A very interesting piece and some thought provoking statements, watch the TED Talk as well… what got me is the answer to the opening question- fear of being ordinary.. very true as in the last few weeks I have been trying to get active on social network sites and she hit me with her remark… do read if you can.. bringing up few insights which I found very thought provoking… though I am debating it J.
In your new book Daring Greatly, you introduce the idea of a shame-based emotion that seems unique to our contemporary society. One aspect you name is the “fear of being ordinary.”
Brené Brown: The overwhelming message in our culture today is that an ordinary life is a meaningless life unless you are grabbing a lot of attention and you have lots of Twitter followers and Facebook fans who know everything you know. I use the shame-based fear of being ordinary as my definition for narcissism. I definitely see it in younger generations, where people fear they are not big enough. No matter how happy and fulfilling their small, quiet life is, they feel it must not mean very much, because it’s not the way people are measuring success. Which is just terrifying.
How does vulnerability relate to our capacity for joy?
As someone who spent more than a decade studying fear, vulnerability, and shame, I never thought in a million years that I would say that joy is probably the most difficult emotion to feel. It’s hard to feel joy because we are so keenly aware that it’s fleeting. When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, we lose the courage to be joyful. Joy is a daring emotion! We are going to let ourselves stop in a moment that won’t last forever, that can be taken away. We feel almost that “you are a schmuck if you let yourself feel too deeply because the bad stuff is going to happen.”
A lot of your work examines how humans experience the emotion of shame. Can you explain how shame relates to vulnerability?
If vulnerability is the willingness to show up and let ourselves be seen, shame gets in the way. How can we be authentically known when we are paralyzed with fear about what people might see? Setting boundaries is a great example; it’s something that people don’t think about as vulnerability, but saying “no” and protecting our time—whether it’s family time, our creative time, whatever our self-care time is—that’s a huge act of vulnerability in a culture where productivity is so highly valued.
Watch the full interview at following link: Original Story, Dec 20, 2012
She may not be a household name just yet, but when you refer to “the woman who talks about vulnerability,” the seven million viewers of her TEDTalks videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=X4Qm9cGRub0)know you mean Brené Brown. A research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, Brown has been studying shame, fear, and vulnerability for 12 years.
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