Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Daring Greatly is at the intersection of Brown’s work as a serious scholar in the social psychology of vulnerability and shame, useful self-help, and TED talk boosterism; quite literally, Brown parleyed a viral TED talk, when that was a hip thing, into a series of best-sellers, two documentary adaptations, and a business consulting practice. Shame is central to a lot of our lives, and very toxic.

The core of Brown’s argument is that wholehearted living, which is all the things like love and connection and creativity and growth, which make life worth living, requires working through the walls of shame that we’ve built up as defenses. A couple of things really hit home for me. The way that masculinity is a box that deforms boys, and that this box is maintained socially by both men and women, seems precisely right. Intimacy is terrifying. The way that parenting often weaponizes shame, to the detriment of both parents and children, strikes me as true as well.

The advice in the book is that everyone feels shame, but people who are living wholeheartedly believe that they are unconditionally worthy of love. Conditional self-acceptance is poison. Shame is an emotional reaction, and can be countered by noting that you are having a reaction and that everything is fine. Standard CBT/DBT techniques.

Brown has a lot of insights, but I personally have a visceral dislike of MBA speak, and a lot of this book is aimed towards effective business leaders. I’m curious to see her more academic work, the methods section on her use of grounded theory is fascinating.