Kevinr- how about a 30 second synopsis for those of us video challenged? My phone will only play the first 2 minutes, despite wifi :-(
<br /><br />Well, I'll try. If you get the opportunity please try to watch from a computer because I can't tell her story anywhere near as well as she can.<br /><br /> Brene is a social worker who started her ten year research on vulnerability by studying connection and our ability to feel connected and how worthy we feel of connection. This sense of worthiness is guided by our shame.<br /> She found that in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen. That the difference between people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who struggle with feeling like they are not good enough, is simply a belief that they are worthy of love and belonging. It's sort of a leap of faith.<br /> Brene found that the whole-hearted people, as she calls them, have the courage to be imperfect, the compassion to be kind to themselves first so they can be kind to others and that they have connection as a result of authenticity. They were willing to let go of who they thought they should be, in order to be who they were, which is something we all have to do in order to feel at all connected. They embrace vulnerability and believe that what makes them vulnerable, makes them beautiful.<br /> Brene, like myself, is one of those people who struggle with allowing themselves to be vulnerable, so this research led to her breakdown, as she calls it, or her spiritual awakening, as her therapist calls it.<br /> She poses that we have a habit of numbing vulnerability, because society doesn't want to see it, and in doing so, we numb everything else as well.<br /> She goes on to state that the result of this is that we are the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in US history. In trying to numb all the things we don't want to feel, we also numb the things we do want to feel. I.E. when you numb despair, or fear, you also numb happiness, and joy, and gratitude. This leads to the dangerous cycle of becoming miserable, looking for purpose and meaning, and feeling vulnerable, and numbing that vulnerability, and becoming miserable, etc, etc.<br /> In addition to numbing our bad emotions, we tend to make things that are uncertain, certain. Religion, for example, has gone from a belief in faith and mystery, to certainty. e.g."I'm right, you are wrong, shut up." <br /> The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid we are... Politics, looks the same. There is no discourse anymore, just blame. Blame is described in the research as a way to discharge pain and discomfort. <br /> We try to perfect ourselves with plastic surgery, etc, and then we try to perfect our children, who are already hard wired for struggle when they get here. She suggests our job shouldn't be to perfect them by getting them to Yale at age 7, it should be to let them know that they are imperfect and wired for struggle, but worthy of love and belonging. <br /> Furthermore, we pretend that what we do doesn't have an effect on people. We do it in our personal lives as well as on a corporate level. Whether it's a bail out or an oil spill, a recall, we pretend what we are doing doesn't have a huge effect on others. Instead of placing blame, we should just be authentic and real and say we are sorry and we will fix it. (Global warming or environmental change is a great example, that just occurred to me. We debate about whether humans are responsible for the problem, rather than seeing what we can do to fix it. If it was an asteroid coming at us, would we waste all our time debating who threw it?)<br /> She says there is another way: To let ourselves be seen. Deeply seen. Vulnerably seen. To love with our whole hearts, even though there is no guarantee. To practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror and instead of catastrophizing what might happen, just say we are grateful because to feel this vulnerable means we are alive.<br /> And most importanly, to believe we are enough so we will stop screaming and start listening and be kinder to the people around us as well as ourselves.<br /> <br /> Sorry, but 30 seconds just didn't cut it. <img src="/images/boards/smilies/smile.gif" border="0" align="absmiddle"> I did paraphrase quite a bit. I hope I did her talk justice. I had to leave out her sense of humor, which is a shame. She is a lot of fun to listen to.<br /> I don't have time today to do her other talk, but if you get the chance you can also look at her new one:
http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame.html<br /><br /><br /><br />