Brené Brown is a celebrity researcher (what an odd combination!) whose ideas about vulnerability and courage made her one of the most popular speakers in TED’s history. I bought her book ‘Daring Greatly’ after launching the Creative Life Manifesto and it became instrumental in both supporting and enhancing my beliefs about creativity and daring greatly.

Brown sees vulnerability as the core emotion as well as the source of innovation, creativity, change, love, empathy, courage and so on. Vulnerability, she argues, is not the same as weakness:

‘To feel is to be vulnerable. To believe vulnerability is weakness is to believe that feeling is weakness. To foreclose on our emotional life out of a fear that the costs will be too high is to walk away from the very thing that gives purpose and meaning to living. … Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.’

Her term ‘wholehearted living’ particularly resonated with me and felt similar to my ideas about creative and authentic living:

‘Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.’

According to Brown’s research, vulnerability is one of the most important values for wholehearted people, whose lives are defined by courage, compassion and connection – all the outcome of being vulnerable. In every talk and TV appearance she gives, Brown recites the following Theodore Roosevelt quote, as it is where she got the term ‘daring greatly’ from, and it encompasses her research on vulnerability and wholeheartedness:

‘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. …’

‘Daring Greatly’ is a great addition to the Creative Life Manifesto and here I must also link to Maya Angelou, talking about her understanding of courage:

‘Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practise any other virtue consistently. You can practise any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.’

So practise vulnerability and grow more courageous and wholehearted!