Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

by Brené Brown

The feelings of powerlessness that often accompany failure start with those all-too-familiar “could have” or “should have” self-inventories. And our fear grows in tandem with the strength of our belief that an opening has been forever closed.

Pervasive feelings of powerlessness eventually lead to despair. My favorite definition of despair comes from author and pastor Rob Bell: Despair is a spiritual condition. It’s the belief that tomorrow will be just like today.

Hope is not an emotion: It’s a cognitive process—a thought process made up of what researcher C. R. Snyder called the trilogy of “goals, pathways, and agency.” Hope happens when we can set goals, have the tenacity and perseverance to pursue those goals, and believe in our own abilities to act. Snyder also found that hope is learned. When boundaries, consistency, and support are in place, children learn it from their parents.

Hope is a function of struggle. If we’re never allowed to fall or face adversity as children, we are denied the opportunity to develop the tenacity and sense of agency we need to be hopeful.

When you’re rumbling with failure and it’s clear that the choices you made along the way were not in alignment with your values, you have to grapple not only with the fallout of failing but also with the feeling that you betrayed yourself.

If there is one thing failure has taught me, it is the value of regret. Regret is one of the most powerful emotional reminders that change and growth are necessary. In fact, I’ve come to believe that regret is a kind of package deal: A function of empathy, it’s a call to courage and a path toward wisdom. Like all emotions, regret can be used constructively or destructively, but the wholesale dismissal of regret is wrongheaded and dangerous.

To live without regret is to believe you have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with your life.

“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

I believe that what we regret most are our failures of courage, whether it’s the courage to be kinder, to show up, to say how we feel, to set boundaries, to be good to ourselves. For that reason, regret can be the birthplace of empathy. When I think of the times when I wasn’t being kind or generous—when I chose being liked over defending someone or something that deserved defending—I feel deep regret, but I’ve also learned something: Regret is what taught me that living outside of my values is not tenable for me. Regrets about not taking chances have made me braver. Regrets about shaming or blaming people I care about have made me more thoughtful. Sometimes the most uncomfortable learning is the most powerful.

I had a visceral reaction when Andrew compared shame to being under a rock. I knew exactly what he was talking about when he described the folly of trying to make decisions while in that impossibly dark, heavy, suffocating place. When we experience shame, we are hijacked by the limbic part of the brain that limits our options to “flight, fight, or freeze.” Those survival responses rarely leave room for thought, which is why most of us desperately shift around under the rock, looking for reflexive relief by hiding, blaming or lashing out, or by people pleasing.

climbing out will leave us more exposed and, ultimately, require more courage.

When I’m in the whirlwind of high emotion, writing my SFD in the form of a letter, or even fantasizing about what I’d like to say to someone, can help me get clear on the story I’m making up. As I mentioned in Chapter Three, “Owning Our Stories,” the value of writing and storytelling came up in the research, but it wasn’t until I thought about this particular story that I connected it to myself. It’s nice to know there’s some constructive use for all those conversations and revenge schemes I rehearse in my head when I’m lying in bed at night.

I believe we all need that. It’s unfair to ask our partners to hold space for the thrashing about that is a necessary part of the reckoning and the rumble, especially when they’re part of the story. The same is true for our colleagues.

they had created what I call “a safe container”—a place where people can share experiences honestly, knowing that what they share will be respected and kept in confidence.

I always warn people—especially mental health professionals—not to be seduced into believing that they can manage these moments simply because they’ve learned how they work. We call shame the master emotion for a reason.

My forehead still resting on my knees, I realized that I needed to say it out loud. A decade of studying shame had taught me the value of doing the one thing that felt the scariest and most counterintuitive—I had to speak shame. I had to say this out loud: “I have such shame about mispronouncing words and things like that. I feel stupid and small and found out and ashamed and afraid and like an impostor and like someone who got caught pretending to be smart.”

Men and women with high levels of shame resilience: 1. Understand shame and recognize what messages and expectations trigger shame for them. 2. Practice critical awareness by reality-checking the messages and expectations that tell us that being imperfect means being inadequate. 3. Reach out and share their stories with people they trust. 4. Speak shame—they use the word shame, they talk about how they’re feeling, and they ask for what they need.

In the process of reality-checking the messages that fuel shame, we often have to dig into identity, labels, and stereotypes. We also have to explore whether the expectations are rooted, as they often are, in nostalgia or the perilous practice of comparing a current struggle with an edited version of “the way things used to be.”

Like the time in Boise when my microphone fell off its stand for the twentieth time and, out of total frustration, I shouted, “Well, shit fire and save matches!” in front of 1,500 people. I got a sweet email from a woman who wrote, “It made me cry when you said that. I hadn’t heard anyone say that since my granny died.”

From Long Island to Silicon Valley, a fear of being perceived as weak forces men into pretending they are never afraid, lonely, confused, vulnerable, or wrong; and an extreme fear of being perceived as cold-hearted, imperfect, high maintenance, or hostile forces women to pretend they’re never exhausted, ambitious, pissed off, or even hungry.

Nostalgia sounds relatively harmless, even like something to indulge in with a modicum of comfort, until we examine the two Greek root words that form nostalgia: nostos, meaning “returning home,” and algos, meaning “pain.” Romanticizing our history to relieve pain is seductive. But it’s also dangerous.

Of all the things trauma takes away from us, the worst is our willingness, or even our ability, to be vulnerable. There’s a reclaiming that has to happen.

To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. —Aristotle

cheap-seat criticism is dangerous. Here’s why: 1. It hurts. The really cruel things people say about us are painful. Cheap-seat folks are season-ticket holders in the arena. They’re good at what they do and they can hit us right where it hurts: our shame triggers. For women, they’ll go after appearance, body image, mothering, and anything else that could dent be-perfect-and-make-everyone-happy expectations. For men, they’ll go straight for the jugular—any appearance of weakness or failure. This is dangerous because after a few hits, we start playing smaller and smaller, making ourselves harder targets. We’re more difficult to hit when we’re small, but we’re also less likely to make a contribution.

2. It doesn’t hurt. We turn to the old standby, “I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks.” We stop caring or, at the very least, we start pretending that we don’t care. This is also dangerous. Not caring what people think is its own hustle. The armor we have to wear to make not caring a reality is heavy, uncomfortable, and quickly obsolete. If you look at the history of armor (as any history-loving vulnerability researcher would) you see a forever-escalating story of weapons and fighting styles. You cover every inch of your body with plate armor? Okay, we’ll start fighting with a tapered sword that can penetrate the small gaps. You cover those gaps? We’ll use maces that can cause injury through your armor. Not caring what people think is a hustle, and it’s not winnable.

3. When cheap-seat criticism becomes the loudest, most prevalent type of criticism we encounter, it pushes out the idea that thoughtful criticism and feedback can be and often are useful. We stop teaching people how to offer constructive, helpful feedback and critiques, and, in order to save ourselves, we shut down all incoming data. We start to exist in echo chambers where nothing we do or say is challenged. This is also dangerous.

When we stop caring what people think, we lose our capacity for connection. But when we are defined by what people think, we lose the courage to be vulnerable. The solution is getting totally...

I was full of shame and fear after reading Pamela’s email that day. But the real pain came from comparing my SFD to what I learned from my rumbles and from realizing that the rock hadn’t been rolled on top of me—I had crawled under a rock of my own making.

Our identities are always changing and growing, they’re not meant to be pinned down. Our histories are never all good or all bad, and running from the past is the surest way to be defined by it. That’s when it owns us. The key is bringing light to the darkness—developing awareness and understanding. And just because we know and understand something in our heads doesn’t mean that we won’t slip up when we’re overwhelmed by emotion.

Carl Jung wrote, “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

In The Gifts, I describe this transformation as a wholehearted revolution: A small, quiet, grassroots movement that starts with each of us saying, “My story matters because I matter.” A movement where we can take to the streets with our messy, imperfect, wild, stretch-marked, wonderful, heartbreaking, grace-filled, and joyful lives. A movement fueled by the freedom that comes when we stop pretending that everything is okay when it isn’t. A call that rises up from our bellies when we find the courage to celebrate those intensely joyful moments even though we’ve convinced ourselves that savoring happiness is inviting disaster.

I wrote in The Gifts: Revolution might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance. Choosing to live and love with our whole hearts is an act of defiance. You’re going to confuse, piss off, and terrify lots of people—including yourself. One minute you’ll pray that the transformation stops, and the next minute you’ll pray that it never ends. You’ll also wonder how you can feel so brave and so afraid at the same time. At least that’s how I feel most of the time…brave, afraid, and very, very alive.

The conspiracies and confabulations that we tend to make up in the face of limited data can tear away at the heart of organizations. Allowing fifty employees to come up with fifty different stories about a leader’s cryptic email is a tremendous waste of energy, time, and talent. Instead, we should put in place a system where people can go to their managers and say, “We need a rumble on that email about the new evaluation system.” Curiosity, clean communication, circling back, and rumbling become part of the culture. Just like people, when organizations own their stories and take responsibility for their actions, they get to write the new endings. When they deny their stories, people on the outside, like the media, take over the story’s authorship to write new narratives that could come to define the organization.

I asked students to write down their first short response to the idea of privilege—a fast story that we could rumble on. One of the white women in the class wrote, “You don’t know me. I came from nothing. I worked for everything I have. I didn’t come from privilege—I’m just like you. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.” This led to a painful discussion about the true nature of unearned privilege and how it has nothing to do with working hard. It’s about being afforded special, almost invisible privileges because of our group membership.

After listening to everyone rumble with both their pain and their privilege, the white woman who wrote the “you don’t know me” note said, “I get it, but I can’t spend my life focusing on the negative things—especially what the black and Hispanic students are talking about. It’s too hard. Too painful.” And before anyone could say a word, she had covered her face with her hands and started to cry. In an instant, we were all in that marshy, dark delta with her. She wiped her face and said, “Oh my God. I get it: I can choose to be bothered when it suits me. I don’t have to live this every day.”

MANIFESTO OF THE BRAVE AND BROKENHEARTED There is no greater threat to the critics and cynics and fearmongers Than those of us who are willing to fall Because we have learned how to rise With skinned knees and bruised hearts; We choose owning our stories of struggle, Over hiding, over hustling, over pretending. When we deny our stories, they define us. When we run from struggle, we are never free. So we turn toward truth and look it in the eye. We will not be characters in our stories. Not villains, not victims, not even heroes. We are the authors of our lives. We write our own daring endings. We craft love from heartbreak, Compassion from shame, Grace from disappointment, Courage from failure. Showing up is our power. Story is our way home. Truth is our song. We are the brave and brokenhearted. We are rising strong.

TEN GUIDEPOSTS FOR WHOLEHEARTED LIVING 1. Cultivating authenticity: letting go of what people think 2. Cultivating self-compassion: letting go of perfectionism 3. Cultivating a resilient spirit: letting go of numbing and powerlessness 4. Cultivating gratitude and joy: letting go of scarcity and fear of the dark 5. Cultivating intuition and trusting faith: letting go of the need for certainty 6. Cultivating creativity: letting go of comparison 7. Cultivating play and rest: letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth 8. Cultivating calm and stillness: letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle 9. Cultivating meaningful work: letting go of self-doubt and “supposed to” 10. Cultivating laughter, song, and dance: letting go of being cool and “always in control”

I define vulnerability as exposure, uncertainty, and emotional risk. Yes, feeling vulnerable is at the core of difficult emotions like fear, grief, and disappointment, but it’s also the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, empathy, innovation, and creativity. When we shut ourselves off from vulnerability, we distance ourselves from the experiences that bring purpose and meaning to our lives.

Shame derives its power from being unspeakable. That’s why it loves perfectionists—we’re so easy to keep quiet. If we cultivate enough awareness about shame to name it and speak to it, we’ve basically cut it off at the knees. Just the way exposure to light was deadly for the Gremlins, language and story bring light to shame and destroy it.

As children we found ways to protect ourselves from vulnerability, from being hurt, diminished, and disappointed. We put on armor; we used our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors as weapons; and we learned how to make ourselves scarce, even to disappear. Now as adults we realize that to live with courage, purpose, and connection—to be the people we long to be—we must again be vulnerable. The courage to be vulnerable means taking off the armor we use to protect ourselves, putting down the weapons that we use to keep people at a distance, showing up, and letting ourselves be seen.