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During an interview in 2013, a reporter told me that after reading The Gifts of Imperfection and Daring Greatly, he wanted to start working on his own issues related to vulnerability, courage, and authenticity. He laughed and said, “It sounds like it could be a long road. Can you give me the upside of doing this work?” I told him that with every ounce of my professional and personal being, I believe that vulnerability—the willingness to show up and be seen with no guarantee of outcome—is the only path to more love, belonging, and joy. He quickly followed up with, “And the downside?” This time I was the one laughing. “You’re going to stumble, fall, and get your ass kicked.”
There was a long pause before he said, “Is this where you tell me that you think daring is still worth it?” I responded with a passionate yes, followed by a confession: “Today it’s a solid yes because I’m not lying facedown after a hard fall. But even in the midst of struggle, I would still say that doing this work is not only worth it, it is the work of living a wholehearted life. But I promise that if you asked me about this in the midst of a fall, I’d be far less enthusiastic and way more pissed off. I’m not great at falling and feeling my way back.”
It’s been two years since that interview—two years of practicing being brave and putting myself out there—and vulnerability is still uncomfortable and falling still hurts. It always will. But I’m learning that the process of struggling and navigating hurt has as much to offer us as the process of being brave and showing up.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the privilege of spending time with some amazing people. They range from top entrepreneurs and leaders in Fortune 500 companies to couples who have maintained loving relationships for more than thirty years and parents working to change the education system. As they’ve shared their experiences and stories of being brave, falling, and getting back up, I kept asking myself: What do these people with strong relationships, parents with deep connections to their children, teachers nurturing creativity and learning, clergy walking with people through faith, and trusted leaders have in common? The answer was clear: They recognize the power of emotion and they’re not afraid to lean in to discomfort.
While vulnerability is the birthplace of many of the fulfilling experiences we long for—love, belonging, joy, creativity, and trust, to name a few—the process of regaining our emotional footing in the midst of struggle is where our courage is tested and our values are forged. Rising strong after a fall is how we cultivate wholeheartedness in our lives; it’s the process that teaches us the most about who we are.
In the past two years, my team and I have also received emails every week from people who write, “I dared greatly. I was brave. I got my butt kicked and now I’m down for the count. How do I get back up?” I knew when I was writing The Gifts and Daring Greatly that I would ultimately write a book about falling down. I’ve collected that data all along, and what I’ve learned about surviving hurt has saved me again and again. It saved me and, in the process, it changed me.
Here’s how I see the progression of my work:
The Gifts of Imperfection —Be you.
Daring Greatly —Be all in.
Rising Strong— Fall. Get up. Try again.
The thread that runs through all three of these books is our yearning to live a wholehearted life. I define wholehearted living as engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough . It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am brave and worthy of love and belonging .
Both The Gifts and Daring Greatly are “call to arms” books. They are about having the courage to show up and be seen even if it means risking failure, hurt, shame, and possibly even heartbreak. Why? Because hiding out, pretending, and armoring up against vulnerability are killing us: killing our spirits, our hopes, our potential, our creativity, our ability to lead, our love, our faith, and our joy. I think these books have resonated so strongly with people for two simple reasons: We’re sick of being afraid and we’re tired of hustling for our self-worth.
We want to be brave, and deep inside we know that being brave requires us to be vulnerable. The great news is that I think we’re making serious headway. Everywhere I go, I meet people who tell me how they’re leaning in to vulnerability and uncertainty—how it’s changing their relationships and their professional lives.
We get thousands of emails from people who talk about their experiences of practicing the Ten Guideposts from The Gifts —even the hard ones like cultivating creativity, play, and self-compassion. I’ve worked alongside CEOs, teachers, and parents who are mounting major efforts to bring about cultural change based on the idea of showing up and daring greatly. The experience has been more than I ever imagined sixteen years ago when my husband, Steve, asked me, “What’s the vision for your career?” and I answered, “I want to start a global conversation about vulnerability and shame.”
If we’re going to put ourselves out there and love with our whole hearts, we’re going to experience heartbreak. If we’re going to try new, innovative things, we’re going to fail. If we’re going to risk caring and engaging, we’re going to experience disappointment. It doesn’t matter if our hurt is caused by a painful breakup or we’re struggling with something smaller, like an offhand comment by a colleague or an argument with an in-law. If we can learn how to feel our way through these experiences and own our stories of struggle, we can write our own brave endings. When we own our stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in stories someone else is telling.
The epigraph for Daring Greatly is Theodore Roosevelt’s powerful quote from his 1910 “Man in the Arena” speech:
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 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.
It’s an inspiring quote that has truly become a touchstone for me. However, as someone who spends a lot of time in the arena, I’d like to focus on one particular piece of Roosevelt’s speech: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood”—STOP. (Imagine the sound of a needle scratching across a record.) Stop here. Before I hear anything else about triumph or achievement, this is where I want to slow down time so I can figure out exactly what happens next.
We’re facedown in the arena. Maybe the crowd has gone silent, the way it does at football games or my daughter’s field hockey matches when the players on the field take a knee because someone is hurt. Or maybe people have started booing and jeering. Or maybe you have tunnel vision and all you can hear is your parent screaming, “Get up! Shake it off!”
Our “facedown” moments can be big ones like getting fired or finding out about an affair, or they can be small ones like learning a child has lied about her report card or experiencing a disappointment at work. Arenas always conjure up grandeur, but an arena is any moment when or place where we have risked showing up and being seen. Risking being awkward and goofy at a new exercise class is an arena. Leading a team at work is an arena. A tough parenting moment puts us in the arena. Being in love is definitely an arena.
When I started thinking about this research, I went to the data and asked myself, What happens when we’re facedown? What’s going on in this moment? What do the women and men who have successfully staggered to their feet and found the courage to try again have in common? What is the process of rising strong ?
I wasn’t positive that slowing down time to capture the process was possible, but I was inspired by Sherlock Holmes to give it a shot. In early 2014, I was drowning in data and my confidence was waning. I was also coming off a tough holiday, when I had spent most of my scheduled vacation time fighting off a respiratory virus that hit Houston like a hurricane. One night in February, I snuggled up on the couch with my daughter, Ellen, to watch the newest season of Masterpiece’s Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. (I’m a huge fan.)
In Season 3, there’s an episode where Sherlock is shot. Don’t worry, I won’t say by whom or why, but, wow, I did not see it coming . The moment he’s shot, time stops. Rather than immediately falling, Sherlock goes into his “mind palace”—that crazy cognitive space where he retrieves memories from cerebral filing cabinets, plots car routes, and makes impossible connections between random facts. Over the next ten minutes or so, many of the cast of recurring characters appear in his mind, each one working in his or her area of expertise and talking him through the best way to stay alive.
First, the London coroner who has a terrific crush on Sherlock shows up. She shakes her head at Sherlock, who seems completely taken aback by his inability to make sense of what’s happening, and comments, “It’s not like it is in the movies, is it, Sherlock?” Aided by a member of the forensics team at New Scotland Yard and Sherlock’s menacing brother, she explains the physics of how he should fall, how shock works, and what he can do to keep himself conscious. The three warn him when pain is coming and what he can expect. What probably takes three seconds in real time plays out for more than ten minutes on the screen. I thought the writing was genius, and it re-energized my efforts to keep at my own slow-motion project.
My goal for this book is to slow down the falling and rising processes: to bring into our awareness all the choices that unfurl in front of us during those moments of discomfort and hurt, and to explore the consequences of those choices. Much as in my other books, I’m using research and storytelling to unpack what I’ve learned. The only difference here is that I’m sharing many more of my personal stories. These narratives grant me not only a front-row seat to watch what’s playing out onstage, but also a backstage pass to access the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are taking place behind the scenes. In my stories, I have the details. It’s like watching the director’s cut of a movie or choosing the bonus feature on a DVD that allows you to listen to the director talk through decisions and thought processes. This is not to say that I can’t capture details from other people’s experiences—I do it all the time. I just can’t weave together history, context, emotion, behavior, and thinking with the same density.
During the final stages of developing the rising strong theory, I met with small groups of people familiar with my work to share my findings and gather feedback from their perspectives on the fit and relevance of the theory. Was I on the right track? Later, two of the participants in those meetings reached out to share their experiences of applying the rising strong process in their lives. I was moved by what they shared and asked if I could include it in this book. They both agreed, and I’m grateful. Their stories are powerful examples of rising.
On a cultural level, I think the absence of honest conversation about the hard work that takes us from lying facedown in the arena to rising strong has led to two dangerous outcomes: the propensity to gold-plate grit and a badassery deficit.
We’ve all fallen, and we have the skinned knees and bruised hearts to prove it. But scars are easier to talk about than they are to show, with all the remembered feelings laid bare. And rarely do we see wounds that are in the process of healing. I’m not sure if it’s because we feel too much shame to let anyone see a process as intimate as overcoming hurt, or if it’s because even when we muster the courage to share our still-incomplete healing, people reflexively look away.
We much prefer stories about falling and rising to be inspirational and sanitized. Our culture is rife with these tales. In a thirty-minute speech, there’s normally thirty seconds dedicated to “And I fought my way back,” or “And then I met someone new,” or, as in the case of my TEDx talk, simply “It was a street fight.”
We like recovery stories to move quickly through the dark so we can get to the sweeping redemptive ending. I worry that this lack of honest accounts of overcoming adversity has created a Gilded Age of Failure. The past couple of years have given rise to failure conferences, failure festivals, and even failure awards. Don’t get me wrong. I love and continue to champion the idea of understanding and accepting failure as part of any worthwhile endeavor. But embracing failure without acknowledging the real hurt and fear that it can cause, or the complex journey that underlies rising strong, is gold-plating grit. To strip failure of its real emotional consequences is to scrub the concepts of grit and resilience of the very qualities that make them both so important—toughness, doggedness, and perseverance.
Yes, there can be no innovation, learning, or creativity without failure. But failing is painful. It fuels the “shouldas and couldas,” which means judgment and shame are often lying in wait.
Yes, I agree with Tennyson, who wrote, “ ’ Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” But heartbreak knocks the wind out of you, and the feelings of loss and longing can make getting out of bed a monumental task. Learning to trust and lean in to love again can feel impossible.
Yes, if we care enough and dare enough, we will experience disappointment. But in those moments when disappointment is washing over us and we’re desperately trying to get our heads and hearts around what is or is not going to be, the death of our expectations can be painful beyond measure.
The work being done by Ashley Good is a great example of how we must embrace the difficult emotion of falling. Good is the founder and CEO of Fail Forward—a social enterprise with the mission to help organizations develop cultures that encourage the risk taking, creativity, and continuous adaptation required for innovation. She got started as a development worker in Ghana with Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) and was integral to the development of EWB’s failure reports and AdmittingFailure.com, a kind of online failure report where anyone can submit stories of failure and learning.
These first reports were bold attempts to break the silence that surrounds failure in the nonprofit sector—a sector dependent on external funding. Frustrated by the learning opportunities missed because of that silence, EWB collected its failures and published them in a glossy annual report. The organization’s commitment to solving some of the world’s most difficult problems, like poverty, requires innovation and learning, so it put achieving its mission before looking good, and sparked a revolution.
In her keynote address at FailCon Oslo—an annual failure conference in Norway—Good asked the audience for words they associated with the term failure. The audience members shouted out the following: sadness, fear, making a fool of myself, desperation, panic, shame, and heartbreak . Then she held up EWB’s failure report and explained that the thirty glossy pages included fourteen stories of failure, proving that EWB had failed at least fourteen times in the last year. She then asked the same audience what words they would use to describe the report and the people who submitted their stories. This time the words shouted out included: helping, generous, open, knowledgeable, brave, and courageous .
Good made the powerful point that there’s a vast difference between how we think about the term failure and how we think about the people and organizations brave enough to share their failures for the purpose of learning and growing. To pretend that we can get to helping, generous, and brave without navigating through tough emotions like desperation, shame, and panic is a profoundly dangerous and misguided assumption. Rather than gold-plating grit and trying to make failure look fashionable, we’d be better off learning how to recognize the beauty in truth and tenacity.
I know, badassery is a strange term, but I couldn’t come up with another one that captures what I mean. When I see people stand fully in their truth, or when I see someone fall down, get back up, and say, “Damn. That really hurt, but this is important to me and I’m going in again”—my gut reaction is, “What a badass.”
There are too many people today who instead of feeling hurt are acting out their hurt; instead of acknowledging pain, they’re inflicting pain on others. Rather than risking feeling disappointed, they’re choosing to live disappointed . Emotional stoicism is not badassery. Blustery posturing is not badassery. Swagger is not badassery. Perfection is about the furthest thing in the world from badassery.
To me the real badass is the person who says, “Our family is really hurting. We could use your support.” And the man who tells his son, “It’s okay to be sad. We all get sad. We just need to talk about it.” And the woman who says, “Our team dropped the ball. We need to stop blaming each other and have some tough conversations about what happened so we can fix it and move forward.” People who wade into discomfort and vulnerability and tell the truth about their stories are the real badasses.
Daring is essential to solve the problems in the world that feel intractable: poverty, violence, inequality, trampled civil rights, and a struggling environment, to name a few. But in addition to having people who are willing to show up and be seen, we also need a critical mass of badasses who are willing to dare, fall, feel their way through tough emotion, and rise again. And we need these folks leading, modeling, and shaping culture in every capacity, including as parents, teachers, administrators, leaders, politicians, clergy, creatives, and community organizers.
So much of what we hear today about courage is inflated and empty rhetoric that camouflages personal fears about one’s likability, ratings, and ability to maintain a level of comfort and status. We need more people who are willing to demonstrate what it looks like to risk and endure failure, disappointment, and regret—people willing to feel their own hurt instead of working it out on other people, people willing to own their stories, live their values, and keep showing up. I feel so lucky to have spent the past couple of years working with some true badasses, from teachers and parents to CEOs, filmmakers, veterans, human-resource professionals, school counselors, and therapists. We’ll explore what they have in common as we move through the book, but here’s a teaser: They’re curious about the emotional world and they face discomfort straight-on.
My hope is that the process outlined in this book gives us language and a rough map that will guide us in getting back on our feet. I’m sharing everything I know, feel, believe, and have experienced about rising strong. I’ll tell you once more that what I learned from the research participants continues to save me, and I’m deeply grateful for that. The truth is that falling hurts. The dare is to keep being brave and feel your way back up.
