Brene Brown | The Biggest Myth About Vulnerability

And the truth is, you know, what I found in my research is that vulnerability is not weakness. In fact, I would argue that it’s our greatest measure of courage.

When we went out and asked people, “What is vulnerability?” we heard things like:

Vulnerability is the first date after my divorce.
Vulnerability is starting my own company.
Vulnerability is taking responsibility for something that went wrong at work.
Vulnerability is sitting with my wife who has stage three breast cancer and making plans for our young kids.
Vulnerability is taking my business public.

You know, the definition I use in my work of vulnerability is simply: uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

Vulnerability is about the willingness to show up and to be seen, even when there are no guarantees.

And it’s interesting to me—I mean, one of the things that I thought was really interesting—I gave a talk, it was probably a couple years ago now, and it was being translated by people doing American Sign Language. And they came up before the talk started and said, “Are there any words that you’re going to use a lot in your talk that we should know about, that might be different?”

I said, “Well, I use the word vulnerability a lot.”

And they kind of—there were two of them—they kind of looked at each other and they said, “Oh, we do this for vulnerability.”

And I said, “What does that mean?”

They said, “It means weaken the knees.”

And I’m like, “Wow. That’s not how I talk about vulnerability.”

And she said, “Well, there’s only one other sign for vulnerability.”

And I said, “What is it?”

And she said—

Vulnerability is courage.

And I said, “Oh. That’s what I’m talking about.”

And so, to me, vulnerability is our most accurate measure of courage.

I mean, it’s pretty powerful when I have 13,000 pieces of data collected over 12 years, and I cannot find a single incident or story of courage that was not completely underpinned by vulnerability.

I think the problem arises in that there are so many little paradoxes with vulnerability. And one of them is that:

Vulnerability is courage in you—but weakness in me.

When I meet you, it’s the first thing I look for in you. But it’s the last thing I want to show you in me.

And so I think to really put ourselves out there, knowing that if we do that enough, we’re going to fail… I just don’t think it gets more courageous than that.