Brené Brown: The Call to Courage (2019)

This one-hour motivational talk by Brené Brown was filmed in front of a live audience at UCLA and then released on Netflix on April 19, 2019. Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston, where she holds the Huffington Foundation – Brené Brown Endowed Chair at The Graduate College of Social Work. Across the last twenty years, she has established an unlikely niche in the market of ideas that has become wildly successful on a popular level: her academic research on shame, vulnerability, and courage. Her research has led to five best-selling books (translated into thirty-two languages), and a 2010 TEDx talk that has become one of the top five most viewed TED talks ever with 38 million views. In this talk Brown circles back to her 2012 book Daring Greatly and what she calls her "God moment that changed everything" for her, namely, a quote from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt in 1910: “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 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 while daring greatly.” The path to true courage, says Brown, passes through authentic vulnerability.

Dan Clendenin: dan@journeywithjesus.net