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

by Brené Brown

When we own our stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in stories someone else is telling.

The epigraph for Daring Greatly is Theodore Roosevelt’s powerful quote from his 1910 “Man in the Arena” speech: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea has a beautiful saying: “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.” What we understand and learn about rising strong is only rumor until we live it and integrate it through some form of creativity so that it becomes part of us.

The most transformative and resilient leaders that I've worked with over the course of my career have three things in common: First, they recognize the central role that relationships and story play in culture and strategy, and they stay curious about their own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Second, they understand and stay curious about how emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are connected in the people they lead, and how those factors affect relationships and perception. And, third, they have the ability and willingness to lean in to discomfort and vulnerability.

It was a rock ’n’ roll photo of Ed Catmull, and the article was about his new book. Ed is the president of Pixar Animation and Walt Disney Animation Studios, and it’s fair to say that his leadership book Creativity, Inc.

One of the truisms of wholehearted living is You either walk into your story and own your truth, or you live outside of your story, hustling for your worthiness.

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. —Maya Angelou

Jonathan Gottschall examines the human need for story in his book The Storytelling Animal.

In one of my favorite studies described in The Storytelling Animal, a team of psychologists asked shoppers to choose a pair of socks among seven pairs and then to give their reasons for choosing that particular pair. Every shopper explained their choice based on subtle differences in color, texture, and stitching. No shopper said, “I don’t know why this is my choice,” or “I have no idea why I picked that one.” All of them had a story that explained their decision. But here’s the kicker: All of the socks were identical. Gottschall explains that all of the shoppers told stories that made their decisions seem rational. But they really weren’t. He writes, “The stories were confabulations—lies, honestly told.”

In Daring Greatly, I write, “One reason that I'm confident that shame exists in schools is simply because 85 percent of the men and women we interviewed for the shame research could recall a school incident from their childhood that was so shaming that it changed how they thought of themselves as learners. What makes this even more haunting is that approximately half of those recollections were what I refer to as creativity scars. The research participants could point to a specific incident where they were told or shown that they weren't good writers, artists, musicians, dancers, or something creative. This helps explain why the gremlins are so powerful when it comes to creativity and innovation.”

James Pennebaker, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Writing to Heal, has done some of the most important and fascinating research I’ve seen on the power of expressive writing in the healing process. In an interview posted on the University of Texas’s website, Pennebaker explains, “Emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives. You don’t just lose a job, you don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are—our financial situation, our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death. Writing helps us focus and organize the experience.”

The song “Delta,” on Crosby, Stills & Nash’s album Daylight Again, is one of the songs that I’ve turned to during the peaks and valleys of the past thirty years.

The moment she said that, I thought of hearing Maya Angelou talk about how when we know better, we do better.

You know the irony about speaking fees? When I do something for full fee, people are respectful and professional. When I do something pro bono because I care about the cause, people are respectful and professional. When I do something because I feel pushed, pressured, guilt-tripped, or shamed into it, I expect people to be appreciative in addition to being respectful and professional. Ninety percent of the time they are none of the above. How can we expect people to put value on our work when we don’t value ourselves enough to set and hold uncomfortable boundaries?

I say “on the surface” because I’ve studied judgment and I know we don’t judge people when we feel good about ourselves.

Most of us buy into the myth that it’s a long fall from “I’m better than you” to “I’m not good enough”—but the truth is that these are two sides of the same coin. Both are attacks on our worthiness. We don’t compare when we’re feeling good about ourselves; we look for what’s good in others. When we practice self-compassion, we are compassionate toward others. Self-righteousness is just the armor of self-loathing.

This doesn’t mean that we stop helping people set goals or that we stop expecting people to grow and change. It means that we stop respecting and evaluating people based on what we think they should accomplish, and start respecting them for who they are and holding them accountable for what they’re actually doing. It means that we stop loving people for who they could be and start loving them for who they are. It means that sometimes when we’re beating ourselves up, we need to stop and say to that harassing voice inside, “Man, I’m doing the very best I can right now.”

Integrity is choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them.

Kelly Rae Roberts.

boundaries are simply our lists of what’s okay and what’s not okay.

Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs. —Joan Didion

C. S. Lewis wrote, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

Disappointment is unmet expectations, and the more significant the expectations, the more significant the disappointment.

Anne Lamott said, “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.”

I’ve heard people say that disappointment is like a paper cut—painful, but not long lasting. I do believe we can heal disappointment, but it’s important not to underestimate the damage it inflicts on our spirit.

Disappointments may be like paper cuts, but if those cuts are deep enough or if there are enough of them, they can leave us seriously wounded.

Nelson Mandela wrote, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”

When I ran this idea by my dear friend and mentor Joe Reynolds—an Episcopal priest and one of the wisest people I know—he was quiet for a while, then said, “Yes. I do think heartbreak is about love. I just want to think about it some more.” A couple of days later, he sent me a letter sharing his thoughts, and later he gave me permission to include it here. Heartbreak is an altogether different thing. Disappointment doesn’t grow into heartbreak, nor does failure. Heartbreak comes from the loss of love or the perceived loss of love. My heart can be broken only by someone (or something, like my dog, though a part of me really believes my dog is a person) to whom I have given my heart. There may be expectations, both met and unmet, in a relationship that ends in heartbreak, but disappointment is not the cause of the heartbreak. There may be failures within the relationship—indeed, there certainly will be, for we are imperfect vessels to hold the love of another person—but the failures didn’t cause the heartbreak. Heartbreak is what happens when love is lost. Heartbreak can come from being rejected by the one you love. The pain is more intense when you thought the other person loved you, but the expectation of returned love isn’t necessary for heartbreak. Unrequited love can be heartbreaking. The death of a loved one is heartbreaking. I didn’t expect them to live forever, and death is nobody’s fault regardless of smoking, bad diets, no exercise, or whatever. But my heart is bro...

As someone who has spent close to fifteen years studying the emotional landscape of the human experience, I can tell you that grief is perhaps the emotion we fear the most. As individuals, we’re afraid of the darkness grief brings. As a society, we have pathologized it and turned it into something to cure or get over. Owning our stories of heartbreak is a tremendous challenge when we live in a culture that tells us to deny our grief.

There are many helpful books about the nature of grief and the grieving process. Many of these resources are based on research, but some of the most profoundly healing books are memoirs by people who have courageously shared their own stories. I have a full list of both in the library on my website (brenebrown.com). What I want to share here is what I’ve learned about grief from the research. Specifically, the three most foundational elements of grief that emerged from my studies: loss, longing, and feeling lost.

In the moving novel The Fault in Our Stars, John Green captures one of those secret losses that accompanies grief. “The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.”

I once heard a friend say that grief is like surfing. Sometimes you feel steady and you’re able to ride the waves, and other times the surf comes crashing down on you, pushing you so far underwater that you’re sure you’ll drown.

“In order for forgiveness to happen, something has to die. If you make a choice to forgive, you have to face into the pain. You simply have to hurt.”

The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World, by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter, the Reverend Mpho Tutu.

Archbishop Tutu writes: To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. It is also a process that does not exclude hatred and anger. These emotions are all part of being human. You should never hate yourself for hating others who do terrible things: The depth of your love is shown by the extent of your anger. However, when I talk of forgiveness, I mean the belief that you can come out the other side a better person. A better person than the one being consumed by anger and hatred. Remaining in that state locks you in a state of victimhood, making you almost dependent on the perpetrator. If you can find it in yourself to forgive, then you are no longer chained to the perpetrator. You can move on, and you can even help the perpetrator to become a better person, too.

C. S. Lewis captured this so beautifully in one of my favorite quotes of all time: To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Saint Teresa of Ávila meant when she said, “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.”

In Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Connection,

When I asked my mom how it worked—why Me-Ma trusted them and why they trusted her—she said, “We were marked.” The hobos used a system of markings on the curbs of the neighborhood to indicate who was safe and who wasn’t, who might feed them and who wouldn’t. I later found out that this may have been the origin of the term easy mark.

Second, Me-Ma had no problem with need. “She wasn’t afraid of people in need because she wasn’t afraid of needing others,” my mom explained. “She didn’t mind extending kindness to others, because she herself relied on the kindness of others.”

As I thought back to that moment in Me-Ma’s bathroom, I knew exactly why I looked away. I was so afraid of my own need that I couldn't look need in the eye.

the real reason I look away is not my fear of helping others, but my fear of needing help.

The danger of tying your self-worth to being a helper is feeling shame when you have to ask for help.

Dependence starts when we’re born and lasts until we die. We accept our dependence as babies, and ultimately, with varying levels of resistance, we accept help as we get to the end of our lives. But in the middle of our lives, we mistakenly fall prey to the myth that successful people are those who help rather than need, and broken people need rather than help. Given enough resources, we can even pay for help and create the mirage that we are completely self-sufficient. But the truth is that no amount of money, influence, resources, or determination will change our physical, emotional, and spiritual dependence on others. Not at the beginning of our lives, not in the messy middle, and not at the end.

For most of us, being an “easy mark” has come to mean being a chump or a sucker or a pushover—shaming identities that are associated with weakness and a lack of street smarts. For the strangers who broke bread at my grandmother’s house, the mark was a sign of courage and compassion. For my grandmother, generosity and giving were not the opposite of receiving: They were parts of the compact between human beings.

It’s always helpful to remember that when perfectionism is driving, shame is riding shotgun. Perfectionism is not healthy striving. It is not asking, How can I be my best self? Instead, it’s asking, What will people think? When

I have a picture over my desk of the pool where I swim that reminds me to keep comparison in check. Under the picture I wrote, “Stay in your own lane. Comparison kills creativity and joy.”

Like guilt, accountability is often motivated by wanting to live in alignment with our values. Accountability is holding ourselves or someone else responsible for specific actions and their specific consequences. Blame, on the other hand, is simply a quick, broad-brush way to off-load anger, fear, shame, or discomfort. We think we’ll feel better after pointing a finger at someone or something, but nothing changes. Instead, blame kills relationships and organizational cultures. It’s toxic. It’s also a go-to reaction for many of us. Accountability is a prerequisite for strong relationships and cultures. It requires authenticity, action, and the courage to apologize and make amends. Rumbling with accountability is a hard and time-consuming process. It also requires vulnerability. We have to own our feelings and reconcile our behaviors and choices with our values.

Charles Feltman’s The Thin Book of Trust.

I love the BRAVING checklist because it reminds me that trusting myself or other people is a vulnerable and courageous process. Boundaries—You respect my boundaries, and when you’re not clear about what’s okay and not okay, you ask. You’re willing to say no. Reliability—You do what you say you’ll do. At work, this means staying aware of your competencies and limitations so you don’t overpromise and are able to deliver on commitments and balance competing priorities. Accountability—You own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends. Vault—You don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share. I need to know that my confidences are kept, and that you’re not sharing with me any information about other people that should be confidential. Integrity—You choose courage over comfort. You choose what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy. And you choose to practice your values rather than simply professing them. Nonjudgment—I can ask for what I need, and you can ask for what you need. We can talk about how we feel without judgment. Generosity—You extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others.