The story that I’m making up is ...
When something upsets or derails us — maybe a confrontation with a co-worker or a spat with a spouse — our brains scramble to turn it into a story. Giving an incident a beginning, middle and end is a pattern the brain recognizes and rewards.
But here’s the thing: A lot of the stories we tell ourselves just aren’t true, says Brené Brown, a Houston social worker and best-selling author.
“Let’s say I have a bad meeting at work with Maggie,” offers Brown, on the phone from her Houston home on the eve of a book tour. “In a split second my brain says, ‘I knew that Maggie didn’t like me.’ And then we take off from there. When we’re in struggle and uncertainty, our emotions are driving while our thoughts and behavior are in the back seat. If we can’t catch that story and reality-check it, it will take us places we don’t want to go.”
Brown, a fifth-generation Texan, has built her career on places people don’t want to go. Years of research on shame and vulnerability — interviewing men and women about their darkest demons, sometimes as tears stream down their cheeks — have led to books that pack exhaustive research with personal stories, pop-culture
touchstones and Texasstyle straight talk.
Brown’s best-selling “Daring Greatly” (2012) focused on vulnerability and the difficult but rewarding process of stepping into the arena and letting yourself be seen. That book helped birth her new title, “Rising Strong,” a guide to getting back up after trying and failing. “Rising Stong” will be released Tuesday.
“After ‘Daring Greatly’ came out and people got really excited about the idea of showing up and being seen, I got slammed with emails and letters,” says Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. “People said, ‘OK. I dared greatly. So, now what?’ I kept saying, ‘If we’re brave enough often enough, we’re going to fall down.’ I always knew I would write about getting back up.”
Brown divides her “Rising Strong” process into three parts that look tidy on paper but, in practice, may take days, months or years of slogging through personal sludge to change your life:
The reckoning: Get curious about how your emotions connect with the way you think and behave.
The rumble: Get honest about the stories you’re making up about your struggles and challenge yourself to determine what’s truth, what’s selfprotection and what must change to live a “wholehearted” life.
The revolution: Write a new ending to your story based on what you learned in the rumble and improve the way you engage with the world.
Brown interviewed a couple of thousand people and gathered close to 150,000 pieces of data for the book. Throughout, she pulls from music lyrics, books, movies, any source that will help distill the points she is trying to make. Ed Catmull of Pixar Animation Studios, television writer and producer Shonda Rhimes, author J.K. Rowling, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, the films “Flushed Away,” “The Silence of the Lambs” and “The Empire Strikes Back” all make appearances. So does Brown’s dad, whose philosophy for owning the past so that you can move forward is: “You got to dance with them that brung you.”
“If you can only draw wisdom from academic endeavors, you’re not that smart,” Brown says. “I learn as much from overhearing conversations in carpool as I do from graduate courses in child development. ... Sometimes a Rolling Stones lyric can capture the accuracy of human experience.”
“Rising Strong” also is filled with Brown’s personal stories.
The book tackles “the unreliable narrators in our heads,” she explains. “It’s easier to tell my own stories because I know what people saw on the outside and what I was thinking on the inside. I had the backstage pass.”
One story describes an early-morning swim she took with her husband, Steve, on a family vaca- tion. They swam across a Lake Travis cove and back. Brown was blissful and eager to connect, but Steve’s brief, breezy responses to her efforts to engage left her reeling. Why wasn’t he responsive? Did he think she’d become a bad swimmer? Did he think she looked bad in her bathing suit?
Instead of confronting him with one of these typical default narratives, she held her tongue and swam back to the dock, beating Steve by a few strokes. When he joined her, she plucked a technique from her research and said:
“I feel like you’re blowing me off, and the story that I’m making up is either that you looked over at me while I was swimming and thought ‘ Man, she’s getting old. She can’t even swim freestyle anymore.’ Or you saw me and thought, ‘ She sure as hell doesn’t rock a Speedo like she did twentyfive years ago.’”
But Steve had his own story. He confessed he was fighting off a panic attack during the entire swim. The night before, he’d dreamed he had taken all five kids — their two and three cousins — on a raft in the cove when a speedboat roared toward them. He pulled the kids underwater and waited for the boat to pass over, but he could tell that his son was out of breath, that he would drown if they stayed under any longer. On top of that was the fear that Brené would be looking for a tough guy in that situation, a guy who shouts “Don’t worry, babe! I got this!”
Brown tells this story in the book (and at speaking gigs around the country) as a story of great possibility, “of what could be if our best selves showed up when we were angry or frustrated or hurt.” No accusations and arguments. Just two people “rumbling” with their personal shame stories and coming out the other side.
Brown says only some parts of her life have changed since her 2010 TEDxHouston talk went viral, leading to best-selling books and appearances with Oprah Winfrey.
“This morning, I woke up, packed lunches, drove carpool, came home and unloaded the dishwasher,” says Brown, whose book tour will take her across the country and overseas. “What’s really changed the most is the velocity of incoming requests and inquiries.”
She spends the majority of her time talking about culture, innovation and creativity with business leaders, to learn how they push through the darkness of the “messy middle” of their work.
“What leaders have in common,” Brown says, “is the capacity for discomfort and a keen awareness of their own emotional workings and the emotional landscape of those around them.”
As a leader in her own field, Brown recognizes how much Houston defines her and informs her work.
“I unapologetically adore Houston,” she says. “What I love about us is that we don’t deny our Texas heritage but we don’t hold onto it as the defining thing about us. We want to be a truly global, inclusive, hardworking city. There’s something amazing about being part of a place that knows where it’s from but doesn’t limit itself in terms of where it wants to go.”