After Brené Brown gave her talk that hot summer morning in Texas, she felt mortified. She had just confessed to a room full of people that she, a quiet, respected university professor, had been led to a year-long nervous breakdown by her research on shame.
In the talk she argued that we need courage to live a full life, and that this means doing things that leave us feeling vulnerable. She admitted that she herself was a perfectionist and a control freak whose attitude, before her breakdown, had been: “Life’s messy, clean it up, organise it and put it into a bento box.”
After the talk she was gripped by regrets; her academic peers would cringe if they found out and she decided not to leave the house for three days until it blew over. “I woke up the morning after I gave that talk with the worst vulnerability hangover of my life.” Thank goodness no one was filming . . .
The video of her talk has since been viewed nearly 21 million times.
Brené Brown is what happens when a Ted talk goes viral. The highbrow sheen of the Ted organisation means that she earning megabucks as America’s new self-help queen — her two subsequent books were No 1 New York Times bestsellers, her new one, Rising Strong, is heading that way and she is a close pal of Oprah Winfrey’s.
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Yet she is also an adviser to some of the most powerful people on the planet. She alludes in her books to being in demand from the military and Fortune 500 companies in the five years since that fateful talk. I press her on which significant names have engaged her services. “It ranges,” she tells me, “from crown princes outside the United States to high-ranking politicians in America.”
Strange times for someone who remains an academic at the University of Houston, a 49-year-old working mother of two teenagers and the wife of a paediatrician. Her lifelong interest in the social science of failure, shame and vulnerability had previously made her something of a leper in our positivity-obsessed culture. She says that when people used to ask her what she did, she would say “shame researcher” if she wanted to stop the conversation dead or the softer “vulnerability researcher” if she was prepared to hear a trembling confession. That changed, by the power of the internet, almost overnight. Days after her talk was put online the calls began to flood in.
She is recognised constantly in the US and when she travels the world. She has told the story in another online talk of buying sports kit for her children in a busy shop, when a woman spotted her and shouted at her across the room, “It’s Vulnerability Ted!” then barrelled over to Brown to quiz her about her breakdown. “Like an action figure, like Ninja Barbie, I’m ‘Vulnerability Ted’,” Brown says. “You can only imagine what it’s like for me at faculty meetings.”
Did she ever have any idea her talk could be popular, let alone one of the most watched Ted talks of all? “Do you want to know the truth? I don’t look at the numbers of views and I’ve never seen it. I had no awareness at all I was being filmed,” she says. “No, I would have worn a better outfit and done my make-up or something. Being recognised takes me off guard. The weirdest thing is everyone makes a lot of assumptions about me. People are pretty shocked to find out I am a major introvert. I’m a homebody and, unless I’m talking about my work, a pretty quiet person.”
So what is it that strikes such a chord about what Brown says? The numbers alone on that first talk — the “views” ticker has leapt every time I check, and it is translated into 50 languages — show that she articulates something important and ignored. She gets many thousands of requests a year to speak. In Rising Strong she writes about how much her original Ted talk has been analysed, second by second, for the secret of its success, “ ‘At minute four, Brené shifts her body to the left and gives a slight half grin. This is known as the “soft smile pivot” and should be used with extreme care.’ I’m exaggerating a bit but not much. It’s so weird.”
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I can tell you what is clear from watching her in action: if anyone more traditionally “self-helpy” had given this talk, it would have flopped. She reminds me of Ellen Degeneres, albeit a less Hollywood version; they share the Southern accent, a wry self-deprecation, a tense demeanour and an abhorrence of schmaltz.
To watch this kind of controlled, sarcastic person open themselves up before you is more compelling and feels more truthful. Brown embodies her own message: how hard it is for her, as it is for most people in their working, personal or political life to acknowledge the darker forces that drive our worst behaviour. Brown’s ideas on shame run counter to Californian “over-sharing”; she calls for a private reckoning. Her examples of where shame needs to be acknowledged range from terrorism, to race relations, to surgical mistakes. “Yeah,” she tells me, “I think that’s all of us. We are all the most dangerous when we are in shame.”
So her appeal is her paradox: an introvert with 21 million views; uptight and open; someone who would roll her eyes at this stuff if only it didn’t matter so much. “People come up after my talks and say: ‘I thought it was funny, but now I’m crying.’ I’m not cynical, but I’m . . .” she pauses for the right-word. “. . . Vulnerability resistant.” She gives a little laugh.
“I do think that British people and Texans have this attitude in common: push through, don’t whine.” I had never thought of the Texans being the Brits of America, but she is convinced: “We have a stiff upper lip — we just have a moustache and a cowboy hat. Texas is definitely a culture very different from California or even New York. We are generous, but also: ‘Stop your pissing and moaning and get something done.’ ”
A fifth-generation Texan, her family motto was “lock and load”, vulnerability not tolerated. She was drawn to studying shame but kept it at arm’s length through the scientific method. Shame, the research went, was highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, bullying, suicide and eating disorders. People used addictions, “crazy-busy” schedules or perfectionism to numb or run from it, but this caused its own problems. Perfectionism, and particularly the modern tendency to “busyness”, was actually blocking creativity, productivity and progress.
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Suddenly, in 2007, Brown realised this wasn’t just theory. Her researched list of attributes of people terrified of vulnerability started to sound familiar. Perfectionist? Journalists have since noted a ribbon organiser in her immaculate home with 30 types of ribbon. Addicted? She talks of her lifelong battle with comfort food. Judgmental, afraid, full of dread, tick tick tick.
This recognition of herself in her research triggered the breakdown. She started crying all the time. She had anxiety attacks. She found herself in the alien world of the therapist’s office where she announced, as she puts it in her Ted talk, “Well, I have a vulnerability issue. And I know that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it’s also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love. And I think I have a problem, and I need some help. But here’s the thing,” and this is trademark Brown comedy undercutting this desperate moment: “No family stuff, no childhood s***.”
Her therapist called this period of Brown’s life “a spiritual awakening”, but Brown says, with her comedic instinct, that although spiritual awakening sounds better, “this was a breakdown”. Her books are less powerful for the lack of this live performance; she is a born storyteller. What makes less sense on the page is mesmerising with her delivery.
The books surprise me by being not remotely academic: no footnoted journals, lots of anecdote and cultural references. She’s great at aphorisms; my favourite is “faith minus vulnerability and mystery equals extremism”, which I benefited from thinking about for some time. These she mingles with painfully relatable stories about how she feels about herself in her swimsuit and how she learnt to think about how she feels in a swimsuit.
In her latest book she describes how: “I received an angry email from a man upset about my quoting a lyric from a song. He wrote: ‘I don’t want complex research summarised with rock lyrics.’ I thought about responding with an elaborate explanation about the nature of conceptualising in grounded theory research, but then I decided there was a simpler, more truthful answer: ‘You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.’ ”
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There’s a section in the book on her talks to creatives at Pixar, the film studio. She tells me: “I’ve done a lot of work with them. I’m a big fan.” Pixar script writers talked about the importance of the tough “second act” in their iconic animated films, which they said was always the hardest to write. The hero has to open up to vulnerability and failure, go through what Pixar termed the “lowest of the low”, which proves who they are far more than the triumphant finale.
I ask Brown if she sees any relevance to her work in the latest Pixar film, Inside Out: in that story the heroine discovers the value of sadness; in the story of Brown’s life, she discovers the value of vulnerability. “Yes. People want to believe it is weakness, to associate it with all this darkness and fear. I want to armour up, but when you armour against vulnerability, you not only do not keep those experiences out, you dull those experiences we want more.”
I ask her how much her life has changed since she became Vulnerability Ted. She laughs, then pauses so long I think the line to Texas has gone dead.
“You know in some ways I wake up in the morning and pack lunches, load the dishes, I carpool. My life is exactly what I hoped my life would look like and it hasn’t changed much. It’s the velocity of incoming requests; that’s changed a lot. I want to say, ‘How did this happen?’ Things are so crazy. But if I really dig deep and think about it, that’s who I am. I was focused and driven about my work from the very beginning because I really believe in it.”
Rising Strong by Brené Brown is published by Vermilion in paperback at £12.99. Brown will lead a day-and-a-half workshop in London, aimed at helping professionals and educators on November 6 & 7. Event and booking details: tinyurl.com/o9e3lbv