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The Whole Hearted Path

A Journey with Brené Brown

By Hana Medina

THE LOOMING CLOUDS threatened to form a tornado at any moment, but all was sunny inside Brené Brown's house in Houston, Texas. When The Connection caught up with the much-sought-after researcher, author and public speaker, she was preparing to go to Necker Island, an islet in the British Virgin Islands archipelago, owned by Sir Richard Branson, to conduct a leadership retreat with the British businessman and various social entrepreneurs. As she describes her upcoming trip, nearly in the same breath she explains how she had a hectic morning chasing her son's gecko, Sticky, after it had escaped while she cleaned its tank. “You wouldn't think it, but those suckers are fast!” she laughs heartily.

Brown's down-to-earth and warm demeanor is immediately apparent as she talks with this reporter across her farmhouse-style kitchen table. Her approachable style makes it easy to forget that Brown is often hailed, by academics and the media, as one of the biggest thought leaders of the modern era.

Her findings

In a time when many people are seeking to shift from busyness to mindfulness, Brown's contributions are striking a chord. As a research professor at the University of Houston's Graduate College of Social Work, she specializes in some of life's toughest topics: feeling unworthy, feeling not good or strong enough, self-perceived shortcomings, trauma, regret, fear, rejection—experiences many of us have but don't know how to address or overcome. She asserts that embracing tough topics is precisely what most of us need to thrive. Brown's research is opening a door to normalizing discussion around these topics, starting with looking closely at two influential emotions: vulnerability and shame.

Let go of who you think you're supposed to be; embrace who you are.  —Brené Brown

In her speech “The Power of Vulnerability,” one of the most watched TED talks, with more than 20 million online views, Brown says, “We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability. And I think there's evidence. … We are the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history. The problem is—and I learned this from the research—that you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can't say, ‘Here's vulnerability, here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. I don't want to feel these. I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin.' ”

Shame, she says, stems from expectations of how we think we're supposed to be, but aren't (see “What do shame and vulnerability look like?” on page 33). “When we're in shame, we're not fit for human consumption. And we're especially dangerous around people over whom we have some power,” she writes in her latest book, Rising Strong. One way we deal with it is by lashing out at others for unrelated events: We miss an important meeting and we yell at our children. We're late for work, so we yell at our partners for hanging the dry cleaning in the wrong spot. “It doesn't have to make sense either,” she says. “It just has to give us some sense of relief and control.”

But here's the key: By addressing these topics, we can begin to live wholeheartedly. In her 2010 book, The Gifts of Imperfection, Brown explains what that looks like: “Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion and connection to wake up in the morning and think, ‘No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough.' It's going to bed at night thinking, ‘Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn't change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.' ”

Reviewing Brown's research is like having a conversation with your next-door neighbor; she explains her findings through analogies, AC/DC lyrics, stories of humbling family experiences and even snarky email exchanges—all done purposefully. “Stories are just data with a soul,” she says.

It's this relatability that attracts everyone from parent groups to executives in Fortune 500 companies to government officials and high-profile celebrities, such as Katie Couric and Oprah Winfrey, with whom she's released a self-guided e-course and filmed two episodes of Super Soul Sunday.

“One of the great benefits of doing this work is it's the great equalizer,” she says. “No amount of success, money, power or influence buys you a free ride through the topics I talk about. I just see people as people.”

Putting shame on the map

Brown's home is immaculate, adorned in modern rustic décor, yet it feels comfortable and lived in. While her home and her life appear pulled together, Brown says her path was a winding one.

After high school, she hitchhiked around Europe for six months, returned and tried going to college more than once, which resulted in getting kicked out or voluntarily dropping out. She held a flurry of jobs, from waiting tables and cleaning houses to finally landing a management position at AT&T, before deciding to finish her bachelor's degree at 29. “I had my resignation letter in my hand and [my boss] said, ‘You're either quitting to become a social worker or a VJ on Headbangers Ball.' That kind of summed up who I was,” laughs Brown, adding that she had always considered people interactions a job perk. “I really wanted to study connection.”

She went straight through her master's and Ph.D. in social work at the University of Houston, where she now teaches. But it wasn't until she started researching shame that she realized she had been subconsciously curious about the topic for some time. In the '90s, she worked at a residential treatment facility where the clinical director always told the staff, “You can't shame or belittle people into changing.”

And it stuck. Brown, now 49, says, “I thought, ‘Man, he's either wrong or he's right and the world is totally jacked up.' Because [shame] is how the world works. It's how advertising works, marketing, that's how a lot of parents work, it's how a lot of school systems work. So when it came back up again in this research as a doctoral student and as a young professor, I was super curious. I thought I'd give myself six months to look at shame,” she laughs. That was in 2000.

On being connected, creative

Fifteen years later, Brown says that the sum of her educational and research career has come down to this: “We are physically, emotionally, socially, spiritually hard-wired for connection. And in the absence of connection, there is always suffering.”

Her research started gaining widespread attention in 2007 with her blog, Ordinary Courage (ordinarycourage.com), and her first book, I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn't): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough.” In Rising Strong, Brown candidly explains the painful personal experience of getting that first book out to the public, a process in which she felt she didn't stay true to herself. So she tried again with The Gifts of Imperfection, this time telling stories her way, and it became her first New York Times best-seller. It was around this time that she caught the attention of the TED Conference, and after her speech at TEDxHouston the speaking requests began pouring in.

In 2012, she knocked it out of the park again, with the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Daring Greatly, which chronicles the process of finding the courage to be vulnerable. That year she closed the TED Conference with her keynote speech, “Listening to Shame.”

In Rising Strong, Brown discusses how to handle failure after you've been vulnerable or dared to go after a goal. And in her personal fashion, it's filled with stories to prompt the reader's self-reflection process. She discusses an interviewee who struggles with his perfectionism and his feelings of shame after putting his team in a bad position at work, along with her own struggle to look the homeless in the eye, realizing the subconscious judgments many of us make about giving and receiving help. In fact, much of her book is told through many of her own struggles. “It's definitely my most personal book to date,” she says.

“To me, there's no more profound finding in this book than the role creativity plays in integration of information. Everyone wants to know … ‘How do I integrate [this information] into my life and how does it become how I live?' And I've never been able to answer that until now: It's clear to me that it's creativity. You want to move stuff from your head to your heart? You've got to use your hands. You've got to write about it; you've got to build something out of Play-Doh about it; you've got to integrate it through creativity in some way. We were just born makers.”

Living research

Vulnerability is the birthplace of connection and the path to the feeling of worthiness. –Brené Brown

The more exposure Brown's work received, the more emails she would get requesting help beyond what her books could offer. Today, she employs a six-person leadership team who help her run The Daring Way (thedaringway.com), an organization that certifies independent practitioners of social work, therapists, counselors and leadership coaches in her research methodologies. “[The Daring Way] felt like an ethical imperative,” says Brown. “It's a really tough part of the work. It's one reason I have a team, because we want to make sure people get the resources they need.”

But her research hasn't just helped change the lives of others—it has personally transformed Brown, who describes the start of her own wholehearted journey as a “breakdown” in her first TED talk. “I cannot talk about wholeheartedness and not live it,” says Brown, who alongside her pediatrician husband, Steve, is raising their two children: Ellen, 16, and Charlie, 9. “I don't miss field hockey games and homecomings and basketball games; I'm pretty much in the stands for those. I've got carpool this week. The magic is in the normal moments. Someone asked me, ‘What is it like for your kids to have this well-known mom?' and [my kids] just want to know where their goggles are, and if I can take everyone to the movies on Friday. I'm Mom.”

She receives thousands of speaking requests each year, but turns down 95 percent of them in order to maintain balance. She says she travels one to two times a month for work and also teaches a graduate school course each year.

And while working and researching put her in her happy place, she forces herself to make rest and play a priority, although she says it doesn't come naturally to her.

Aside from raising her children, Brown says she's been clear on her goal since she was pregnant with her daughter while earning her Ph.D. She told her husband, “I hope my legacy [will be] that ‘she changed the conversation' and that ‘she gave us words to talk about the things we need to talk about.' Because I think that we are dying to get back to ourselves and to each other. I don't think we can find our way back to each other until we find our way back to ourselves. A lot of us have lost ourselves in being who we think we're supposed to be. And vulnerability is the only way back. If we don't have language and conversation, we won't find our way back.”  C

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.”

Excerpted from Daring Greatly, by Brené Brown

What do shame and vulnerability look like?

Common shame triggers

IN HER TED talk “The Power of Vulnerability,” Brown explains that shame feels the same for men and women, but that it's organized by gender.

“For women, the best example I can give you is Enjoli, the [1980s] commercial. ‘I can put the wash on the line, pack the lunches, hand out the kisses and be at work at five to nine. I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan and never let you forget you're a man.' For women, shame is ‘Do it all, do it perfectly and never let them see you sweat.' I don't know how much perfume that commercial sold, but I guarantee you, it moved a lot of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. Shame, for women, is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we're supposed to be. And it's a straitjacket.

“For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations. Shame is, one, do not be perceived as what? Weak.”

Examples of vulnerability

• Sharing an unpopular opinion

• Standing up for yourself

• Asking for help

• Saying no

• Starting your own business

• Helping your 37-year-old wife with her stage 4 breast cancer make decisions about her will

• Calling a friend whose child just died

• Signing up your mom for hospice care

• Saying “I love you” first and not knowing if you're going to be loved back

• Getting fired

• Trying something new

• Presenting your product to the world and getting no response

Excerpted from Daring Greatly, by Brené Brown