TED Talks:The Power of Vulnerability 3

And you know how I feel about vulnerability. I hatevulnerability. And so I thought, this is my chance to beat it backwith my measuring stick. I'm going in, I'm going to figure thisstuff out, I'm going to spend a year; I'm going to totallydeconstruct shame, I'm going to understand how vulnerabilityworks, and I'm going to outsmart it. So I was ready, and I wasreally excited. As you know, it's not going to turn out well. (Laughter) You know this. So I could tell you a lot about shame, but I'd have to borrow everyone else's time. But here's what I can tell you that it boils down to - and this may be one of the most important things that I've ever learned in the decade of doingthis research. My one year turned into six years, thousands of stories, hundreds of long interviews, focus groups. At one point people were sending me journal pages and sending me their stories - thousands of pieces of data in six years. And I kind of got a handle on it.
I kind of understood, this is what shame is, this is how it works. I wrote a book, I published atheory, but something was not okay - and what it was is that, if I roughly took the people Iinterviewed and divided them into people who really have a sense of worthiness - that's what thiscomes down to, a sense of worthiness - they have a strong sense of love and belonging - and folkswho struggle for it, and folks who are always wondering if their good enough. There was only onevariable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the peoplewho really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belongingbelieve they're worthy of love and belonging. That's it. They believe they're worthy. And to me, the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy ofconnection, was something that, personally and professionally, I felt like I needed to understandbetter. So what I did is I took all of the interviews where I saw worthiness, where I saw people livingthat way, and just looked at those.
What do these people have in common? I have a slight office supply addiction, but that's anothertalk. So I had a manila folder, and I had a Sharpie, and I was like, what am I going to call thisresearch? And the first words that came to my mind were whole-hearted. These are whole-heartedpeople, living from this deep sense of worthiness. So I wrote at the top of the manila folder, and Istarted looking at the data. In fact, I did it first in a four-day very intensive data analysis, where Iwent back, pulled these interviews, pulled the stories, pulled the incidents. What's the theme? What's the pattern? My husband left town with the kids because I always go into this JacksonPollock crazy thing, where I'm just like writing and in my researcher mode. And so here's what Ifound. What they had in common was a sense of courage. And I want to separate courage andbravery for you for a minute. Courage, the original definition of courage when it first came into theEnglish language - it's from the Latin word cor, meaning heart - and the original definition was to tellthe story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks had, very simply, the courageto be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselveskindly. And the last was they had connection, and - this was the hard part - as a result ofauthenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be whothey were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection.