Brené Brown, an introduction to her life and work: Home

Casandra Brené Brown spent the first part of her career as a little-known teacher and research professor at the University of Houston's Graduate College of Social Work. In her early research, Brown conducted hundreds of interviews with different women in the effort to understand the emotion of shame, which she claimed was at once one of the "most primitive and universal of human emotions" as well as the least-studied and most misunderstood (p. 43). She later developed the material from this article into a book which Penguin published in 2007 as I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn't) : Making the Journey from "What Will People Think?" to "I Am Enough" . Brown's work has always been rooted in Grounded Theory (GT), a research approach that begins with careful listening and observation of human experience, rather than the attempt to demonstrate or disprove particular theoretical framework, and surprise is a major component of work in GT. GT relies on conducting interviews and focus groups, listening closely to how people tell their own stories, and looking for common themes. It is an approach requires a high tolerance for fear, uncertainty, and surprise--emotions Brown has explored extensively in her research.

In 2010, Brown was invited to present a talk at the TEDx on "The power of vulnerability." Her talk would go on to receive tens of millions of views, and become one of the most viewed (and loved) TED Talks of all time, and within the space of a few months, Brown went from a moderately-successful academic little-known beyond the confines of her particular discipline, to something of a celebrity self-help guru who was recognized in supermarkets. Brown described this experience in the follow-up talk "Listening to shame" as one of the most difficult and disorienting experiences of her life. One of Brown's insights is that success is always attended by discomfort, and not just the discomfort of long hours and hard work, but emotional pain as well: feelings like a fraud, feeling like a failure, feeling like a fool. The hard work of vulnerability requires embracing this discomfort as the only way forward. In Brown's work, the only way to live a meaningful life is through embracing genuine connection with other people. And the only way to achieve meaningful connection is by embracing the painful, dangerous vulnerability which make honesty, empathy, and compassion possible.