Rumbling With Vulnerability
Rumbling with vulnerability is Brown's name for the specific practice of remaining inside a difficult emotional experience long enough to examine what is happening within it — rather than reaching for the armor, the quick resolution, or the distraction that the discomfort solicits. A rumble is not a fight and not a surrender; it is a disciplined engagement with uncertainty in which the person stays present to her own emotional experience, names the stories her mind is generating, and tests those stories against evidence without collapsing into either premature acceptance or premature rejection. The practice requires specific verbal rituals — the phrase the story I am telling myself being the most consequential — that create enough distance between the person and her narratives to make examination possible.
In the AI Story
The AI transition generates rumble-worthy moments continuously. The senior engineer watching her tools obsolete: what story is she telling herself? The leader deciding whether to mandate AI adoption: what story is underwriting the decision? The parent lying awake about her child's future: what narrative is doing the work of projecting the fear? In each case, the capacity to say the story I am telling myself is... opens the specific cognitive space in which the narrative can be examined rather than obeyed. The narrative may turn out to be accurate. More often it will turn out to be shame-driven, evidence-light, and systematically distorted in the directions shame research predicts — global, permanent, personal.
The practice is particularly demanding in the AI context because the temporal compression the transition produces leaves little room for the sustained engagement that rumbling requires. The rumble is slow by design; the transition rewards speed. The person who pauses to examine her story is, in the competitive logic of the current moment, losing ground to colleagues who are simply acting on theirs. The irony is that the colleagues acting without examination are usually acting on distorted stories, and the acting produces second-order costs the rumbling would have prevented.
Rumbling is also the practice through which the Rorschach test of the AI discourse becomes navigable. The person who can rumble can hold both readings of an ambiguous data point — the enthusiastic tweet that optimists read as flow and pessimists read as exploitation — without collapsing into one resolution. The collapse is what armored engagement looks like; the holding is what rumbling permits. The collapse feels like decisiveness. The holding feels like weakness. Brown's research suggests that the feelings are wrong — the holding is the position of strength, because it retains contact with the full range of relevant information.
Origin
The practice was formalized in Rising Strong (2015) and extended into leadership applications in Dare to Lead (2018), where rumbling with vulnerability became the first of the four skill sets of daring leadership.
Key Ideas
The story I am telling myself. The verbal ritual that creates reflective distance between the person and her narrative.
Delta exploration. Testing the gap between the story being told and the story the evidence supports.
Staying in the middle. Resisting the pull toward premature resolution that the discomfort of ambiguity generates.
Slow by design. Rumbling requires time — a resource the AI transition's temporal compression makes scarce.
Holding over collapsing. The rumble's strength is its capacity to hold contradictory readings without forcing resolution.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Brené Brown, Rising Strong (Random House, 2015)
- Brené Brown, Dare to Lead (Random House, 2018)
- Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart (Random House, 2021)