Rising Strong
Everybody falls, but the key is knowing how to get up again
Book Edition Details
Summary
Embrace vulnerability and rise stronger from life's inevitable falls with Brené Brown's Rising Strong (2015). Drawing on extensive research, Brown outlines a three-step process—reckoning with emotions, rumbling with stories, and living the process—to help you navigate hurt, cultivate wholeheartedness, and become braver and kinder through every struggle.
Introduction
Sarah stared at her laptop screen, the cursor blinking mockingly at the end of her resignation letter. Three months ago, she had confidently pitched her innovative project to the board, certain it would revolutionize their approach. Instead, it had failed spectacularly, and now she felt like a fraud exposed for all to see. The weight of disappointment pressed down on her shoulders as she wondered if she'd ever have the courage to take another professional risk again. Yet somewhere deep inside, beneath the layers of shame and fear, a small voice whispered that this moment of falling might actually be the beginning of something transformative. This scenario captures the universal human experience of falling down and the challenging journey of getting back up. We all face moments when our courage leads us into failure, when our vulnerability results in heartbreak, or when our best efforts crumble before our eyes. In these moments, we have a choice: we can either stay down, numbed by our pain and paralyzed by our fear, or we can rise strong, integrating our experiences into wisdom that makes us more whole, more resilient, and more compassionate. This exploration reveals how the process of rising after a fall isn't just about bouncing back—it's about growing forward, transforming our relationship with struggle itself, and discovering that our greatest breakdowns often precede our most profound breakthroughs.
The Reckoning: Walking Into Our Story
The swimming incident at Lake Travis began innocently enough. After twenty-five years of marriage, the author and her husband Steve decided to swim across a cove together during their vacation. Midway through the swim, she attempted to connect emotionally, sharing how beautiful the moment felt and how grateful she was to be swimming together. Instead of the warm response she expected, Steve offered only a curt "Yeah. Water's good" and continued swimming. Her attempts at deeper connection were met with more dismissive responses, leaving her feeling exposed, rejected, and increasingly angry as she swam back to the dock alone. Rather than immediately attacking or retreating into sullen silence, something made her pause when they reached the dock. She asked Steve to get back in the water because she sensed something important needed to be addressed. In that moment of choosing curiosity over reactivity, she discovered that Steve had been fighting off a panic attack during their entire swim. The night before, he'd dreamed about being responsible for five children on a raft when a speedboat nearly killed them all. His seemingly cold responses weren't rejection of her vulnerability, but rather his own struggle with anxiety and responsibility. This story illuminates the first crucial step of rising strong: the reckoning. When we're emotionally triggered, our immediate instinct is often to either attack or withdraw. The reckoning requires us to recognize that we're in an emotional moment and get curious about what's really happening, both within ourselves and in the situation. It demands that we walk into our story rather than away from it, acknowledging our feelings without immediately trying to fix, blame, or escape them. The courage to pause and investigate our emotional reality, even when we're hurting, becomes the foundation for all genuine healing and connection.
The Rumble: Owning Our Truth and Confabulations
Andrew had built his reputation as the steady, reliable voice in his advertising agency, the person everyone trusted to accurately estimate project costs and maintain company culture. When his team was invited to pitch for a major campaign, despite his reservations about the client's reputation and their own stretched resources, he got caught up in the collective excitement and said, "We can do this." Two months of grueling work later, they found themselves in a presentation where the potential client's team spent the entire time on their laptops, barely listening, making inappropriate comments, and treating Andrew's talented colleagues with complete disrespect. Flying home after the disastrous meeting, Andrew was consumed by a loop of self-condemnation: "I'm a screwup. I failed. I've lost their trust." His first instinct was to look for someone else to blame, but he recognized this as his shame talking and reached out to a trusted friend. Through their conversation, he began to distinguish between "I am a screwup" and "I screwed up"—a seemingly small but profound difference that separated his identity from his actions. This clarity allowed him to face his team the next day, own his mistake, apologize genuinely, and lead them in deciding to withdraw from the pitch process entirely. The rumble represents the messy, difficult work of examining the stories we create about our struggles. In the absence of complete information, our brains automatically fill in the gaps with narratives that often serve to protect us from further hurt but rarely reflect the full truth. These "shitty first drafts" of our experiences are usually dominated by shame, blame, and fear. The rumble requires us to get honest about these initial stories, challenge our assumptions, and reality-check our conspiracies and confabulations. It's the difference between being hijacked by our emotions and learning from them, between letting our failures define us and integrating them into our growth. Only by courageously examining our stories can we separate truth from fiction and move toward genuine healing.
The Revolution: Writing New Brave Endings
The email arrived like a poison dart, disguised as professional feedback. Pamela, someone the author had met briefly at a speaking event, wrote to "helpfully" point out that she had mispronounced Pema Chödrön's name during her presentation, suggesting that someone positioning herself as an expert should be more careful. The criticism hit directly at the author's deepest shame trigger: the fear of not being intellectual enough, of being exposed as someone who didn't belong in academic circles. Her immediate response was to craft a devastating reply that would systematically destroy Pamela's credibility by exposing the inappropriate things she had shared during their lunch conversation. The letter was perfect in its cruelty, designed to make Pamela feel exactly what the author was feeling: small, found out, ashamed, and inadequate. But sitting in her therapist's office, reading the letter aloud, she suddenly understood the terrible truth of what she was doing. She wanted Pamela to feel like "an impostor who'd been caught"—precisely because that's exactly how she felt herself. The realization that she was capable of the same cruelty she condemned in others became a moment of profound integration, helping her understand how shame drives us to wound others when we're wounded ourselves. This represents the revolutionary aspect of rising strong: the moment when we integrate our learnings and write new endings to our stories. The revolution isn't just personal recovery; it's a fundamental transformation in how we engage with the world. Instead of perpetuating cycles of hurt by passing our pain onto others, we learn to interrupt these patterns through vulnerability, accountability, and compassion. We discover that our greatest wounds, when properly integrated, can become sources of empathy and wisdom rather than weapons of retaliation. The revolution occurs when we choose to be the authors of our own stories rather than characters in narratives someone else is writing, when we transform our falls into foundations for deeper courage and more authentic connection.
Living Wholeheartedly: From Process to Practice
When the rising strong process transforms from an emergency response to a daily practice, something remarkable happens in our relationships, our work, and our communities. At the author's company, team meetings regularly include moments where someone might say, "I need to circle back on something," followed by honest sharing about stories they're making up or emotions they're experiencing. Instead of allowing misunderstandings to fester or resentments to build, they've created a culture where curiosity replaces blame and vulnerability becomes a leadership strength rather than a weakness. In families, this practice transforms how conflicts are navigated and how children learn emotional intelligence. Rather than dismissing teenage complaints about social media comparisons or academic pressure, parents learn to ask, "What story are you making up about these pictures?" or "What are you telling yourself about this situation?" These conversations often reveal that beneath the drama lies very human needs for belonging, competence, and connection. Children learn that their emotions are valid and that their stories, while real to them, might not represent the complete truth of their circumstances. The most profound revolution occurs in communities where people commit to having difficult conversations about race, privilege, inequality, and other challenging topics. Instead of avoiding discomfort or attacking others, community members learn to share their stories, acknowledge their emotions, and rumble with difficult truths together. They discover that stereotypes and prejudices often begin as "shitty first drafts"—incomplete stories based on limited experience or inherited assumptions that can be examined, challenged, and rewritten through genuine connection and shared vulnerability. Living wholeheartedly means recognizing that we are all the authors of our own lives, capable of writing brave endings to even our most difficult chapters. It means understanding that courage is not the absence of fear but the willingness to show up despite our fear. When rising strong becomes our default response to struggle, we model for others that it's possible to face adversity with both strength and tenderness, to be both tough and vulnerable, to hold space for our own pain while remaining open to connection and growth.
Summary
The journey from falling down to rising strong reveals one of life's most profound truths: our greatest struggles often become the birthplace of our most authentic wisdom and deepest connections. Through the three-step process of reckoning with our emotions, rumbling with our stories, and revolutionizing our responses, we discover that falling isn't the opposite of courage—it's the consequence of it. Every time we dare greatly, we risk falling, but every fall offers us the opportunity to rise stronger, wiser, and more wholeheartedly than before. The transformation from victim to author of our own stories requires us to abandon the comfortable narratives of blame and shame in favor of the more difficult but liberating work of owning our experiences completely. We learn that the stories we tell ourselves in our darkest moments are rarely the whole truth, and that by examining these stories with curiosity rather than judgment, we can separate fact from fear-based fiction. This process doesn't make us invulnerable to future falls, but it does make us confident in our ability to rise again, knowing that each fall teaches us something essential about resilience, compassion, and the beautiful complexity of being human. When we embrace the truth that we are worthy of love and belonging exactly as we are—with all our imperfections and struggles—we give others permission to do the same, creating ripples of courage and authenticity that have the power to transform families, organizations, and entire communities.
By Brené Brown
