#100: Brené Brown on Vulnerability and Home Run TED Talks

I was raised to believe that vulnerability is weakness—that you wake up in the morning, you armor up, you go out into the day, you kick some ass, you don't let people see your emotions, you mitigate uncertainty and risk as much as you can, and that's the way you live ... From the very earliest stages of my research... that is not how vulnerability emerged in the data; vulnerability emerged as not weakness but probably our best measure of courage.

If you take a Petri dish and you put shame in a Petri dish, and you douse it with secrecy, silence, and judgment, it grows exponentially. It will grow into every corner and crevice of our lives. If you have the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and you douse it with empathy, shame can't survive empathy. Empathy is a very hostile environment for shame.

I think the soul of my healthy competitiveness and my ambition is the belief that I am enough ... When I don't believe I'm enough, I engage in behaviors not to push myself, not to grow and stretch and learn, not to strive for excellence, but to prove to other people what I can do. But when I start from a place [of] 'You know what? I'm enough. I'm imperfect. I'm afraid. I'm super vulnerable. But that does not change the fact that I'm also brave and worthy of love and belonging...' When I start from that place, I am completely unleashed.

Show me a woman who can sit with a man in real fear and vulnerability; I will show you a woman who's done her own work around vulnerability and doesn't derive her power or status from that man. You show me a man who can sit with a woman who's in real fear and vulnerability, and I'll show you a man who's done his own work around vulnerability and doesn't derive his power from being Oz, the all-knowing and all-fixing.

The simplest definition for vulnerability is really uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Vulnerability is about the willingness to show up and be seen when you have zero control over the outcome.

We see shame, highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, aggression violence, suicide, eating disorders—very highly correlated. What we see as the inverse is we see guilt. And shame and guilt are very different. Shame is 'I am a bad person.' Guilt is 'I did something bad.'

Live-tweeting your bikini wax—that is not vulnerability ... Nor are sharing intimate details of your children's reaction to your impending divorce on Facebook. That is not vulnerability. Vulnerability is the birthplace of intimacy, trust, connection, creativity, innovation ... But it's not permission to overshare.

The only people who don't experience shame are people who don't have a capacity for connection, are people who don't have a capacity for empathy. So, if we are capable of having connection, we know shame because shame is the fear that we're not worthy of connection.

He or she who's willing to be the most uncomfortable is not only the bravest but rises the fastest.