Brene Brown Leaves the Audience SPEECHLESS | One Of the Best Speech EVER

[Music] so my story is that I am a researcher and I never thought I would have a big public career and so I did a TED Talk that went very viral and in the wake of that I was kind of everywhere for a couple of months on every CNN.com NPR it was everywhere and something I wasn't used to marching orders from my therapist and my husband were do not read the comments online so I read all the comments online and so one morning I woke up and there were two or three new articles out and

I started reading the comments and they were devastating they weren't about my work they were about me they were super personal and they were the things that created people play in their mind and then give up doing what they really want to do like if I asked every single one of you what would you try if you knew people would never say this about you what would that what would this be it would those were the comments that morning last research more Botox just mean personal attacks the things that really up until that moment had

inspired me to stay very small in my life and my career just so I could avoid those things so that morning Steve and the kids leave I stay home I get on the couch and I watch eight hours of Downton Abbey and when it's over I don't want to turn off Downton Abbey because I've been because the minute you turn off Downton Abbey then it's like soccer practice and dinner and back to the mean people and maybe should I get BOTOX and maybe you know maybe if I stand still when I talk so I get

my laptop and I do a search for who was president in the United States during the Downton Abbey era so I put it in and Theodore Roosevelt comes up and a quote comes up and I read it and this is what it says it's a quote from a speech that he gave in the early 1900s that this were born and a lot of people called and they in the arena speech and this is the passage that changes my life it's not the critic who counts it's not the man who points out how the strong man

stumbles or where the doer of Deeds could have done it better the credit belongs to the person who's actually in the arena whose face is marred with blood and sweat and dust who at the best in the end knows the Triumph of high achievement and who at worst if he fails he fails daring greatly so the moment that I read that I closed my laptop and this is what shifted in me three huge things first I spent the last 12 years studying vulnerability and that quote with everything I know about vulnerability it is not about

winning it's not about losing it's about showing up and being seen the second thing this is who I want to be I want to create I want to make things that didn't exist before I touch them I want to show up and be seen in my work and in my life and if you're going to show up and be seen there is only one guarantee and that is you will get your ass kicked that's the only certainty you have if you're going to go in the arena and spend any time in there whatsoever especially if

you've committed to creating in your life you will get your ass kept so you have to decide at that moment I think for all of us if courage is a value that we hold this is a consequence you can't avoid it the third thing which really Set Me Free and I think Steve my husband would argue has made me somewhat dangerous is kind of a new philosophy about criticism which is this if you're not in the arena also getting your ass kicked I'm not interested in your feedback we numb vulnerability when we're waiting for the

call when we're trying to think about if we're going you know it was funny I guess Wednesday I sent something out on Twitter on Twitter and on Facebook that says what how would you define vulnerability what makes you feel vulnerable and within an hour and a half I had 150 responses because I wanted to know you know what's out there having to ask my husband for help because I'm sick and we're newly married initiating sex with my husband initiating sex with my wife being turned down asking someone out waiting for the doctor to call back

getting laid off laying off people this is the world we live in we live in a vulnerable world and one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability and I think there's evidence and it's not the only reason this evidence exists but I think that there it's a huge cause we are the most in debt obese addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S history the problem is and I learned this from the research that you cannot selectively numb emotion you can't say here's the bad stuff here's vulnerability here's grief here's shame here's

fear here's disappointment I don't want to feel these I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin I don't want to feel these you can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects or emotions you cannot selectively numb so when we numb those we numb Joy we numb gratitude we numb happiness and then we are miserable and we are looking for purpose and meaning and then we feel vulnerable so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin and it becomes this dangerous cycle one of the things

that I think that we need to think about is why and how we numb and it doesn't just have to be addiction the other thing we do is we make everything that's uncertain religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty I'm right you're wrong shut up that's it just certain the more afraid we are the more vulnerable we are the more afraid we are this is what politics looks like today there's no discourse anymore there's no conversation there's just blame you know how blame is described in the research a way to

discharge pain and discomfort we perfect now let me tell if there's anyone who wants their life to look like this it would be me but it doesn't work because what we do is we take fat from our butts and put it in our cheeks which Jess I hope in 100 years people will look back and go wow and we perfect most dangerously our children let me tell you what we think about let me think very quickly about children they're hardwired for struggle when they get here when you hold those perfect little babies in your hand

our job is not to say look at them look at her she's perfect my job is just to keep her perfect make sure she makes the tennis team by fifth grade and Yale by seventh grade our job that's not our job our job is to look and say you know what you're imperfect and you're wired for struggle but you are worthy of love and belonging that's our job show me a generation of kids raised like that and we'll end the problems I think that we see today we pretend that what we do doesn't have an

effect on people we do that in our personal lives we do that corporate whether it's a bailout an oil spill a recall we pretend like what we're doing doesn't have a huge impact on other people I would say to companies this is not our first rodeo people we just need you to be authentic and real and say we're sorry we'll fix it but there's another way and I'll leave you with this this is what I have found to let ourselves be seen deeply seen vulnerably seen to love with our whole hearts even though there's no

guarantee and that's really hard and I can tell you as a parent that's excruciatingly difficult to practice gratitude and joy and those moments of kind of Terror when we're wondering can I love you this much can I believe in this as passionately can I be this Fierce about this just to be able to stop and instead of catastrophizing what might happen to say I'm just so grateful because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive and the last which I think is probably the most important is to believe that we're enough because when we work from

a place I believe that says I'm enough then we stop screaming and start listening we're Kinder and gentler to the people around us and we're Kinder and gentler to ourselves that's all I have talk when I do a lot of leadership work I talk about understanding your personal values and my two personal values or faith and courage and so they say don't talk about faith it's inappropriate it's this is a you know an organ Corporation and then a lot I do a lot of work in churches and they'll say don't cuss and so I just

got to the point where I'm like I've set across from thousands and thousands of people over the last two decades of my life listening to the hardest things you could imagine and the two things that everyone has in common when they're talking about those things are cussing and praying if you don't want me to cuss and you don't want me to pray awesome ask somebody else because what I'm not going to do is get up and you and there are a million people in this space who are better than I am who know different things

than I do invite them if you need me to wear a suit I totally get it I'm not gonna do that I'm gonna wear jeans and boots and probably I'll wear a nice shirt but I'm not going to do that because I don't get up there when I speak in public I don't get up there you know to talk from my Brooks Brothers self to your Brooks brother self I get up there and when I walk on the stage I'm going to talk about things that 90 of the people in the audience have never thought

about talked about and are scared to listen to and they need to see me as a person and I'm just that person I think the clear I want if you invite me I want your event or your leadership team I want it to be successful foreign [Music]