Month: December 2015

I’ve been doing a lot of internal work lately, and in the process came across this Tim Ferris podcast where he interviews Brené Brown, author of Daring Greatly. I’ve heard the “Man in the Arena” quote many times, enough that it feels hackneyed and overwrought by now. But Brown’s reaction to it, during a tough place in her own career, was really arresting to me, so I thought I’d share:

“For me, daring greatly — that quote from Theodore Roosevelt, I even got teary-eyed when you were reading it. It was a life-changer for me. It was right after the TEDX Houston talk had gone viral […] and as you can imagine, all these online stories had online comments. And my husband and my therapist were like, “Don’t read the comments.” And so I read all the comments one day. […]

“We all have the shame triggers[…] that you could overhear someone saying about you that would be so painful and so hurtful that you don’t know if you could survive it. Most of us have those things. And so for me up until that point, those things really dictated my life. I was like, “Look, I’m going to engineer this career to kinda be small and safe. I’m going to play right under the radar because I’m not willing to put myself out there and be criticized. But the problem with staying small is that it’s always served up with resentment and pissed-offed-ness. Because we’re not using our gifts, we’re not in our power, and there’s always a price for that.

“And so to me, when I read that quote — when I looked at the comments, they were like, ‘Of course she embraces imperfection, what choice would you have if you look like her,’ ‘I feel sorry for her husband and kids,’ ‘More botox, less research,’ and ‘You need to shake loose ten pounds before you can talk about being worthy.’ Just like, really hurtful, shitty stuff. And then like thirty minutes after reading all that I came upon that quote from Theodore Roosevelt. And in that moment, what I realized was, ‘You know what? I do want to live a brave life. I do want to live in the arena.’ And if you’re going to live in the arena, the only guarantee is you will get your ass kicked.

“The second thing is that daring greatly is being vulnerable, so when you ask yourself, “Did I dare greatly today?” The big question I ask is that, ‘When I had the opportunity, did I choose courage over comfort?’ […]

“One of the things that really turned my life upside down […] in my research […] was the difference between healthy striving for excellence, and perfectionism. I’ve always been perfectionistic about my stuff, and what I learned in my research was that perfectionism is very outwardly defined. It’s dictated by ‘What will people think?’ and healthy striving is internally motivated.

“Perfectionism is a defense mechanism, classically. which says that ‘If I live perfect, love perfect, work perfect and accomplish perfectly, I can reduce or minimize shame, blame, criticism and judgement’. And so we carry this thing around thinking it’s protecting us, but what it’s really doing is keeping us from being seen. So when I ask myself personally, ‘Have I dared greatly today?’ sometimes for me the question was, ‘Was I enough?’ or ‘Am I trying to get everything perfect so that I can somehow think I’m mitigating criticism and judgement?'”

You can hear the entire interview here.