Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
£6.60£10.40 (-37%)
**Now on Netflix as The Call to Courage**
‘She’s so good, Brené Brown, at finding the language to articulate collective feeling’ Dolly Alderton
Every time we are faced with change, no matter how great or small, we also face risk. We feel uncertain and exposed. We feel vulnerable. Most of us try to fight those feelings – or feel guilt for feeling them in the first place.
In a powerful new vision Dr Brené Brown challenges everything we think we know about vulnerability, and dispels the widely accepted myth that it’s a weakness. She argues that, in truth, vulnerability is strength and when we shut ourselves off from vulnerability – from revealing our true selves – we distance ourselves from the experiences that bring purpose and meaning to our lives.
Daring Greatly is the culmination of 12 years of groundbreaking social research, across every area of our lives including home, relationships, work, and parenting. It is an invitation to be courageous; to show up and let ourselves be seen, even when there are no guarantees.
This is vulnerability. This is daring greatly.
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by Jim Harries
This review of Brown’s book takes a perspective of Christian Mission to the majority World, especially Africa. The author of this review has spent nearly 30 years, while serving in Africa, encouraging other missionaries to be vulnerable. Hence his fascination with Brown’s observations on vulnerability.
In summary, Brown tells us that many problems in family, school, and organization are caused through inadequate recognition of the power of shame. Rigid machine-likeness that characterises today’s modern results-oriented society, stultifies innovation, relationship, joy, and creativity, and results in disengagement. Manoeuvring through shame, by enacting appropriate levels of vulnerability, in necessary combination with profound spirituality, results in healthy overcoming of shame, which brings about wholeheartedness. In parts of the majority world, especially Africa, taboos supporting traditional customs backed by the power of ancestors, are driven by the power of shame. (Brown makes no reference to majority world contexts. As mentioned above, this review endeavours to translate her book into some majority world contexts.)
Vulnerability, which is “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure” is also “the core of all emotions and feelings” and “creativity, Innovation, and learning”, Brown tells us (p33, p187). Her analysis adds, to me, clarification to an already clear need for vulnerability in intercultural relationship. Intercultural missionaries often struggle to win the trust of people they are reaching. Vulnerability, says Brown, is a prerequisite for winning trust (p47). I agree. That is a profound, and very challenging, observation. Brown tells us that vulnerability is a prerequisite for love and for belonging. Those who fear vulnerability, she emphasizes, become cruel, cynical, and critical. The functioning of effective feedback loops requires vulnerability. Brown’s observations ring true. The giving and receiving of feedback can bring extreme relational volatility. While feedback-loops are essential for organisational success, what to one person may be positive feedback, may not be so received by another! Only vulnerability can guarantee feedback effectiveness.
Brown is a shame researcher. Her studies of shame took her to analysis of vulnerability. Someone is shamed when their identity is linked to their failings. Missionaries who fear vulnerability fear an appearance of failure in the eyes of their supporters. They fear being enveloped by the very poverty that they supposedly come to resolve. These fears undermine vulnerability. A solution, Brown tells us, is self-compassion. This leads to wholehearted living, which is dependent on having a healthy spirituality, Brown (who is a Christian) tells us. Vulnerability, and the resultant trust by nationals, love, and belonging, can be achieved if missionaries separate their failings from their identity. Then they can be forgiven. ‘Guilt’ is ‘I have failed’. Unlike shame, guilt can be forgiven. The much more destructive shame is ‘I am a failure’, causing someone to give up and disengage (p66). Missionaries who intend to minister over a long term need to learn that God can forgive their failings – they may be guilty of some things, but they need not be ashamed.
Brown talks of a gap needing to be filled. The gap is between what we say, and what we do. The gap can be overcome through honesty, which can only arise from a readiness to be vulnerable. Dis-honesty, in this sense, results in withdrawal, through disengagement.
Many of Brown’s examples draw on the US educational sector. Teachers shamed when students’ results are too low, disengage from profound upbuilding-relationships with students, in favour of simply passing on information needed in examinations. So also, missionaries being set on achieving the kinds of results recognised by Westerners, especially by donors, pre-empts vulnerable engagement with majority world cultures, that could in the long run be the most innovative and profoundly transformative. Vulnerability, which includes refusal to be victim to shaming mechanisms (considered by Brown to be Gremlins; which should remind us of evil spirits), could transform mission approaches. Such a link, between Brown’s writing and potential missionary fruitfulness, should not surprise us: Brown works with profoundly Christian paradigms in all but name, implicitly positioning us in a position where we should become vulnerable to God himself.
by Bvc
This book teaches you about being real in life to stop all the cover ups, its fantastic- a breath of fresh air!
by Jane Wilkinnson
Daring Greatly is an easy read, not bursting at the seams with difficult to understand terminology. lt comes across as an extension of Rising Strong, but so what. Most of us have an experienced an event, that we’ve exhausted over and over, similar to Daring Greatly…
However, it is thoughtfully created, the narrative flows really easily and is often a page, after page turner! From a personal point of view it felt Brené Brown was writing and talking about me.
lnteresting and informative book.
by Frida Jackson
I’ve listened to the audio book but purchased as a gift for colleagues and they loved it.
by Jim Ogden
Daring Greatly is a work of genius; a labour of love of the Author, Brenee Brown, who, through searching on her own personal journey, realised that what was happening at home was all connected to the work she was doing as a paid researcher. From that moment on she made the connection between shame, vulnerability, courage and gratitude to be the keys to transformation in the lives we live.
What is so compelling about this book is that with every page, I observed the mind challenge every thing that Brown wrote about the human condition and its denial of shame: “no, I am not that person… I am NOT that person. I have no thing to be ashamed about!” But then Brown cites examples from case studies, and twenty years of facts collated from her research, in order to support the contentions that come through her in this book. At this point, the mind has nowhere to go. The mind submits to the fact that this book is not, as so many are in the Self-Development field, an opinion of its author, based on his/her own life experiences, but that this book is based upon hard data, real life human experiences shared over thousands of hours of testimony of personal interviews between the author and volunteers across every socio-economic sector of the United States; of data gathering and processing of questionnaires, to finally be able to write this account of what was found.
Thank you, Brenee Brown, for having dedicated – and most probably, sacrificed – so much of yourself, in bringing these profound insights of human behaviour to the conscious awareness of human kind through this book. I know that it has profoundly shifted the perspective of how I see myself, and what is important to me, and most of all, given me the courage to own with conviction, free of the shame, the purpose of what I am here to bring to humanity right now. With eternal love and gratitude, Sister.
by Mircea Ivanescu
i got this for me and my partner and we’re learning a lot! Highly recommend it!
by M.C
This book changed my life! It helps me see that the path of love, joy, adventure and growth is the same path where I will (not if) experience setbacks, perceived failure and pain.
It gives me the courage to keep trying, one day at a time. And the hope that clear intentions, vulnerability and self inquiry are anchors to a joyful, purposeful life.
My life has changed immeasurably over the years since I first got this book, and I have shared the book with many friends. At times of doubt, my friends and I have reminded each other that we are ‘Darling Greatly’.
by micky
CANT PUT THE BOOK DOWN