Brené Brown: The Call to Courage

I’ve watched Brené Brown’s Ted talks for many times and have been very inspired by her.

Her latest speech “The Call to Courage” has been on Netflix since the mid of April. I love how she connected her stories with great wisdom. She’s super great at telling stories and connecting with the audience.

Her stories and reflections from the stories came in a very engaging and touching way. I could feel the atmosphere even though I was just watching it on Netflix. I’ve taken a lot of screenshots and typed these notes from her inspiring talk. I would like to share my notes and ……

I highly recommend watching the entire speech on Netflix.

The Arena

In the beginning, she elaborated on how she was invited to give a Ted talk at Texas and how she decided to share her vulnerability to the entire audience. ( which turned out to be the famous Ted talk : The power of vulnerability)

She felt painful seeing the hateful comments afterwards and tried very hard to overcome the struggles. However, she was overwhelmed and felt very frustrated.

One day she came across a speech that Theodore Roosevelt gave in 1910.

She said that her life could be distinguished into two parts: Life that was before, and after seeing this passage: ((I love this so much!))

“It’s not the critic who counts. It’s not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done it different.

The credit belongs to the person who’s actually in the arena, whose face is marred with dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes up short again and again and again, and who, in the end, while he may know the triumph of high achievement, at least when he fails, he does so daring greatly.”

These are the reflection she had have afterwards:

I’m gonna be brave with my life. I’m gonna show up.I’m gonna live in the arena. I’m gonna take chances.

If you ‘re brave with your life, you choose to live in the arena, you’re going to get your ass kicked. You are going to fall. You are going to fail. You are going to know heartbreak. It’s a choice.

It’s a choice that I make every day.

Every day, she tells herself before her feet hit the floor :

“Today I’ll choose courage over comfort. I can’t make commitments for tomorrow, but today I’m gonna choose to be brave.”

She also told the audience that:

1. You’re going to know failure if you’re brave with your life.
2. Vulnerability is not about winning. It’s not about losing. It’s having the courage to show up when you can’t control the outcome.
3. We can measure how brave you are by how vulnerable you’re willing to be.
4. If you’re gonna be in the arena, join me. It’s really great.
5. If you’re not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion because you were being brave, I am not interested in or open to your feedback about my work.

How to deal with criticism and hateful comments?

She told everyone that how people crush others by saying hateful words without even stepping into the arena and really work hard. She also told the audience what we should do if we’re in this situation.

1. There are millions of cheap seats in the world today, filled with people who will never once step foot. They will never once put themselves out there, but they will make it a full-time job to hurl criticism and judgment and really hateful things toward us. And we have to get out of the habit of catching them and dissecting, holding them close to our hearts. We’ve gotta let them drop on the floor.
2. Don’t grab that hurtful stuff from the cheap seats and pull it close. Don’t pull it anywhere near your heart. Just let it fall to the ground. You don’t have to stomp it or kick it. You just gotta step over it and keep going.

She talks about how people usually say “I don’t care what others say.” while they did care a lot. She stated that it’s impossible for us to ignore what others said, but we should distinguish between constructive suggestions and what’s pure hateful and destructive criticism.

1. You can’t take criticism and feedback from people who are not being brave with their lives. It will crush you.The deal is that you have to be very specific about people whose opinions of you matter.
2. People who love you not despite your imperfection and vulnerability, but because of your imperfection and vulnerability. Their feedback matters.

Vulnerability is the path back to each other, but we’re so afraid to get on it.

She told the audience about her experience of feeling rejection, shame, fear and loneliness while she was making an emotional bid for connection to her husband during a long vacation.

She was affectionate and expressed her feelings to her husband while they were swimming in the lake. She told her husband: “You are the most important thing in my life. And to be able to see you and know you is the greatest privilege of my life, and to be seen by you is the most important thing in my life.”

However, her husband ignored her and told her that “water’s good” .

She was so sad and was almost driven crazy. She had a deep conversation with her husband afterwards and found out that her husband didn’t do it on purpose. The fact is that he didn’t even know what she’s talking about because he was dealing with his fear of swimming in the lake and was counting strokes all the time. She told her husband that she’s grateful that he shared this vulnerability with her.

She came up with these conclusions afterwards:

1. How can you let yourself be loved if you can’t be seen?
2. Vulnerability is the path back to each other, but we’re so afraid to get on it. We want it so bad, but we’re so afraid to let ourselves be seen, and we’re so afraid to see people.
3. Vulnerability is like the gooey center of hard emotion. The problem with the armor is that vulnerability is totally the center of these(shame, scarcity, fear, anxiety, uncertainty), but it’s also the birthplace of these(love, belonging, joy)
4. To love is to be vulnerable. To give someone your heart and say, “I know this could hurt so bad, but I’m willing to do it. I’m willing to be vulnerable and love you.”
5. Some people would rather never know love than to know hurt or grief, and that is a huge price to pay.

She then talked about how the society expected people to be tough and can’t show any sign of weakness.

1. What’s the number one shame trigger around feminine norms? Appearance and body image.
2. You show me a woman who can sit with a man in real shame and fear and vulnerability and just be with him, I’ll show you a woman who’s done her work and doesn’t derive her status or power from that guy.
3. You show me a guy who can sit with a woman who’s in real shame and fear and vulnerability and not fix anything but just listen. I’ll show you a guy who’s done his work and doesn’t derive his power and status from being Oz, the fixer of all things.
4. We usually reserve using people’s vulnerability against them for the people we love the most because we are scared when we see vulnerability in other people.
5. We are in the midst of what I would call “a political and social shit-show” right now. It’s a cultural nightmare, and we want belonging in the midst of this thing, right? The opposite of belonging, from the research, is fitting in. Fitting in is assessing and acclimating.
6. Speaking your truth, telling your story, and never betraying yourself for other people. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are. It requires to be who you are, and that’s vulnerable.

Lean into joy. Feel it and embrace it.

She said that “joy is the most vulnerable of all human emotions. We are terrified to feel joy.”

This really hits me and resonates with me. For example, I can be happy when many good things happen but still feeling afraid of something awful might come up afterwards at the same time. (And the personal stories she shared made the audience roared with laughter.)

1. Joy is the most vulnerable of all human emotions. We are terrified to feel joy. We are so afraid that if we let ourselves feel joy, something will come along and rip it away from us, and we will get sucker punched by pain and trauma and loss. So that, in the midst of great things, we literally dress rehearse tragedy.
2. When we lose our capacity for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding.
3. The people who could really lean into joy, they didn’t dress rehearse tragedy. They practice gratitude.
   Some of us try to use it as a reminder to be grateful.
   Some people use that as a warning to start dress-rehearsing for bad things.

You can still feel grateful when you thought you shouldn’t.

This perspective is very new to me! I’ve always think that it would be so inconsiderate to feel grateful when others are actually deprived of the things that we feel grateful for. She said that “Gratitude in some ways is healing for people, and we don’t think about it that way.”

1. They said “When you are grateful for what you have, I understand that you understand the magnitude of what I’ve lost.” (They: parents who lost their children)
2. So often we’re afraid to be grateful for what we have, especially in front of people who’ve gone through great trauma and loss cause we think it’s insensitive.
3. For those of us who don’t want to be grateful, to show a picture of our child to someone maybe who’s lost a child. What they see is, “Not only are you not going to talk to me about your child, me talking about my loss and child is not on the table either.”

The ordinary moments that we often left behind

Based on the interviews with parents dealing with loss of their kids, they said that they missed the ordinary moments more than anything else. (Which are things that they never really took notice of when they’re happening. )

I get so busy sometimes chasing the extraordinary moments that I don’t pay attention to the ordinary moments.

The moments that, if taken away, I would miss more than anything.

She reminded everyone that we shouldn’t put our focus on chasing the extraordinary moments in life, which usually end up paying no attention to the ordinary moments that are precious.

Take a moment and commit to that feeling.

She told everyone how her daughter take “picture memories” :

“When I’m really grateful, and things are just amazing. I close my eyes and take a picture memory, so when I feel lonely or things are hard, I can remember it.”

She said that we should all consider taking a moment and just commit to that feeling and think about “What were we in, in that moment?

Do the joyful thing.

She said it’s really hard for her to just do the joyful thing or just choose joy sometimes. She mentioned that research defines play as time spent without purpose. (She calls that an anxiety attack.)

However, she also stated that it’s really okay to choose a thing that seems frivolous and fun and has no ROI(Return on investment) or payoff or upside.

She talked about how her son chose “the secret treasure (which is pokemon pencil)” instead of getting points added to his final grade when he earned first place on his art project.

I could do this and it could get me here, or I could just pick the secret treasure.

Just the joy.

Vulnerability and work: No vulnerability, no creativity.

She said whenever people invite her to give lectures, she was asked to talk about anything but vulnerability.

She talked about the connections between vulnerability and the following elements for successful company or relationships.

Empathy, trust, innovation, creativity, inclusivity, equity, hard conversations, feedback, problem-solving, ethical decision making.

1. No vulnerability, no creativity.
   No tolerance for failure, no innovation.
   If you’re not willing to fail, you can’t innovate.
   If you’re not willing to build a vulnerable culture, you can’t create.
2. To not have the conversations because they make you uncomfortable is the definition of privilege.
   Your comfort is not at the center of this discussion.

The people who are targeted by racism and homophobia, and heterosexism, and gender bias are not responsible for initiating these conversations and building the tables where they should be happening.

Show up and bring our whole hearts

1. I don’t know if I’m gonna nail this, but I’m gonna try ‘cause what I’m sure as hell not gonna do is stay quiet.We have to be able to choose courage over comfort.
2. When we build cultures at work, where there is zero tolerance for vulnerability, where perfectionism and armor are rewarded and necessary, you can’t have these conversations. They’re not productive.
3. Giving feedback, receiving feedback, problem-solving, ethical decision-making… these are born of vulnerability.
4. I understand that work seems like a hard place to be vulnerable, but we spend more than half of our lives at work, and I’ve never met a single person or interviewed a single person that had a joyful, wholehearted life that was miserable at work. That stuff will eat you alive.
5. We all have a responsibility to show up and bring our whole hearts and our whole selves to work and lean in to the tough conversations.
6. Brave leaders are never silent around hard things. Our job is to excavate the unsaid. What is the thing that’s not being said? That requires courage and vulnerability.

Dispel Five Myths about Vulnerability

1: Vulnerability is weakness. (X)

There is no courage without vulnerability that did not require uncertainty, risk, or emotional exposure.

“We’re taught to be brave while most of us were raised to believe that vulnerability is weakness.” And here’s the rub: Be brave, but never put yourself out there. (which is impossible to be brave if we don’t put ourselves out)

2: “I don’t do vulnerability.” (X)

1. You do vulnerability knowingly, or vulnerability does you.
2. It’s so much easier to cause pain than feel pain. People are taking their pain and they’re working it out on other people.
3. When you don’t acknowledge your vulnerability, you work your shit out on other people. Stop working your shit out on other people. Don’t offload your hard stuff on other people.

3: “I can go it alone.”(X)

1. We can’t go it alone. We’re neurologically and biologically hardwired for connection with other people.
2. In the absence of connection, love, and belonging, there is always suffering.

4:You can engineer the uncertainty and discomfort out of vulnerability.(X)

We can’t. The minute it becomes comfortable, it’s no longer vulnerability.

5: Vulnerability is disclosure.(X)

People ponder on the question of whether “Trust comes before vulnerability” or “vulnerability comes before trust”. Instead of choosing from these options, she said “It’s a slow stacking over time of vulnerability and trust.”

1. You share with people who’ve earned the right to hear your story.
   You story is a privilege to hear.
   Vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability.
2. You don’t measure vulnerability by the amount of disclosure.
   You measure it by the amount of courage to show up and be seen when you can’t control the outcome.

Sometimes winning is not coming in first.

She told a really touching story about her daughter participating in a swimming game. (I really love how she told the story with vivid descriptions and made everyone in tears.)

Her daughter could have given up by simply not showing up, but she decided to show up. Though she felt very frustrated due to the fact that she was way behind other competitors, she showed up and finished it. She told her parents “But I was brave, and I won.”

This also corresponds with what she’ve mentioned earlier:

“Vulnerability is not about winning. It’s not about losing. It’s having the courage to show up when you can’t control the outcome.”

Sometimes winning is not coming in first. Sometimes winning is doing the really brave thing. Maybe winning for you is just coming off the block and getting wet. Maybe that’s winning for you. Maybe that’s what a win looks like.

She said : “Though vulnerability is hard, scary, and feels dangerous, it’s not as hard, scary, or dangerous as getting to the end of our lives and having to ask ourselves:

“What if I would have shown up?”

“What it I would have said I love you?”

“What if I would have come off the blocks?”

She concluded her wonderful speech by reinforcing these reminders:

Show up.

Be seen.

Answer the call to courage.

Come off the blocks ‘cause you’re worth it.

You’re worth being brave.