It’s Evan, my one word is believe
and I believe that you have the ability to create
something special that will change the planet.
To help you on your journey,
I started the Mentor Me series,
and the goal here is to try to hang around people
who have done a lot more than us,
who have achieved massive success,
and hopefully by hanging around theme a little bit longer,
some of their mindsets, their attitudes, their beliefs,
the way they see the world, will seep into us,
to help us become the best version of ourselves.
So, today we’re going to learn from Brene Brown,
and the power of vulnerability and emotions.
Mentor me, Brene.
Rule number three is my personal favorite,
and I’d love to know which one you guys like the best.
(upbeat music)
– I want to start with two questions,
that I really want you to think about.
And the two questions are,
what should I be afraid of today?
And, who’s to blame?
What should scare me and who’s fault is it?
To me, these are the most profoundly dangerous questions
that we center our lives around.
And, to me, what they are indicators of,
is a culture of scarcity, a culture of not enough.
And when you think about any milieu in your life,
think about education.
What are we supposed to be afraid of,
and who’s to blame?
Politics, the economy, social issues.
I guarantee you if you turn on the news
or opened a paper today, the focus would be
here’s why you should be afraid
and here’s who’s fault it is.
What’s interesting to me about that,
is it’s not just at a cultural level, or a community level,
that stuff happens in my house, every week.
Every week, with my husband,
I talk to him about why we should be fearful
and who’s fault it is.
Mostly it’s his.
(laughing)
But you know, if something doesn’t go well
at my daughter’s school, then I’m like, oh my God,
this is going to have huge implications for university,
and we should be terrified right now
that she’s not getting cursive.
I know she’s four,
(laughing)
but this is still relevant.
It’s indicative of scarcity.
So let’s talk about what scarcity culture is
and what it looks like.
Scarcity culture is best understood
with the simple question of never enough.
And you can fill in the blanks,
never good enough, safe enough, certain enough,
perfect enough, relevant enough, and perhaps, I think,
one of the most dangerous and insidious messages today,
is never extraordinary enough.
Somehow, in the world we live in today, an ordinary life
has become synonymous with a meaningless life.
I’ve watched it happen, not only as a researcher,
I’m a qualitative researcher,
so I sit across from people and look in their eyes
and I have a good sense of what’s going on in their lives.
But, as a university professor,
who’s been teaching for the last 17 years,
it’s been very clear to me that extraordinary
means relevant.
And the top one is the big one, for all of us personally,
never good enough.
Which is shame, which we all have, on occasion,
that sense that we’re not smart enough, good enough,
perfect enough, loved enough, promoted enough,
we’re not enough.
So what we do in response to scarcity culture,
I think all of us every day, is this.
We wake up in the morning and we armor up.
And we put it on and we say, I’m going to go out in the world,
I’m basically going to just kick some ass,
I’m not going to let anyone see who I am,
and in doing so, I can protect myself,
against the things that hurt the most,
judgment, criticism, fear, blame, ridicule.
I’m going to armor up and I’m going to be safe.
And we rationalize and we convince ourselves
that this armor is really smart.
And we use a lot of different things to armor, too.
Perfectionism, intellectualizing,
but if you get really, really, clear
about what we’re doing every morning
when we wake up and decide to armor, it’s this simple.
This is what we’re protecting,
We’re protecting being hurt, for a very simple reason,
that no one really wants to talk about, which is this,
love, belonging, irreducible needs
of men, women, and children.
In the absence of love and belonging,
there’s always suffering.
And so what we believe is that we can protect our sense
of being lovable and being acceptable,
and being worth connection with armor.
Here’s the very worst news from my research,
the news that above all other, I did not want to hear,
it’s simply this, and I don’t even want to say it to you
because I think it’s mean to say it.
But it’s so true, and it’s simply,
our capacity for wholeheartedness
can never be greater
than our willingness to be brokenhearted.
Which is a terrible thing, but a truthful thing.
That we can only love and be loved
as much as we are willing to have our heart broken.
And so when we move through the world like this,
and with our partners, with our children,
with our friends, in classrooms,
with the people who work for us,
with the people we work for,
there are tremendous casualties.
The biggest myth about vulnerability is that it’s weakness.
I think a lot of people were raised to believe that.
It was modeled, certainly in our culture,
we see that a lot.
To be vulnerable, to be open, to be exposed,
is to be weak.
And the truth is, what I found in my research,
is that vulnerability is not weakness.
In fact, I would argue that it’s our greatest
measure of courage.
When we went out an asked people, what is vulnerability,
we heard things like, vulnerability is the first date
after my divorce.
Vulnerability is starting my own company.
Vulnerability is taking responsibility for something
that went wrong at work.
Vulnerability is sitting with my wife
who has stage three breast cancer
and making plans for our young kids.
Vulnerability is taking my business public.
The definition I use in my work, of vulnerability,
is simply uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure.
Vulnerability is about the willingness to show up,
and to be seen, even when there are no guarantees.
It’s interesting to me, one of the things that I thought
was really interesting, I gave a talk,
it’s probably a couple of years now,
and it was being translated by people doing
American Sign Language.
They came up before the talk started and they said,
are there any words that you’re going to use a lot
in your talk that we should know about
that might be different.
And, I said, well I use the word vulnerability a lot.
There were two of them, they kind of looked at each other
and they said, oh, we do this, for vulnerability.
And I said, what does that mean?
They said it means weak in the knees.
I’m like, wow, that’s not how I talk about vulnerability.
And she said there’s only one other sign for vulnerability.
And I said, what is it.
And she said,
And, I said, oh, that’s what I’m talking about.
And, so, to me, vulnerability is our most accurate
measure of courage.
I mean it’s pretty powerful
when I have 13,000 pieces of data
collected over 12 years,
that I cannot find a single incident or story of courage,
that was not completely underpinned by vulnerability.
I think the problem arises that
there’s so many little paradoxes with vulnerability
and one of them is that vulnerability is courage in you,
but weakness in me.
When I meet you, it’s the first thing I look for in you.
But it’s the last thing I want to show you in me.
And, so, I think, to really put ourselves out there,
knowing that if we do that enough, we’re going to fail,
I just don’t think it gets more courageous than that.
If I roughly took the people I interviewed,
and divided them into people
who really have a sense of worthiness,
that’s what this comes down to, a sense of worthiness,
they have strong sense of love and belonging,
and folks who struggle for it,
and folks who are always wondering if they’re good enough,
there was only one variable that separated the people
who have a strong sense of love and belonging
and really struggle for it, and that was the people
who have a strong sense of love and belonging
believe they’re worthy of love and belonging.
That’s it.
They believe they’re worthy.
And, to me, the hard part of, the one thing
that keeps us out of connection,
is our fear that we’re not worthy of connection
was something that personally and professionally,
I felt like I needed to understand better.
So, what I did, is I took all of the interviews
where I saw worthiness, where I saw people living that way,
and just looked at those.
What do these people have in common?
And I have a slight office supply addiction,
but that’s another talk.
(laughing)
So, I had a manila folder and I had a sharpie,
and I was like, what am I going to call this research?
The first words that came to my mind were wholehearted.
These are wholehearted people, living from this deep
sense of worthiness.
So, I wrote at the top of the manila folder,
and I started looking at the data.
In fact, I did it at first, in a four day, very intensive,
data analysis, where I went back, pulled these interviews,
pulled these stories, pulled the incidents,
what’s the theme, what’s the pattern?
My husband left town with the kids,
(laughing)
because I always go into this Jackson Pollock crazy thing,
where I’m just writing and in my researcher mode.
And so, here’s what I found.
What they had in common, was a sense of courage.
And I want to separate courage and bravery
for you for a minute.
Courage, the original definition of courage,
when it first came into the English language,
it’s from the Latin word cor, meaning heart,
and the original definition was to tell the story
of who you are with your whole heart.
And so these folks had very simply,
the courage to be imperfect.
They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first,
and then to others, because as it turns out,
we can’t practice compassion with other people,
if we can’t treat ourselves kindly.
And the last was they had connection,
and this was the hard part, 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 you have to absolutely do that for connection.
The other thing that they had in common was this,
they fully embraced vulnerability.
They believed that what made them vulnerable,
made them beautiful.
They didn’t talk about vulnerability being comfortable,
nor did they really talk about being excruciating,
as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing,
they just talked about it being necessary.
They talked about the willingness to say I love you first.
The willingness to do something
where there are no guarantees.
The willingness to breathe through the waiting
for the doctor to call after your mammogram.
Be willing to invest in a relationship
that may or may not work out.
They thought this was fundamental.
Let me tell you this real story, this just happened.
I spoke at HubSpot last week.
OK, 13,000 in this Boston convention center.
It’s like 10 minutes before I go on,
and I look at Twitter and this person sends this tweet out
that says, why is Brene at HubSpot?
Why is @brenebrown at HubSpot 2015?
And he had just tweeted love Seth Godin,
love Amy Schumer, all these people but,
why is Brene Brown?
And I’m like, oh, my God, why am I at HubSpot?
What am I doing here?
(laughing)
And the, I start sweating and even though
it’s a convention center, it’s like, ladies,
and I’m like, oh my God, what am I doing?
And I’m the opening keynote and then, he tweets it again.
And, I’m like, oh my God.
These are marketing people, I don’t know anything.
So I start Googling on my phone, marketing terms 2015.
(laughing)
Wait, the first term that comes up is incentivize,
I’m like, I’ve got to work the word incentivize
into this keynote.
I’m like, what does that mean exactly, I don’t know,
(laughing)
but I’m going to say, we’re going to incentivize, I’m like,
what is happening, and I have a total crisis of confidence.
Shame drives two tapes, not good enough
and who do you think you are?
I’m like, who, who am I?
Right, snaps, terrible.
Then all of a sudden, I’m like, who is it?
Because what happens when you get backed into a corner?
My brain is making up this story,
you don’t belong here.
I’m like that story is not going to work
because I’m going on in five seconds.
(laughing)
OK, the best case scenario, attack,
Attack, attack this guy.
Maybe attack him from the stage.
Maybe you that as my opening. – Damn.
– Maybe say, like, John Doe, asks what I’m going here.
Well let me tell ya’ll.
And then I click on the tweet to figure out
what his name is, and I accidentally hit the link
in his tweet, and it goes to this page
that says, what is Brene Brown doing at HubSpot?
She’s talking about vulnerability and that’s so important.
Here’s her TedTalk, (laughing)
here are her books.
Could you imagine if I would have gone out there and been like,
a creep? – Dear jerk,
(laughing)
– Totally, and that’s a true story, it just happened.
So what happens is when something hard happens,
and we’re captured by something difficult,
our emotions get the first crack at making sense
of something, a bad look, a hard phone call,
a disagreement at work.
We think that we’re rational beings,
we think that cognition is going to carry us through
and make sense of it, but it doesn’t.
You know, emotion’s driving, thought and behavior
are not even in the front seat riding shotgun,
they’re not even in the backseat.
Thought and behavior in the trunk, going, hey,
and emotion’s driving.
So the first thing we do, is we tell ourselves a story,
that reduces ambiguity about what happened.
Oh, I’m not supposed to be here,
I’m not good enough to be here,
men and women who have the greatest capacity
for rising strong, in the moment something happens,
they hack into that neuro-biological process
of making up a story.
They stop and say, wait a minute,
what’s actually going on here?
What am I feeling, what do I know for sure?
What is a story?
There’s a name in research for story,
that has one or two limited data points
and we fill in the rest with fear.
It’s called a conspiracy.
(laughing)
A conspiracy is a story with limited data points.
so here’s what I know, I know a guy sent a tweet,
I know I’m getting ready to talk, that’s all I know>
So, now that I’m ready to ruin his career,
and use him as a whipping person as I talk.
What is going on?
The first step of rising strong is
recognize you’ve been snagged by emotion
and get curious about it.
That’s it.
But how many of you were raised in families
where you were encouraged to get curious
about your emotions and talk about them and explore them?
(laughing)
Versus how many of you were raised in families
where you were taught, hey, suck it up?
Push through and get it done.
So the first thing is really reckoning with emotion.
What am I feeling, and what do I need to know more about?
And, so that thing that you say, does someone know something
that I don’t know?
Do they have information I don’t have?
That’s a huge part of the reckoning.
We just don’t do it.
So in that minute, in the back stage,
when I was on my phone, I could have just said,
whoa, Brene, your heart is racing,
your teeth are clenched,
and you’re going in for the kill here.
What do you know about this?
Nothing.
You know nothing.
And what if you knew everything, who cares?
Who gives a ?
There are 13,000 people, you’re going to spend an hour,
targeting one guy you don’t know?
– Thank you guys so much for watching.
I hope you enjoyed.
I’d love to know what did you learn from this video,
that you’re going to immediately apply, somehow,
to your life or your business?
What was the single most important lesson that you learned?
Leave it down in the comments below,
I’m really curious to find out.
I also want to give a quick shout-out to Mike Markham.
Mike, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book,
Your One Word, and doing the review on restaurant-hr.
I really, really appreciate the support Mike,
and I’m so glad that you enjoyed my book.
So thank you guys again for watching,
I believe in you.
I hope you can continue to believe in yourself,
and whatever your one word is.
Much love.
I’ll see you soon.
”
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