Hi, I'm Heather Eastman. And this is well said a podcast on the Art and Science of living. Well, this podcast is brought to you by indigo.
For a lot of people letting the world. See your truest self. The tender vulnerable part is really hard. Even scary hard. Our Guest today is the renowned researcher author and Ted Talks Superstar brene Brown. And she is here to say doing that, scary hard thing can actually change your life in hugely positive. And transformative ways. Renee has spent more than two decades studying the emotions and qualities that Define us.
Humans emotions, like, courage, vulnerability, shame and empathy. You may already know her from her wildly popular, TED Talks or her Spotify podcasts, or her five New York Times bestselling books. Her work has literally inspired Millions this past December Brunei. Published a new book. Now, a Heather's pick called atlas of the heart. And we're here to talk about this book and her work in general. I'm delighted to welcome.
Comprende Brown to well said hello, Brittany. Hello. It is such a joy to welcome you to our podcast. You are a beloved author at Indigo with our customers and our employees. And now I just learned last night with my granddaughter who is in the first year of her Master's in psychology who literally went berserk. And I think held me in high regard really high regard for the first time, because,
I love you. So you are really held in
such high esteem. Thank you.
So I'm grateful. I know that your schedule is crazy packed. So thank you.
I'm grateful to be here and thank you for inviting me before,
heading into the new book Alice of the heart. I'm really curious to know. How are you? How have you been? And how are you processing? This pandemic, this two-year-long cataclysmic intervention into our lives. As we knew them.
I'll be just really honest and vulnerable with you. I think.
I still to in it to have any kind of wise reflection. I think that like everyone, my surge capacity is completely deleted. I am worn out. I think it was some of the greatest parenting challenges of my life just, you know, with a calculus. That's kind of always changing about what's safe and what's not and what is the risk of exposure for my kids?
Is social and emotional toll that isolation takes hardest season in my marriage of 30 years hands down. My husband's a physician. So it's just, I'm unsure. I'm getting ready to go into four and a half weeks off completely off the grid. And I'm thinking maybe I'll reflect on it then, or maybe I'll just play a lot of pickleball and watch a shit ton of British Mysteries and not worry about it. And I'll reflect some time when were far enough away from it. That I can look back safely.
Speaking of British TV. Are you by chance? Like me a brick box fan. It is so my go-to when I'm really feeling that covid burnout thing.
Oh, breadbox. Oh my God. It's my, if I got a tattoo. It's a either. A quarter brick box. Are you kidding? Exactly? Brick box is Mikey.
I have to say, I love this phrase of my surge capacity is depleted. I think that's how we all feel our surge capacity is gone. We have nothing left.
That's from the work of a researcher at the University of Minnesota. But she studies kind of War crisis, natural disasters and you know, she writes a lot about how we have a surge capacity but our wiring and our adrenaline is really there for short, bursts of Crisis. And this has been a crisis. Has been unraveling, not only has it been in crisis, unraveling the last two years. It.
It has held captive crises within the crisis addiction crisis, depression domestic violence. Everyone that had to stay at home didn't have a place a safe place to stay at home, you know, and so I think to be honest with you, I'm really leaning heavy into Carl Jung right now. Who said that for every great progression will experience a devastating regression.
Mmm-hmm. And so I'm
thinking Jesus. I hope this is the
In regression because that's what it feels like. Politically socially economically, climate environmentally. I feel like we're in a great regression.
I wonder whether the pandemic will end up accelerating a regression. We were already in and pushing it. So into foreground that something positive will come out of it or whether it will deepen, the regression to a point that will take us a long time to deal
with to climb out.
Out. Yeah, what an important question. So
one of the ideas in your book, I found hugely powerful. Is this notion that when we feel pain sometimes instead of identifying it as pain and dealing with it, trying to untangle it, we get angry. We deflect it. Mmm, we push it outwards and it does come out as anger toward others. Maybe it's even Collective pain, pushed outwards that's causing some of the rancor and dangerous divisions were seeing in the US.
Can you share more about this whole idea of internal pain pushed outward? I mean, emotional
pain is no joke, we know from research that the same centers that light up in my brain. When I feel physical pain are the centers that lied up when I feel social pain or emotional pain. I mean, there are some studies that show pain from social isolation is improved by ibuprofen. I mean, emotional pain is real. We are a social species.
No, that loneliness is a very strong predictor of early death. I think, if you go back, Heather to the ferry. First myth, the very first place where we take the wrong trail. It's the belief that we are rational cognitive beings, who on occasion inconveniently experience, emotion, and that our job is to dismiss emotion and get back to
our rational logic thinking where that is not the case that is not supported by any research at all, especially in the last 10 years when we've got Pet Imaging. And I mean, we are emotional beings first and foremost, who on occasion, think rationally, but when emotion is driving cognition and thought are not even like sitting next to us in the front seat there like tied up in the back of the trunk and so
I think when we talk about pain, if my thinking is, hey, look, I'm supposed to be a logical, rational, cognitive being this pain is killing me. It's week for me to even feel it and that is why it is so much easier for us to cause pain then to experience and feel pain. We just literally deflected
and
And
again, I was put my time between Austin Houston. I was on the lake and Austin. I saw this big kind of decorated boat that had a bunch of trump stuff and it had like a 20-foot flag. And the flag was like 6 feet by 6 feet. It said fuck your feelings
and
which is kind of a Hallmark of that campaign. What it's saying is that feelings are weakness and should be disregarded. They make you weak. They make you vulnerable vulnerabilities.
- when in all reality, that is the most emotional emotive flag you could ever have. That is a rage flag. That is a contempt flag. That is a flag of emotion about him. It's like an irony flag, but I think when you ask the question, did the pandemic just highlight fault lines of a regression that we were already in and that way we can move to progression faster or did they deepen those fault?
Lines, so tremendously that we're going to have a hard time clawing our way out. I think the answer is yes, and I think the fault lines have been magnified.
I see so many white friends of mine saying oh my God, the system's broken and I see so many black friends and Indigenous friends and Latina Latino friends saying, yes, it is broken, but it was designed that way and it was broken before you felt it because we were in the first Ripple of it
and so
and
Korean Health Care, police brutality, I mean, just all of the veneers. I mean I live in Houston, it's December of it's 85 degrees here, right? I never in my life thought that I would live through a storm which we went live through, you know, six months ago.
We're houstonians froze to death children. Mmm, because our politicians decided not to winterize our power grids. And we decided not even to be a part of the national power grid for greed, like every system. I never thought, I mean, if you want to say, who is the least likely in high school to end up being a prepper. It would be me. Like, I trust the infrastructure. I trust government. I trust science. And now
Like fuck, right? Like Detroit drinking water, the taxes power grid. It is a great regression.
So let's dive a bit further into some of the emotions you expand on. In atlas of the heart. You have put vulnerability at the very heart of our understanding ourselves. How do you define personal vulnerability? And why have you come to understand how important it is for us to embrace it? And then to leverage it to make our lives
richer? You as a fifth generation Texan, I can
You that I was definitely raised to believe that vulnerability is weakness. And I think most of us were raised to believe that being vulnerable as being weak. It, just again does not bear out. So the definition of vulnerability that emerge from the data for us is it's the emotion we feel when we are uncertain at risk and emotionally exposed. So we asked people for examples. The first date after my divorce, trying to get pregnant after my second miscarriage, sitting with my wife who has stage four breast cancer.
Answer and talking about plans for our toddlers. It is saying I love you. First. One of my favorite parenting, ones was sending your child to school knowing how excited he is to make Orchestra first chair and being fairly confident. He will not make the orchestra at all.
Vulnerability is really just full of. I'm uncertain. There's a risk here and I'm emotionally exposed here, like, I could get hurt. And so, I spent a lot of time trying to convince people that vulnerability is not weakness. It's actually the only path to courage and I got real Clarity on it. One day when I was on a military base here in Houston working with special forces troops and I
The troops. I said, give me an example of courage and your life or in someone else's life that you've observed. Give me a single example.
Of Courage that did not require uncertainty risk and emotional exposure and there was just kind of this really penetrating silence and heads fell into hands. And finally, one young man stood up and said, three tours, ma'am. There is no courage without vulnerability. Mmm-hmm. Then the next week. I'm in Seattle, working with the Seattle Seahawks this football team. Ask the players. The same question after they had said, look, we're professional football players. We don't do vulnerability, and I said, just go Kate.
Give me an example of Courage on the field or off that doesn't require uncertainty risk and emotional exposure. And they wanted to cuddle for a minute, of course, and they came back and they said ma'am. There is no courage without vulnerability. I use this Teddy. Roosevelt, quote, as the epigraph of the book on vulnerability. No, it's not the critic who
counts but the one who does actually strive to do the Deeds. Yeah, man in the ring with
the dust that's it. And I just was told and then saw something where LeBron
the basketball player were right that on the soles of his shoes before every game. And so I think where we get lost as we get confused about what vulnerability is and isn't vulnerability - boundaries is not vulnerability, vulnerability is not oversharing. Yeah, I spend 90% of my time working in organizations with leaders and I'll have leaders, say, listen, I believe what you're saying. How much should I cry? How much should I disclose? And I'm like, oh Jesus. You don't understand what I'm saying? Look, this was the big learning from the
Research for us. The biggest barrier to courage is not
fear.
Its armor. It's how
in moments when we're afraid do we armor up to self? Protect our ego? Do we become the knower instead of the learner? Do we become perfectionistic? Do we become cynical? What is the armor that we use to self protect against vulnerability? And so it's not about crying. It's not about disclosure. It's not about oversharing. It's about not tapping out of our values, not tapping out of
Hard conversations when shit gets hard.
So an atlas of the heart. You take the reader on a kind of Journey Through 87 different emotions and experiences. How did this particular book come about? And how did you get to 87? So I taught a Class A
course online over the course of a year and it had a component on emotional literacy. And we saw people really struggling. So seventy thousand plus people took this course.
So after we ended the last session of it, we D identified, all the comments were about 550,000 of them, submitted to human subjects approval and then in our analysis of the secondary data on what emotions, do people really struggle to name and that when they finally can name them, it helps them regulate manage. He'll process and move on. Or in the case of positive emotion, helps them invite more of that into their lives. We ended up with 150.
We took the 150 and we invited a focus group of clinicians counselors therapists who worked with a very diverse group of patients and clients to come in and help
us.
Look at the 150 and say what's necessary, what can go and that's how we ended up with the 87. So then we're like, let's make it and alphabetical short-form dictionary in the center of the book. And then we had College interns that were with us that summer and they said we hate this.
This idea. And I said why, and they said, because we've spent the summer learning these and the only way we can learn them is comparatively. So what helps us understand, shame is how it's different from guilt humiliation, and embarrassment. And so, then we decided. Okay. So rather than doing it Alpha, we were using the map metaphor already, so will group them by kind of where they live together and how they work together. And then, as we started writing,
What I realized was I've two choices, make it quick and digestible which is like all the rage or make it real and nuanced which actually reflects The Human Experience of the emotion. And so it has to be the intersection of data and research but also story so that people can see themselves in it and go. Oh, yeah. So I can give you a three line definition of vulnerability, but when I say
Oh trying to get pregnant after your second miscarriage, then people are like oh shit. I know
that. Let me actually dive into one. You just mentioned that I found so relevant and instructive and that is the difference between the emotion of Shame and how debilitating it can be and how it can. So derail us in a profound way and guilt over something help us to understand that difference. It's a wonderful distinction.
Yeah, and I think guilt gets a really bad rap and it's very
Ashley adaptive. So the best way to understand the distinction between shame and guilt is shame. I am bad guilt. I've done something bad and the predictor of our proneness, whether we have a tendency to be more, shame prone, or guilt. Prone is really in self-talk. And so if I get back my paper and I'm looking at it, I've got a d-minus, and my self talk is God. I'm so stupid. I'm such an idiot that shame. If my self talk is God. It was so stupid to go out last night and not
Not study for this thing. That's the difference between shame and guilt and what we see from the research is that shame is debilitating. Shame is not a compass for value-driven behavior. When we shame other people are, when we feel shame. What we normally do actually is blame rationalize in double down, which is why a lot of the new research today that says, shaming people around not vaccinating is completely ineffective.
And it's interesting because shame is highly correlated with addiction depression violence aggression bullying. Eating disorders and guilt is inversely correlated with these outcomes. Meaning, the more guilt. Prohm. We are the better we farewell around those outcomes. So for a long time, we weren't sure that humiliation was as dangerous as shame because the only variable it's a tiny variable that really predicts the difference between whether we experience it.
Something to shame and humiliation is deserving. So, if you look at me and you're like burn a, you're an idiot and you're stupid and your book sock and you do that in front of a hundred people at an event, probably I'm going to feel shame or humiliation. Shame is I believe that to about myself and humiliation was man. I did not deserve that. And so the variable that predicts the difference between shame and humiliation is deserving, it goes.
Don't know what I've said in every book until now every book I've written, I've said that shame more. Debilitating, a more dangerous than humiliation. Now, what we know is research has found a very strong correlation between humiliation and violence.
One of your ideas is that Curiosity can be our super power when I saw that. I just jumped for Joy because you highlighted something. I so believe and it's also
Something our curiosity. It's something we can all access and develop. So how did you come to this insight and help us understand? What being curious means? What does it look like when we're being curious?
It just, it's what emerged from the data when we were trying to figure out, man. There's a group of people here. I don't know what to call them. But we came up with the term grounded, confidence. Not a confidence, that's blustery, our posturing, but really just grounded tethered.
But then, we were like shit. These people, when people talk about them in the research. They're like, they'll drive you crazy. They have a hundred questions about everything. They don't want to know, just what they need to know to do their jobs. They want to know how that's connected to a larger strategy. They want to know how did they figure that out? They want assignments to take on work. That they're not sure that they're going to be good at doing the risk failing. They'll risk failing and they're not afraid to ask for help. They're not afraid to say, listen.
I took on this assignment. This is what I've learned so far, but I think I'm over my skis I'm gonna need some support here. Can I ask I have 32 questions and I may need some money to walk me through some stuff. And what was funny and ironic for us is it's exactly what we hire for. Like we are not interested in hiring anyone, no matter the expertise. If all they want to do is stuff. They're already good at doing
thinking about relationships that are filled with all kinds of emotion. I was really taken with the advice that you shared with your daughter as she was.
Thinking about what courses? She might take it school. I found there was a real wisdom in your guidance, and I'd love to cover a bit of that today because in a way it seems connected to this idea of curiosity and the superpower of curiosity.
Yeah. I just said listen, you can't know right now. I need you to just major in curiosity. And if you already know exactly what you want to be at 18. I don't think I want to pay for college right now. I think you need to explore your
Life until you're unsure of what you want to be and then we'll pay for college and and she's like this is the most cringey advice I've ever received. And then she got to school and she said, okay, I'm convinced. I'm going to major in curiosity and and she did and you know the first semester she took, you know, black power Theory, German philosophy, you know, short for graduate school probably and then her last semester is he would get increasingly anxious. Everyone knows mom. Everyone knows what they're doing and I'm just taking classes. I love and I'm in this
Build your own major major, and then her last year. She said, oh my God, she called me. I found a thread and I said, yeah, and I said, tell me about the thread and she said, I'm interested in the intersection of New Media storytelling and emotion. And I said great, the
family business next
year. Next gen 3.0.
Yeah. Listen, Renee. Honestly, I was just gobsmacked as
I explored your work.
How profound it is and how right it is for each of us. Personally, and then collectively for society? I would go so far out on a limb, is to say, if we don't heed your encouragement, to embrace our understanding of emotion, as Who We Are,
it would be very hard to get out of some of the challenges we're facing. So I'm so grateful for this time, but more so for your work, thank you. Thank you so much.
God thank you so much. What an amazing conversation and made my day.
Thank you for tuning in to our conversation with brene, brown for more ideas to help you live. Well, including the book featured in this episode visit Indigo dot, see a slash podcast if you enjoyed this episode,
Please leave us a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify and share with your friends. You can follow us wherever you. Listen. Well said was produced for Indigo ink by vocal fry studios. And is hosted by me Heather reesman.
