Let's give the final word to Golden Globe-winning actress and writer Amy Poehler. If you're scared to fail, you'll struggle to produce new ideas or fresh perspectives. Any society that equates vulnerability with weakness will put people off trying to innovate. The risk of failure and the uncertainty it brings along requires you to be vulnerable. To put it bluntly, being creative requires you to fail – often, you might need to fail multiple times. You also don't really know if your ideas will actually turn out to be any good. You never quite know when it will strike. Let me explain: As you probably know, creativity is a tricky thing to manage. It's the cornerstone of human innovation and creativity. Vulnerability isn't just essential to courage. To be clear: as soon as the audience focused on their actual courageous experiences, the myth of vulnerability and weakness crumbled. Not one of the soldiers could come up with a single example of courageousness in which vulnerability hadn't come along for the ride. Then, she asked these brave, tough soldiers whether any of them had ever undertaken or witnessed a courageous act that did not require them to feel vulnerable.

She first explained to them that vulnerability is the emotion that accompanies risk and uncertainty. In 2014, Brené Brown stood in a room of special forces military personnel. In fact, the opposite is true: acts of courage are impossible if you don't first put yourself in a vulnerable position. However, there is no single piece of empirical data to suggest that vulnerability is associated with weakness. Of course, experiences that make you feel vulnerable, like losing a job or putting yourself out there emotionally, can bring feelings of anxiety, uncertainty, and a desire for self-protection. Because one thing that vulnerability certainly isn't is a weakness. We feel it when we expose ourselves to others and experience times of risk or uncertainty.īut, even though vulnerability is such a common feeling, we aren't always clear on what vulnerability is and – perhaps more crucially – what it isn't. As these answers show, vulnerability is a universal human emotion.

Vulnerability is the first date after your difficult divorce, it's starting to run your first business, or it's how you feel when you get laid off from work. Most of the time, she gets the answers you'd connect with. Let's start this Blink by asking a bold question: what makes you feel vulnerable? Brené Brown has asked this question to thousands of individuals over the years.

Dare to be great brene brown