[2021-02-15] Be brilliant
This afternoon, I watched a video of Brené Brown delivering a speech at a conference of creative people in 2013. She is a compelling speaker, author and researcher whose work focuses on vulnerability. I've previously written about her book Daring Greatly, but in that post I did not include the quote that serves as the foundation of her book and her subsequent speech.
The phrase Daring Greatly is from Theodore Roosevelt’s speech "Citizenship in a Republic." The address, sometimes referred to as "The Man in the Arena," was delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, on April 23, 1910. This is the passage that made the speech famous:
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 errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Brown recounts that, following her highly successful TED Talk: The power of vulnerability in 2010, she read online comments in response to articles written about her. The comments were devastating, she says. They were not about her work but about her personally, such as her appearance and her parenting. "They were the things that creative people play in the mind and then give up doing what they really want to do," she says in her 2013 speech.
Soon after reading the comments, she stumbled upon Roosevelt's speech and the quote above, which she says changed her life. She learned two things:
- If I'm going to show up and be seen—in other words, put myself out there—I am going to be criticized.
- If critics are not in the arena and therefore not prepared to be criticized themselves, I'm not interested in listening to their feedback.
Fear of criticism is precisely what held me back, initially, from sharing my story of living with ovarian cancer. I feared that online comments in social media would be mean-spirited, inappropriate and personal. Overwhelmingly, I have experienced just the opposite.
What helped me overcome my reticence to go public was a conviction that my story would serve someone else. Brown calls this embracing a value. "If courage is a value that we hold," she says, being criticized "is a consequence."
In some ways, it may seem easier for someone like Brown to share her research and conclusions than for someone like me to share a very personal story, but I'm not convinced. Critics can argue with Brown about her work, but would have a harder time arguing with me about my experience, especially my experience with cancer.
Nevertheless, I avoid identifying others in my blog posts, to shield them from potential critiques or follow-on questions. I learned that from a colleague years ago who used to say, "I don't tell other people's stories."
Whether and to what extent we face external critics if we put ourselves out there, we inevitably face inner critics. Of the inner critics Brown identifies in her speech, the one that stood out for me was scarcity. Scarcity leads Brown to sometimes ask herself: "What am I doing that's original? Everyone else is doing this. 150 people are doing this who are better trained than I am. What am I contributing? Does this really matter?"
This perfectly describes the kinds of questions I have asked myself. But I remind myself that my story is unique and—in the spirit of Susan Jeffers' book of the same name—I choose to Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway. Similarly, Brown says to her critics: "I see you. I hear you. But I'm going to show up and do this anyway."
Brown concludes her speech by saying: "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?'"
And so I choose to share my story. I already know that doing so has made a difference in the lives of many readers, as they have told me so. I don't have to wonder what would have been different if I had chosen to tell my truth.
Nelson Mandela expressed a similar idea in his 1993 inauguration speech:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves: Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Who are you not to be?
Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking, so that others won't feel insecure around you.
Mandela goes on to say that, as we let our own light shine, we give others permission to shine their light as well.
As someone who understands fear and inner critics and not wanting to tell someone else's story in the course of telling mine, I say share your story. It could be quietly in a journal, or slowly in a memoir to be published in the future, or loudly through a blog or speech. Be brilliant, be talented, be fabulous. Who are you not to be?
