I’m more and more certain that the most profound changes ahead of us will come from focusing on the most basic truths about human behavior.
That the communities we frequent, be they Facebook or Slack or your favorite blog, will platform shared impulses and surface the most basic elements that connect people with each other.
The why behind a share. The emotional memory behind a tap or a swipe.
That when you hit on something simple and true, it connects you broadly to the rest of the world. Sometimes unstoppably so.
I’m reacting and simply in awe of the overpowering human truths that are reverberating through my head after watching and rewatching the Brene Brown Ted Talk on The Power of Vulnerability.
She has surfaced something deceptively simple yet powerful that is personally a large challenge for me.
Something that I practice as a marketer and brand storyteller but been unable to put my finger on in words. Something I do, but not with enough self-awareness or individual intent.
Something that I’ve been challenged to come to grips with as I work to make myself a better person, more open and flexible as I get older with a longer legacy of experiences that shape my forward looking thinking.
An ongoing awareness that as an expert in my field, I need to apply knowledge and perspective while being completely open to what I don’t know, to audiences generationally different and unique.
Brene brilliantly brings out that there is a natural friction between who we truly are and how we present who we want to be. And that this is why authenticity is so difficult to obtain and so powerful when you do.
How with groups, we conceptualize an organizational culture on top of the innate messiness of the human condition. How we naturally create an ongoing tension between the drives of individuals to connect and the basic incongruity of placing order and structures on those connections at scale.
She describers herself as a hacker of the condition of human messiness, searching not for order but for behavioral data that pinpoints the why of why we feel certain ways about ourselves.
She talks poignantly about love and beauty and happiness.
Not as a self help lecturer, but as a social scientist. As a storyteller putting soul and chutzpah into understanding the data. The empirical observational facts from her extensive studies of the human condition.
She’s created language around the behavioral needs of people, their relationship to creativity and how it impacts an individuals ability to be happy and productive.
Focusing on how if you strip away all of our veneers, we as people and a culture are simply wired to connect. That our genetic makeup is to couple and span outward atomically to make new relationships.
How that drive for connection and human touch in most people is sadly defined by its absence.
You ask people about love and they tell you about heartache.
You ask people about happiness and they define it by the loneliness that exists when it is not there. They are defining what they need through a fear of not having it.
There’s some Zen in the humorous casualness of her expressions.
But there’s also a bit of new world, scientific Existentialism as well. She’s in some way channeling Camus to me in a light hearted way.
I need to say that I’m both embracing her words and fighting the implications of her ideas.
First because she is talking about letting go as the source–no the prerequisite–to being both strong and creative.Vulnerability as a state of power.
About the core of beauty as personal vulnerability. Happiness as the acceptance of who we are, not who we want people to see. Nor even who we aspire to be.
This is hard stuff for me to internalize on a personal level.
Wrapping my control freak head around letting go is a humongous leap for me on so many levels.
But my gut tells me she is more than partly correct. I’m listening hard.
The second takeaway from her thesis is the unavoidable analog between the empowerment of people and the dynamics of the communities they belong to.
Communities thrive when each person is empowered to the fullest extent possible. When they feel at ease, in control and wanting to share and express their opinions without fear of reprisal or need to be right. She is acknowledging in behavioral terms one of the core principals of community design.
And thirdly–though she never uses the word–her criteria for happiness and being at a place that fosters strength—self acceptance, authenticity and the lack of fear of rejection are the key elements of leadership. Within or without of community itself.
This video is simply a great watch. There is something so powerful here.
Whether indeed it’s a lasting epiphany—as it appears right now—or simply a truism that I acknowledge and file away, we shall see.
What I’ve decided to do is dig in and see where it takes me.
See how what she says about interpersonal quests have analogs to the behaviors of groups.
See where each of us can bring the social data we discover from understanding ourselves and our relationships to deepen the stories we tell about the things that matter to us.
See if by internalizing this I can indeed be a better person, more flexible, connected and productive.
Stories as data told with soul is simply a brilliant way to express this.
More is coming on this.
