By Sarah Larson, The New Yorker, October 25, 2021
In August, Brené Brown, the Houston-based writer, researcher, professor, social worker, podcast host, C.E.O., and consultant-guru to organizations including Pixar, Google, and the U.S. Special Forces, met with a group of graduate students at the McCombs School of Business, at the University of Texas at Austin, to talk about emotions. Brown, fifty-five, was wearing a shiny maize blouse, jeans, and a black face mask. It was the first day of her new class, Dare to Lead, and she stood onstage in a small auditorium. There were about a hundred people in the room; Brown had them stand up and introduce themselves. “Howdy!” a Black student in a fleece jacket said, giving a Longhorns salute. “Who else is from Washington, D.C.?” Other students were from Texas, Nigeria, Ohio, Hong Kong. They were concentrating in fields like accounting and management, and they were going to confront one another’s humanity.
For more than twenty years, Brown, a Ph.D. in social work, has combined her research results—about shame, vulnerability, and other pillars of emotional life—with stories that illustrate them, delivered with a potent blend of empathy and Texan bravado (“Curiosity is a shit-starter”). Her work comes in many forms: five Times No. 1 best-selling books, two Spotify podcasts, a Netflix special. At the University of Houston, she’s a research professor of social work; at McCombs, a visiting professor of management. She’s also a business in her own right, with programs that train people and organizations to contend with vulnerability and courage. In all realms, her conclusions tend to surprise, then resonate, like a Zen koan: “When perfectionism is driving us, shame is always riding shotgun.”
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