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

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.