Rising Strong by Brené Brown is a three-phase strategy for bouncing back from failure that you may use in your personal life as well as as a team or corporation to accept setbacks as a part of life, cope with your emotions, challenge your own ideas, and rise stronger every time. Rising Strong is about overcoming failure in order to avoid being held back from attempting again by past mistakes. This book is about learning to take that chance, to step up and say, "Yes, let me try that again," even if you've already failed. The process of rising strong is separated into three separate phases, which you can recognize and progress through again and again to get stronger with each of your failures if you understand the underlying principles.
3 Phases
When you pay attention to your emotions and dare to inquire about them, you are reckoning. Do you know somebody who appears to shrug off setbacks? Someone who can get up, dust themselves off, and keep going even when the odds are stacked against them? This can be achieved with two components of reckoning with your emotions that Brown describes:
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Recognize your feelings by allowing yourself to feel them.
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Ask yourself why you're experiencing these feelings, be curious, and look into it. This works because being curious causes you to naturally come up with inventive ideas. When you write down the story you tell yourself, whether it's true or not, you get rumbling.
The narrative fallacy causes us to jump to the wrong conclusions when we try to forecast the future based on what has happened in the past. But this isn't limited to rational facts and occurrences; it also applies to our emotions. We make up tales to cope with our emotions, but these stories can often become traps that we can't seem to get out of. It's just a fiction you make up for yourself. The purpose of rumbling is to keep these stories in check. It's like having a detector for your own mind. Brown enjoys rumbling by writing down her first draft, which she refers to as the fiction she tells herself about a specific scenario. It's a straightforward "fill-in-the-blanks" template:
● This is the story I'm making up...
● My feelings are telling me...
● I'm experiencing...
● My reasoning appears to be...
● My activities are...
Fill in the holes and write down your first draft the next time you're feeling sad. You'll gain immediate perspective and be able to assess your story objectively. You'll also be less inclined to get caught up in your own story.
A revolution occurs when you convert your rumbling insights into beneficial developments. Here's how a revolution can be sparked by reckoning and rumbling. “When you look away from a homeless person, you degrade their humanity,” Brown’s pastor stated at a homeless fundraiser. Hearing this made her feel very uneasy. She pondered her emotions for a while. Then she realized she couldn't look at poor people since begging looked like a weak thing to do from her affluent vantage point. Her initial draft implied that she didn't do enough to help others. She was embarrassed by how little she had in comparison to how much she had. She also received the impression that she needed to do more. She eventually changed her mind about how she treated others. She even discovered that asking for help, rather than being a sign of weakness, is an important element of becoming strong. That is a true revolution, and it occurs when you reckon and wrestle with your emotions and thoughts.