The Resilient Mind - The Risk of Comfort - Brene Brown

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Watch the full video interview on the new Resilient Mind YouTube channel: WatchBrené Brown is an American professor, social worker, author, and podcast host. Brown is known for her work on shame, vulnerability, and leadership, and for her widely viewed 2010 TEDx talk. She has written six number-one New York Times bestselling books and hosted two podcasts on Spotify. Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_Journal🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you'll be listening to The Risk of Comfort with Brenna E Brown. This episode is also available in video. Watch it on YouTube by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Vulnerability is defined as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Can you name one act of courage that you've ever been involved in or that you've ever even witnessed that did not involve uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

And it's a loaded question because I know the answer is no, because I've asked it thousands and thousands. I've stood in front of Navy SEALs and Special Forces, military personnel and said, I want you to try hard to give me an example of courage that didn't require vulnerability. And in 10 years, I've never had a single person. Give me an example of courage, even on the field that doesn't involve vulnerability.

If you think you're being brave and it doesn't involve risk or uncertainty, you're not being that brave. You know how it's going to turn out, it's not courage. And so in that moment, people go, shit, but I want to be brave and I don't want to be vulnerable. And I'm like, therein lies, no one wants to be uncomfortable. No one wants to be vulnerable and everyone wants to be brave. And it just doesn't work like that.

I mean, when I ask people, what is vulnerability? People would say, initiating sex with my life, sending my child out the door who thinks he's going to make the first chair in orchestra and knowing he's probably not going to make the orchestra at all. Getting fired, starting my own business, saying, I love you first in a relationship, trying to get pregnant after my first miscarriage. Vulnerability, it's uncertainty. It's not knowing, but doing it anyway because it's the brave thing to do.

The problem is, I think, that the greatest shame trigger for men is do not be perceived as weak. And in our culture, we believe that vulnerability is weakness. So you don't have to skip too many steps before you go, hey, it's shaming to be vulnerable. And so men do two things in the face of shame. pissed off or shut down, put on a mask. And so what we're learning and what people are starting to see very quickly is you cannot be a courageous leader if you're not vulnerable. If you're not willing to have hard, uncomfortable conversations, give hard feedback, receive hard feedback, excavate issues like Charlottesville that no one wants to talk about. Like discomfort is the

great enemy of courage. Like my motto is we say it here all the time. Choose courage over comfort because you can't have both. And if you're thinking, think you're being brave and you're super comfortable, you're not being that brave. I was so shocked to learn in the research that the opposite of belonging is fitting in. Because fitting in is assessing a group of people and thinking, who do I need to be, what do I need to say, what do I need to wear, how do I need to act, and changing who you are. And true belonging never asks us to change who we are. It demands that we be who we are. Because if we fit in because how we've changed ourselves, that's not belonging.

that's not belonging because you betrayed yourself for other people and that's not sustainable. You start to lose yourself. So I think it's hard. You have to show up as who you are. You can lose yourself in the fitting man and you can lose yourself in the rebuttal to the fitting man. It's really hard. I mean, it's this thing that it's a quote that is, Braving the Wilderness is all about this, starts with this quote from Maya Angelou, that we're never free until we belong nowhere, we belong everywhere, which is nowhere, which is no place at all, which I thought was a terrible quote for many years. And I was like, why are you saying that, Dr. Angelo? But then I realized, and she says, the cost is high, but the reward is great. I think

that's the thing that I feel like I belong everywhere I go, no matter where it is or who I'm with, as long as I never betray myself. And the minute I become who you want me to be in order to fit in and make sure people like me is the moment I no longer belong anywhere. And that is hard. I mean, that's a hard practice. That's an everyday practice. Blame. How many of you are blamers?

How many of you, when something goes wrong, the first thing you want to know is whose fault it is? I'm like, hi, my name is Brunay. I'm a blamer. How many of you go to that place when something bad happens, the first thing you want to know is whose fault is it? Even, I'd rather it be my fault than no one's fault. Because why? Why? Because it gives us some semblance of control. It gives it some semblance of control. But here, if you enjoy blaming, this is where you should stick your fingers in your ear and do the

no, no, no, nothing, because I'm getting ready to ruin it for you. Because here's what we know from the research. Blame is simply the discharging of discomfort and pain. It has an inverse relationship with accountability, meaning that people who blame a lot sell business. them have the tenacity and grit to actually hold people accountable because we expend all of our energy raging for 15 seconds and figuring out whose fault something knows. Accountability by definition is a vulnerable process. It means me calling you and saying, hey, my feelings were really heard about this. No, no, no, no, no. And talking. It doesn't. It's not blaming. Blaming is simply a way that we discharge anger, which is really hard. And blaming is very corrosive in,

relationships, and it's one of the reasons we miss our opportunities for empathy. Because when something happens and we're hearing a story, we're not really listening. We're in the place where I was making the connections as quickly as we can about whose fault something was. There's a researcher at the University of Kansas Lawrence, C.R. Schneider, he died a couple of years ago, who spent his career studying hope. I've lucked into his research because when I had my list of words that all of these wholehearted men and women had in common, I took a combination of them one day for the millionth time doing a keyword search in the academic literature. And I came up with his theory on hope. And it not only changed the way I think about my work, but it changed my life. And it changed

the way I'm raising my kids. As it turns out, hope is not an emotion at all. I think most of us think of hope is a feeling of possibility, of positivity. I'm very hopeful. What hope actually is a cognitive thinking approach. Hope is not how we feel. It's how we think. And here is the most, I think, profound news of all. It is 100% teachable. The majority, we can measure hope in people.

They measure highly hopeful or low hopefulness. What we see traditionally in people who have high levels of hope is they learned it through parenting, through their parents, who either explicitly taught hope or modeled hope. And as you can see, there are three pieces of it, goals, pathway, and agency. What this means simply is people who have high levels of hope in their lives have these three abilities. They can set goals, which is in itself not an easy task. They can cultivate pathways to achieving those goals. And they have a sense of agency.

And agency is simply, I believe I can do it. here's the part that I think is so important. Hope is a function of struggle. Hope looks like I've got a goal. It's reachable. I believe in my ability to get there, even if I have to plan B. One of the things that's happened in our culture is that we are not letting our children have any experiences of failure. No experiences of hard work, failure, more hard work.

equals success. What happens, and what I see as a college professor often, is when they get to us, it's a whole different ballgame. Most of my friends get text messages when their children's averages fall below 95. We don't do that in college. The workforce, the last Fortune 200 company I spoke with, they said one of the greatest problems with a number of younger employees contacting their parents about performance evaluations and asking them if they could call their bosses. We think of hope is this really binding emotion, this kind of collective dreaming that we do together. And I think it can be a collective binding experience, but it is not bound around gauzy feelings of possibility. When hope brings people together, it brings people together from a place of struggle through hard work to achievement.

and people who experience that together, whether you're a team working in an ad agency on the next presentation or you're a family or you're a group of kids in class, what brings people together is the sense of success, of accomplishment, having experienced struggle. And so what I would ask, invite you to think about at least,

is that hope is a function of struggle. And it's the product of not tying our failure to who we are. The biggest thing that gets in the way of this whole idea of agency and pathway is that if I fail, I am a failure. What we see in high hopeful people is that they can separate their achievements and their struggles and their failures from who they are as people. Shame, we believe, is the most primitive human affect or emotion that we experience. We all have it. What we know from research about three or four decades now is the only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human connection.

If you don't experience shame, it's because you have no capacity for connection or empathy. And so what we're talking about there is kind of some serious psychopathology. So shame is something we all have. It drives two primary tapes or kind of ways of thinking. The two big things that shame drives is never good enough and who do you think you are. And those are vices, let me tell you. Never good enough. You know, it's funny because if I said how many of you wrestle with shame, no one would raise their hand.

But if I said how many of you struggle with perfectionism, that would be different, right? Would that feel different? Yeah, it would feel different. Shame, birthplace of perfectionism. Where we struggle with perfectionism, we struggle with shame. So this is a really universal thing for all of us. and it's really best easily understood as the fear of disconnection. There's something about me.

There's something I've done or failed to do where our self-worth is tied to our net worth, where everyone's houses are supposed to look like stills out of the pottery barn catalog. How many of you've received the fall of pottery barn catalog? It's devastating to me. It is. I just want, for one autumn,

for all the pumpkin crap to be outside and to have my kids, slow motion in sweaters. That's just one time. You know, we have a media that tells us what we should look like, how much we should make, what we should weigh, how many times a week we should be having sex, we got the rules. And no one's doing it, but everyone's pretending. The issue around shame is it's an absolute silent epidemic. It's so funny because no one will talk about shame, but if you look at the Nielsen ratings for the last five years, the shows that really capture the top 10, shame-based programming, reality TV. You want to know what you.

What courage is to me, what courage is to me is the ability to tell your story and like who you are in the process of doing that. And that's hard. Men and women who have high levels of shame resilience, what I found, and this is the work I've been doing for the last three years, have a tendency to have more authenticity. They live with a deeper sense of love and belonging, and they have a much more resilient spirit. And I think those are the things we're after. I think we want to feel comfortable in our own skin. I think we want a deep sense of love and belonging. I think it's a basic human need.

And I'll tell you very quickly, if you were to ask me just from the data, what is the difference between people who have a deep sense of love and belonging and people who are struggling for it? The answer would be worthiness. That's the only difference. Men and women who carry a deep sense of love and belonging within them believe that they're worthy of love and belonging. The trick is no prerequisites.

Not when I make partner. Not when I lose 20 pounds. Not if I get pregnant. Not if my husband comes back. Not if my daughter gets into Yale. Not if I make the Fortune 500. No prerequisites. Just as is right now worthy of love and belonging.

And the last thing is a resilient spirit. That is an absolute outcome of being able to live in your story. You know, we get to rewrite the ending of our stories if we were willing to walk into them and own them. It's a powerful thing. Shame versus guilt very quickly. This is really important. A lot of people confuse these two.

The difference between shame and guilt is the difference between I am bad and I did something bad. How many of you in the audience, if you made a mistake and hurt someone's feelings, how many of you would be willing to say, I'm sorry, I made a mistake? Show of hands. How many of you, if you made that mistake, would be willing to say, I'm sorry, I am a mistake. That's the difference between shame and guilt. Here's what we know, three decades of research. Shame, highly correlated, addiction, violence, depression, bullying, and eating disorders.

So I want to tell you about something that changed my life as a creative person. And it's a quote from Theodore Roosevelt and it has completely, I mean, I know it sounds cheesy and cliche to think a quote can change your life. but sometimes when you hear something, when you need to hear it, and you're ready to hear it, something shifts inside of you. And so my story is that I am a researcher and I never thought I would have a big public career. And so I did a TED talk that went very viral. And in the wake of that, I was kind of everywhere for a couple of months on every CNN.com, NPR. It was everywhere and something I wasn't used to.

and the marching orders from my therapist and my husband were do not read the comments online. So I read all the comments online. And so one morning I woke up and there were two or three new articles out and I started reading the comments. And they were devastating. They weren't about my work. They were about me. They were super personal. and they were the things that created people play in their mind

and then give up doing what they really want to do. Like if I asked every single one of you, what would you try if you knew people would never say this about you? What would this be? Those were the comments that morning. Of course she embraces imperfection. What choice does she have? Look how she looks.

I feel sorry for her kid. Less research, more Botox. Just mean personal attacks. The things that really, up until that moment, had inspired me to stay very small in my life and my career, just so I could avoid those things. So I put it in, and Theodore Roosevelt comes up, and a quote comes up.

And I read it, and this is what it says. It's a quote from a speech that he gave in the early 1900s at the Sorbonne, and a lot of people call the man the arena speech, and this is the passage that changes my life. It's not the critic who counts. It's not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done it better. The credit belongs to the person who's actually in the arena,

whose face is marred with blood and sweat and dust, who at the best in the end knows the triumph of high achievement and who at worst if he fails he fails daring greatly so the moment that i read that i closed my laptop and this is what shifted in me three huge things first i've spent the last 12 years studying vulnerability and that quote was everything i know about vulnerability. It is not about winning. It's not about losing. It's about showing up and being seen. The second thing, this is who I want to be. I want to create. I want to make things that didn't exist before I touch them. I want to show up and be seen in my work and in my life. And if you're going to show up and be seen, there is only one guarantee. And that is, you will get. You will

your ass kicked. That is a guarantee. That's the only certainty you have. If you're going to go in the arena and spend any time in there whatsoever, especially if you've committed to creating in your life, you will get your ass kicked. So you have to decide at that moment, I think for all of us, if courage is a value that we hold, this is a consequence. You can't avoid it. Third thing, which really set me free and is kind of a new philosophy. about criticism, which is this. If you're not in the arena also getting your ass kicked, I'm not interested in your feedback.

If you have constructive information feedback to give me, I want it. I'm an academic. I'm hardwired for wrestling around with stuff like that. I just say, hey, you forgot all this literature. Hey, you should have done this or terrible sentence construction over here. Like, let's go, let's do it. I love that. But if you're in the cheap seats, not putting yourself on the line

and just talking about how I could do it better, I'm in no way interested in your feedback. So I know about the sweating creative. And so what I want to do today is I want to talk very specifically about the arena. Watch. The arena's right there. You can see it. The light's there.

And the fear is this. I'm scared. A lot of self-doubt. Comparison, anxiety, uncertainty. And so what do most people do when they're walking into the arena? and those things are going to greet them up top. What do you do? You armor up, right?

This is where I would imagine the old days that they got all their stuff on. But God, that stuff is heavy, and that stuff is suffocating. And the problem is when you armor up against vulnerability, you shut yourself off. And I've said this to audiences before,

but I have never said it to an audience where it is more true than today the second. when you armor up, you armor up. In this hallway, you shut yourself off from everything that you do and that you love. Because vulnerability is certainly a part of fear and self-doubt and grief and uncertainty and shame, but it's also the birthplace of these. It's the birthplace of love, of belonging, of joy, trust, empathy, creativity, and innovation.

Without vulnerability, you cannot create. I used to think the best way to put your work out into the world is to make sure the critics are not in the arena, but you have no control over who's in the arena. And the best way I have found is to know that they're there and to know exactly what they're going to say to you.

because each of you know. The three seats that will always be taken when you walk into the arena, when you share your work with someone, the three seats that will always be taken, are shame, scarcity, and comparison. Shame, completely universal human emotion. We all have it.

It's that gremlin that whispers, you're not enough. Or you're feeling pretty confident. So shame always has a seat. The other seat that's always taken is scarcity. What am I doing that everyone, what am I doing that's original? Everyone else is doing this. 150 people are doing it who are better trained than I am.

What am I contributing? Does this really matter? The third seat always, comparison. How many of you ever struggle with comparison? Comparison is always there. The fourth seat I left open for you. You got to know who's in the fourth seat. Is it a teacher?

Is it a parent? Is it a shitty ex-co worker? The thing is, I don't care what people think, I don't worry about the critics in the arena, sends a huge red flag up for me. We're hardwired for connection. When we stop caring what people think, we lose our capacity for connection. When we become defined by what people think, we lose our capacity to be vulnerable. Not caring what people think is its own kind of hustle.

me. So rather than locking these folks out from the arena, what I'm going to invite you to do is reserve seats for them, which doesn't seem like a good thing to do. But I have 13,000 pieces of data, and I've done this work for 12 years. And what I have found and what I have learned from these folks and then try to apply it in my own life that has changed my life is to reserve a seat, to take the critics to lunch, and to simply say what I have learned. I'm trying to do something new and hard and original, and I'm trying to be created, and I'm trying to innovate, to say, I see you, I hear you, but I'm going to show up and do this anyway. And I've got a seat for you, and you're welcome to come, but I'm not interested in your feedback.

The other piece that's tough is, to me, if you're going to spend your life from the arena, if you're going to spend your life showing up, really showing up, there's a couple of things that you need. The first is a clarity of values. You have to, like, I know. Like, when I came out here, I knew I could screw this completely up. I could get boot off stage. Bad things could happen. But I don't have a choice because if courage is my value, I have to do this. Whether it's successful or not, it's irrelevant. So a real clarity of values is important. The other thing is, you got to have at least one person in your life who's willing to pick you up and dust you off and look at you when you fail, which hopefully you will, because if you're not failing, you're really not

showing up, but who is willing to look at you when you fail and say, man, that sucked. Yeah, it was totally as bad as you thought, but you were brave. And let's get you cleaned up, because you're going to go back in. And this is someone who loves you not despite your imperfections and vulnerabilities, but because of them. And they should have great seats in the Like I forgot for five, ten, for a decade, I forgot to invite these people into my arena. I didn't want to belong to a club that would let me in. I forgot to invite people because I thought if you're, if you're my fan, if you're here supporting me, how important could you be? Like, I'm trying to win over the people who hate me.

So I guess the real specific how-toes are this. The world keeps going whether you know it or not. The critics are in the arena, whether you identify. them and think about the messages that keep us small. They're there, whether you do that or not. What I have found in my life and what I've found in my research fueled what I did in my life is that the people who have the most courage, who are willing to show them to be the most vulnerable, are the ones who are very clear about who the critics are, the ones who reserve

seats for them and say, I hear you, I get it, I know where the messaging is coming from. I'm not buying it anymore. So to get very clear, the last thing, which I think is the hardest, is this. One of these seats needs to be reserved for you. One of these seats needs to be reserved for me. I need, when we look up and we're putting an idea, our piece of art, our design, forward, who do you think the biggest critic in the arena normally is? yourself. And so definitely me. Like I have never watched either of those TED talks.

Because it's not in service of the work for me and I try to do things that are only in service of my work because what would it serve for me to watch it? I would sit there and go, oh my God, stuck in your stomach. Oh my God, that's not what you were going to say. You know, we're so self-critical. And one of the things that I think has happens, and I think that happens a lot, it happens in different professions, but I think I see it a lot with creatives, is there is an ideal of what you're supposed to be. And what a lot of us end up doing is we orphaned the parts of ourselves that don't fit with that ideal is supposed to be. And what it leaves when we orphaned all those parts of us is it just leaves the critic. And so reserved in

this seat is this, where we came from, how we started, the people who love us, the moments that make us who we are. And in that share should be this person. The person who believes in what we're doing and why we're doing it. And the person who says, yeah, it's so scary to show up. It feels dangerous to be seen. It's terrifying. But it is not as scary, dangerous, or terrifying as getting to the end of our lives

and thinking, what if I would have shown up? What would have been different? Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.