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7. Shame takes
hold when we confuse what we do with who we are.
We run from vulnerability because we’re afraid of shame and
how shame makes us feel. Shame is distinct from embarrassment, guilt, or
humiliation. These terms refer to the painful emotional reactions to things
we have done. Shame, however, is felt when our thinking shifts and we
believe that we, our very essence, is now unworthy of being seen because of
what we have done. If we hide from this painful feeling, we numb the center
of all feeling.
Shame can also be defined as the fear of disconnection. The
human condition, with its inevitable heights and depths, is no walk in the
park, and it is almost unbearable without human connection. Shame dares us
to do the impossible, to live in a state void of connection and love. But
connection and love are the very things that make surviving worthwhile.
Just like darkness is defeated by exposure to light, voicing
our shame quickly destroys it. The more aware we are of what shame is, the
quicker we can identify it with language and free ourselves from its grip.
If we have let shame fester, sharing our story with a trusted friend will
expose it. We can also take a more proactive approach, and make it a habit
to speak our shame in the moment and then replace it with the truth. The
truth will always be that we are enough and that our imperfect actions are
distinct from our identity.
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8. Cultural
expectations surrounding femininity and masculinity can trigger shame.
Expectations surrounding gender may be the greatest source
of shame in our culture. For women, the primary shame trigger is being
perceived as imperfect or not enough. Women feel they have to be everything
to everyone. They feel it is expected that they remain calm, cool, and
collected in the midst of chaos. Women feel voiceless to communicate their
stress and failures in the various roles and responsibilities they hold.
Shame does not have to exist in this space anymore, but until women learn
to identify the shame and use language to demythologize it, it will fester
and keep them from vulnerability and connection.
For men, the greatest shame trigger is being seen as
emotionally weak or a failure at work. These triggers sound like outdated
stereotypes, yet they persist. After Brown delivered a talk at TEDx
Houston, she was approached by a man who, with tears in his eyes, told her
how sick he was of women begging him to be emotionally vulnerable only to
find his emotions unappealing once he brought them to the surface. He
said that the women in his life would rather see him die on the horse
before they watched him fall off it. This story illustrates the great need
that men have to be vulnerable. We need to create a safe place for the
entire spectrum of emotions to be communicated.
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9. Vulnerability
has the power to rehumanize us.
Vulnerability is bravely engaging with the uncertainty,
risk, and emotional exposure inherent in life. Being vulnerable is being
human. Shame is the fear of disconnection where the greatest human needs
include connection, love, and belonging. If engagement is the key to
vulnerability, then disengagement is the enemy of it. Disengagement is
similar to the “flight” in a fight-or-flight response.
For those who have experienced the dark side of religious or
political dogmatism, they know how fitting an illustration it is for
disengagement. In its true nature, spiritual connection is a product of
love and belonging which are vulnerabilities. When spirituality is divorced
from its very nature and replaced with compliance and consequences, a grave
exploitation of vulnerability has taken place. People’s search for
absolutes in religion is often birthed in vulnerability. There is an
admittance of fear and an honest desperation for something or someone to
tell us the truth of who we are. If religious leaders fail to model the
true nature of spirituality, which includes wrestling with the unknown,
they are merely leveraging vulnerability to meet their needs. Disengagement
happens when any culture, whether a family, a school, or a corporation, is
afraid to share their honest feelings.
Although disengagement has become socially acceptable, it is
worth fighting against. You can only give what you have, so the first step
is choosing to engage with your own inherent vulnerability. Take a good
look at your humanness and choose to embrace yourself as worthy. Speak your
shame out of existence and decide what kind of parent, person, and leader
you are going to model for those in your sphere of influence.
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Endnotes
Neutral news is
hard to find. The Pour Over
provides concise, politically neutral, and entertaining summaries of the
world’s biggest news paired with reminders to stay focused on eternity, and
delivers it straight to your inbox. It's free, too. Check it out.
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Daring
Greatly here. And since we get a commission on
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