The result, she told the audience, was a breakdown. She had been on “a mission to control and predict”, but this had led her to research “which suggested that the way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting”. The problem, she realised, was that it didn’t include her. And the key, she theorised, is that they were able to be vulnerable. She discovered, however, that there was a class of people who simply felt good enough, who weren’t plagued by fear or doubt. She’s a qualitative researcher, so her work involves interviewing people and listening to their stories, and after hundreds of interviews she thought she’d found some common threads: that connection is the key to everything, but shame – or a fear of disconnection – keeps us from it. It was on her specialist subject: vulnerability and its partner in crime, shame. And at least it means people are now reading her work – her last two books were both bestsellers.Īnd all because, back in 2010, she agreed to give a talk to a few hundred people at a small TEDx event in Texas. “This is a book about getting back up.” She may not want to see herself as a self-help author, but her publishers certainly do. The work is really interesting – the work is the research.”Īnd yet the text underneath Rising Strong’s title, plastered across the cover, is pretty unequivocal: “If we are brave enough, often enough, we will fall,” it says. It should be about the work, right? I’m not that interesting. It also… to be totally frank with you, I actually don’t like the cult of personality celebrity stuff around my work at all. Part of the problem, she says, is that “it’s not me. A photo shoot was scheduled for after my interview, but when I catch up with her in her London hotel she explains that she has pulled out because it was just “too much”.

On the other she seems, well, a bit exhausted. On the one hand she’s now reaching the kind of audience that most academics can only dream of. She was “the vulnerability woman” or “the shame academic”, and it’s a measure of how much her life has changed that during a whistlestop few days in Britain she has had a private leadership session with banking executives in the City, an evening in front of a capacity crowd at Alain de Botton’s School of Life, an all-day workshop training counsellors in her methodology, and a whole string of interviews to mark the launch of her latest book, Rising Strong. F ive years ago, Brené Brown was an obscure academic – an associate professor of social work at the University of Houston – and then, overnight, she was famous.

Daring greatly by brené brown