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.