Book Club Review: Brene Brown – Daring Greatly

Written by Elizabeth Sullivan.

Brene Brown - Daring Greatly

Brene Brown – Daring Greatly – How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the way we Live, Love, Parent and Lead

Brené Brown encourages us to dare greatly: to embrace vulnerability and imperfection, to live wholeheartedly, and to courageously engage in our lives. Every day we experience the uncertainty, risks, and emotional exposure that define what it means to be vulnerable, or to dare greatly.

Brené challenges everything we think we know about vulnerability. Based on twelve years of research, she argues that vulnerability is not a weakness, but rather our clearest path to courage, engagement, and connection.

As humans our deepest needs are connection, love, and belonging. Our fear of not having these needs met, the fear of showing our vulnerability and being rejected, results in a system of shame that disconnects us from our families, our communities, and our work.

Brené defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” She counters with the wisdom that “shame resilience is the key 

to embracing our vulnerability” and leading a wholehearted life. If we are to dare greatly in our lives, we must confront the mental gremlins that prevent us from truly engaging with others. Shame resilience is about moving through shame to empathy. If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding shame can’t survive. And she outlines a strategy to build shame resilience:

  • Recognizing shame and understanding its triggers
  • Practicing awareness and self-compassion
  • Reaching out to empathetic connections and sharing our stories
  • Speaking about shame and asking for what we need

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12 shame categories emerged from her research: appearance and body image, money & work, motherhood/fatherhood, family, parenting, mental & physical health, addiction, sex, aging, religion, surviving trauma, being stereo typed or labelled. For women, the strongest t

rigger for shame is how we look, we still feel the most shame about not being, thin, young and beautiful enough. Men live under one unrelenting message – do not be seen as weak.

We judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking those who are doing worse than we’re doing. If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people’s choices. If I feel good about my body, I don’t go around making fun of other people’s weight or 

appearance. We’re hard on each other because we’re using each other as a way out of our own perceived inadequacy.

In order to remove our armor and put down our weapons, it’s necessary to identify how we are masking our shame and protecting our vulnerabilities. Dr. Brown identifies three major shields that we use to protect ourselves:

Foreboding Joy (Imagining dreadful outcomes that clamp down on momentary joy i.e. it’s going awesome – it will go bad any moment)
Perfectionism (Believing that doing everything perfectly protects us from shame)
Numbing (Embracing anything that deadens the pain of discomfort and shame)
She also identifies the powerful disarming strategies for freeing ourselves of these masks:

Worthiness (I am enough) We discussed how we sometimes don’t notice we are beating ourselves up. We would usually cut another person slack – so why not go as easy on ourselves?
Boundaries (I’ve had enough)
Engagement (I’m taking risks and letting myself be seen)
In the final chapters of Daring Greatly, Dr. Brown examines how shame affects our culture and examines the power of leadership to cultivate engagement and transform our organizations. Shining a light on our educational and corporate cultures, she identifies the hallmarks of shame-based systems: blaming, gossiping, name-calling, favoritism, harassment, humiliation, bullying, and, ultimately, disengagement. We discussed how this culture of shame extends to work cultures like the NHS, where there is a lot of shaming and focus on what’s broken which affects the mindset and self-esteem of the organization.

Are you living with shame? Do you feel an underlying itch of ‘never enough’? Do you find yourself disconnecting from people you love? If any of these questions ring true then I hope you’ll read this for yourself.

 

 


 

Elizabeth Sullivan

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