Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution. by Brené Brown

"The physics of vulnerability is simple: If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall. The author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Daring Greatly and The Gifts of Imperfection tells us what it takes to get back up, and how owning our stories of disappointment, failure, and heartbreak gives us the power to write a daring new ending. Struggle, Brene Brown writes, can be our greatest call to courage, and rising strong our clearest path to a wholehearted life"--

"With her 2010 TED talk on the power of vulnerability (over 18 million views), her bestselling books on the transformative gifts of shame and vulnerability, and her inspiring call for wholehearted living, Brene Brown has changed the cultural conversation. Her work has been embraced by Oprah Winfrey and corporate leaders alike making her a highly sought after public speaker. For Brene, the conversation about vulnerability and shame naturally evolves into a discussion of bravery--its origins, its catalysts, its chemistry. How we are brave. What constitutes bravery. What activates the impulse to be brave. And how to recognize where our own "hero's journey" begins--in the depths of failure, disappointment, heartbreak, and grief--and how, once we grapple with our story, we are able to rise from those depths and determine how we want our story will end"--

This book is solidly meh. Given the fonts and the platitudes, it reads more like a vapid girl's instagram account. I've liked Brene's other books a great deal, but this one has very little meat on its bones.

While Daring Greatly focuses on vulnerability, Rising Strong takes a look at this too, but adds on compassion, curiosity, love, generosity and more as a route to happiness and integrity. A few months out I can't say I remember much about this book verbatim, but my Myers Briggs did change from “Thinking” to “Feeling”, so I think it had a bigger impact than I can put into words.

Reading this book is like being cornered at a cocktail party by someone who's self-absorbed and not-overly-bright, while they explain psychology by massively oversharing their own experiences.

This gets two stars from me because it does have a few lessons about cognitive behavioral therapy that could help a reader who is totally unfamiliar with that approach. However, there are manymanymany better resources on the subject (I'm putting a couple links at the end of this review).

Maybe Brown's style will work for some people, but she came off rather unprofessional and self-centered to me. For every useful sentence about human psychology, there are paragraphs of personal anecdotes from Brown's own life. There are also quite a few name-drops and sales pitches related to her coaching business.

I also found it off-putting that she starts off by explicitly rejecting the scientific method, calling her approach “qualitative research” or something. Basically that means she cobbled together preexisting ideas from philosophy and actual science, did a bunch of interviews, and pulled common threads to write about. And of course instead of citations, she has famous quotations - everything from Walt Whitman to the movie Gremlins (?).

Overall, this comes off feeling really padded and contrived to me. My advice is skip the tome and look up a summary if you're interested.

https://psychcentral.com/lib/15-common-cognitive-distortions/
https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/cbt-cognitive-behavioral-therapy-techniques-worksheets/

3.5
Informative, but a bit sluggish at the beginning. It captured my attention a little more towards the end. Could have been the type of anecdotes that just weren't resonating with me.