Dr. brené brown

• Daring Greatly: The Power of Vulnerability
  Brown's foundational work reframes vulnerability not as weakness but as the birthplace of courage, creativity, and connection. She shows audiences why the willingness to show up and be seen — without controlling the outcome — is the foundation of a meaningful life and brave work.
• Dare to Lead: Building Braver Leaders and Courageous Cultures
  Drawing on a seven-year study of leadership, Brown lays out what distinguishes daring leaders: the willingness to have hard conversations, to choose courage over comfort, and to build cultures where people can bring their whole selves to work.
• Shame, Empathy, and the Courage to Be Seen
  Brown explains how shame operates in organizations and lives — and how empathy and "shame resilience" allow people and teams to take risks, recover from setbacks, and innovate without the fear of being found unworthy.
• Rising Strong: Resilience and the Courage to Begin Again
  Brown explores what it takes to get back up after failure — the process of reckoning with emotion, rumbling with our stories, and choosing to remain brave in the face of uncertainty and risk.

speaker Bio: 

Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston, where she holds the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair, and a visiting professor in management at the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business. Over the past two decades she has studied courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy, work that has made her one of the most influential voices on leadership and human connection in the world. Her 2010 TED Talk, "The Power of Vulnerability," remains one of the most viewed talks ever recorded, and she was the first researcher to have a filmed lecture released on Netflix.

The author of six #1 New York Times bestsellers — including Daring Greatly, Dare to Lead, and Atlas of the Heart — Brown is also the host of the award-winning podcasts Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead, and in 2024 was named Executive Chair of the Center for Daring Leadership at BetterUp. A social worker and qualitative researcher by training, she grounds her ideas in years of studying real human stories — what she calls "data with a soul" — and spends most of her time helping organizations around the world develop braver leaders and more courageous cultures.

Summary: Core Conviction

Brown's central finding, drawn from two decades of grounded-theory research, overturns a common assumption: vulnerability is not weakness but the most accurate measure of courage. We cannot selectively numb difficult emotions without also numbing joy, creativity, and connection — so the willingness to be vulnerable, to show up without guarantees, becomes the precondition for everything from innovation to authentic leadership. In organizations, this translates into a practical argument: cultures built on armor, perfectionism, and the fear of shame cannot produce the candor and risk-taking that real performance requires. Her gift on stage is to make rigorous social science feel personal — turning research into a permission slip for leaders to choose, as she puts it, courage over comfort.

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