DR. BRENÉ BROWN: How to Know Ourselves & Be Known by Our People
November, 30 2021
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. This is going to be the shortest introduction on earth, because nobody wants to hear me talk when you know who’s about to speak on these very grounds we are on. I’m going to introduce you to, although who needs this introduction, we’re going to do it anyway, to our friend, one of our favorite people on this little earth, and her name is Dr. Brene Brown.
Abby Wambach:
Woo.
Glennon Doyle:
Dr. Brene Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston, where she holds the Huffington Foundation endowed chair at the Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. She is the author of five number one, New York times bestsellers, which Abby actually asked…
Abby Wambach:
Five.
Glennon Doyle:
She was like, “Wait.” Brene, she goes, “That’s not right. This isn’t right.” I was like..
Abby Wambach:
Five.
Glennon Doyle:
“Oh no, no, no. It’s right.”
Abby Wambach:
Five number ones.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s correct. That’s so weird. Okay. And is the host of the weekly Spotify original podcast, Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead. So freaking good.
Abby Wambach:
So good.
Glennon Doyle:
Brene’s books have been translated into more than 30 languages and titles, including Dare to Lead, Braving the Wilderness, Rising Strong, Daring Greatly, and The Gifts of Imperfection. I love them all.
Glennon Doyle:
Most recently, Brene collaborated with Tarana Burke to co-edit You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience.
Abby Wambach:
So good.
Glennon Doyle:
Have we ever had so much to say about someone’s introduction?
Abby Wambach:
No, I just… Every single one, I’m like, “Yes. Yes.”
Glennon Doyle:
We’d like to comment on all the words. Okay. In her latest book, Atlas of the Heart, which our entire team has spent the last weeks with-
Abby Wambach:
Look at the freaking
Glennon Doyle:
She takes us on a journey through 87 of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human. Brene lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Steve. They have two children, Ellen and Charlie.
Glennon Doyle:
Dr. Bene Brown, thanks for being here.
Brené Brown:
Hi.
Glennon Doyle:
Hello. Hello. Okay. So we, this little team, have been talking about your book for the last weeks. Okay. The new book, Atlas of the Heart, which is about to take the entire world by storm. I think it already has. I think before anyone got it, Amazon already named it number one or on the top. I’m like, “Have they even read it? No.” Everyone’s just like, “Here we go. Brene put out a book. It’s the best.”
Abby Wambach:
Number one.
Glennon Doyle:
And they’re always right.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. So here’s what I want to say about this book to start off with. I want you to tell me if I’m right about this.
Brené Brown:
Okay.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Brené Brown:
I’m ready.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. So start to finish, read the whole thing many times, and in my own little brain, I’m trying to figure out why this is so freaking important. And so for me, I think… This is what I say to my sister the other day. I think for me it’s because, okay, if connection to other human beings is what heals us and gets us through, then the ability to understand, put language to, and communicate our internal emotional selves to each other is the only way that we will heal and get through, because that is how we connect.
Glennon Doyle:
And it’s also the only really real way to be loved by anyone. If being loved is truly about being seen and understood, we can only be seen and understood if we can put words to this wild thing that’s constantly happening inside of ourselves.
Glennon Doyle:
Dr. Brene Brown, is that right? Am I right? So this book is a guide to defining our internal selves so that we can translate ourselves to the people we love into the world. Okay. Tell me if I’m right. If I’m not right, I’m just going to splice in something that says, “Yes, Glennon. You are right.”
Brené Brown:
No, I mean yeah, you nailed it. That’s it. That’s it. I didn’t know, going into this book, first of all… Oh God, this book was so fricking hard. It was just… I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through this book, to be honest with you. And I think it is everything that you’re describing. It is how do we find our way back to ourselves and to each other? And how do we do it without language, without some understanding of…
Brené Brown:
I love what you said, what there’s this wild thing happening inside of us. We are not, much to my dismay and the dismay of many other people, we are not cognitive, thinking beings who on occasion feel. We are emotional beings. It defines who we are, and it’s just like every now and then when I was writing this, I got to this place where I was like, “Fuck, what have I gotten myself into? What is happening here?” This is too big. It’s too unwieldy. And so, yeah, it’s everything you said, Glennon. No splicing necessary. Look at her.
Abby Wambach:
A plus on the book report, Glennon. A plus on the book report.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you.Thank you.
Brené Brown:
That’s right.
Abby Wambach:
Sissy, you’ve had… I can’t wait for Brene and Sister to talk about this book because sister has had so many thoughts and feelings. So-
Amanda Doyle:
I have had 87 emotions about this.
Brené Brown:
Yes. You [crosstalk 00:05:45] me.
Amanda Doyle:
I really feel so grateful to you because you’re explaining it so well, but you’re also so vulnerable in it at the same time. And I feel like you were sharing some about when growing up in your home was both full of intense love and also intense rage. And Glennon and I had a similar experience when we were growing up, and I really deeply resonated with your description of how the unpredictability of that environment gave you this superpower that enabled you to meticulously read people’s emotions. And I feel like that has also served me well as the survival strategy works in the world because you can read people. But the flip side of that is also true, that I can’t turn off that high monitoring. So I feel like I’m always just in anticipatory anxiety mode, just high alert at all times.
Amanda Doyle:
So when I was reading this, I got to the place where you talk about calm, and you say that nothing is more important than getting a grip on your reactivity. My question is about that. It’s how do we manage to use the superpower to be tuned in to people’s emotions, but also not let it completely hijack our own emotional experience of really everything?
Brené Brown:
Man, it was a super power. It was a survival power. Because even, I think I write in there, and it was, for sure it was the most personal I’ve ever been with growing up and how things were hard. And even when things were great, y’all know my sister Barrett and then she’s got a twin Ashley, and then we’ve got a brother between us. And so I’m the oldest. And so even when things… And it’s a hard place to be because even when things were really fun and intensely fun, I was the protector in waiting. And I knew one, something is going to go side ways. One comment’s not going to work. One joke is not going to be funny, and something’s going to happen.
Brené Brown:
And so at the same time, I’m being made fun of for not jumping in all the fun. I’m also going to be the person, when shit turns really fast, that’s going to have to gather my siblings and get them out of the way.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Brené Brown:
Yeah. And so, as I’ve worked through that, especially with my therapist, she’s like, “You called it a superpower because you could read very quickly, wow, this is going to go bad in five to seven minutes.” She said, “I would call it hyper vigilance.” Yeah. And she said, “And boy, does that exact a price.” Yeah. You’re always hypervigilant, even if things are good. Because the unpredictability growing up is the really hard part. That’s the hard part about not being able to guess what the antecedent is. What is the thing that’s going to cause everything to tumble?
Brené Brown:
And so, I think the work that I still do is… There’s two things. So I think honestly, and this has been hard, and I think I was in the space writing the book, which made it really hard. I could cry maybe, but I think I’ve had to limit my time with people that demand that hyper vigilance, including people I love.
Glennon Doyle:
Same.
Brené Brown:
Yeah. And I remember when I first started seeing Diana my therapist, I was… Golly, I was 10 years sober and I’m 25 now, so 15 years ago. And I was sober, but I was really leaning into food and work. And so I had just given up some of the food stuff and I was really working on work. And I remember saying to her, “I need some medicine. I need some medicine because I got nothing now. I got nothing.” And she said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “I’m like a turtle in a briar patch, and you took away my Bud Light, and you took away my cigarettes, and now you’ve taken away the apple fritter, and now you’ve taken away the 70 hours of work. I’m a turtle without a shell in a briar patch. Everywhere I turn, it hurts. I’m going to need something.” And she goes, “Have you thought about getting out of the fucking briar patch?”
Abby Wambach:
Oh my gosh.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Brené Brown:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes to that.
Abby Wambach:
Oh my gosh.
Brené Brown:
Yeah. And I was like, “But is that the world?” And she said, “It can partly be the world, but it’s also your relationships, the family stuff, the worlds you create.”
Brené Brown:
And so for me… There was a definition by John Kabat-Zinn that I came across when I was studying overwhelm, that really, I think about it every day. He said that overwhelm was the feeling that life is unfolding at a rate that’s unmanageable for me and my nervous system. And so really what I have found, emotion is body. And so, like you, I think, “How do I be calm but hypervigilant?” And I don’t think you can be. I think it becomes a safety issue. I think it just becomes… And it was funny because we had some really hard family shit going on, and it was the first time in my life, because I was writing this book, where I said, “I can opt into this, but my nervous system can’t take it anymore. I don’t have that anymore.”
Glennon Doyle:
It’s such permission. It’s not always the next strategy or the next thing to cope. It’s creating a life that needs less coping from us.
Brené Brown:
Yeah. Because there’s shit that we cannot control, like the pandemics and white supremacy. And we can make changes, but we don’t have a ton of control over it, but the stuff we can control, I think, where do I feel safe enough to be my best calm self?
Abby Wambach:
I love that.
Abby Wambach:
To go back to what you said about the overwhelm, we did an entire podcast on overwhelm, and it’s a topic of conversation in my family for a lot of reasons. And I think you did an extraordinary job in this book to define overwhelm. You said… I think that it’s so important to me because I don’t necessarily get overwhelmed, but I live with people that get overwhelmed. And your definition of overwhelmed, it just blew my mind. You said, you define it as relating to our perception of how we are coping with our situation, not how we are actually coping, but our perception of how we are coping, whether we can handle it.
Abby Wambach:
For me, I’m like, okay. Wow. That is incredible. And it makes me remember the story you told in this book about I’m blown. Can you please tell the story of I’m blown because we actually just walk around our house now, “I’m blown.”
Glennon Doyle:
Brene, 30 times a day. I’m the boy who cried, “I’m blown.” And now, no one’s going to listen to me anymore.
Abby Wambach:
You have to tell the story, please.
Brené Brown:
Do you know what’s so weird, Glennon, that you said that? I gave a talk last night. It’s the first time I’ve been in front of an audience since a year and a half, and I actually talked about the boy who cried wolf, related to overwhelm. It is so weird that you say that.
Brené Brown:
Well, first of all, let me just start by saying this, that there’s a power of language. So this was new to me, and I’ve studied emotion for 20 years, but we just didn’t have until probably the last five or seven, maybe 10, but really five or seven years, the fMRIs and the PET imaging to understand that language doesn’t just communicate emotion. It shapes emotion. So if I said, “Hey Glennon, can you make me those great chocolate chip cookies that you make?” And you get out your bowl and you put in… I’ve never made chocolate chip cookies in my life, but I don’t know, flour, I guess, and chocolate chips and shit like eggs and milk and whatever.
Abby Wambach:
Butter.
Brené Brown:
Butter. Butter. Anything good has butter. What if I told you that the cookies tasted differently, radically differently, depending on what bowl you used? We think of language just as a carrier of things, but it doesn’t. It shapes things.
Brené Brown:
And so, the story about being blown and being in the weeds is really just waiting tables, bartending for six, seven years, all the way through college, graduate school. And when it was busy, we’d get in the weeds. And I’d be in the weeds. I’d come in through the kitchen door and I’d be like, “Shit. Abby, can you take teas to three and four? Glennon, can you re-bread seven? Amanda, can you pull a ticket for me for seven? I don’t know where their Greek salad is.” That’s in the weeds. It’s things are getting hard. There are obstacles we’re moving through. I need to take a breath, but I’m on top of it, but it’s difficult.
Brené Brown:
Every now and then… It’s a funny story, actually. Every now and then, someone would walk in the kitchen and just say, “I’m blown.” And it only happened to me twice in a six or seven year career. And this is a hard… The Pappas restaurants in Texas, Pappadeaux, Pappasito’s, they’re serious. They have scarred me deeply because still today, if I walk in the kitchen and Steve’s leaning there, talking to Charlie, I’m like, “Hey, you got time to lean, you got time to clean.” Or I’ll walk… Glennon, you would be like, “What’s happening?”
Glennon Doyle:
No, I know what you’re saying, because this one will forget the stage of life she’s in. And she will turn around to me in an airport and say, “Hustle. Let’s hustle.” And I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no. This is not the soccer. We don’t tell each other to hustle.” Right. So same. I’m with you.
Brené Brown:
We don’t?
Abby Wambach:
I was like, “Thank you, Brene.” Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
We do not tell each other to hustle.
Brené Brown:
Oh my God. My favorite line in the airport is, “Hey folks, walk with purpose. Let’s walk with purpose.”
Abby Wambach:
Let’s go.
Brené Brown:
Yeah, let’s go.
Abby Wambach:
Let’s go.
Brené Brown:
So, if I go into the kitchen and I’m like, “I’m blown,” it’s really weird because what happens is the rule, if you’re blown, is you have to leave the floor of the kitchen and the restaurant for at least 10 or 15 minutes. So what will happen is Amanda will go, okay, she’ll go up and get my table numbers from the hostess stand, not even assuming I can tell you what tables I have or what section I have. So Abby’s the kitchen manager, because you would be, of course. It’s a high stress, get it done job. So Abby starts pulling all the table numbers once she knows what they are, and then they just take over.
Brené Brown:
So overwhelmed is a very intense amount of stress, where actually you can no longer function in it. What’s interesting is the only real empirically-based solution to overwhelm is nothingness.
Abby Wambach:
Mm Hmm. That’s what I’m talking about. I knew this all along.
Glennon Doyle:
Say more things about that.
Abby Wambach:
I knew this all along. I knew from the time I was born nothingness was the cure.
Brené Brown:
I’m going to have my Glennon and Abby Atlas score sheet. Glennon nails the overview, and Abby knew overwhelm from the very beginning. Okay. Amanda, I just have you in the healthy, we’ll do therapy together column.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes. Perfect.
Brené Brown:
Okay. No, so it’s so funny because actually these Pappadeaux managers, through just trial and error, knew what to do. They knew you had to leave. So back then, actually we’d go behind the restaurant and smoke a cigarette.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, of course.
Brené Brown:
That’s what we would do, but it’s nothingness. And so, one time when I was overwhelmed, they took over. I went to the cooler for five minutes, and I went to the back of the restaurant, smoked a cigarette. One time it was toward the end of the shift, it was the only other time I was blown, and I was working a triple, which was lunch, light lunch, and dinner, because tuition was due at UT. And I walked in the kitchen, and they’re like, “Move. You’re in the way.” Because it’s people hustling, carrying big trays. And I was like, “I’m just, I’m blown.” And they said, “Okay, grab her stuff.” And they got my stuff, and they said, “Listen, just go home. Give us all your money and we’ll check you out. The head wait will check you out.” And I said, “Okay.”
Brené Brown:
So instead of doing nothing, I got in my car. Well, because it was the end of the night, I had already started marrying the Tabasco’s and ketchup, putting them together and filling them up. So I’m driving my car, I light a cigarette. I rub my eye.
Abby Wambach:
Oh shit.
Brené Brown:
I get Tabasco in my eye. I can’t see out of this eye. I drop my cigarettes, and we had to wear these polyester skirts, so it catches on fire.
Glennon Doyle:
No.
Amanda Doyle:
No.
Brené Brown:
It just starts… Yeah. Just starts burning like an ’80s girl with a cigarette at a rock concert. [crosstalk 00:20:41] light the thing and be like this. Yeah. It just starts burning a hole, then it catches on my tights. And then I can’t see, and I do this with the other eye. I can’t see out of both eyes. I jump the curb and end up almost getting to a really terrible wreck.
Brené Brown:
And I always think about that now. This is what I’ve learned from this research. One, I got to fricking stop saying I’m overwhelmed when I’m not overwhelmed.
Glennon Doyle:
Damn it. Okay.
Brené Brown:
Because neuro biologically, my body goes, “Okay, life’s happening too fast. We’re out of control now.” so I need to, when I’m overwhelmed, my commitment to myself now is if I use that language, I’m going to stop what I’m doing and go outside for 10 or 15 minutes.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow.
Brené Brown:
So because your body says, “Oh, we know what to do. We’re shutting down.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Brené Brown:
And if you can tell people what you need, you’re probably not overwhelmed. Yeah, have you ever had that thing where I would say to Steve, “Oh, okay. Fuck. I’m completely overwhelmed.” “Okay. Make me a list.” And I’m like, “Dude, if I could make you a list, that would not be overwhelmed. I need you to take the wheel.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, yes.
Brené Brown:
That’s the power of language. It is interesting empirical research in the book too. Anxiety and excitement present exactly the same neuro physiologically. In studies, people who labeled it excitement had positive experiences. Those who labeled it as anxiety had negative experiences.
Abby Wambach:
That’s very much the difference between Glennon and I.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, I feel that we have married the two ideas. So now instead of saying I’m anxious or I’m scared about big things that are coming up, we say I’m scited.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Half scared, half excited that’s the butterflies. That’s the okay, this is new, but it’s a good one. I’m going to keep going because I want the thing afterwards. So I’m going to keep going. It’s not fear, the gift of fear, which is telling me stop. It’s the butterflies, which are telling me go. So scited is where we land.
Abby Wambach:
Love it.
Brené Brown:
Okay, let me just stop you here and say, this is a working example of the importance of language. So this German philosopher, Ludwig Wiggenstein says. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” So why did you make up that word?
Glennon Doyle:
To talk to the kids. Everything is all… because one of them had to do something new at school. Was it the spelling bee? It was something like that. And she was saying, “I’m too scared. I’m too scared.” And so we started talking through what that feeling was inside. Did she actually even want to do the spelling bee? “Yes. I do want to be a part of the spelling bee.” So then, well, if you want the thing afterwards, then what is this, this thing that’s happening inside of us? It’s saying this thing is new. It’s out of my comfort zone, but it feels like a good thing. It doesn’t feel like a thing that is scaring me to stop.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s scaring me to go.
Abby Wambach:
It doesn’t have to be either/or. It doesn’t have to be, you don’t have to be scared or excited. You can be both.
Glennon Doyle:
Right, right.
Abby Wambach:
And both.
Brené Brown:
Yes. And that’s exactly why language matters so much. So now your kids, and now after this podcast, my kids will have a word for this is what courage feels like. It’s scited. But we make up those words because language gives us a neurobiologic handle on what feels too amorphous and gauzy to grab.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Glennon Doyle:
And what you’re doing, because actually when you think about it, that word, having the… And we have a lot of invented words in our family actually. But it helps me know them better because when they’re saying, “I’m scited about this,” Tish’s going to play guitar last night or something, I know they want that thing. I know that they’re not signaling to me, “Mommy, this is too much for me,” which is I’m scared or I’m uncomfortable or I’m… It’s a signal to me, I’m about to do something hard, and I need your encouragement because I’m feeling really vulnerable, but I don’t want you to talk me out of the thing.
Abby Wambach:
It’s really good.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Brené Brown:
That’s the power. It’s why we make up things like hangry or…
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Brené Brown:
We need language.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Breautiful. Breautiful is a word we say all the time.
Abby Wambach:
God, yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. This is something like saying goodbye to someone you love. It’s both. It’s the and both of this is so painful and so important to my human experience that I wouldn’t change it for anything.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Right.
Brené Brown:
Language matters.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. So I want to talk about this thing, this part about belonging, which you’re the most brilliant person on earth to teaching us about how important belonging is. But in this book I felt like there was a whole new part for me. So in it, you talk about a time you asked a large group of eighth graders to come up with their experiences of belonging and not belonging. Okay. And I expected, these are eighth graders, the majority of their responses to be about the pressure of middle school peers. But the majority were about their parents’ reactions to them seeming not to fit in. So they said not belonging feels like not being as cool or as popular as your parents want you to be, not being good at the same things your parents are good at, your parents being embarrassed because you don’t have enough friends.
Glennon Doyle:
And while I’m reading this, it struck me, holy shit. We are so desperate to make sure our kids don’t experience the trauma of not belonging that we are, in fact, the ones that are giving them that experience.
Abby Wambach:
Unreal.
Glennon Doyle:
So in Braving the Wilderness, you talked about not making the drill team at your school and said, “That became the day I no longer belonged in my family.” I tried out for cheerleading five times, Brene Brown.
Abby Wambach:
She didn’t get the memo.
Glennon Doyle:
Five times. I wanted that uniform of belonging so bad.
Abby Wambach:
Oh God, me too.
Glennon Doyle:
I just wanted someone to just put on something that would say I belonged. But no. Okay. So how do we, as parents, release our people from this manufactured pressure to belong, so that they actually can feel like they belong in our families?
Brené Brown:
Yeah. I think it’s as simple and as hard as, “I see you, I love you, and you will always belong here.” It is as simple and hard as doing your own work so you’re not working your shit out on your kids.
Abby Wambach:
Dang.
Brené Brown:
Yeah. And it is… The hardest thing about raising a middle schooler is the unhealed, sweaty seventh grader inside of us who’s got the tray in their hand and doesn’t smell quite right and doesn’t know where they’re going to sit. And we so desperately don’t want that for our own children, and that thing is so still raw, that we almost can’t take it if we have to watch it unfold again.
Brené Brown:
And I want to tell you, let me think about this for a second. So one of my kids, I’m just trying to think about how to do it in a mindful way, with the boundaries with my kids. But one of my kids experienced a not getting into something recently. And it’s very hard, and I was prepping for it because we had to tell them, and I was prepping for it. I get really… Steve’s superpower is calm. It’s just how he’s wired, but it’s also the pediatrician thing. And so I’m like, “Okay, so how bad is it going to be? How hard, how hurt? Can you give me…” And he’s like, “I think it’s going to be okay. I think it’s this.” And I said, “Fuck, this is going to be like the Bear Cadets.” And he said, “No, no, no, no, no. We’re not even near Bear Cadet level.” And I said, “Okay.”
Brené Brown:
And so then he went upstairs, and I was doing something, and he came down five minutes later and he was teary-eyed. And first of all, I was like, “Shit, it’s going to be like the Bear Cadets.” I was like, “What’s going on?” And he said, “It will never be like that for our kids because we aren’t those parents.”
Amanda Doyle:
Oh my God.
Brené Brown:
And so all I needed in that moment was really for one of my parents to say, “Fuck that drill team.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Brené Brown:
You know what I mean? And God, that sucks. And I had no idea at the time that… I had no idea of their trauma and their history at the time. I just had the Grease version in my mind, captain of the football team, head of the drill team. It was a movie. I didn’t know, head of the football, captain of the football team to work out rage after his father’s death, and head of the drill team to overcompensate for an alcoholic mother, and no one was allowed to go to their house because my grandmother was an alcoholic. And back then, the only women in AA were bringing coffee to the men in AA.
Brené Brown:
And so I didn’t know that part of it. So all I thought… And so when I got in the back of the station wagon, first of all, I went up to the numbers. And you wore a number when you tried out. I’ll never forget the song either.
Glennon Doyle:
I know my song too.
Brené Brown:
Yeah. Just boo. And I remember looking, I was number 62, and I was like, “58, 60, 64.” And I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” And then I remember a girl named Chris, who everyone wanted to be a girl named Chris back then, because you wanted a Charlie’s Angels name or a boy name. And a girl named Chris runs up and she’s like, “Yes.” And then her dad leaped out of his car and ran toward her and grabbed her and twirled in the air with her.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh God.
Brené Brown:
And I was like yeah, yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
Jesus.
Brené Brown:
And I remember just walking back to the car and getting in the backseat, and Ashley and Barrett were in the back back of the station wagon. It was me and my brother, my mom and my dad. And I just cried with my head in my hands, and we just drove off, and nothing was ever spoken about it again.
Abby Wambach:
Oh my. Okay.
Brené Brown:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
That reminds me, in the book you say that the center will hold if and only if we can feel the edges. And that… I was until this moment thinking about as that’s our boundaries with other people. If we have a solid ground under us and we know where we end and when someone else begins, we can love them without shaking our core. But it’s… But that’s with our kids, right?
Brené Brown:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
Only if we can accept our edges are not their edges.
Brené Brown:
They’re not their edges. They’re not their edges. Yeah. And their edges force us out into really shaky ground sometimes. And I remember my therapist saying… I said something about… Ellen was talkative. Ellen would come home from school. She’s 22 now, she’s in graduate school. She would come home from school and she’d say, “Okay, this has happened.” And then an hour later, we’d be at first period.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my God, yes. It’s a hostage situation.
Brené Brown:
Yeah. And I was like, yes. Yeah. And we still… I’m like, “Give me tea. I’ll be asleep when you get home tonight. But then I’ll see the tea when I wake up in the morning.”
Brené Brown:
And then with Charlie, “Good.” “No, no, no. How was it?” “Good. Fine.” And so I tell my therapist, I’m like, “This is unacceptable.” And she says, “Say more.” And I said, “He’s not giving me enough information for me to shine.” And she said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “I don’t have enough information. He’s not telling me what I need in order for me to… I have all the words, and I have all the relationship information, and I have like, I wonder if you’re making up a story, and I need more. This is not working at all for me.”
Amanda Doyle:
He is underutilizing this resource that is you.
Abby Wambach:
This is so good.
Brené Brown:
And I am not able to be my best self with this.
Glennon Doyle:
Obsessed.
Brené Brown:
And she..
Abby Wambach:
I’m stealing this.
Brené Brown:
Yeah. She was just like..
Glennon Doyle:
We have one that makes me feel that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Brené Brown:
Do you?
Abby Wambach:
Yes, we do.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We sure do. We have one that at one point, when I demanded that they talk about their feelings, said to me, “I do not know where they are.”
Brené Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. And then I realized, wow. She’s like, “I think you just let him be him. And you worry about shining on your own terms. “He’s not responsible for your shine.”
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. That’s good.
Amanda Doyle:
You worry about shining on your own terms.
Abby Wambach:
Okay. Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
Not a sermon, just a thought.
Abby Wambach:
The story of not making that team has given you, I think, quite a bit of story now and it’s not for nothing. And I just want to say some of the stuff for Glennon that she had to struggle through has given her a little bit of positive stuff in her adulthood.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s true material for days.
Abby Wambach:
Material. Material.
Glennon Doyle:
And I do want to just make one slight concession, but then I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to say the thing and then I want to move to the next thing. Okay?
Brené Brown:
Okay.
Glennon Doyle:
When you were talking, I just remembered, and Sister, I’ve never even freaking told you this, but.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh Jesus.
Glennon Doyle:
But I one time came home from high school and told Mom and Dad that I had been voted up for the superlative of most popular and most likely to succeed. But that was not true. And I don’t want to talk about it, but I just want to say.
Abby Wambach:
We will later.
Glennon Doyle:
Think about what kind of poor child is trying to convince her parents that she is something at school that she’s not. And why is that so important? Why did I think that was so important? My parents thought I was cool.
Abby Wambach:
Do you want to talk about it?
Glennon Doyle:
Next.
Abby Wambach:
Okay. So here, I have to ask you this. This is a huge topic of conversation in my family right now. In our house, we can’t stop talking about this idea of what is enough. And you know this, Brene. We’ve talked a lot about the scarcity mentality with my book WOLFPACK, And I come from that mindset and that place of scarcity, women’s sports. Glennon… When offers are made to me, it’s impossible for me to say no. And since Untamed has come out, things get offered to Glennon, and she says no a lot.
Abby Wambach:
And that makes me feel anxious because of my scarcity stuff. I know that’s my stuff, my problems. However, she sees it as a way or people not having defined what enough means to them. And because of your success and because you are at the top of your game and are always just… We just love and idolize you, I wonder how you decide what is enough and how you define it in fact.
Glennon Doyle:
And contentment.
Abby Wambach:
Right because you spoke about it in your book.
Glennon Doyle:
Contentment, which is so freaking good. How do you define what your.
Amanda Doyle:
I just want to show everyone Brene’s face right now when you said contentment. That’s the face that I feel in my heart when people say, “It’s fine.” It’s just like, “I’m allergic at every level to what’s happening right now.”
Brené Brown:
Yes. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s enough. I only can tell you what’s too much with a side dish of rage and resentment.
Abby Wambach:
Dang.
Glennon Doyle:
Good stuff.
Brené Brown:
Yeah. But I really can’t… I say no… So first of all, I say no… I interviewed James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, and that book is really powerful. And one of his quotes is literally on a sticky note everywhere I walk, that says, “We will never rise to the level of our goals. We will fall to the level of our systems.” Yeah. And so, I have systems in place where I don’t even see 90% of the stuff I say no to. So I have a system in place that controls my scarcity stuff and my shame stuff. And my holy shit, if I say no, they’re going to stop asking stuff. And my who do you think you are stuff. And I’m really comfortable with that. And I feel good about myself for putting those systems in place.
Brené Brown:
This is not my idea, but I’m working on this right now. And I met with a business coach, and I don’t know that maybe he’d be comfortable with me sharing who he is, but I was working with a business coach, and we were talking. He said, “You’re going to have more opportunities than you’ve got time, just based on how old you are.” I’m in my 50s And he said, “What do you want?” And I described what I wanted. And he goes, “That’s not going to work.” And I said, “Why?” And he said, “Because you want all control and no accountability.” And I said, “Well, yes, that’s true.”
Glennon Doyle:
That’s what I said.
Abby Wambach:
That’s exactly what I want.
Brené Brown:
But then he gave me this piece of advice that’s really been… I’m processing it. I’m in it right now. I don’t have any report back to you. He said, “Your problem…” I actually told him my problem is discernment and fear about what’s enough. I have a discernment problem. And he said, “I want you to change the way you think about every opportunity into this question. What do you want to be held accountable for?”
Amanda Doyle:
Wow.
Brené Brown:
So now when I get asked to do something, I say to myself, “Do I want to be held accountable for that? Fuck no. I do not want to be held accountable for that. Do you want to be held accountable for this? Yes. I’ll be held accountable for that.”
Brené Brown:
And so, for me it may be just personalized advice, but he said, “You’re a magnet for accountability because of your platform.” And because I have a lot of visibility. And he said, “But I would imagine you were that way when you were four.”
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, well think about you with your sisters and brother. You were accountable for the environment, the atmosphere, the-
Brené Brown:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
This has been who you have been since birth, probably. Wow.
Brené Brown:
Yeah. And so the thing me now is A, what do I want to be held accountable for? That drives my yes or no. And B, do I want to do it? Is there joy in it? Or do I want to prove I can do it?
Abby Wambach:
Okay. Yep. That’s good.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes. And that’s the power of language. When you think of it as an opportunity, you’re like, “I want all the opportunities. Give me all the opportunities.” But when you really drill down and say, no, this thing that is coming is something for which I will be responsible and accountable and name it that way, it’s like the bowl with the cookies.
Brené Brown:
Amen.
Amanda Doyle:
It changes your whole experience.
Brené Brown:
The bowl with the cookies. It does because the question is, “Hey, there’s this great opportunity. We really think we can scale your work and we could do this and we could start this. And then we’re going to…” I’m sure something that y’all both heard a million times. We can scale.
Glennon Doyle:
If I hear scale again. If I hear the word scale again, I swear.
Brené Brown:
Yeah. “We can scale. We can bring your work here and blah, blah, blah.” And then “Yeah, of course, yes. What will I be held accountable for?” “Well, we’ll need to hire a team of engineers and everything from password resets to customer survey.” “I don’t want to be held accountable for any of that.” “Well, who would you like to be held accountable for it?” “Well, anybody but me.” “Well, there’s no one else.” “Oh, then I don’t want to do it.”
Amanda Doyle:
And that is beautiful. We are going into the holidays. We are going into a new year, reframing things that we feel like things are happening to us all the time and around us. And to be able to make commitments out in the world, invitations, and to say, “I don’t want to be accountable for that.” I will be accountable for coaching my daughter. That’s something I want to do, but I will not be accountable for signing up for whatever the heck I feel pressured into.
Brené Brown:
Yes. Because I want to be held accountable for my ass on the stadium seat every water polo match.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Brené Brown:
Hold me accountable for that. I’m that person with the neck and the, “Ball side, ball side. Weak, weak.”
Amanda Doyle:
You got time to lean, you got time to swim.
Glennon Doyle:
Brene, you and my sister. I just-
Abby Wambach:
Same.
Glennon Doyle:
My sister has sent me videos of her daughter’s lacrosse games, where I have said to Abby, “Who is this freaking-
Abby Wambach:
Who’s yelling?
Glennon Doyle:
They need to not let this person in who’s in this video.
Abby Wambach:
“Who’s yelling?” I’m like, “That’s you sister.”
Glennon Doyle:
And Abby’s always like, “It’s her again. It’s her.”
Abby Wambach:
Your sister’s the one that’s yelling.
Glennon Doyle:
Screaming positivity but just the intensity.
Brené Brown:
Intensity.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Dr. Brene Brown, our next right thing is without a doubt going to be to get this incredible book that I feel like could be a family Bible too. A family where people sit and go through it with their kids, like we are doing with our little ones who are big now because I think it will help us know each other better and communicate with each other better.
Brené Brown:
I hope so.
Glennon Doyle:
Which I can’t imagine a better thing that you could do, that you could be more accountable for in your life than actually giving people the language to strengthen their bonds and understanding of each other. It’s so beautiful. And then also, in addition to going to get Atlas of the Heart yesterday, can you give us a next right thing that we can do in terms of our language, just right now, this week, to help us be seen and see our people a little bit better? If we’re tired, if we’re just tired and we just want a little easy thing.
Brené Brown:
Yeah. A tired, easy thing. When we see someone in struggle, reframe “I’m here to fix” to “I’m here to walk with.” That for me, yeah, it’s like when I… This framework for meaningful connection that’s in the back, I’ve been working on it since my dissertation, so 22 years. And I came across this concept of near enemy. It’s a Buddhist concept, which there’s the opposite of things. The opposite of compassion, the far enemy is cruelty, but what we better really watch, and what’s more likely to unravel connection every single time is not the far enemy of the virtue that we’re seeking to show up in, it’s the near enemy. So the near enemy of compassion is pity.
Brené Brown:
So to me, it was a really big breakthrough that I believe, and I’m putting forward now, and I think researchers will come back and behind me and test, but I think the near enemy of connection is control.
Brené Brown:
And when I see my kids suffering, and they say, “This happened at school and it was so painful,” and I jump to fix it rather than sitting in the pain with them, I have severed connection for the sake of control. And it’s not Machiavellian control, but I’m trying to control hurt.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Brené Brown:
I’m trying to control my own discomfort, their discomfort, my pain, their pain. And so I would just say the easy thing we can do… It’s not easy. But the small thing is when we see someone struggling, especially someone we care about, my job is to be in connection with, not to fix.
Glennon Doyle:
There you go. You heard it from Dr. Brené Brown. And when we hear it from Dr. Brené Brown, we just effing do it.
Brené Brown:
Just do it.
Glennon Doyle:
So do it when life gets hard this week, don’t fix it. Just walk with it.
Brené Brown:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
And we’ll see you back here in two days with more Dr. Brené Brown. We love you. Bye-bye. I give you Tish Milton and Brandi Carlile.