Brené Brown on Vulnerability, Courage, and our Fear of People’s Opinions | From the FM Archives

Brené Brown (0:01)

Caring what everyone thinks and not caring what anyone thinks are both super problematic. When you care about what everyone thinks, you lose the willingness to be vulnerable and to put yourself out there. When you stop caring about what anyone thinks at all, you lose your capacity for connection because we're hardwired neurobiologically to care about what people think.

So our job becomes to get specific on whose opinions matter.

Michael Gervais (0:35)

Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade in training, a high-performance psychologist. And today, I am really excited to reshare a fresh version of our 2018 conversation with the one and the only Dr. Brene Brown. As many of you know, I just published my first book. It's titled, The First Rule of Mastery. And it's all about this excessive worry that we have about what somebody might be thinking of us and how that gets in the way of our potential. And so I wanted to re-release this episode with Brene because it speaks so elegantly to that topic. I found that while writing and beginning to share the book, this episode in my mind came up again and again and again. So if you're unfamiliar with her work, she's a research professor at the University of Houston where she spent over two decades plus studying courage and vulnerability and shame and empathy and leadership.

She's the author of six New York Times bestsellers and her TED Talk, The Power of Vulnerability. It's just so good. It's one of the most downloaded TED Talks of all time. She's got over 63 million views on it. How about that?

Brené's a legend. And this conversation is really special. Its insights have stood the test of time. So if you heard this conversation when it first came out over five years ago, it is definitely worth revisiting. And if you haven't, you're in for a real treat.

So with that, it's my honor to reintroduce and revisit this incredible conversation with the ever insightful Dr. Brene Brown.

Brene, how are you?

Brené Brown (2:14)

I'm doing great. I'm excited to be with you.

Michael Gervais (2:17)

Yeah, this is fun. I've been wanting to have this conversation with you for a long time. So I'm super psyched as well.

Brené Brown (2:23)

Every time I've seen you a couple of places when we're both kind of traveling and we meet up and I'm like, we need to have a conversation. It would be really interesting.

Michael Gervais (2:31)

Yeah, for sure. Okay, so first of all, as we get going, congratulations on your body work. It's significant.

You've made a dent in human wellness and that is no easy task. So congratulations.

Brené Brown (2:45)

Thank you. I love it so much. And I'm for sure have learned way more from people than I'll be able to teach. So I'm grateful for that.

Michael Gervais (2:55)

Yeah, when you say that, I feel that tremendously. And I also, I don't know if I'm as free as you are because you feel grateful. I feel almost burdened.

And I don't know if you feel that or that's unique to me, but I can't quite figure out how to get everything out that I've come to understand or that I wrestle with that I think I'm onto something. I don't have the mechanism to get it out. And you have gratitude for all that you've learned, which I certainly do as well. But do you ever have that other side where you feel burdened?

Brené Brown (3:26)

Hell, yes.

Michael Gervais (3:28)

Oh, good. So I'm not alone.

Brené Brown (3:30)

No.

Michael Gervais (3:31)

Okay, what is that like for you?

Brené Brown (3:33)

Awful sometimes, especially because I look at my work from a perspective of being a steward of people's stories and struggles and what they've shared with me and what is the best way to take those and make sense of them and get them out to the world in order to be true and loyal to the people who shared their hard stuff with me.

So I put myself under massive and massive amounts of pressure. And it does feel really hard sometimes. And I remember like maybe, I don't know, three or four months ago, I was walking with my husband and we were kind of walking through our neighborhood one evening and I was right on the edge of burnout. And I'm like, I wish I could just like, God or someone would say, okay, I think this is enough now.

Like, or you can just rest or, but, and you know, he's like, that's not good, Brene. Like, I don't think you need like, he's like, you're getting everything out that you're, I'm like, but I've learned so much from people and people have done such brave things, sharing things with me and I just feel like, am I a good enough steward of it? You know, and he's like, yeah, because like, what's the option? You know, the alternative is that you work 20 hours a day, you know, seven days a week, 20 years in a row, and just collapse. And he's like, that's not stewardship either.