PDF Summary:Daring Greatly, by Brené Brown

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The Biggest Obstacle to Wholeheartedness: Shame

Shame is the greatest obstacle to wholehearted living.

Shame makes you feel like you’re not enough as you are, and it causes you to fear you’re not worthy of connection or belonging. It’s the result of living in a culture that encourages you to believe you must live an extraordinary life in order for it to be a meaningful one. You feel shame when the reality of your life doesn’t match your own expectations or the expectations of others.

Shame kills your courage, impedes your ability to think or act in innovative ways, and prevents you from experiencing life meaningfully. Shame thrives when kept hidden and left unchecked. In order for shame to survive, it needs you to believe you’re not connected and don’t belong.

The Best Solution For Shame: Vulnerability

Vulnerability is the cure for shame.

It’s defined by actions that leave you feeling exposed, at risk, and for which you cannot predict the outcome (such as telling someone you have a crush on them, or asking for help when you’re struggling). Vulnerability frees you from the shackles of shame by exposing the lies it tells you. Counterintuitively, when you...

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Result #2: Comparison, or determining the value of something by ranking it alongside something else.

We do this in our culture by comparing our lives to the lives of others, or to our idea of the perfect life. Competition is healthy for growth, but over-comparison impedes growth by limiting it to a narrow standard or expectation.

Result #3: Disengagement, or a lack of willingness and ability to connect.

Our culture is full of disengagement—we are disengaged in the way we glorify hiding or detaching from pain (stoicism), as well as in our collective focus on serving the self and not the other (individualism). Disengagement prevents you from taking risks in your life, because you are detached from your willingness to be vulnerable. You’re not present enough to show up. When disengaged, you’re not able to be seen or heard, and you’re not able to truly see or hear others, which impedes your ability to connect, and activates your fear of inadequacy. When you’re not able to connect in meaningful ways, or feel like others don’t have the desire to invest time and effort into connecting with you, you doubt your worthiness of love.

Result #4: Narcissistic...

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A great way to dispel is to look at the definitions of “vulnerability” and “weakness.” Merriam-Webster defines Vulnerability as “open to attack or damage.” Weakness is defined as “the inability to withstand attack or wounding.” There are important distinctions in these definitions. To be weak means to be unable to defend, whereas to be vulnerable means to be open. You are certainly capable of being harmed when you’re open, but this does not mean you are defenseless.

You may think your emotions make you weak, but your emotions on their own demonstrate neither weakness, nor strength. The way you choose to view them is what determines your experience of them. Studies show that acknowledging the ways you are vulnerable, paradoxically, makes you stronger, not weaker. If you don’t acknowledge your vulnerability, you are not prepared to protect yourself. It’s the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand, and believing what you can’t see, can’t hurt you.

How Do You Confront This Myth?

You confront it by showing up, and being willing to be vulnerable, even at the risk of pain. Examples might be joining a recreational team for a sport you’ve never played, asking...

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Of the four terms, guilt and shame are the most relevant to wholeheartedness. Shame in particular is toxic, and prevents wholeheartedness, because it conflates your behavior with who you are, corroding your belief in your ability to grow. It also impedes action, because it makes you believe that if you do something bad, you are inherently bad, which prevents you from feeling like it’s possible to change. Therefore, shame is inherently destructive.

Categories of Shame

Brown’s research identified 12 categories of shame that fall under three core themes.

Body Image and Health

1. Mental and physical health: Fear of not having a fit enough body, not being strong enough, not being smart enough, and so on.
2. Addiction: Fear of never feeling happy enough, or alive enough, or peaceful enough.
3. Sex: Fear of unworthiness, or fear of being ugly.
4. Aging: Fear of no longer being loved and admired for looks, or fear of mind deterioration.
5. Appearance and body image: Fear of not having the right weight, the right make-up, clothes, and so on.

Relationships

6. Motherhood or Fatherhood: Fear of being unprepared or unable to identify with the role of...

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The greatest danger with this shield is the way you can slip into experiencing life through a lens of perpetual disappointment, to a point where you don’t even feel joy, you just expect pain. The tragedy of this is that you become starved for joy, but unable to be with the vulnerability that would allow you to access it. All you’re really doing when you feed foreboding joy is trying to avoid being surprised by pain. You would rather practice the expectation of it, than be “caught with your pants down”, so to speak.

Armor #2—Perfectionism

The self-destructive belief that you can avoid shame if you do everything in life exactly right.

• An example would be overachieving in school to avoid the shame of not feeling worthy enough or smart enough, or people-pleasing in our relationships at our own expense, to avoid conflict or rejection.

It’s common to believe that perfectionism is protecting you, when in reality, it is preventing the world from seeing who you truly are. Perfectionism is about approval. If you struggle with perfectionism, it’s likely you were rewarded for this behavior from an early age. The risk of being rewarded for perfectionism is that you...

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Practice #2—Practice Gratitude

Those who have experienced tragic loss understand the importance of appreciating what you have when you have it. You can pay your respect to the reality of loss by honoring the joy that arises in your everyday experiences.

Practice #3—Embrace the Discomfort of Softening Into Joy

It’s impossible to prepare for or avoid pain. No amount of catastrophizing in advance will protect you from loss. Every time you do this, you lose the opportunity to develop resilience. Resilience is a cornerstone of hope, and you can build resilience by really allowing yourself to sink into moments of joy, even when you are fearful it will go away.

Disarming Tool #2: Perfectionism

Embrace imperfection, strive for excellence.

No one is perfect. The healthy alternative to perfectionism is striving to be the best version of yourself, and allowing your own perception to determine this, rather than the perception of others. Perfectionism has a spectrum, but the way out is to shift from being other-focused to being self-focused. In other words, you stop thinking, “Do others think I am enough?” and start trusting that you are enough. You can shift...

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Strategy: The method or plan for achieving a goal. You might say strategy is part of “how we want to show up”. Everyone utilizes strategy. Families utilize it to achieve life milestones like having a baby or moving across the country, religious groups use it to build their congregation, and teachers use it to facilitate student learning goals.

Culture: Culture, or as Brown calls it, “the way we do things around here,” is defined by what behavior is acceptable within the collective. You might call culture “how we show up in practice”. Culture is made up of social contracts that formulate the status quo. From a goal-oriented standpoint, it’s less about the goal or the strategy of achieving it, and more about who or what the goal serves.

When we don’t find a way to align strategy and culture, we experience a greater societal disconnect, which prevents our ability to engage with one another in wholehearted ways on the broader scale.

How Can We Gain Insight Into the Culture of Any Group?

In order to see the gap between a society’s strategy and culture, you need to first understand what the culture of that society is. You can learn a lot about any particular culture...

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Obstacle #2: Risk Avoidance

Creativity and learning are, by nature, unpredictable and uncertain experiences. They can only occur as a result of taking risks and being vulnerable. You need to be able to experience failure to learn and grow.

What Do These Obstacles Look Like In Our Schools and Workplaces?

Put simply, they look like cultures based in shame. These types of environments are unsustainable. They facilitate the erosion of self-esteem and self-worth. When people experience shame long enough, defense mechanisms automatically arise as protection. The number one defense mechanism that will arise in a shame-prone environment is disengagement.

How Can You Tell Shame Has Taken Over The Culture?

Usually, you are on your way to shame culture in your school or organization if you see any of the following red flags:

Red Flag #1—Blaming

• For example, let’s say you are a high school student, and you have a teacher who doesn’t effectively teach the concepts they are covering. You then take a quiz, which you fail. Instead of acknowledging there may have been gaps in the curriculum, your teacher tells you that you need to pay better attention in...

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Problem #2—Judgment

Being certain of anything to an extreme can cause you to judge others for what you perceive to be “wrong” choices. It plays on your inner doubt, because we tend to only engage in judgment when we don’t have confidence in our own methods. This impedes growth because the fear of not being perfect causes you to focus instead on at least being better than those around you, which can become a vicious shame and judgment cycle.

The ultimate problem with giving in to the craving for certainty is that it sets an unstable foundation from which to raise happy, healthy kids, and increases a parent’s fear of making irreparable mistakes.

How Parents Unintentionally Harm Their Children

Children, from a survival standpoint, are deeply vulnerable. They are dependent on those caring for them. Shame causes children to feel unlovable, which threatens their sense of, not just emotional, but physical safety. Under these conditions, for children, shame is trauma. One of the most common ways you can fall short as a parent is by failing to distinguish for your children the difference between “you are bad” and “you did something bad.”

This distinction is important...