I first heard about Brené Brown from AndKathleen’s post about her a while back, and I’d read a few articles about her work on vulnerability, but I didn’t actually watch her TEDx talk until yesterday, when I was coooking for hours and needed something to distract me. Her talk is about her research on wholeheartedness – essentially, living authentically, having strong relationships, and feeling fulfilled. In interviews she did, she found that the common factor in wholehearted people was vulnerability. I’ve been mulling over this all day – how do we achieve vulnerability? There are some times when it happens by accident, for sure, but how can we work that into more of our relationships and friendships?
I dislike small talk, so oftentimes, when I meet people, I’ll ask them questions that end up becoming pretty personal, like “What’s your story?” or “What’s your biggest fear?” and I feel like they usually yield interesting responses. I’ve nailed down my own answer to “What’s your biggest fear?” but I’ve yet to find a concise way to answer “What’s your story?”
There are a handful of experiences that I don’t like to talk about, and I feel like all of them are major, formative parts of me. I don’t like to talk about them becuase I’m worried that people will define me by them, or that people will think that I’m telling them a sob story. The outcome is that I mention them in passing, usually, when it’s relevant to the conversation at hand. I still feel like I’m being inauthentic, though, telling people “You get to know me, but if you want the gritty details, you’ll only get those by accident.”
I don’t have some kind of magic solution – I’m still trying to figure out how to be close to people, how to have deep, meaningful connections with those around me.
Brown mentions this this quote from Theodore Roosevelt.
“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, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; 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, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
The first time I heard that was in my AP U.S. History class, where Mr. Franchi wrote a quotation on the white board every few days. It pushes me to ask myself how I’m taking risks, how I’m putting myself out there, how I’m in the arena every single day. Some days, it’s less than others. Some days, going to work and trying to do things that may or may not work out makes me feel like I’ve been in the arena, and some days writing something weird and confusing makes me feel that way. I felt like I was in the arena when I moved to new places where I didn’t know anyone, and I felt like I was in the arena when I applied for e-chief at the Herald after four months there.
I need to do that more often, I need to be finding oppurtunities to stick my neck out and take risks and just do the thing more often, until I learn to get it right.