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

My story is that I'm a researcher and I n

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thought I'd have a big public career, so I did a TED talk that went really viral, and from that I was

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ywhere for a couple of months on every CNN. .com NPR was everywhere and one thing I wasn't used to taking orders from my therapist and my husband was not to read the online comments, so I read all the online comments and one morning I woke up and there were two or three new ones. articles and I started reading the comments and they were devastating, they weren't about my job, they were about me, they were super personal and they were the things that made people play games in their mind and then stop doing what they really wanted to do. like I was asking each of you what you would try if you knew people would never say this about you what would that be those were the comments that morning the latest research plus Botox just means personal attacks the things that had really inspired me up to that point 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, sit on the couch and watch eight hours of Downton Abbey and when it's over, I don't want to turn off Downton Abbey because I've been doing it because the minute you turn off Downton Abbey it's like soccer practice and dinner and going back to bad people and maybe I should take BOTOX and maybe you know, maybe if I I stay still when I talk, so I grab my laptop and I look up who was president in the United States during the Downton Abbey era, so I type it in and Theodore Roosevelt comes up and a quote comes up and I read it and this. is what he says is a quote from a

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he gave in the early 1900s that this was born and many people called and were in the arena

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and this is the passage that changes my life it is not the critic who tells it is not the man who points how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better, the credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena whose face is stained with blood, sweat and dust, who at

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in the end knows the triumph of great achievements and who in the worst case scenario, if he fails, fails a lot, daring a lot, so the moment I read that I closed my laptop and this is what changed three huge things in me.

First I spent the last 12 years studying vulnerability and that quote with everything I know about vulnerability it's not about winning it's not about losing it's about showing up and being seen second this is what I want to be I want to create I want to do things that did not exist before I touched them I want to appear and be seen in my work and in my life and if you are going to appear and be seen there is only one guarantee and that is that they will kick your ass, that is the only certainty you have if you are going to Going to the arena and spending any time there, especially if you have committed to creating in your life, will keep you free, so you will have to decide at that moment.

I think for all of us, if courage is a value that we hold, this is a consequence that you cannot avoid. The third thing that really freed me, and I think Steve, my husband, would say has done something dangerous to me, is a kind of new philosophy about criticism, which is this if you're not in the arena it also kicks your ass I'm not interested. in your comments we numb vulnerability when we're waiting for the call when we're trying to think if we're going to go you know that was funny I guess on Wednesday I sent something out on Twitter and Facebook that says how would you define vulnerability, what makes you feel vulnerable and in a hour and a half I had 150 responses because I wanted to 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 rejected asking someone out waiting having the doctor call back being fired firing people this is the world we live in we live in a vulnerable world and one of the ways we deal with it is to numb the vulnerability and I think there is evidence and it's not the only reason why There is this evidence, but I think there is a big reason why we are the most indebted, obese, addicted and medicated cohort of adults.

In American history, the problem is, and I learned this from research, that you can't selectively numb emotions, you can't say, here's the bad stuff, here's the vulnerability, here's the pain, here's the pain. There is shame, here is fear, here is disappointment, I don't want to feel this, I'm leaving. Have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. I don't want to feel this. You can't numb those resentments without numbing the other affections or emotions. You can't selectively numb them, so when we numb them, we numb the joy, we numb the gratitude. numb happiness and then we feel miserable and we search for purpose and meaning and then we feel vulnerable, so we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin and it becomes this dangerous cycle, one of the things that I think we need what we think is why and how we numb ourselves and it doesn't have to be just addiction, the other thing we do is create everything that is uncertain religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty I'm right, you're wrong, shut up up that's for sure the more afraid we are the more vulnerable we are the more afraid we are this is what politics looks like today there is no longer speech there is no conversation there is only guilt you know how guilt is described in research a way to discharge the pain and the awkwardness we perfect it now let me tell you if there is anyone who wants their life to look like that it would be me but it doesn't work because what we do is take fat out of our butts and put it on our cheeks which Jess I hope in 100 years people look back and say: wow! and we perfect our children in a more dangerous way.

Let me tell you what we think. Let me think very quickly about the children. They are programmed to fight 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 in fifth grade and to Yale in seventh grade our job that's not our job our job is look and say, You know you are imperfect and you are prepared to fight, but you are worthy of love and belonging, that is our job, show me a generation of children raised like this and we will end the problems that I think we see today. we pretend that what we do doesn't have an effect on people we do in our personal lives we do that corporate, whether it's a rescue, an oil spill, a recall, we pretend that what we're doing doesn't have a big impact on A Other people would tell companies that this is not our first rodeo, we just need you to be authentic and real and say we are sorry, we will fix it, but there is another way and I leave you with this, this is what I have discovered that we should letting ourselves see deeply, be seen, be seen, be seen, be seen, love with all our hearts, even if there is no guarantee, and that is very difficult, and I can tell you, as a parent, it is unbearably difficult to practice gratitude and joy, and those moments of terror when we wonder: Can I love you so much?

Can I believe in this so passionately? Can I be so fierce about it just so I can stop and instead of catastrophizing what might happen, say: I'm so grateful for feeling so vulnerable? It means I'm alive and the last thing I think is probably the most important is believing that we are enough because when we work from a place that I believe says I am enough, then we stop shouting and start listening, we are kinder. and kinder to the people around us and we are kinder and gentler to ourselves, that's all I talk about 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 that is what they say, don Don't talk about faith, it's inappropriate, it's an organ corporation and then I work a lot in churches and they tell me not to say bad words, so I got to the point where I think.

I have faced thousands and thousands of people over the last two decades of my life listening to the most difficult things you can imagine and the two things they all have in common when they talk about those things are cursing and praying if you don't want me to say bad words. and you don't want me to pray. Ask someone 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 me. I know different things than what I do. I invite you if you need me to wear a suit.

I totally understand it. I will not do it. I'll wear jeans and boots and probably wear a nice shirt, but I'm not going. do that because I don't go up there when I speak in public. I don't go up there, you know, to talk from my Brooks Brothers self to your Brooks Brothers self, I go up there and when I go on stage. I'm going to talk about things that 90 of the people in the

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have never thought about talking about and are afraid to listen to and need to see me as a person and I'm just that person.

I think it's clear what I want if you invite me I want your event or your leadership team I want it to be successful abroad