Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

by Brené Brown

When shame becomes a management style, engagement dies. When failure is not an option we can forget about learning, creativity, and innovation.

How are our struggles and behaviors related to protecting ourselves?

Think about how often we compare ourselves and our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed: “Remember when…? Those were the days…”

Vulnerability is the core of all emotions and feelings. To feel is to be vulnerable. To believe vulnerability is weakness is to believe that feeling is weakness. To foreclose on our emotional life out of a fear that the costs will be too high is to walk away from the very thing that gives purpose and meaning to living.

If you’re wondering what happens if you attach your self-worth to your art or your product and people love it, let me answer that from personal and professional experience. You’re in even deeper trouble. Everything shame needs to hijack and control your life is in place. You’ve handed over your self-worth to what people think. It’s panned out a couple of times, but now it feels a lot like Hotel California: You can check in, but you can never leave. You’re officially a prisoner of “pleasing, performing, and perfecting.”

I mean the ability to practice authenticity when we experience shame, to move through the experience without sacrificing our values, and to come out on the other side of the shame experience with more courage, compassion, and connection than we had going into it. Shame resilience is about moving from shame to empathy—the real antidote to shame.

every choice has consequences or leads to someone being disappointed.

You spend your life fighting to get out, throwing punches at the side of the box and hoping it will break. You always feel angry and you’re always swinging. Or you just give up. You don’t give a shit about anything.”

“Or you stay high so you don’t really notice how unbearable it is. That’s the easiest way.”

it’s so scary to have sex with someone you care about when you’re worried about how your body looks.

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt.”

“I used to take every good thing and imagine the worst possible disaster,”

“I would literally picture the worst-case scenario and try to control all of the outcomes.

increasingly afraid to try new things,

“It’s easier to live disappointed than it is to feel disappointed. It feels more vulnerable to dip in and out of disappointment than to just set up camp there. You sacrifice joy, but you suffer less pain.”

When we spend our lives (knowingly or unknowingly) pushing away vulnerability, we can’t hold space open for the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure of joy.

The fear of failing, making mistakes, not meeting people’s expectations, and being criticized keeps us outside of the arena where healthy competition and striving unfolds.

there is no way to control perception, no matter how much time and energy we spend trying.

If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging.

using vulnerability is not the same thing as being vulnerable; it’s the opposite—it’s armor.

being vulnerable with a larger audience is only a good idea if the healing is tied to the sharing, not to the expectations I might have for the response I get.

“Worthiness is my birthright.”

If you don’t feel comfortable owning it, then don’t say it.

We can’t give people what we don’t have.

An organization is not the physical facilities within which it operates; it is the networks of people in it.”

Without feedback there can be no transformative change. When we don’t talk to the people we’re leading about their strengths and their opportunities for growth, they begin to question their contributions and our commitment.

The size, severity, or complexity of a problem doesn’t always reflect our emotional reactivity to it.

“Are you the adult that you want your child to grow up to be?”

I say “dangerous” because certainty often breeds absolutes, intolerance, and judgment.

“What we are teaches the child more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.”

The important thing to know about worthiness is that it doesn’t have prerequisites.

Shame corrodes the part of us that believes we can do and be better.

letting their children struggle and experience adversity.

I had spent many years never trying anything that I wasn’t already good at doing, and how those choices almost made me forget what it feels like to be brave. I said, “Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up.”