Atlas of the Heart

Brené Brown is a research professor in social work at the University of Houston, where she holds the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair, created especially for her. She's also a visiting professor in management at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.

She's the author of eight books, five of them New York Times number one bestsellers, and hosts the weekly podcasts "Unlocking Us" and "Dare to Lead." And as if that weren't enough, her TED Talk, "The Power of Vulnerability," is amongst the most viewed in the format's history.

So she's not only a serious academic, but an effective and successful communicator.

But what does she have to say, and what's her big idea?

Brown's academic research has focused on courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. Courage and empathy are obviously positive traits that anyone would want to see in a leader. But how can vulnerability be a virtue, or shame a subject worth studying?

This book explores these ideas, and much more besides. As such, pretty much anyone could read it and come away with new and thought-provoking insights. And it's fun, too. There are plenty of personal anecdotes and wry self-knowledge mixed into the heavyweight thinking.

So keep listening to hear how anger obscures more than it reveals, how empathy is way better than sympathy, and what we all need to do to build meaningful connections with others.

Although this book is called an atlas, it could as easily have been called a dictionary, or a glossary. Much of it is given over to a description of terms.

It's organized into 14 chapters; 13 of these are numbered, with titles that begin with the phrase "Places We Go When... " So there's a chapter called "Places We Go When We Fall Short," and another called "Places We Go When Life Is Good." This arrangement lines up with the idea that the book is an atlas. It's a book of places we find ourselves in.

Each chapter covers a group of emotions, moods, or states of mind. The book as a whole covers 87. That's a lot of different emotions. Way more than many of us might expect, or even be able to comprehend. But comprehending emotion, and being able to name and describe it, lies at the heart of what this book seeks to do.

The final chapter is very different. It's called "Cultivating Meaningful Connection," and it's part conclusion, part manifesto. You'll hear more on this later.

You've already heard that much of the difficulty people have with talking about their emotions is down to a failure of language. We don't communicate properly. We don't get the terminology right. And we often confuse one kind of feeling with another.

Take compassion, pity, empathy, and sympathy, which Brown covers in Chapter Seven, "Places We Go With Others." At a first glance you might think they mean pretty much the same thing. As the chapter title suggests, they're all emotions or states we feel toward others. And they've all got a general vibe of shared feeling.

But Brown teases out some crucial differences. Take compassion and empathy. You might find them listed as synonyms in a thesaurus, but they're different. Compassion is the ability to recognize and respond to shared human experience. It leads people to behave kindly and show empathy. Empathy itself, though, is the skill of understanding what someone else is going through, and showing that you do.

Sympathy and pity don't fare so well in Brown's assessment. In fact, pity is the "near enemy" of compassion. The idea of a near enemy is borrowed from Buddhism. It's an emotion or situation that closely resembles a positive one, but actually has more negative characteristics. Pity is an emotion we can feel without engagement. We can pity the victims of war or natural disasters when we see them on TV, but we're not engaging with their plight. Our response is distant and comfortable.

Sympathy bears the same relation to empathy. You can sympathize with someone else's suffering without taking on the tough work of doing anything about it. Compassion and empathy are active and involve identification with others. Pity and sympathy are passive and reinforce a sense of difference.

But why does this matter? Well, because plenty of people think they're responding with compassion when they're not. They're making themselves feel better while assuming that they're helping someone else. A manager who mistakes sympathy for empathy will likely have a completely different view of their relationships with their team members than they do. A team like this can quickly become dysfunctional.

Anger is another emotion whose interpretation is often at odds with reality. And Brown is frank about the fact that she doesn't completely understand it. The consensus among emotions experts is that anger is a primary emotion. That means it's an emotion in its own right. And you've already heard about the 7,000 survey participants who could mostly only describe themselves as happy, sad or angry.

Brown isn't sure it's so simple. She feels that anger is mainly an indicator of other, hidden emotions that get swept up or overlooked in the midst of angry feelings. And identifying these emotions is important.

When survey participants talked in more detail about their feelings, they often uncovered complex stories of how they had become angry. These might involve shame, fear, grief, or guilt. All these emotions are masked by the active vehemence of anger. And they're all harder to talk about as a result.

Brown believes we're living in a period of crisis for emotional literacy. We misunderstand ourselves and others because we don't grasp the meaning or the detail of our emotions. And anger plays a big part in obscuring those details.

It's not all bad, though. Righteous anger can be a catalyst for change. It can be a genuine expression of compassion when witnessing injustice, for example. But although it can spark change, it can't be change. Holding on to anger can be corrosive, both mentally and physically.

Shame is another emotion that turns out to be a lot more complex than we might think. It's also Brown's home territory. She's been researching it for 20 years.

For a start, shame's not the same thing as guilt. Shame focuses on the self; guilt focuses on behavior. Guilt can drive positive change. Shame can't. Guilt says, "You shouldn't have done that. Make amends." Shame says, "You're bad and worthless. Period." Shame can't help you change anything.

This matters, because shame is a deeply inhibiting emotion. And it's pretty nearly universal. The only people who don't feel shame are psychopaths. That's something we get wrong, a lot. We call someone shameless if they do something unethical or plain wrong. But those people are often driven by deep-rooted shame. Narcissists, for example, are driven by a shaming fear of being ordinary.

So how do we cope with shame? Brown offers a four-pronged strategy. First, recognize it. Understand when it's affecting you and what triggered it.

Second, criticize it. Are the messages you're getting about yourself from your subconscious reasonable and realistic?

Third, reach out. Empathy is the antidote to shame. But you can't begin to experience empathy unless you've made a connection with someone else.

Fourth, talk it out. Say how you feel, and ask for what you need from others. If you've chosen the right people, they can help you articulate and challenge your shame.

All the definitions and analysis in the book come together in the final chapter. You've already heard that cultivating meaningful connection between people lies at the heart of Brown's work. This is the call to action. So what does it involve?

Connection is the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard and valued. It's non-judgmental and makes both parties in a relationship feel stronger. Meaningful connection develops from three main sets of skills. The first is what Brown calls "grounded confidence." It's a term she introduced in her book "Dare to Lead." We develop grounded confidence when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, curious, and open to learning and practicing new skills.

The importance of vulnerability is everywhere in this book. It involves being emotionally open, and taking risks. It does not involve weakness. In fact, Brown sees it as a necessary condition for living courageously and building genuine confidence.

The second factor in meaningful connection is being able to "walk alongside others." Brown adapts this idea from Latin American religious activism. Walking alongside someone means sharing their experience without seeking to control or direct it, or to put yourself at the center of it. It requires complete focus on the other person, not yourself. It also needs you to be compassionate and empathetic, not merely sympathetic.

The third strand is "story stewardship." Story stewardship is the only way to truly understand how someone else is feeling. Sure, you can guess pretty quickly that someone else is angry, or hurting, or elated. But many emotions present themselves in the same way. If you see someone crying, you might make all kinds of assumptions about why, until you actually listen to their story.

Story stewardship means showing respect for what someone tells you about themselves. Indeed, Brown talks about the sacred nature of personal stories. They're not to be used to impose judgment, or to fit the listener's own agenda. And it's vital to hear them in full, offering personal insights only when they build trust.

The emphasis on storytelling is important here. Brown's a social scientist. Data matters to her. But quantitative information can only tell us so much. Everything about meaningful connection is founded on language, and particularly narrative. Knowing and applying the language of emotion accurately is a vital part of all three strands that make up meaningful connection. That's why Brown wrote the book in the way that she did. She says as much.

You've heard about the importance of near enemies in the way we treat others. Pity masquerades as compassion. Someone else's story becomes yours, as your concern turns into control. And near enemies are particularly insidious in the language we use.

Knowing and applying the language of emotion has its own near enemy. That enemy is forcing emotion and experience to fit what we know. So we take complex emotions like defensiveness or shame and force them into language we understand. And we end up using reductive terms like sad or angry about ourselves.

One of the key points of the book is that we can't hope to understand or connect with others unless we understand ourselves. That's why mad, sad and happy aren't enough. We need a glossary, or an atlas, to show us where and who we are.

"Atlas of the Heart" is a comprehensive overview of the many different kinds of human emotions. Brown gets the balance between accessibility and academic rigor pretty much right. That's her trademark. Heavyweight theory and personal recollection often sit together on the same page, without jarring. And the tone is self-aware and self-deprecating throughout.

Some readers might be put off by the cartoon-style illustrations and the extracted quotes spread across several pages in large letters. It's certainly a book that looks as though it's been designed to make an impression. The widespread use of bold type to reinforce key points also feels a little patronizing. It's as if the author doesn't quite trust the reader to work it out for themselves.

Brown's strongly liberal agenda is also worth bearing in mind, and may not be to all readers' tastes. She's pretty explicit about it. But that doesn't make "Atlas of the Heart" any less controlled or persuasive.

You might be tempted to treat this book as a reference work, dipping in when you want to investigate a particular emotion. And you can do that. But it's better to read this book as a whole. Certainly, when you read the chapter on cultivating meaningful connection, there's a strong sense of an argument coming together. The book is more than just a checklist and a set of definitions. It's a plea and a manifesto too.

"Atlas of the Heart," by Brené Brown, is published by Random House in the U.S., and by Vermilion, an imprint of Penguin, in the U.K.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.