Author
Brené Brown
The researcher who spent years interviewing people about shame and found that vulnerability is where courage begins.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston whose work, based on years of qualitative interviews, has focused on shame, vulnerability, courage and connection.
A 2010 TED talk on vulnerability made her widely known; The Gifts of Imperfection appeared the same year, and Daring Greatly in 2012 set out the arena, armour and shame resilience for a general reader.
Rising Strong followed in 2015, Dare to Lead in 2018 on leadership, and Atlas of the Heart in 2021 on the vocabulary of emotion; she also hosts podcasts on the same themes.
The signature
Brown writes as a researcher who tells her own stories against her findings, with the interview data underneath. Her signature is the precise definition, vulnerability as uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure, shame as 'I am bad' against guilt's 'I did something bad', and Roosevelt's arena as the filter for whose opinion counts.