Popular speaker touts compassionate message of “daring greatly”
“Vulnerability … is our most accurate measurement of courage,” says Brené Brown
WINNIPEG, MB—Being vulnerable and open is terrifying, dangerous and risky—but not as terrifying, dangerous and risky as disconnecting from others and wondering what life might have looked like if we would have had the courage to express how we really felt.
That’s the message Houston-based social work professor and renowned speaker Brené Brown recently delivered during a keynote address in Winnipeg.
Brown’s 2010 TEDx Houston talk on the power of vulnerability is one of the most-watched talks on TED.com, with more than 12 million views. Brown spoke in Winnipeg about how courage, compassion and connection are the keys to living fully.
Near the beginning of her keynote, Brown quoted a passage from a 1910 address by former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt titled, “Citizenship in a Republic.”
In the address, Roosevelt states, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena … who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
Brown said when she came across Roosevelt’s words, it was “a God thing.” They were one of the inspirations for her latest book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.
“I want to live in the arena,” Brown told the sold-out Winnipeg crowd of 800, adding that “daring greatly” is not easy.
That shouldn’t stop people from trying though, Brown noted. Society today has equated happiness with comfort, but there is nothing comfortable about being courageous.
“If you want to be courageous, you have to prepare to be hurt,” she said. “Vulnerability … is about having the courage to show up and be seen when there are no guarantees.”
Vulnerability is necessary for human connection, something we all long for, but we’re often afraid of it. Ironically, we appreciate vulnerability in others but see it as a weakness in ourselves, Brown said.
“Vulnerability is not weakness,” Brown said. “It is our most accurate measurement of courage.”
During the question-and-answer period following the keynote, Brown noted that the absence of love and belonging leads to suffering.
“I am a very prayerful person,” she said, noting that gratitude, compassion, rest, play and spirituality are important elements of believing in one’s own worthiness.
Brown’s keynote was part of a two-day conference held at the Winnipeg Convention Centre November 5-6 titled, “Wired for Connection: How Empathy, Shame, and Vulnerability Affect Helping and Healing.” The Catholic Health Association of Manitoba’s (CHAM) Compassion Project organized the conference.
Representatives from the Compassion Project say they brought Brown to Winnipeg for the two-day conference because they wanted to equip people with practical ways of being compassionate.
“At the heart of [the Catholic] tradition, and of many spiritual traditions, is the essence of compassion,” says Micheline St-Hilaire, organizational change and development leader for the Compassion Project. “So, connecting to that essence and finding ways to touch our core, I think, is the practice of our faith tradition.”
Dawn MacDonald, coordinator of the Compassion Project, agrees.
“Really, the heart of Jesus’s healing ministry was compassion,” she says.
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