Who inspires me 8: Brené Brown

I wrote about our approach to Rehearsal Days here a while back. In one of our early days together I showed the TED Talk by Brené Brown called “The Power of Vulnerability” (27 million views and still counting). I knew it was a powerful talk and I knew that it was deeply inspiring. I also thought that it was probably a risk to show it to the team as it is so raw with emotion and the team were having a tricky time with some issues when I shared it.

What I didn’t expect was the impact the film had! It was profound. One of the things that I really wanted to achieve with Rehearsal Days was an open space for the core team to work together and feel that there is a trusted space where we can share together, create together and build our own “island of sanity” in an otherwise mad world.

This video achieved that. It brought us straight into some of the really key things about working together. We had the opportunity to consider shame, guilt and vulnerability. Core emotions that are usually under the surface in the workplace and go unnoticed.

For that reason alone, Brené Brown wins a “people who inspire me” award. But the journey goes back further. After seeing the TED Talk the first time a few years ago I bought her first book “The Gifts of Imperfection” and loved the way it talked to the core of our emotions. As Brené likes to emphasise, she is a researcher working in social work research. She knew that the terrain she was heading into was open to criticism. The social sciences have spent so long developing their credibility as “sciences” and then along comes a researcher who wants to talk about soft emotions like shame. And she wants to raise these issues because they were what emerged as she interviewed more and more people. I also read “Daring Greatly” and was again deeply inspired by what she was saying.

These books aren’t just lazy self-help books. She takes the research base really seriously. And then she has the courage to develop her argument out into the space that is so difficult to express and yet so vital to address. In her second TED Talk “Listening to Shame“, Brené Brown half-jokes about the outcome of telling people in her first talk that she had a nervous breakdown whilst going through the research and reaching her conclusions. She then tells us how the explosion of attention for the first talk sent her into a panic about what she had done.

It is so refreshing to hear her talking in such a self-effacing way about her own raw emotions, being so honest and open about the human condition. She really is a wonderful role model of what she is talking about.

Her work has been truly inspiring to me and I look forward to continuing to be inspired by the path that she takes. Thank you Brené.

(November Challenge 13/31)

Also published on Medium.