The Gifts of Imperfection

BRENÉ BROWN

Reviewed by Todd

Topics like shame, vulnerability, and perfectionism don’t come up often at staff meetings. They don’t appear much in performance reviews or sales calls or brainstorming sessions for the next big idea. Don’t let their absence denote a lack of importance, because these essential human experiences are being talked about in quiet lunchtime conversations away from the office and at home after the kids have gone to bed. Or maybe these topics are not being talked about at all because we don’t even know how to express these feelings, not because they are inconsequential. Luckily, Brené Brown has no such qualms, and in fact, has done more to reintroduce all business people to how our inner selves work to define our work selves.

You may likely know Brené Brown and her work through her breakout TEDxHouston Talk she gave three months prior to the publication of this book or the follow-up success of more TED Talks, appearances in Oprah’s world of magazine and television, and the publication of two more well-received books. The Gifts of Imperfection is the book that first exposed her work to a broader audience.

Brown’s research is based in social work and she originally focused her studies on trying to understand what creates connection in people’s lives. But for every request for stories of connection, she got a story about disconnection or a lack of belonging. As a result, for the next ten years Brown searched for the causes of this disconnect. Through interviews with over ten thousand people she believes she found the antidote, which she refers to as “wholehearted living.”

At 125 pages, Brown moves fast. Her approach is to touch on a dozen core ideas and augment them with a handful of supporting thoughts. The research she divined was so powerful and challenging that she took a year off to deal with the implications in her own life, a time she refers to as “the 2007 Breakdown Spiritual Awakening,” and so, her anecdotes are largely mined from the personal struggles she had dealing with shame.

In her research, Brown uses a method called Grounded Theory, a qualitative process that lets the findings emerge from the collected data. In the stories she collected, Brown asked about love and found out that a sense of belonging was also present in tandem. She found other pairings: joy and gratitude, calm and stillness, intuition and faith, and power and hope. In each case, she found a quality of wholeheartedness and a condition that allowed it to flourish. Her advice is delivered in the form of ten guideposts, each one titled in a pair with an intention and its converse distraction. For example, “Cultivating Gratitude and Joy / Letting Go of Scarcity and Fear of the Dark” is the fourth guidepost. Other guideposts point to creativity, play, and meaningful work, all essential to bringing your best to your work.

“Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”

With little question, a book like The Gifts of Imperfection belongs in a modern collection of personal development titles. What might be harder to see is its inclusion in a compilation of business books. Concepts like faith, stillness, and gratitude still seem distant from the world of business. Hopefully, this inclusion closes that gap just a little. TS

The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, Hazelden, Paperback 2010, 9781592858491

WHERE TO NEXT? Here for why the search for wholeheartedness should not be delayed Here for why bringing our whole selves to work makes us better leaders Here for the first time humanistic qualities were introduced to business | EVEN MORE: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle; Quiet by Susan Cain; The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin