A Review of Daring Greatly by Brené Brown

 Brené Brown is such an amazing researcher storyteller who talks and writes about topics that greatly influences the way we live, love, parent, and lead. 

Daring greatly is one of her amazing bodies of work and it so interesting how this book speaks to what we go through as humans and sometimes, we feel ashamed to talk about them because we think they are weaknesses. 

The core of this book talks about vulnerability and how it takes courage to make that happen. Rather than sit at the edge and dish out advice and judgment to ourselves and also to others, “we must dare to show up and let ourselves be seen“ because this is vulnerability and this is what it means to dare greatly.

Brené covered a couple of areas under vulnerability of which you need to read the book to get a full sense of them. Some areas mentioned in the book are:

 *Scarcity: Our culture of “Never Enough”. This thought, more often than naught has affected how we show up for ourselves and the people that we love. It has made us live less than we should be living. This quote by Brené just drove this point home.

“Don’t walk through the world looking for evidence that you don’t belong because you’ll always find it.“

Our worth and our belonging are not negotiated with other people. We carry those inside of our hearts.

 *Understanding and Combating Shame. We usually misunderstand the difference between shame and guilt and we use them in almost our day-to-day interaction with people. Guilt is ‘I did something bad’ while shame is ‘I am bad’. Knowing this difference, helps you see life from a whole new light. One of the driving forces of shame is perfectionism.

 *Wholehearted parenting. In teaching our children to dare greatly in this scarcity engulfed culture of ours, the question should not be “Are you parenting the right way?” but rather, it should be “Are you the adult that you want your children to grow up to be?”.

 This is so important because we cannot give what we do not have. Children learn better from what they see than what they hear. 

One of my favorite quotes from this book is Theodore Roosevelt’s speech on “Citizenship in a Republic” which is often referred to as “The Man in The Arena”. This quote happens to be one of the outstanding quotes addressing vulnerability in the most comprehensive yet simple way.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause;

who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

You’ve just got to soak in every word from this quote to understand its depth.

This book has allowed me to see myself from a place of love and belonging and to understand that worthiness, a core belief that we are enough, comes only when I live inside my story. It is highly recommended to people who want to change how they generally live their lives by not sticking to the status quo.

There is a crack in everything and that’s how the light gets in. You’re imperfectly perfect and you, my dear reader, are enough.

Good news’ here!

If you need a copy of this book, you can send an email to adedayograceamarachi@gmail.com and you’ll have it sitting pretty in your inbox. It’s my little gift to you for always being here.

My next read will be Braving the Wilderness by the phenomenal Brené Brown and I will also be sharing a review of the book when I’m done reading it. if you’d love to read it, then subscribe to this blog so you’ll get a notification when the review is up here.

It’s always a pleasure serving you!

#gleaningwithgrace