Brené Brown on Boundaries, Feelings & Core Emotions | Ten Percent Happier Podcast with Dan Harris

foreign this is the 10 happier podcast I'm Dan Harris [Music] a male friend of mine once uh made a funny comment about how his wife who was also a friend of mine had helped him overcome what he called emotional imbecility I love that phrase his wife had apparently helped him get better at understanding what he was feeling why he was feeling it and then how not to be yanked around by sad feelings now I'm definitely not accusing anybody listening to this show of emotional imbecility of course but it is worth noting that my guests today

the great brene Brown did some incredible research in which she found that most people are only able to identify three of their emotions happy sad and pissed off in her most recent book and accompanying TV show brene makes a compelling evidence-based case for getting better acquainted with the full spectrum of your emotions instead of emotional imbecility she uses the term emotional granularity she says and I fully agree with her here that the better you understand yourself the better you will be at surfing rather than drowning in your emotions and the better you will be therefore

at relating to other human beings and given how important relationships are to our own flourishing this can become an upward spiral Renee is the author of six number one New York Times bestsellers her most recent book is called atlas of the heart which is also the name of the five episode HBO Max series that debuted in March of this past year Renee is a research professor at the University of Houston and a visiting professor in management at the University of Texas at Austin Macomb School of Business she has spent the past two decades studying courage

vulnerability shame and empathy she hosts two weekly Spotify original podcasts unlocking US and dare to lead her Ted Talk on the power of vulnerability is one of the top five most viewed TED talks in the world with over 50 million views in this conversation we talked about why she decided to map the 87 key emotions and experiences how she was deeply influenced by the Buddhist concept of the near enemy why she no longer believes it's possible to read other people's emotions why we should believe other people when they tell us how they feel although she

does not rule out the possibility of manipulation in this regard what she means when she says she has created a new framework for meaningful connection and why meaningful connections require boundaries a couple of notes here before we get started brene is in my opinion delightfully profane we've chosen to let Renee do her thing and not bleep her but you should know that if you're listening with kids or if you have sensitive ears there's a clean version of the episode available over on our website 10.com or on the 10 happier [Music] hibernet Brown hello how are

you doing great thanks for coming back on the show I do want to say that several of the things you said the last time you're on the show pop up into my mind all the time so I'm really happy to have you back well thanks I'm happy to be back so congratulations on the new book and the new TV show atlas of the heart why Atlas what's your thinking behind the map metaphor oh my God I'm still processing that you said in TV show that is so uncomfortable I just have to take a second and

be like why am I out of my Lane why am I out of my Lane yeah do you see how red my like I'm I'm turning red like it's yeah stepping out of your lane requires courage which is on brand for you I guess so but I didn't even put my blinker on like I just did it and and not used to it yet the cartography stuff I could talk to you about more easily because I'm a cartography fan I love Maps I collect old Maps when I first visualized this book and thought about you

know I'm a metaphoraholic so I was like what metaphor am I going to work am I going to use an epigraph a quote that really speaks to me and I thought this is going to be the map book but this is not going to be a single map book this is going to be a collection of maps and so the atlas really spoke to me like an atlas is a collection of maps and I hope what this book does and I hope what the show does I hope it helps ground us and kind of tether

us to Solid Ground around where we are what we're feeling what we're going through I think so often in our lives and mine included I just had a morning like this today it was really hard and stressful and I had to work through some really uncomfortable stuff we're always looking on the outside of us to figure out how can I find my way back how can I get retethered how can I get grounded and all of that especially when we feel very adrift and so for me what the research has taught me is that the

anchoring happens within there is nothing external that's going to offer us a way home and so I think the combination of feeling untethered personally after covid and I don't think it's after I don't know what preposition to use anymore during between Queen and in the midst of it's just been a very hard couple of years and I thought man what I'd really like is some kind of map for myself just to find my way back home and in particular here we're talking about mapping emotions as I understand it and I'm going to quote you back

to you you say something to the effect of there's nothing more human than emotion but we know very little about emotions and we have very little language with which to describe them can you expand upon that yeah you know probably a decade ago or so we were running a curriculum based on my shame resilience research and we asked people to write a list of every emotion they felt comfortable or able to identify while they were actually experiencing it and I was so curious I didn't even really have a hypothesis about what that number would be

I guess I thought eight or nine but the mean or average was three happy sad and pissed off I can tell when I'm happy I can tell when I'm sad I can tell when I'm really pissed off and that has haunted me struck in my craw I don't even know how to describe it really it just I could never get over it because the Human Experience is so vast and complex what does it mean if we have to shove everything we experience into one of these three buckets you know like what I'm really experiencing is

resentment or anguish or awe or wonder or love and I have to just say I'm happy or I'm sad well anguish and sadness are not the same thing you know and bitter sweetness and sadness are the same thing and resentment and pissed off are not the same thing and so I really want to try to put together some kind of glossary of the emotions and experiences and I say emotions and experiences I'm gonna say this right off the bat because there's real pissing match and academics around what constitutes an emotion and what doesn't and so

just to cover my basis I say emotions 87 emotions and experiences because some of them actually I know are not emotions some of them I'd be willing to go toe-to-toe with some folks on others I'm not sure and I actually don't care I don't think it matters very much but first of all which ones do we need to know and secondly how do we Define them if we know they're important to be able to label a name and so it became a really big project I had no idea I thought it'd take a year and

it took four I want to hear more about the project and the research in a second but let me just ask quickly what are the consequences of us not being able to have this sort of emotional lexicon internally and externally so in the research they refer to kind of being able to with Nuance name emotions as emotional granularity and what we know is that if we can name something or accurately label it we are much more likely to be able to ask for what we need move through it productively in the case of positive emotion

we're able to replicate and seek more of those experiences like I'll give you two examples you could have a moment in your life where you kind of walked away and said oh man that was cool that was really cool and not know oh that was awe that I experienced those Goosebumps that feeling of being small compared to the world but at the same time my smallness is connected to the world in this inextricable way that's awe and if I understand all what I know is that these are the kind of experiences nature beauty art being

outside my dog these are the kind of things that bring that and I want more of that in my life and awe is good I mean we need it as human beings it's such a fuel and then we can have the experience of man that was really cool I want to know more about that and that's not all that's Wonder and what awe and wonder sharing common is a feeling of vastness a feeling of being small but also connected to a world but the difference is with awe we just want to step back and watch

that unfold and with Wonder it Peaks our curiosity and we want to learn more and so to me having that language around and boy you think we're bad at labeling negative emotion or heart emotion or whatever you want to call it and we have really no language for positive emotion other than that was good that's cool had some Goosebumps but I'll tell you why it's also important and this was the thing that was just like I did not know this going into the research to the extent that I understand it now language does not just

communicate emotion it shapes emotion it changes language changes our bodies Our neurons and so the best example I can give and it's kind of like a solid C plus example I can't think of a better one though is if I said to you Dan can you make me your famous chocolate chip cookies like I've had them at your house a couple times they're incredible and you said great and you made them exactly the same way you always made them but instead of using the Blue Bowl you use the white bowl and this time they tasted

a little bit different and had a little cinnamon taste to them language doesn't just carry the emotion it actually changes it so first of all let me just go on the record as saying someone who studied emotion for 20 years I got a lot of it wrong I was using a ton of the wrong language and some major hypotheses in my work were wrong so one of the things that I learned that I was was not serving me is I would say on a very regular basis I am so overwhelmed I am overwhelmed I'm so

overwhelmed well what I learned in this research is there's a difference between stress and overwhelm and overwhelm is a very intense kind of stress where actually John cabotzin has this great definition the world is unfolding at a pace that our mind our neurobiology can't keep up with what's interesting is when one says to themselves hey I'm so overwhelmed our body goes okay let's shut down because the only cure to recovery from overwhelm is actually nothingness so now when I feel like oh my God I don't that's too much it's too much I always say to

myself now are you stressed are you overwhelmed like are you in some serious whack-a-mole or are you actually overwhelmed and incapable of making good decisions like what's going on and so now about 90 of the time I'll just say wow I'm stressed and now I do not allow myself to say overwhelmed without stopping what I'm doing and going outside and walking if you're going to say you're overwhelmed then you're going to own it and you're going to address it and so there's a great quote in the book and I remember the first time I heard

it I was an undergrad in a philosophy course and I was like geez what does that even mean it's Ludwig Wittgenstein and the quote is the limits of my language mean the limits of my world what happens when we don't have a vocabulary that's as expansive as our experiences hard it's fascinating I hear two benefits to the emotional granularity from what you just said one is if you can name it particularly a positive emotion well then you can replicate it oh that was awe so now I can seek that out on the regular and the

other is that if we're naming things incorrectly we're kind of throwing our body or nervous system in the wrong direction perhaps unnecessarily I mean that's 100 right and if you look at the research on emotional granularity the correlation is not to just being able to regulate emotion and move through it productively and replicate it emotional granularity is positively correlated with really significant life indicators like positive well-being social connection I mean it's a big deal again we're talking about two of the 87 that were just like I had this wrong when my kids call and say

oh my God Mom I'm so overwhelmed I'm so overwhelmed I've got a 23 year old in graduate school and I've got a 16 year old in high school I'm so overwhelmed I'd be like okay let's just cut it into small pieces what's do when what's going on and now I'm like yeah sometimes things just unfold faster than we can do them the only way through this is nothing go for a run go for a walk sit out in your backyard for 15 minutes I handle it completely different not only for myself but as a parent

or a partner and as a leader we do two word check-ins if someone checks in and says you know I'm anxious and overwhelmed as soon as that meeting's over I Circle back and say let's talk about the overwhelm what's on your agenda I've got back-to-mac meetings until four well pick the next one because you're gonna have to reschedule it you're gonna have to walk away from everything for a while just it makes no sense and the data on the kind of decisions we make in overwhelm they're for right you know it's so funny because I

used to have this list of like speaking requests incoming speaking requests and by the like the end of the first page I'd be completely overwhelmed do you know what I would do I would just say yes to everything after that just to get it over not to get the speaking over to get the list over then it'd be like you're flying out tomorrow no I can't fly out tomorrow my son's got a water polo game tomorrow no you're you're flying out you agreed to this four months ago you're like yes yes yes you said for

sure so yeah but I just said for sure because I was overwhelmed and I'm like well we got contracts now and you're flying out tomorrow morning then cry out to the airport I see some look of recognition in your face here Dan say but just to call you out but no you could I am fair game for calling out anytime yes absolutely I get overwhelmed and actually for me it's more like I mean I definitely over commit but it's also like I'm a jerk and that really hurts that hurts oh I am too I am

too I don't get overwhelmed and small and quiet I get overwhelmed and scared and scary I get intense yeah so I can be a jerk too so now when I'm really overwhelmed I'm like that's it I'll be out in the parking lot don't come after me coming up Renee talks about how she mapped the 87 key emotions and experiences why we need to be able to name our emotions in order to regulate them and we're going to talk about some examples of pairs of emotions that often get confused for one another and what the consequences

of this confusion can be right after this [Music] you talked about the 87 and that is a reference to the 87 emotions or experiences for the Persnickety out there that came up as part of your research so maybe that's a good entree to the research yeah so it was interesting I wasn't sure where to start I wasn't sure what was important what's not important and so we had this huge secondary data set so I co-taught a course with Oprah about I don't even know how maybe 2007 and we had close to 100 000 people go

through this course and we archived all of the comments and part of the course was identifying emotion and so we de-identified everything took it through human subjects and then did a Content analysis asking what are the emotions or experiences that people really struggle to name and then once they're named having that language really helps them talk about them process them and move through them and we came up with I don't know maybe 150 I think then we brought in a focus group of clinicians and these were licensed clinicians therapists who worked and have still worked

in a very diverse settings therapists who work on college campuses work in addiction and Behavioral Health psychoanalysis I mean all over it wasn't fancy it was all 150 of the emotions and experiences in a room posted up and then they got stickers of different colors to indicate the importance and they had to answer when my clients can language this it helps them move through it or in the case of positive emotions replicate it when they can't it causes pain and suffering and then from there we ended up with about 80 and we ended up with

87 because every now and then actually that was because of interns so we thought well here's our list interns are the best that's why they should be paid here's our list we'll do it alphabetically because how else are you going to do it what do you privilege over the other like how do you do it and the interns were like that's the worst idea we've ever heard and we're like why and they said because we learned them through comparison so when you taught us shame guilt humiliation embarrassment as part of our onboarding which is kind

of my central work that I've been doing forever we understood what shame was by understanding what shame wasn't and what guilt was and then humiliation how humiliation is different from shame and guilt and then how embarrassment which is one of the four self-conscious affects is different altogether and so you've got to put them in comparison pods we've got to learn comparatively and so when that happened we added some words that we thought would help clarify the core ones that emerged so for example well Sean freuda it comes up a lot in clinical work because people

feel a lot of Shame around it actually they're like oh I feel so happy that brene has taken this great fall publicly and then I feel shame about feeling happy about it and so one of the things I thought was interesting is let's talk about Freud and freuda which is the opposite of schadenfreude so Freud and Freud didn't emerge from the data but it's a really helpful comparative tool another one that the research team thought would be helpful is irreverent so admiration and reverence emerged as important but irreverent I thought was an interesting word because

it is a very loaded word for people because people have a very natural tendency to connect reverence with church or synagogue or Temple or mosque just religion in general then they feel guilty about enjoying irreverent things one of the number one algorithm categories in on Netflix so irreverent comedy irreverent cartoon irreverent series irreverent acting irreverent drama and so we added some words just to help give color and context to some of the main words and the headline of all of this I assume there were many headlines but maybe the Uber headline was ignorance is not

Bliss we need to understand the map here the maps plural yes we need the maps and we need the language we need the language we desperately need the language I mean philosophy is not research but if you go back to Ludwig Wittgenstein and you think about the limits of your language being the limits of your world it's very powerful for someone to say I mean just from the work that I've done for many years around shame I mean just the ability to say what I'm experiencing right now is really deep shame really profound shame just

the ability to name shame starts to weaken it because shame cannot stand being spoken shame works when it convinces you that you are alone and then when you name it and wrap words around it and then speak it when I call and say Dan you're not going to believe what happened at work today I am in a shame storm and you say hit me what happened and I tell you and then you come back and say oh God and I've been there Jesus I'm sorry that's how I've been I'm sorry now shame can't hold on

to anything because now I don't think I'm alone anymore and that's the prerequisite for shame to work I have to believe that I'm alone and so very different than if I called you and said oh my God this really embarrassing thing happened at work today that's like walking outside of the bathroom with you know a toilet paper stuck on your shoe or something like if I called you and said can I tell you this really embarrassing thing that happened at work would your mindset be different if I said that or if I said hey I'm

in some Shame about something that happened at work today yes yes I I would think the latter would be more grave yes yeah it's different we have to be able to name it if we want any chance of regulating it what are some other examples of emotions that we can get confused with yeah so I never to this day and I haven't decided yet if I'm going to use the correct term because I still take objection to it but jealousy and envy so if you show me your pictures from your trip to Greece and I'm

looking at them and I go oh my God I'm so jealous I'm dying to travel again it's been so long since I've been anywhere I'm not actually jealous I'm actually envious envy and jealousy are very different constructs Envy is wanting something that someone else has jealousy is the fear of losing something we have to someone else so let me say that again Envy is wanting something that someone else has jealousy is being afraid of losing something we have to someone else researchers find that and I'm not a jealousy and envy researcher but when I was

reading the research from these folks many of them talked about how Envy normally is a two-person experience where jealousy is normally a three-person experience and it's not just the way we think about it it can be the jealousy a child feels when a baby sibling comes along and I'm not losing a parent but I'm losing time and attention the reason why I would never say to you wow those pictures are great sientorini is beautiful I really Envy I would never say that because the problem with Envy is I think one reason we stay away from

it is it's like one of the big seven sins right like it's Envy is one of those big ones so I think for those of us you know I'm a product of early Catholic school I wouldn't want to say I'm envious of anything the second problem with Envy is that there is malicious Envy there is kind of benign Envy but there's also malicious Envy which means not only do I want what you have you should not have had it and so then I feel like if I'm going to use the word MBA to say wow

then I'm really envious of your trip I mean not that I don't want you to have it not a malicious kind of Envy but a happy for you but I'd like to go there too so I think it's just easier to say I'm jealous but that's actually not the right term so there are times yes you're calling for a Precision in language but you're also saying let's not take it so far that we have to like tie ourselves in knots yeah I think with the jealousy of everything I I'm like y'all go first in you

know in the culture it's just do you not feel like envious to be envious sounds worse than to be jealous it doesn't quite roll off the tongue it's not the thing we say no and then I can make jealousy really cute by saying oh I'm so jelly then that sounds really like friendly but there's no fun word for envious so I'm gonna try to think of one but um those two are oh let me tell you one more that changed my life and my marriage and my work this one was no joke like if this

is not an example of the power of emotional granularity I do not know what is so Mark Brackett who heads up the Yale Center for emotional studies I'm doing a talk with him on his book and we're doing a podcast and before we go on and I start recording I say hey can I just ask you a personal question I got a little free therapy here and he goes yeah shoot I said resentment is from the anger family right because I really struggle with resentment and he said no uh-uh not at all resentment is part

of the Envy family I was like what he goes no resentment's kind of a function of envy and then we started the podcast and I was like what so I think about the times when I'm really resentful where I feel like I'm in hour 16 of my day and people have gone home or the house is a mess and people are coming and Steve's sitting down to watch the game and I'm like you know just coming home from work and picking up everywhere and I'm so resentful and I'm not angry about what they're not doing

I'm envious that I'm not sitting down and so for me what goes hand in hand is my resentment problem and my inability to ask for what I need and acknowledge my limits but wouldn't that be co-morbid with anger on the regular I mean I could see them arising yeah I think they are comorbid in some ways but I think for me now I mean it has really been a life changer for me when I start to feel resentful and I always know when I start to feel resentful because I start having this big conversation like

planning what I'm going to say can I mistake this and then they're gonna say that and then I'm going to come back with this and then they're going to have no comeback at all but now when I start to feel resentful the first thing I say is what do I need that I'm not asking for what do I need like rest play sleep time away what do I need that I'm not asking for and it's been a crazy change force in my life that's fantastic and it does remind me of the researcher Christopher germer who's

one of the two lead researchers in the field of self-compassion he said the preeminent self-compassion question is what do I need right now oh my God it's so good and I tell you what Chris germer's work along with cornfield with along with Kristen Neff I would not have been able to finish this book without it yeah about their concept of near enemy changed everything for me as a researcher coming up Renee talks about the Buddhist concept of the near enemy she explains why she no longer believes that it is possible to read emotions in other

people and we're going to talk about something that I struggle with all the time how to give good feedback after this [Music] can you say more about the concept of near enemy yeah so for my dissertation working on my PhD I study connection and I was able to Define connection I was able to develop this framework for how we connect with each other especially as it pertains to professional helping like social workers counselors psychologists but even Physicians doctors Community organizers nurses and one of the properties that emerged from the data was this idea of disruption

to connection and I couldn't figure out what disrupts connection like obviously it's disconnection but it never resonated fully it never explained what the research participants were saying because like if you reach out to me if you make a bid for connection with me and I just don't return it or I just cut you off you have a lot of clarity about what just happened like I made a bid for connection and that's not going anywhere but there's something that happens every day in relationships every hour in relationships every kind of relationship that just corrodes connection

that I could not figure out what it was so I came across this term for the second time in my life the first time I was like oh that's interesting and just kept reading then I came across it when I was working on the atlas research it's the Buddhist concept of near enemy it's the Buddhist concept of this thing that masquerades as the virtue that you're seeking to embody or be and while it masquerades as this thing it actually unravels everything between people and so that became the linchpin for in the back of atlas of

the Heart the book and in the show I talk about this new framework for meaningful connection and the linchpin is literally the near enemy concept so let me grab this can I read you something this is what Jack cornfield's work he says that near enemies may seem like the qualities that we believe are important may even be mistaken for them but they are different and often undermine our practices I just want you to hang on the sentence for a minute the sentence like I spent a week doing nothing but just sitting in the sentence the

near enemies depict how spirituality can be misunderstood or misused to separate us from life like the near enemies depict how spirituality can be misunderstood or misused to separate us from life so I flip over to jack cornfield's work and so here's an example of what he says about here's a near enemy that he writes about which I think is a very helpful example love the near enemy of Love is attachment attachment masquerades is love it says I will love this person because I need something from them or I will love you if you love me

back I'll love you but only if you'll change and be the way I want this isn't the fullness of Love instead there's attachment there's clinging and fear true love allows honors and appreciates attachment grasps demands needs and aims to possess another great example of near enemy is the near enemy of compassion is pity so think about this if I called you and said Dan I'm really struggling [Music] and you listened and you sat with me in it and you said you know what does love look like right now what does support look like right now

and said offered to take some action that's compassion right but if I told you what happened you said oh bless your heart you poor thing that's such a great example of I get off the phone I think well he said something nice right but why do I feel so alone because near enemies Drive separation when someone says you poor thing or like in Texas the worst bless your heart what they're saying is not I feel with you as an imperfect human with an imperfect human what that says is I feel sorry for you from over

here where that does not happen [Music] right that separation and so for me again the far enemies are easy the far enemy of compassion is cruelty or indifference you know the far enemy of love may also be indifference the far enemies I get the far enemies but the near enemy and so what is the near enemy of connection which I didn't even know the question was how can you put together a framework on connection if you don't understand the near enemy because I didn't even think about that construct but the near enemy of connection is

control teams like we're making a good effort but what we're trying to do is actually control something we're trying to control for example I did this podcast and we were talking about near enemy and I did it with Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach and Lennon was saying you know navigating a newly divorced and remarried family sometimes her kids will say it's hard to have two homes you know it's hard to have this house and dad's house and what she wants to come back with real quick is oh my God but it's actually great you have

two houses and you know we're only a block apart and you know if you get sick of one you go you know and that's an attempt to control feelings because it's hard to stay in connection there and say that is hard because you know who wants to be the subject of their kids therapy like not me like I'm like I'm so much better than my parents around some of this you can't talk about me in therapy like I've come so far but you know but yeah alas they do but I thought about this too as

a social worker it's really important to me and also as a grounded Theory person it's so important that every finding has macro and micro application so I think about politicians I think about like Donald Trump and the people who follow Donald Trump and you look and you want to say man There's real connection there these people are dialed into him they're connected but he's not sharing vulnerability he's exploiting vulnerability he's not being an emotion with he's leveraging emotion you know and so even on a macro level it fits that sometimes when we think we see

connection but then when we step back and say God I don't feel closer I feel separate I think the near enemy of control was at work and I'm guilty of it man like if one of my kids calls and says listen I got in trouble or this happened I'm like you know the first thing I I do is how can you fix it so I look like a good parent as opposed to God that sounds really tough how was that for you I'm thinking you get your ass upstairs and you email that teacher and apologize

for being just you know like that's my training so I think when we talk about emotional granularity part of it is understanding how we need to connect with ourselves first and the depth of that connection will dictate the depth of our capacity for connection with other people I did not know that before this book I got that wrong this seems crucial so I'm just gonna sit in this for a second understanding your own inner Maps will help you have good relationships with other people and since having good relationships with other people is probably the most

important variable in human happiness this is an upward spiral this is an upper spiral this is a virtuous cycle not a vicious cycle this is a virtuous upward spiral and so what does that mean be connected it seems so Gauzy just this example with my kids to know when they say something's hard and to recognize when I'm moving into self-protection which is self-focused not other focused that I'm missing an opportunity for real connection and love and compassion with my kid because I've moved into self-protection which is probably going to move me into control the second

thing that I think that I really got wrong and I bet I've said this to tens if not hundreds of thousands of people over the past 15 years and I've heard many many other emotions researchers say it as well we in a very kind of very fast way say you need to understand emotions in yourself and others you need to be able to read emotion in self and others I no longer believe it is possible at all to read emotion in other people I don't believe it yeah that seems like an article of faith that

we can read emotion in other people I feel like yes yeah what changed for you because too many emotions or affects present in the same way and I actually think it's a really terrible hot wiring of connection to think we can do that and I'll tell you why I think what we're called to do in the service of meaningful connection is not walk in someone else's shoes but to believe them when they tell us what their experiences are like in their shoes and that pushes a ton of buttons because around race around gender around poverty

around class or around difference every everything that if you tell me your experience and part of connection is believing you and it doesn't align with my lived experience it creates such cognitive dissonance in me that can very quickly lead to what is my part in that experience for you it gets very hard but it is truly to believe yourself to say Jesus that should hurt my feelings oh God Renee come on suck it up like you're tougher than that no no I'm not and I need to believe myself when I say that hurt my feelings

and reading these comments or being on all the social media it's not good for me I'm not I can't do it and I'm living that right now it's like I have to keep all these antenna open to do my work to understand the world and people's experiences of it and the cost of that for me is that I cannot be taking in all the time hurtful trivial crap online and then when I hear someone's experience when they tell me something instead of saying oh do you think you're overreacting or was it really that bad to

say because that's control I'm trying to control the level of discomfort what I'm saying is my comfort is more important than that hardship you just said to me and so you know one of the things that was so fun about the HBO special is after I had a total freak out the last minute and said I can't do it I changed my mind you know and everything's set up like we're getting radio it's like action I'm like no I can't they said you play football we'll do the rest which speaks to me because I'm a

big Sports person and I'd already convinced them to bring in an audience and just let me teach because that's you know I'm in the classroom for 20 something years so I can teach and so what was so funny about that is as I was teaching the audience kept asking me all these just hard great questions and the answer always ended up being either the near enemy concept or the concept of having to believe people and I got to use film because I've taught with film and television Clips my my entire teaching career like from a

junior faculty from a doctoral student you know working on my ta ship that paid my tuition and so there's have you seen the movie Chef I am familiar with it but I have not seen it okay my one of my all-time favorite movies well there's a scene where John favorite plays the chef who Justin Hoffman owns this restaurant he's forcing him to make this food that's been popular for 20 years where you know the chef wants to make great stuff a Critic comes in and just makes fun of the food and then John favor as

the chef comes out of the kitchen and loses his mind Fu and you know but you know and so I played the clip for the audience on the HBO special and said what is he feeling right now and people said rage anger grief embarrassment humiliation resentment you know and I said I would have guessed shame because one way shame shows up a lot is in Rage and anger and I said this is why we cannot read emotion in other people if we really care about connection and compassion we have to be curious and ask we

have to be Learners not knowers we have to believe people I'm feeling both curious and chastened by the argument you're making right here chastened mostly as a dad because my seven-year-old son I often accuse him of malingering and manipulating particularly with his mom and her instinct is to believe him and my instinct is to say he's playing you and so I feel chastened on that front because I'm probably being an ogre and curious because if you're exhorting us to believe people are you saying there is no such thing as emotional Warfare or manipulation or anything

along those lines no oh I think there absolutely is I mean I think we see it every single day but I think still seeing the position of the learner not the knower and being curious and extending that question that you posed as the big question of compassion what do you need right now and if you need this and are not asking for it in a straightforward way what's getting in your way of asking for what you need right now so I might be confronted with somebody whether it's a diminutive kid with Oreos all over his

face or whatever or anybody and I could feel okay I'm being manipulated however I can drop beneath that and say there's some need here and maybe it's being expressed unskillfully and can I get it whatever is underneath all of this yeah if our goal is meaningful connection I mean one thing I can tell you for sure is that boundaries is a prerequisite for good relationships I mean for meaningful connection requires boundaries and so you can very much say to anybody from you know our kids to our colleagues to whomever here's what's okay and here's what's

not okay you know it's okay to ask me for something you want or need it's not okay to lie or manipulate to get it and if you think that's the only way you can get it we need to talk about why and what part I might have in that and if you think there's some kind of unfairness then let's dig into that and talk about that because that must be what's really going on here I've heard you do this before where you play act how you would give somebody feedback in a workplace or in this

case in an interpersonal relationship and there are times when I need to give people feedback and I wish I could just call you and have you do it you're very good at it no well you know what I I don't know if I'm good sometimes I'm good at sometimes I'm sometimes I I mean you have no idea the number of times I have to Circle back and say I apologize for how I showed up yesterday I was not who I wanted to be in that conversation I'd like another shot at it I mean I have

to do that I just had to do it what is today I had to do it Sunday night like with a family member two family members three family members everyone that was on the court when we played I had to show up because my sister and I should not play Devils with our husbands against our husbands period but yeah but you know what I really live by this idea that I'm here to get it right not to be right I have very little vested in being right and I have a very high threshold for discomfort

and knowing that about myself one thing I will always do like in a work context is we always teach people to give feedback in two sessions one is I want to sit down and talk about what's going on what I observe I feel like it's something we need to work on together it doesn't feel good to me and I'd like for you to think about what you need from me what my part might be and we can meet tomorrow again for 30 more minutes because not everyone can think on their feet and sometimes we need

to pull back and we get flooded and overwhelmed and so I don't know that I'm particularly good at it I'm just I can do discomfort well I don't want to create discomfort around holding you longer than your what I would assume to be very demanding schedule can bear however in our remaining minute or two here I'm going to give you some discomfort because I'm going to remind you again that you are now a TV star and can you please plug your show and book before we go yeah I'm really excited the book is called atlas

of the heart the subtitle is mapping meaningful connection in the language of Human Experience I'm really proud of the book to be honest with you it took a lot during a really hard time but I'm proud of it and I think it's been useful for me and I hope other people find it useful and then we decided to turn the book into a five-part HBO Max Series where we tackle in the first season 30 of the 87 emotions and using a lot of film television and pop culture Clips to kind of dig into emotion it's

a fun way to teach because it gives us a little bit of permission to spectate and kind of step back and watch emotion unfold with somebody besides us so it's neat and it's basically me with a live audience teaching and it's weird and different for me but if you're not doing something that scares you a little bit what's the point right over that is a point you have made many many times to great effect so congratulations on both the book and the TV show and thank you very much for doing this really appreciate it thank

you thanks again to brene Brown before we let you go here a quick note from our friends at the Insight Meditation Society next month IMS is kicking off a new online program conceived by the great Sharon Salzburg it's called essential mindfulness every month for nine months a different world-class meditation teacher will teach a series of lessons on the intersection of mindfulness and a variety of fascinating topics from ethics to trauma to science to interpersonal communication the All-Star roster of teachers includes many people who have been guests on this show such as Kamala Masters Alexis Santos

deraw Williams and Oren J sopher the sessions will be short convenient and affordable and you can view them live or after the fact you can sign up for all nine months of sessions or just pick and choose the topics that interest you the most so whether you use mindfulness to manage stress and difficult emotions improve relationships increase engagement or enhance your overall well-being these discussions can help you further live out your mindfulness practice take it off the cushion so to speak to find out more and sign up for essential mindfulness check out dharma.org or click

the link in the show notes thanks as well to everybody who works so hard on this show 10 happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman DJ Kashmir Justine Davey and Lauren Smith our supervising producer is Marissa Schneiderman can be regular is our managing producer and our executive producer is Jen point we get our scoring and mixing from Peter Bonaventure over at ultraviolet audio we'll see you all on Friday for a bonus meditation [Music] hey hey Prime members you can listen to 10 happier early and AD free on Amazon music download the Amazon music app today or

you can listen early and AD free with onereplus in apple podcasts before you go do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com survey