Reflections on Brene Brown

Brené Brown is a social science researcher who writes about shame, vulnerability, and courage. Thanks to a book club I attend, I have had the opportunity to read two of Brené Brown's books: Daring Greatly and Rising Strong.  As I was reading those books, the personal connections I made were mostly about parenting, gratitude, and writing. Parenting issues resonated with me because I am a mother and Brené connected her research directly to the best ways to help our kids become courageous.  I happened to read Brené's work soon after reading One Thousand Gifts, which had prompted me to be intentional about being grateful, so everything  Brené said about gratitude caught my attention.  But here in this blog post, I want to explore how her insights connect to writing so that maybe, in re-reading this post myself, I will be encouraged to write more, or at least understand my own hang-ups about writing.

I keep saying I want to write.  I keep meaning to write.  I keep toying with blog posts that I don't publish.  I sit down to try and within a few minutes decide I don't have time or the topic I was considering doesn't seem worth the effort.  After Brené's books, I finally understood why writing is so hard and so scary.  Putting my words out there for someone else to read is an inherently vulnerable activity.  My respect for other people writing blog posts has increased dramatically since I read Brené's books and since I have tried to write my own blog posts.

Brené's books are wonderful and very readable, full of stories and clear explanations, and yet I did not find them very quotable.  I wanted to copy our a few sentences that encapsulated her argument, but I kept finding that I would need to copy out several pages for quotes from her books to make sense.  Her interview in an On Being episode gives a good overview of her main ideas from her books. These are the the quotes or ideas stood out to me again in the podcast and what they mean to me for writing.

• "Comparison kills creativity."  I think I have always known better than to compare myself with writers I consider truly great (Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Jane Austen, etc.) but I do still struggle with comparing my writing with other "ordinary" people's writing.  Comparison never helps anything.  Feeling inadequacy does not help my creativity.  Feeling smug and superior doesn't help either.  I want to learn to appreciate writing without turning it into a measuring stick for my own.
• Writing requires courage.  It will always take courage to put something I wrote "out there" for other people to read, judge, and criticize.  It will never get easy (maybe easier, but never easy).  Anything worth writing creates a certain level of vulnerability.  Now that I know why it is so difficult, maybe I can learn to embrace the challenge and risk inherent in writing instead of trying to find a way to keep it from feeling scary. 
• What I produce does not change my value as a person. If what I wrote is terrible, I am still a valuable person.  If what I write is wonderful, it will not make me any more valuable. Brené pointed out we can't have it both ways.  It would be nice if good writing reflected me while poor writing didn't, but either both change my value or neither do.  I know my value as a person comes from the fact that the creator of the universe decided to make me.  Nothing I do can change that.  So while writing is scary, it is not so very scary as I sometimes try to make it.
• "Success is not a victory march."   Brené said that having her TED talk receive tremendous attention also meant feeling very vulnerable and having to deal with criticism and her fear of criticism.  There is never a point when success is entirely positive.  Sometimes we who dream of success imagine that it will be perfect and wonderful and painless.  In reality, however, success involves a mix of positives and negatives.  This idea makes me think of the Emily Dickinson poem Success Is Counted Sweetest.