Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead – Brené Brown

There are some books that are meant to change you and your life. And this is one such book.

From the experiences, in the early days of my life, I have closed myself to vulnerability. I used to build a wall around myself and did not allow anyone to come close to me. And with this, I was guarding myself against hurt and pain.

With time I eased up and realized that humans can’t live without emotional connections. But my real learning was when I met someone last year who taught me what it is really like to be vulnerable. That person taught me how to lead a genuine life by the example of living it.

With such learnings, I became mindful of so many things in my life, opened up, and tried to live a genuine and intentional lifestyle. But after reading this book I realized how much I was still missing learning.

This book taught me how good I am at doing shame. Living in a culture of scarcity and feeling not good enough for most things. And as Brene pointed out that you can’t do vulnerability good if you are good at doing shame. And when you are ashamed of something you find something or someone else to blame it for, because you don’t want yourself to deal with your emotions.

But after reading this book, once I let go of things that shamed me and accepted that I am enough, there was a heavy burden that was lifted from my heart. Suddenly I was forgiving towards(even though there is nothing to forgive as such) people for whom I have to hold up something in my heart for so long. And finally after so long I was on terms with my life.

After reading all this you know that I highly recommend this book. If you don’t know about this author then you should first check out her Ted Talk on the main Ted Channel. Her talk is among one of the most viewed videos on the Ted website and it is a distillation of this book.

This book captures a lot of areas dealing with vulnerabilities and shame in life, parenting, relationship, and corporates. Some of the things were not relevant to me immediately but this is a book I might re-read in the future. So, I am skipping the summary for this book for my next reading.