By: Brene Brown

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Death, taxes, and failure. If you strive to do great things in your business and life, those are the 3 things that are guaranteed to happen to you.

Not only are you certain to fail, you are most likely to do it many different times and in many different ways. Maybe you’ll disappoint an important client. Maybe you’ll mis-handle a sensitive employee issue. Maybe that new initiative you spearheaded will blow up in spectacular fashion. I could go on.

So if we — as people out to do great things in the world — are certain to fail in many different ways — why are we so bad at dealing with the emotions that inevitably come along with it?

That's the issue we'll explore with this summary of Rising Strong. Join us for the next 10 minutes as we explore what to do when we fail, and how to get back up again stronger than ever.

The Rules of Engagement for Rising Strong

You've probably seen or heard the following quote from Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in The Arena" speech, but it bears repeating:

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.

From this quote comes what Brown called the basic laws of emotional physics: simple but powerful truths that helps us understand why courage is both transformational and rare.

These are the rules of engagement for rising strong.

1. If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability. There are more spectators than players for a reason - being in the arena is tough. Being in the arena means committing to failure.

2. Once we fall in the service of being brave, we can never go back. Once you place yourself in the game, you can't go back to being a spectator. Courage transforms the emotional structure of our being. We know what it means to show up and play, and when we are just spectating.

3. This journey belongs to no one but you; however, no one successfully goes it alone. We need to surround ourselves with others who can give us support and walk side-by-side with us on this journey.

4. We’re wired for story. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that hearing a story - which we define as a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end — causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These are the chemicals that trigger our abilities as humans to connect, empathize and make meaning. More on stories later.

5. Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea have an incredible saying: "Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle." What they are saying is that we truly learn when we use our knowledge - through an act of creativity - and put it into action.

6. Rising strong is the same process whether you’re navigating personal or professional struggles. Your emotions show up in your personal and business life, and you can't deal with them fully in one area of your life and ignore them in another.

7. Comparative suffering is a function of fear and scarcity. Failing leads to self-doubt, and self-trust and even our worthiness. In those moments, we often compare our struggles to those of other people in other situations. That is a natural part of the process and having compassion and empathy towards yourself in those moments is critical.

8. You can’t engineer an emotional, vulnerable, and courageous process into an easy, one-size-fits-all formula. When we are dealing with messy emotions like we are when we fall down, the outcome can take minutes or years.

9. Courage is contagious. Your experience will profoundly affect the people around you whether you are aware of it or not. Courage begets more courage - both in yourself and in others.

10. Rising strong is a spiritual practice. As Brown points out, getting back up does not require religion or doctrine. But it is a spiritual practice in the sense that we are all connected to one another by a power greater than all of us.
    
    

The Problem: Gold Plating Grit

One of the things that Brown suggests is standing in our way - as a society as a whole - is that we like to “gold plate grit." This essentially means that we embrace the idea that failure is a positive experience, without acknowledging the hurt, fear and confusion it can cause.

We love to hear the stories of people getting back up with they get knocked down — Steve Jobs getting ousted from and then coming back to save Apple is a great example — but we don’t spend a lot of time talking about the real emotional consequences of failure.

Steve Jobs, and every other person in the history of mankind who has failed, had to work through tough emotions like desperation, shame and panic. So do you.

As Brown points out, the real badasses aren’t the people who ignore the negative baggage that comes along with failure. The real badasses are the people who fall down, get back up, and say, “Damn. That really hurt, but this is important to me and I’m going in again.”

The 3 Stages Of Dealing With Your Failures

There isn’t a step-by-step playbook for dealing with failure, but there is a path that you can follow.

Stage 1: The Reckoning

The first stage is called “The Reckoning and it’s where we recognize the emotions that come along with failure and get curious about how they affect the way we think and behave.

Notice that this is the opposite of ignoring these emotions and refusing to talk about them, which is what most of us are inclined to do.

How do you recognize these emotions?

Usually, you’ll feel a knot in your stomach, you’ll want to eat a box of Oreos in one sitting, or you’ll feel like slamming your fist through a brick wall. Or maybe all of them at the same time. When you feel this way, it’s a good indication that you should start paying attention to what’s going on.

Research has shown that most people are not very good at correctly identifying the emotions they are feeling in the moment. The good news is that we don't have to pinpoint our emotions accurately - we just need to recognize that we are feeling something.

Then, you need to open a line of inquiry into what's going on and why.

Stage 2: The Rumble

The second stage is called “The Rumble” and this is when we confront the stories we make up about ourselves through this struggle.

For instance, a common story we make up about ourselves when we fail is that “I’m not good enough.”

Sometimes that might be true, but most often this is a self-protection mechanism that tries to prevent us from getting hurt again. After all, if we’re not good enough, why bother getting up and trying again?

Rumbling is all about identifying the story you are making up so that you can properly deal with it. Brown suggests that we take the step of actually writing it down using six simple sentences in the following structure.

1. The story I'm making up:
2. My emotions:
3. My body:
4. My thinking:
5. My beliefs:
6. My actions:

Brown tells us that the most important thing in the process is to just get it down on paper. It doesn't need to be perfect.

Now that we have it down, we can deal with it. We'll ask ourselves some simple questions in this stage.

1. What more do I need to learn and understand about the situation?
2. What more do I need to learn and understand about the other people in the story?
3. What more do I need to learn and understand about myself?

What we'll most likely learn through that process is that there is a difference between what we make up about our experiences and the truth. This is where the key learnings and wisdom live.

Stage 3: The Revolution

The third and last stage is called “The Revolution. As Brown points out, this is where we write a new ending to the story. A story where you get up off the mat, brush yourself off, and change the way you engage with the world in a positive, life-affirming way.

This last step takes an incredible amount of courage, because you are opening yourself up to the one thing that your biology is hard-wired to avoid — getting hurt again.

As Brown points out, this is revolutionary change because it fundamentally transforms our thoughts and beliefs. Rumbling with our story and owning it so that we can write a new, more courageous ending, changes how we engage with the world forever.

How to Rumble with Criticism

Let’s talk about a concrete situation that you’ll most certainly face if you are trying to do anything that’s remotely game changing in your business or your life — getting criticized by other people. Especially people who are watching the game from the cheap seats.

How you react to this criticism — how you rumble with it — is going to have an enormous impact on the trajectory of your life.

There are 3 traps we can fall into when dealing with criticism.

First, we start to play small. Getting criticized hurts, and our natural reaction is to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We do what we need to do in order to make ourselves a smaller target, and in the process strip away everything that gives us the strength and the courage to do great things.

Second, we resort to the “I don’t care about what anyone thinks” defence. As Brown points out — this is a game we can’t win. You are wired to care about what other people think, whether you like it or not.

Third, we fall into the trap of eliminating all criticism from our lives. This is like throwing the baby out with the bath water, because thoughtful and constructive criticism is incredibly useful, especially to people who are attempting to do great things.

The solution that Brown gives us is to get totally clear on whose opinions actually matter. Take out a one-inch-by-one-inch piece of paper right now, and write down the names of the people who really matter to you. If you find yourself wanting to cheat and increasing the size of the paper, you need to tighten up that list.

These people should be the ones who love you because of your imperfections and vulnerabilities, not in spite of them. These are the people who will be there for you when you fail (did I mention that it’s certain that you will?), confirm that it totally sucks that you failed, and then gently remind you that you are one brave badass who is about to get back into the ring.

And that is the greatest gift you could ever give yourself.