It is about human behaviour and emotions.
Well, then ‘why read this’?
Because if you eat cooked food, you’re a human.
No other species does that.
And as a human, you experience life emotionally.
For which, you will need ‘Emotional Granularity’ (an ability to accurately recognize and label experiences and emotions).
There are two ‘absolute’ certainties in life. That you will:
– Have experiences and emotions
– Need to communicate with others for support.
What bridges the two is ‘language’ by allowing you to make sense of your experiences and communicate with others.
Without sufficient emotional vocabulary, you’re limited to expressing your emotions as ‘mad, sad, and happy’.
😁
That’s not quite sufficient, right?
This book helps you develop emotional granularity through a process of labeling your emotional experiences.
It will almost feel like it has opened you up to a universe of new choices and second choices.
One where you can share your most exhilarating to most heart-breaking moments with others and build a strong connection.
That’s transformative!
What left me amazed is how Brené Brown brought this book to life:
She spent over three years collecting over 550,000 comments from real people, collating them into categories, and analyzing them with a team of counselors, therapists, emotional researchers, kindergarten teachers, and doctoral professors.
For a subject matter so complex where “there are as many theories of emotions as there are emotional theorists”, and no one agrees on how to define an emotion, she thought beyond ‘a list of human emotions’.
Her research and experiences of a tough childhood, made her realise that human emotions and experiences are layers of:
🧠 Biology – How and why they shape our bodies
👥 Biography – How family and society shape our beliefs about connection between feelings, thoughts and behaviour
🤝 Behaviour – Our go-to ways of action points
💭 Backstory – The context bringing the thought or feeling
So, she sat down with a mapmaker and scholar in cartography to create a map metaphor for this book.
After you’ve read the book, you’ll have a tool to explore the interaction between the layers of your emotions and experiences and tell a strong story.
If you’ve read the ancient Indian Philosophy, you’re aware of the adage:
“That what you seek is within you.”
While this book has no direct connection to this, it has done a mind-blowing job of combining data, insights from experts and feedback from people at the ground level to prove “the anchor you are searching for is connection, and it is internal”.
I could only read the first chapter before I went back to read the 30-page long introduction with unending curiosity wondering how she came up with the idea for this book at all.
Now, I am so excited I cannot wait to read what’s next.