Most Replayed Moment: Brené Brown on Vulnerability, Self Esteem and The Four Skillsets Of Courage

The host starts with a skeptical question. He notes that a lot of the vulnerability on display in conversations like this one is "performative," and asks whether being vulnerable actually matters for his health, happiness and future. Brené Brown answers with a definition rather than a yes or no. She treats vulnerability as a feeling, not a behaviour or a character trait: "the cringe, the awkward," the emotion that shows up in moments of uncertainty, risk or emotional exposure.

Vulnerability is the emotion we experience when we are up against uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure.

Brown says this idea was hard to get across because people are "so raised to believe that vulnerability is weakness." Her evidence is a challenge she put to two groups. At Fort Bragg, working with special forces, she asked soldiers for a single example of courage, either one they had witnessed or one they had done, that involved no uncertainty, risk or emotional exposure. She says "No one could answer it," until a young soldier stood up and said "three tours." The next week she asked Seattle Seahawks players the same thing about courage on or off the field. According to Brown, they told her it was not possible.

From these exchanges she concludes that "There is no courage without vulnerability." Her answer to the host is conditional. Vulnerability is important "if we want to be brave with our lives," and if we want to act in a way that is "values aligned and courageous," because that means coming to terms with how we feel when we are uncertain, at risk or exposed. She also gives a test for telling real courage from its imitation: "If you know how it's going to end, that is not courage." Worth keeping in mind: the evidence here is two group conversations as Brown recounts them, not systematic data reported in this excerpt.

Courage is the willingness to show up and be all in when you cannot predict the outcome.

Brown's everyday example of vulnerability is "I love you first." When she asks the host whether he has ever said it first, he hedges: "I'm not sure," and then says it has "been a while" since he was in that situation. Brown points out that he would have had to go first.

She then tells a story from a talk she gave in LA. Afterwards a young man, "probably 22 or 23," came up to tell her how her work had changed his life, and a crowd gathered around them. He had taken a woman he was "so crazy about" to their favourite restaurant. He waited until the chocolate volcano dessert arrived and told her he loved her. She replied that she thought he was "awesome," said they should date other people, and took an Uber home. Brown says that partway through she thought it was a bad story and wondered when it would turn. He told her he spent the drive home repeatedly cursing her by name.

The turn came at his apartment. When he told his two roommates what had happened, one said "that's not how it works": when you move toward someone, they move away, so you should always be pulling back so they come toward you. The young man rejected that advice. He said he didn't want to "be that dude" and described what he had done in Brown's own terms: "I was daring greatly." Brown says both roommates "just got teary-eyed" and told him "right on, man." She uses the story to repeat her main claim and adds a rhetorical question: "How can you say your brave if you're not putting yourself out there?"