DRMacIver's Notebook
Book Review: “Daring Greatly” by Brene Brown
Book Review: “Daring Greatly” by Brene Brown
This was a pretty good book, and is going onto my rereadings shelf.
A friend described Brene Brown as “A bit too shiny and US American self-helpy” and that’s not an unfair description, but I found the book fairly useful anyway.
The most useful aspect of this book for me was clarifying the distinction of shame vs guilt. Guilt is feeling that you have done something bad, shame is feeling that you are something bad. The former is often a productive emotion (within bounds), the latter almost never is, because thinking you are in some way intrinsically bad mostly causes you to lock down and blocks you from becoming better.
I also found the discussion of how shame plays out differently depending on gender helpful for reasons that I don’t currently feel able to elaborate well.
There are a number of suggested interventions in this book. I’ve yet to try any of them and I’m not convinced that I’m going to, but I intend to revisit it and that may change when I do. Even without those interventions, I found it helpful for reshaping some of my perspectives and giving me better language to talk about it.