Daring Greatly is wide-ranging, making it difficult to summarize in a review. So I will focus on a chapter of the book called The Vulnerability Armory. Brown asserts that we learned to protect ourselves from vulnerability—from being hurt, diminished, or disappointed—by putting on emotional armor and acting invulnerable when we were children. Now as adults we must learn to dare greatly by taking the risk of removing our armor and being vulnerable for the sake of connection.
In comparison to self-esteem, self-kindness does not require that we feel superior to others. Self-kindness is not an evaluation of ourselves at all, but is an attitude we adopt toward our own failure and suffering. Researchers have identified three components to self-kindness.