Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability

Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver, and our world could stand to be a little kinder and braver– Brene Brown. She is famous for her talk Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability

Casandra Brene Brown is an American professor, lecturer, author, and podcast host. She worked as a research professor at the University of Houston and has published a couple of books about vulnerability and shame. Her books became New York Times bestsellers and people started to recognize her. She gave a ted talk named Brene Brown: The power of vulnerability.

Through ‘The power of vulnerability she has highlighted the link between courage and vulnerability. She describes it as having the courage to show up when you can’t control the outcome. Her ted talk was full of meaningful life lessons and has about 16M views in it.

Some important life lessons on Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability from the ted talk are:

1. Vulnerability is not a sign of weakness.

She was very specific in her speech and said ‘Vulnerability is our most accurate way to measure courage, and we literally do that as researchers’ It is not a sign of weakness rather it depicts how strong and fearless one is that possesses the ability to be vulnerable.

2. Opening up has its benefits:

The fear of heartache followed by trust issues makes people detached from love. We can never anticipate who is going to leave us and under which circumstances, so to stuff your feelings inside you for the probability of future risk is not a wise choice. You can’t change the inevitable, the best you can do is embrace them when you have a chance.

3. being vulnerable at work as advantages:

If you are willing to innovate, be prepared to fail. No vulnerability, no creativity. No tolerance for failure, no innovation, she advised.

4. Vulnerability is inescapable:

Being vulnerable is in fact experiencing emotions. She says it’s either you do vulnerability knowingly do the vulnerability dos you, either the way it is bound to happen.

5. The choice to embrace exposure is easier in the end:

Vulnerability is a hard choice, it is scary and feels dangerous. You know what’s scarier than that?, getting to the end of our life and having to ask ourselves, what if I had done it, what if I had approached things in a different manner, what if I was courageous enough to explain what went wrong. So have the courage to live the life to fullest, because you are worth it and you are worth being brave.

(Source: Ted Talk by Beren Brown)

Key points of Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability Ted Talk:

• What to be afraid of and who is to be blamed?
• Scarcity Culture: Never enough
• Self-Protection: against the judgment
• Need for love and belongings- painful not to have it
• Vulnerability is the path to joy, love, and trust
• Empathy is different than sympathy.
• Empathy fuels connection
• Sympathy drives disconnection
• Blame.
• Shame- I am bad- Focus on self
• Guilt-I did something bad-Focus on behavior.

(Source: www.usatoday.com)

Key steps to showing Empathy:

Brown discusses these 4 key steps to showing empathy:

1. Perspective Taking- Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.
2. Staying out of judgment and listening- Listen to understand not to reply.
3. Recognizing emotions in another person that you have maybe felt before.- Make them feel they aren’t alone in solving the problem
4. Communicating that you can recognize those emotions- People are looking for a connection

If you are intrigued by her ted talks and want more of such lessons for the life you can read her books and know about her ted talk key points in detail.

Some of her famous books are:

1. Daring Greatly
2. Dare to Lead
3. The gift of Imperfection.
4. Rising Strong
5. Power of vulnerability
6. Braving the wilderness
7. I thought it was just me
8. Men, Women, and Worthiness.

You can choose courage or you can choose comfort. You certainly cannot have both. So take the risk that you feel is worth it but master enough courage so far, connect to people and be open about your feels. We are humans and we all have bad days, it’s not only completely Okay to not be okay all the time, but also is a healthy growth process.

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