Daring Greatly - Brene Brown

[Turgon]

I came across this TED Talk by Brene Brown called The Power of Vulnerability earlier on this year and saw it tied into Self Compassion although with an emphasis in her book about self compassion being one aspect that can lead a person towards being open and vulnerable with people they can trust, but that trust is tied into vulnerability. And that there are numerous ways that people shut down and disengage from this capacity and is usually dictated by things like shame and fear.

the book also has a number of patterns on how people create 'vulnerability armor's' around themselves as she calls it, but these different types of armors actually do more damage in the long-run by preventing us from being compassionate and empathetic with ourselves or anyone else for that matter and really blocks the way towards taking chances and being creative.

The phrase Daring Greatly is from Theodore Roosevelt’s speech “Citizenship in a Republic.” The speech, sometimes referred to as “The Man in the Arena,” was delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, on April 23, 1910. This is the passage that made the speech famous:
“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 errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in worthy cause; 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 first time I read this quote, I thought, this is vulnerability. Everything I’ve learned from over a decade of research on vulnerability has taught me this exact lesson. Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.

Vulnerability is not weakness, and the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure we face every day are not optional. Our only choice is a question of engagement. Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose; the level to which we protect ourselves from being vulnerable is a measure of our fear and disconnection.

When we spend our lives waiting until we’re perfect or bulletproof before we walk into the arena, we ultimately sacrifice relationships and opportunities that may not be recoverable, we squander precious time, and we turn our backs on our gifts, those unique contributions that only we can make.

Perfect and bulletproof are seductive, but they don’t exist in human experience. We must walk into the arena, whatever it may be – a new relationship, an important meeting, our creative process, or a difficult family conversation – with courage and willingness to engage. Rather than sitting on the sidelines and hurling judgement and advice, we must dare to show up and let ourselves be seen. This is vulnerability. This is daring greatly.

Introduction

The surest thing I took away from my BSW, MSW, and Ph.D. in social work is this: Connection is why we’re here. We are hardwired to connect with others, it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and without it there is suffering. I wanted to develop research that explained the anatomy of connection.

Studying connection was a simple idea, but before I knew it, I had been hijacked by my research participants who, when asked to talk about their most important relationships and experiences of connection, kept telling me about heartbreak, betrayal, and shame – the fear of not being worthy of real connection. We humans have a tendency to define things by what they are not. This is especially true of our emotional experiences.

By accident, then, I became a shame and empathy researcher, spending six years developing a theory that explains what shame is, how it works, and how we cultivate resilience in the face of believing that we’re not enough – that we’re not worthy of love and belonging. In 2006 I realized that in addition to understanding shame, I had to understand the flip side: “What do the people who are the most resilient to shame, who believe in their worthiness – I call these people the Wholehearted – have in common?”

Ch. 1 -Scarcity: Looking Inside our Culture of “Never Enough”

Scarcity: The Never Enough Problem

Scarcity is the “never enough” problem. The word scarce is from the Old Norman French scars, meaning “restricted in quantity” (c. 1300). Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.

What makes this constant assessing and comparing so self-defeating is that we are often comparing our lives, our marriages, our families, and our communities to unattainable, media-driven visions of perfection, or we’re holding up our reality against our own fictional account of how great someone else has it. Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. 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…”

The Source of Scarcity

1. Shame – Is fear of ridicule and belittling used to manage people and/or to keep people in line? Is self-worth tied to achievement, productivity, or compliance? Are blaming and finger-pointing norms? Are put-downs and name-calling rampant? What about favouritism? Is perfectionism an issue?

2. Comparison – Healthy competition can be beneficial, but is there constant overt or covert comparing and ranking? Has creativity suffocated? Are people held to one narrow standard rather than acknowledged for their unique gifts and contributions? Is there an ideal way of being or one form of talent that is used as measurement of everyone else’s worth?

3. Disengagement – Are people afraid to take risks and try new things? Is it easier to stay quiet than to share stories, experiences, and ideas? Does it feel as if no one is really paying attention or listening? Is everyone struggling to be seen and heard?

When I think about my family in the context of these questions, I know that these are the exact issues that my husband, Steve, and I work to overcome every single day. I use the word overcome because to grow a relationship or raise a family or create an organizational culture or run a school or nurture a faith community, all in a way that is fundamentally opposite to the cultural norms driven by scarcity, it takes awareness, commitment, and work … every single day. The larger culture is always applying pressure, and unless we’re willing to push back and fight for what we believe in, the default becomes a state of scarcity.

The counterapproach to living in scarcity is not about abundance. In fact, I think abundance and scarcity are two sides of the same coin. The opposite of “never enough” isn’t abundance or “more than I could imagine.” The opposite of scarcity is enough, or what I call Wholeheartedness. As I explained in the introduction, there are many tenets of Wholeheartedness, but at its very core is vulnerability and worthiness: facing uncertainty, exposure, and emotional risks, and knowing that I am enough.

If you go back to these three sets of questions about scarcity that I just posed and ask yourself if you’d be willing to be vulnerable or to dare greatly in any setting defined by these values, the answer for most of us is a resounding no. If you ask yourself if these are conditions conducive to cultivating worthiness, the answer again is no. The greatest casualties of a scarcity culture are our willingness to own our vulnerabilities and our ability to engage with the world from a place of worthiness.

 

[Turgon]

Continued

Ch. 2 – Debunking the Vulnerability Myths

Myth # 1: “Vulnerability is a Weakness”

Vulnerability isn’t good or bad: It’s not what we call a dark emotion, nor is it always a light, positive experience. 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 very costs will be too high is to walk away from the very thing that gives purpose and meaning to living.
Our rejection of vulnerability often stems from our associating it with dark emotions like fear, shame, grief, sadness, and disappointment – emotions that we don’t want to discuss, even when they profoundly affect the way we live, love, work, and even lead. What most of us fail to understand and what took me a decade of research to learn is that vulnerability is also the cradle of the emotions and experiences that we crave.

… It starts to make sense that we dismiss vulnerability as weakness only when we realize that we’ve confused feeling with failing and emotions with liabilities. If we want to reclaim the essential emotional part of our lives and reignite our passion and purpose, we have to learn how to engage with our vulnerability and how to feel the emotions that come with it…

What really brings the definition of vulnerability up close and personal are the examples people shared when I asked them to finish this sentence stem: “Vulnerability is _________.” Here are some replies:

• Sharing an unpopular opinion
• Standing up for myself
• Asking for help
• Saying no
• Admitting I’m afraid
• Being accountable (etc.)

Yes, we are totally exposed when we are vulnerable. Yes, we are in the torture chamber that we call uncertainty. And, yes, we’re taking a huge emotional risk when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. But there’s no equation where taking risks, braving uncertainty, and opening ourselves up to emotional exposure equals weakness.

When we asked the question “How does vulnerability feel?” the answers were equally as powerful”

• It’s taking off the mask and hoping the real me isn’t too disappointing
• Not sucking it in anymore
• It’s where courage and fear meet
• Infinitely terrifying and achingly necessary
• I know it’s happening when I feel the need to strike first before I’m struck
• Letting go of control

And the answer that appeared over and over in all of our efforts to better understand vulnerability? Naked.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the word vulnerability derived from the Latin word vulnerare, meaning “to wound.” The definition includes “capable of being wounded” and “open to attack or damage.” Merriam-Webster defines weakness as the inability to withstand attack or wounding. Just from a linguistic perspective, it’s clear that these are very different concepts, and in fact, one could argue that weakness often stems from a lack of vulnerability – when we don’t acknowledge how and where we’re tender, we’re more at risk of being hurt.

Myth # 2: “I Don’t do Vulnerability”

When we operate from the belief that we “don’t do vulnerability” it’s extremely helpful to ask ourselves the following questions. If we truly don’t know the answers, we can bravely ask someone with who we are close – they’ll probably have an answer (even if we don’t want to hear it):

1.What do I do when I feel emotionally exposed?
2. How do I behave when I’m feeling very uncomfortable and uncertain?
3. How willing am I to take emotional risks?

Before I started doing this work, my honest answers would have been:

1. Scared, angry, judgemental, controlling, perfecting, manufacturing certainty
2. Scared, angry, judgemental, controlling, perfecting, manufacturing certainty
3. At work, very unwilling if criticism, judgement, blame or shame is possible. Taking emotional risks with the people I love was always mired in fear of something bad happening.

When we pretend we can avoid vulnerability we engage in behaviours that are often inconsistent with who we want to be. Experiencing vulnerability isn’t a choice – the only choice we have is how we’re going to respond when we are confronted with uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure…

Myth # 3: Vulnerability is Letting it all Hang Out

Vulnerability is based on mutuality and required boundaries and trust. It’s not oversharing, it’s not purging, it’s not indiscriminate disclosure, and it’s not celebrity-style social media information dumps. Vulnerability is about sharing our feelings and experiences with people who have earned the right to hear them… We don’t lead with “Hi, my name is Brene, and here’s my darkest struggle.” That may be desperation or wounded-ness or even attention-seeking, but it’s not vulnerability. Why? Because sharing appropriately, with boundaries, means sharing with people with whom we’ve developed relationships that can bear the weight of our story. The result of this … increased connection, trust and engagement.

… “letting it all hang out” or boundary-less disclosure is one way to protect ourselves from real vulnerability. And the TMI (too much information) issue is not a case of “too much vulnerability” – vulnerability is bankrupt on its own terms when people move from being vulnerable to using vulnerability to deal with unmet needs, get attention, or engage in shock-and-awe behaviours that are so commonplace in today’s culture…

When I talk to groups about the importance of being vulnerable, there’s always a flood of questions about the need of trust”

• How do I know if I can trust someone enough to be vulnerable?
• I’ll only be vulnerable with someone if I’m sure they won’t turn on me.
• How can you tell who’s got your back?
• How do we build trust with people?

We need to feel trust to be vulnerable and we need to be vulnerable in order to trust.

“What I’ve found through research is that trust is built in very small moments, which I call “sliding door” moments, after the movie. In any interaction, there is a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner.

Let me give you an example of that from my own relationship. One night, I really wanted to finish a mystery novel. I thought I knew who the killer was, but I was anxious to find out. At one point in the night, I put the novel on my bedside and walked into the bathroom.

As I passed the mirror, I saw my wife’s face in the reflection, and she looked sad, brushing her hair. There was a sliding door moment.
I had a choice. I could sneak out of the bathroom and think, I don’t want to deal with her sadness tonight; I want to read my novel. But instead, because I’m a sensitive researcher of relationships, I decided to go into the bathroom. I took the brush from her hair and asked, “What’s the matter, baby?” And she told me why she was sad.

Now, at that moment, I was building trust; I was there for her. I was connecting with her rather than choosing to think only about what I wanted. These are the moments, we’ve discovered, that builds trust.

One such moment is not that important, but if you’re always choosing to turn away, then, trust erodes in a relationship – very gradually, very slowly.”

… When the people we love or with whom we have a deep connection stop caring, stop paying attention, stop investing, and stop fighting for the relationship, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in. Disengagement triggers shame and our greatest fears – the fears of being abandoned, unworthy and unlovable…

… Trust is a product of vulnerability that grows over time and requires work, attention, and full engagement. Trust isn’t a grand gesture – it’s a growing marble collection.

Myth # 4: We Can Go It Alone

Well, as much as I love the idea of walking alone down a lonely street of dreams, the vulnerability journey is not the kind of journey we can make alone. We need support. We need folks who will let us try on new ways of being without judging us. We need a hand to pull us up off the ground when we get kicked down in the arena (and if we live a courageous life, that will happen). Across the course of my research, participants were very clear about their need for support, encouragement, and sometimes professional help as they reengaged with vulnerability and their emotional lives. Most of us are good at giving help, but when it comes to vulnerability, we need to ask for help too…

… Going back to Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech, I also learned that the people who love me, the people I really depend on, were never the critics who were pointing at me while I stumbled. They weren’t in the bleachers at all. They were with me in the arena. Fighting for me and with me.

 

[Turgon]

Ch. 3 – Understanding and Combating Shame (aka, Gremlin Ninja Warrior Training)

Defense against the Dark Arts

You’ve designed a product or written an article or created a piece of art that you want to share with a group of friends. Sharing something that you’ve created is a vulnerable but essential part of engaged and Wholehearted living. It’s the epitome of daring greatly. But because of how you were raised or how you approach the world, you’ve knowingly or unknowingly attached your self-worth to how your art or product is received. In simple terms, if they love it, you’re worthy; if they don’t, you’re worthless.

One of two things happen at this point in the process:

1. Once you realize that your self-worth is hitched to what you’ve produced or created, it’s unlikely that you’ll share it, or if you do, you’ll strip away a layer or two of the juiciest creativity and innovation to make the revealing less risky. There’s too much on the line to just put your wildest creations out there.

2. If you do share it in its most creative form and the reception doesn’t meet your expectations, you’re crushed. Your offering is no good and you’re no good. The chances of soliciting feedback, reengaging, and going back to the drawing board are slim. You shut down. Shame tells you that you shouldn’t have even tried. Shame tells you that you’re not good enough and should have known better.

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 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 … You’re officially a prisoner of “pleasure, performing, and perfecting.”

With an awareness of shame and strong shame resilience skills, this scenario is completely different. You still want folks to like, respect, and even admire what you’ve created, but yours self-worth is not on the table. You know that you are far more than a painting, an innovative idea, an effective pitch, a good sermon, or a high amazon.com ranking. Yes, it will be disappointing and difficult if your friends or colleagues don’t share your enthusiasm, or if things don’t go well, but this is about what you do, not who you are…

When our self-worth isn’t on the line, we are far more willing to be courageous and risk sharing our raw talents and gifts. From my research with families, schools and organizations, it’s clear that shame-resilient cultures nurture folks who are much more open to soliciting, accepting, and incorporating feedback…

I Get it. Shame is Bad. So What Do We Do About It?

The answer is shame resilience. Note that shame resistance is not possible. As long as we care about connection, the fear of disconnection will always be a powerful force in our lives, and the pain caused by shame will always be real. But here’s the great news. In all my studies, I’ve found that men and women with high levels of shame resilience have four things in common – I call them the elements of shame resilience. Learning to put these elements into action is what I call “Gremlin Ninja Warrior Training.”

We’ll go through each of the four elements, but first I want to explain what I mean by shame resilience. 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.

If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive. Self-compassion is also critically important, but because shame is a social concept – it happens between people – it also heals best between people. A social wound needs a social balm, and empathy is that balm. Self-compassion is key because when we’re able to be gentle with ourselves in the midst of shame, we’re more likely to reach out, connect, and experience empathy.

To get to empathy, we have to first know what we’re dealing with. Here are the four elements of shame resilience – the steps don’t always happen in this order, but they always ultimately lead us to empathy and healing:

1. Recognizing Shame and Understanding its Triggers. Shame is biology and biography. Can you physically recognize when you’re in the grips of shame, feel your way through it, and figure out what message and expectations triggered it?

2. Practicing Critical Awareness. Can you reality-check the messages and expectations that are driving your shame? Are they realistic? Attainable? Are they what you want to be or what you think others need/want from you?

3. Reaching Out. Are you owning and sharing your story? We can’t experience empathy if we’re not connecting.

4. Speaking Shame. Are you talking about how you feel and asking for what you need when you feel shame?

Shame thrives on secret keeping, and when it comes to secrets, there’s some serious science behind the twelve-step program saying, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.”

Ch. 4 – The Vulnerability Armory

The “Enough” Mandate

For me the most powerful part of this research was discovering the strategies that seem to empower people to take off the masks and armor that I’m about to describe. I assumed that I’d find unique strategies for each protection mechanism, similar to what emerged in the ten guideposts I wrote about in The Gifts of Imperfection. But that wasn’t the case here.

In the first chapter, I talked about “enough” as the opposite of scarcity, and the properties of scarcity as shame, comparison, and disengagement. Well, it appears that believing that we’re “enough” is the way out of the armor – it gives us permission to take off the mask.

With that sense of “enough” comes an embrace of worthiness, boundaries, and engagement. This lay at the core of every strategy illuminated by the research participants for freeing themselves from their armor:
• I am enough (worthiness versus shame)
• I’ve had enough (boundaries versus one-uping and comparison)
• Showing up, taking risks, and letting myself be seen is enough (engagement versus disengagement)

Ch. 5 – Mind the Gap

The gap starts here: We can’t give people what we don’t have. Who we are matters immeasurably more than what we know or who we want to be.

Minding the gap is a daring strategy. We have to pay attention to the space between where we’re actually standing and where we want to be. More importantly, we have to practice the values that we’re holding out as important out as important in our culture. Minding the gap requires both an embrace of our own vulnerability and cultivation of shame resilience – we’re going to be called upon to show up as leaders and parents and educators in new and uncomfortable ways. We don’t have to be perfect, just engaged and committed to aligning values with actions. We also need to be prepared: The gremlins will be out in full force, as they love to sneak up just when we’re about to step into the arena, be vulnerable, and take some chances.