Kay:
Alright, we’re back again with another episode here in book club. Today, we’re going to talk about Brené Brown. Many of you have likely heard of Brené. She recently released a book called “Atlas of the Heart,” but she has many best-selling books. But the “Atlas of the Heart” has also taken off with her HBO special of the same title and we just love Brené and have been students of hers for almost a decade.
Shi:
And she’s been teaching and researching for decades. She lives in, I believe, Texas in the Houston area. She’s a tenured professor and researcher and really focuses on emotions, particularly starting out with the emotion of shame. She was a shame researcher for a long time and has expanded her emotional portfolio and research portfolio quite a bit since then. But her work has really helped bring the ideas of vulnerability and authenticity into organizations more so than I think anybody else’s work at this time.
Kay:
Well, I have loved what Brené has brought forward. The subject of shame and vulnerability, especially as it plays into workplaces, hasn’t been something that has been touched a whole lot right? You think about work. You think about the office environment. You think about business, right? Do emotions have a place in business? Most people would likely say no, but Brené came forward and said, well, people have emotions and people have a place in business, which means emotions have a place in business too.
Shi:
Understanding how they operate and how they guide the decisions that we make within our organizations and within our own selves and within our lives is incredibly fascinating. Pick up any of Brené Brown’s books and you will love it and you will be fascinated, and if you are an Audible user as Kay and I both are, she reads her books and as time has gone on, she gets more and more keen to developing the work towards a listening audience. She says, look, I listen to Audible and books all the time so I’m going to make this really easy for you as you listen. So, I just finished listening to “Atlas of the Heart.” There were several times where it starts to get a little researchy, and then she’ll say, let me read that to you again and break it down because this is really pivotal. I don’t want you to miss it. If you’re driving, like listen to this. And you’re like, oh yeah. She’s like, literally talking to me right now and she’ll go over it and it’ll just be so transformative and informative.
Kay:
Well, this newest book and corresponding HBO special “Atlas of the Heart” has really been impactful for me personally, because it is an atlas of emotions. So, she goes through the 84 emotions that we know through research exist within a human heart and there were a few of those that I didn’t even know existed that were really great to kind of understand. The concept of the book is that we are rooting language into the emotional concept so that people can accurately describe how they feel in a moment to help other people understand where they’re at. She says, “If we have a common language, that’s backed by research, we’ll find that we can more easily help share where we’re at with others.”
Shi:
Right. Well, that’s exactly what an atlas does for a map. So, she’s giving us the atlas to our emotions and to the feelings that our heart feels. You know, what she reveals in this latest work is that after surveying thousands of people about what emotions they experience, on a daily or a weekly basis. Lots of emotions were named, but three were overwhelmingly named as those reoccurring emotions and that’s happy, sad, and mad and what a just kind of disappointing outcome for the human experience to get boiled down to those three emotional dimensions. Because as you listen into the book, we really do have so much more depth and breadth with our emotions and once we’re able to articulate and identify those emotions we can more easily navigate where they’re trying to protect us or help us or guide us in ways that are more constructive and less detrimental to our relationships and to ourselves.
Kay:
You know, there are so many amazing things that came out of this particular book and some incredible insights and takeaways, but because these are short episodes, I want to leave you with a quick, short thing that I just thought was so stinking impactful. She said in the book that we experience emotional pain and physical pain in the same exact part of our brains and that the anticipation of this pain either emotional or physical is what drives fear. So, just going to go through that again. We experience that emotional pain and physical pain in the exact same part of our brain. So, when you say I have a broken heart and it hurts or I feel uncomfortable with the way that this conversation is making me feel you’re right. It’s okay that those emotions give you physical reactions because it is real, and it is being processed by those same exact centers in your big, beautiful brain.
Shi:
And as much as we love Brené Brown, who’s coming up next is a giant in the industry and in our world and I’m betting, you know who he is.
Kay:
We’ll be at you next with Tony Robbins.
