Brené Brown Ted Talk 2010, and the feeling of easiness

A few weeks ago I watched the TED talk 2010 of Brené Brown about the power of vulnerability.

I was rather skeptical about her Ted talk. But indeed, because I was afraid of having missed something last time, I have listened to it once again just before writting this article (English is not my mother tongue).

So.

Brené Brown has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame (this is from her bio), and she divided the people she interviewed into:

• people who have a strong sense of worthiness, of love and belonging
• and thos who struggle for it 

And the only difference she found between these two categories of people is those who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they are worthy of love and belonging.

That's it!

And to me, almost everything in this TED talk is about this "that's it". This makes you feel like getting over shame, shyness, etc... is so easy that it can be contained in a simple "that's it". But in fact, what  Brené Brown is saying is: that people who have strong sense of love and belonging have it  because they believe they are worthy of love and belonging.

They believe.

This is when we can start being enthousiastic, because everybody knows that believing in something doesn't necessarily mean that something is true. So a belief can be make out of nothing. Now what does Brené Brown seem to say: to believe in something can make it real. And it is great, because, for example, believing I'm worthy of love can change my deep belief that I'm less than a shit.

Well, I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical about when you believe you are a shit you will easily believe you are worthy of love. There is no "that's it" in it, unless you can say "Humans appeared in Africa about 4 million years ago then they colonized the entire world and created computers, that's it" and you snap your fingers and give a big smile :)

No, someone who believes he or she is not worthy of cannot easily think he or she is worth, even though a belief can have no link to reality and still exists.

Then let's keep listening to the Ted talk. After discovering there were these certain kind of people who have this strong sense of worthiness, Brené Brown decided to focus on them and try to find out what they had in common. She found out that they were wholehearted, they had:

• the courage to be imperfect
• compassion, but they were kind to themselves first
• connection with others as a result of their authenticity
• vulerability, for example able to say "I love you" first without guarantee the other loves them

Now, these findings are great, but these qualities found in "strong sense of worthiness" people are not easily earned. You cannot wake up one morning and say: "today I will be vulnerable, I will have the courage to be imperfect, so I will then be happy and experience love". But in fact, the problem of happiness and love has not been made easier. This is not what Brené Brown says anyway, though her talk can make believe weak people (like me) that is that easy.

What Brené Brown seems to say seems not far from the joke my father used to say when I was a child:

"to catch a bird is easy, all you have to do is to put a grain of salt under its tail."

And in my opinion, if you feel like what says Brené Brown is easy to implement this can be a problem, because finally you are left with a feeling that the problem can be fixed, or studied easily, and it cannot. So you are probably struggling with the same problem but thinking that this problem is easy to deal with!

And the result can be: you will feel less worthy than you felt before and so experience more shame for not solving your problems.