Brene Brown: how do you get “deliberate” about your life?

This week in Sunday Life I get deliberately vulnerable

23d373f9fa5690a22aec2eeb004b3a04 Brene Brown: how do you get "deliberate" about your life?
Illo by Erik Marinovich

I love the number three. It’s a thing (as they say on Twitter, preceded by a “hashtag”). When things come in threes – three knock-backs, three mentions of the same person in a week – I’ve learned to take note. And something always comes of it. There’s nothing particularly woo-woo about this predilection. I’m a wary, hesitant person – it takes three strikes, generally, for me to notice and trust something, and then to act.

This week University of Houston scientist Brene Brown told me she’s a three kind of a kid, too. Of course, I got around to watching Brown on TED.com only after three people mentioned her to me. Her talk on vulnerability has since become one of the most popular TED presentations ever. And so I contacted her to see if I could interview her for this column on Skype. And whattayaknow, she replied immediately to say she was due in Sydney the very day I was also going to be in town.

Woo-woo? Or just weird? Whatever. We met.

Can I just say, I was more excited about meeting Brown than anyone I’ve encountered in my weekly journey for this column. Three hands down. Brown’s spent eight years studying thousands of people to determine how best to live a wholehearted life.

It drills down to this:

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