The Power of Vulnerability with Brene Brown
Here at eLuma, our 2019 company theme is Building Leadership. With this, challenged ourselves to build a greater culture of development and growth. With each passing month, we study a new aspect of leadership to ensure that we open ourselves to new insights and change. This last month we have been reading Brene Brown‘s powerful book, “Dare to Lead: Proven Principles of Effective Leadership” and have been exploring the many of the ideas presented in the book and in her talks, including The Power of Vulnerability.
One of the key areas of focus is the communication of strong leaders. In reading this book and watching some of her videos, we were struck by the idea where our vulnerability gives us power. While the idea seems counterintuitive, it is nonetheless, an essential part of productive human connection, which is the foundation for true communication. The idea is explored in Ms. Brown’s Ted Talk, The Power of Vulnerability.”So if you are interested in making your communication better (and who doesn’t need better communication”, I highly encourage that you watch — the link to the video is posted below.
Here is one of our favorite excerpts from The Power of Vulnerability:
“There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who 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? I have a slight office supply addiction, but that’s another talk. So I had a manila folder, and I had a Sharpie, and I was like, what am I going to call this research? And the first words that came to my mind were “whole-hearted.” These are whole-hearted 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 first in a four-day, very intensive data analysis, where I went back, pulled the interviews, the stories, pulled the incidents. What’s the theme? What’s the pattern? My husband left town with the kids 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 “kerr,” 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.”
If this resonates on any level, here’s the link to the video, so you can watch in it’s entirety:
