Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

I mean, anything Brene Brown writes is gold.

This book had a lot of good nuggets. I want to go back and check out some of the things I highlighted again. Some good insights for sure. The tie of shame to other feelings (such as need) was incredibly insightful.

3.5
Informative, but a bit sluggish at the beginning. It captured my attention a little more towards the end. Could have been the type of anecdotes that just weren't resonating with me.

I like Brené. Her work on shame is incredibly powerful. But now, post viral TED Talk, she's doing high priced executive sessions at Pixar, and getting invited on Oprah. With Rising Strong we get Brené not only thinking of her research on resilience but also buttressing her brand. I kept thinking, stop trying to make “rumble” happen. Same goes for chandeliering and the acronym BRAVING. It felt like the utmost of restraint that kept her from slapping on a ™ after half of these.

I get it. We do have to wrestle (or rumble) with our feelings and pay attention to how we're framing our own story. How that narrative is often fuelled by our own biases, self-doubt, and need for comforting patterns that can do away with the discomfort of ambiguity. But that's all easier said than done. When we're face down in the dirt it's not always clear how we negotiate our way to something better. And the book did not help. The examples given were so far removed from anything I was familiar with as to be completely abstract. I never felt I was given better tools to find my way to “rising strong”.

Maybe it's enough to just point out the dysfunctional ways we tend to react when we're down on our hands and knees. To advocate for more curiosity about our emotional state and working on the self talk to something better. But that would have been a much shorter book.

Wow I think I need to go through this
Multiple times. It's great!

Reading this book is like being cornered at a cocktail party by someone who's self-absorbed and not-overly-bright, while they explain psychology by massively oversharing their own experiences.

This gets two stars from me because it does have a few lessons about cognitive behavioral therapy that could help a reader who is totally unfamiliar with that approach. However, there are manymanymany better resources on the subject (I'm putting a couple links at the end of this review).

Maybe Brown's style will work for some people, but she came off rather unprofessional and self-centered to me. For every useful sentence about human psychology, there are paragraphs of personal anecdotes from Brown's own life. There are also quite a few name-drops and sales pitches related to her coaching business.

I also found it off-putting that she starts off by explicitly rejecting the scientific method, calling her approach “qualitative research” or something. Basically that means she cobbled together preexisting ideas from philosophy and actual science, did a bunch of interviews, and pulled common threads to write about. And of course instead of citations, she has famous quotations - everything from Walt Whitman to the movie Gremlins (?).

Overall, this comes off feeling really padded and contrived to me. My advice is skip the tome and look up a summary if you're interested.

https://psychcentral.com/lib/15-common-cognitive-distortions/
https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/cbt-cognitive-behavioral-therapy-techniques-worksheets/

Infinitely relevant.
Are you a human who sometimes interacts with other humans? Read this.
This is 100% not my genre, but I'm thankful for the wisdom I gained from Brené via this audio book. I can't help but think of her as my wisest, most supportive auntie. She's no guru, she's just a student who took the test last semester, and is gracious enough to share her notes with you–messy and personal as they are. I have all of her work in my Audible queue.

I read the beginning of this book a while ago, and didn't like it at all. Once I got into it it was really interesting though.

While Daring Greatly focuses on vulnerability, Rising Strong takes a look at this too, but adds on compassion, curiosity, love, generosity and more as a route to happiness and integrity. A few months out I can't say I remember much about this book verbatim, but my Myers Briggs did change from “Thinking” to “Feeling”, so I think it had a bigger impact than I can put into words.

While Daring Greatly focuses on vulnerability, Rising Strong takes a look at this too, but adds on compassion, curiosity, love, generosity and more as a route to happiness and integrity. A few months out I can't say I remember much about this book verbatim, but my Myers Briggs did change from “Thinking” to “Feeling”, so I think it had a bigger impact than I can put into words.

This book is solidly meh. Given the fonts and the platitudes, it reads more like a vapid girl's instagram account. I've liked Brene's other books a great deal, but this one has very little meat on its bones.

Brene Brown has stoked up the conversation about the power of vulnerability. In Rising Strong, Brown reminds us of the downside of vulnerability: when we dare, we fall. She shares stories of struggle to rise again on the road to a wholehearted life.

I want to be vulnerable. I want you to be vulnerable. Let's read this book. Let's talk about this book. Let's be vulnerable. Let's be wholehearted.