Failure and vulnerability are the very element of spiritual growth and personal wisdom.

What goes wrong for us as much as what goes right, what we know to be our flaws, as much as what we know to be our strengths.

These make hope, reasonable, and lived virtue possible.

They are part of our gift to the world.

This is becoming wise, an inquiry into the mystery and art of living.

I'm Krista Tippett.

Brune Brown has become a sought-out teacher in all kinds of settings at every level of leadership on this ancient basic truth that had been lost from our common vocabulary for generations.

It all began with research she did at the University of Houston's graduate college of social work where she's a

professor. I always ask a very simple question to people. I just say, think of the last time you did

something that you thought was really brave. Or the last time you saw someone do something really brave.

You know, I think without question, and I can tell you as a researcher, 11,000 pieces of data, I've never, I cannot find a single example of courage, moral courage, spiritual courage, leadership courage, relational courage. I cannot find a single example of courage in my research that was not born completely of vulnerability.

And so I think we buy into some mythology about vulnerability being weakness and being gullibility and being frailty because it gives us permission not to do it.

Bray Brown's own life as a self-professed classic perfectionist was turned inside out by these findings.

She went on to share what she was learning at a TEDx talk in her Houston hometown.

That has since become one of the most widely viewed TED talks of all time,

despite an arguably unappealing title, listening to shame.

I love learning that she stumbled on old, new truths that

sound negative in modern ears while researching the nature of wholehearted lives. I start thinking,

you know, what I'm looking for are these kind of very wholehearted people. So I started coding data and looking for patterns and themes and words.

And they started emerging very quickly. And I just started to put together lists like,

here are the things that wholehearted men and women really consciously choose and here are the things that they push away from.

And I just remember looking up and looking at the kind of

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