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

by Brené Brown

shame is the fear of disconnection—the fear that we’re unlovable and don’t belong—makes it easy to see why so many people in midlife overfocus on their children’s lives, work sixty hours a week, or turn to affairs, addiction, and disengagement.

The three forms of shielding that I am about to introduce are what I refer to as the “common vulnerability arsenal” because I have found that we all incorporate them into our personal armor in some way. These include foreboding joy, or the paradoxical dread that clamps down on momentary joyfulness; perfectionism, or believing that doing everything perfectly means you’ll never feel shame; and numbing, the embrace of whatever deadens the pain of discomfort and pain.

Because when we lose the ability or willingness to be vulnerable, joy becomes something we approach with deep foreboding.

In a culture of deep scarcity—of never feeling safe, certain, and sure enough—joy can feel like a setup.

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These stories illustrate how the concept of foreboding joy as a method of minimizing vulnerability is best understood as a continuum that runs from “rehearsing tragedy” to what I call “perpetual disappointment.”

For those welcoming the experience, the shudder of vulnerability that accompanies joy is an invitation to practice gratitude, to acknowledge how truly grateful we are for the person, the beauty, the connection, or simply the moment before us.

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Okay, this can be fairly awkward in the middle of a conversation, but it’s much better than the alternative—catastrophizing and controlling.

Perfectionism is not self-improvement. Perfectionism is, at its core, about trying to earn approval.

Healthy striving is self- focused: How can I improve? Perfectionism is other-focused: What will they think? Perfectionism is a hustle.

Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.

Taking a balanced approach to negative emotions so that feelings are neither suppressed nor exaggerated. We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time. Mindfulness requires that we not “overidentify” with thoughts and feelings, so that we are caught up and swept away by negativity.

love how her definition of mindfulness reminds us that being mindful also means not overidentifying with or exaggerating our feelings.

These folks had elevated “enough” to whole new levels. Yes, they practiced mindfulness and leaning, but they also set serious boundaries in their lives.

What was interesting to me was how the participants could be divided into two camps: Group A defined the challenge of anxiety as finding ways to manage and soothe the anxiety, while Group B clearly defined the problem as changing the behaviors that led to anxiety.

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The smaller group, Group B—the participants who addressed anxiety at the root by aligning their lives with their values and setting boundaries—fell on the Wholehearted continuum.

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Are my choices comforting and nourishing my spirit, or are they temporary reprieves from vulnerability and difficult emotions ultimately diminishing my spirit?

“We train our warriors to use controlled violence and aggression, to suppress strong emotional reactions in the face of adversity, to tolerate physical and emotional pain, and to overcome the fear of injury and death. These qualities are also associated with increased risk for suicide.”

We have to give ourselves a break when we share too much too soon, and we have to practice self-kindness when we feel like we weren’t able to hold space for someone who hit us with the floodlight. Judgment exacerbates disconnection.

Serpentining is the perfect metaphor for how we spend enormous energy trying to dodge vulnerability when it would take far less effort to face it straight on.

“Don’t try to win over the haters; you’re not the jackass whisperer.”

When religious leaders leverage our fear and need for more certainty by extracting vulnerability from spirituality and turning faith into “compliance and consequences,” rather than teaching and modeling how to wrestle with the unknown and how to embrace mystery, the entire concept of faith is bankrupt on its own terms.

I’ve come to believe that a leader is anyone who holds her- or himself accountable for finding potential in people and processes.

Shame can only rise so far in any system before people disengage to protect themselves. When we’re disengaged, we don’t show up, we don’t contribute, and we stop caring.

Right off the bat, I believe that feedback thrives in cultures where the goal is not “getting comfortable with hard conversations” but normalizing discomfort.

Imagine the stress and anxiety of not knowing what you’re doing, trying to convince a customer that you do, not being able to ask for help, and not having anyone to talk to about your struggle. This is how we lose people. It’s too difficult to stay engaged in these circumstances. We start cutting corners, we stop caring, and we check out. After my talk, one of the mentors came up to me and said, “I’ve been in sales my entire career, and let me tell you, there’s nothing more important than having the courage to say, ‘I don’t know,’ and ‘I messed up’—being honest and open is key to success in every part of our lives.”

In terms of teaching our children to dare greatly in the “never enough” culture, the question isn’t so much “Are you parenting the right way?” as it is: “Are you the adult that you want your child to grow up to be?”

what we want for our children is what we want for ourselves—we want to raise children who live and love with their whole hearts.

As parents, we help our children develop shame resilience and worthiness by staying very mindful about the prerequisites that we’re knowingly or unknowingly handing down to them. Are we sending them overt or covert messages about what makes them more and less lovable? Or are we focusing on behaviors that need to change and making it clear that their essential worthiness is not on the table?

We may not always have a sense of belonging on the recess playground or at a big, fancy conference, but in that moment we knew that we belonged where it mattered the most—at home.

He explained that in its original Latin form, sacrifice means to make sacred or to make holy. I Wholeheartedly believe that when we are fully engaged in parenting, regardless of how imperfect, vulnerable, and messy it is, we are creating something sacred.

Hope is a function of struggle. If we want our children to develop high levels of hopefulness, we have to let them struggle.

According to Snyder, who dedicated his career to studying this topic, hope isn’t an emotion; it’s a way of thinking or a cognitive process. Emotions play a supporting role, but hope is really a thought process made up of what Snyder calls a trilogy of goals, pathways, and agency.

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Hope is learned! According to Snyder, children most often learn hope from their parents. To learn hopefulness, children need relationships that are characterized by boundaries, consistency, and support.