Living Brave

Today is the beginning of the Brene Brown semester Living Brave and I’m excited and scared and already feeling behind. But – mostly – excited. I fell in love with her work from the moment I saw her viral TEDtalk and have loved everything of hers that I’ve run into since then.

The course is largely based around this quote from Theodore Roosevelt:

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 at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

This course a mixture of reading (the first part of the semester is reading her book Daring Greatly and the second part focuses on her book Rising Strong), videos to watch, worksheets to fill out and questions to answer. There are also public forums (well, public to the people who signed up for the course) as well as 4 live question and answer sessions with Brene (I feel like we’re on a first name basis now). It’s a cohesive, well thought out program that promises to dig deep as long as I let it.

That’s the hard part, of course, allowing myself — giving myself permission, as pal Brene would say — to really open up and be vulnerable to find my answers. As silly as it sounds, being vulnerable even to myself is a little uncomfortable for me; it’s certainly not something that comes naturally. And after that, I’ll work on taking it one step further and sharing what I’ve learned with friends who have earned the right to hear about it (or, you know, I’ll just post it all on my blog).

If anyone is interested in joining, I’d love to have company on the journey. You can sign up until January 15th and if you use the promotional code FBTRIBE you’ll get 20% off.

And just for kicks, here’s a very short animated video of Empathy vs. Sympathy (voiced by my bestie Brene) that both makes you laugh and nod your head in understanding. Watch it – you’ll be glad you did.