Blog Post 6: Brené Brown

About a week ago, we watched two Ted Talks by Brené Brown. The titles were The power of vulnerability and Listening to shame. I really enjoyed listening to her (so much that I now follow her on every social media network possible). I think part of the reason I enjoyed her Ted Talks so much was because she was discussing two topics, vulnerability and shame,  that people are afraid to talk about. Our society shuns these topics from conversations and people tend to avoid them as much as possible.

The first Ted Talk she did, The power of vulnerability, talks about human connection, love, and belonging. She states that connection only can happen when we are seen. She discussed that people who feel a strong connection to love and belonging believe they are worthy to feel love and belonging and are not fearful and shameful of feeling worthy. She found that people who believe they are worthy are whole-hearted people who have the courage to be imperfect, the compassion to be kind to themselves before others, and feel connection as a result of authenticity. She found that all of these people fully embraced vulnerability. Brené discussed how we numb vulnerability in our lives and try to avoid confronting our feelings of vulnerability. She concluded that when we numb the bad emotions and feelings we are afraid to face then we prevent joy from happening within our lives. After listening to this, it emphasized to me that it is ok to not perfect everything in our lives. It also made me realize it is ok to admit we are vulnerable because we have be vulnerable to feel joy and happiness. 


In Brené's talk, Listening to shame, she discusses what happens when people confront shame head-on. She begins talking about how vulnerability is not weakness and is an act of courage. She discusses all the different areas in our lives that we cannot address without realizing our feelings of shame. Shame is what causes us to think we are not good enough. It was interesting when she talked about how shame is organized by gender. For women shame is conflicting expectations about what we are supposed to be and for men shame is to not appear as weak. Both of these talks made me realize that we should address vulnerability and shame. Addressing these topics will help us be more honest with others and ourselves.

Observation:

Last week for one of my class, we participated in the SNAP challenge. I realized from my own and classmates experiences how hard and difficult it can be to live off of a certain amount of money.

Blog Post 5: Building Communities

Last week in class, Organizations and Communities, we were put into groups and were told to build a community. We had very little boundaries and drew up a city through combining our groups ideas.  It seemed like it would be easy to come up with an ideal community, but it was much harder than expected. It is difficult to think of everything that makes a community work. The first thing we decided on was our population. From there we had to consider a government, health care plan, jobs, education, crime and numerous other things. It was difficult to make everything work together. It was very interesting to see the rest of the classes' ideal communities. After listening to everyone present their communities, it made me think of all the factors we might of forgotten to take into consideration. After presenting the different communities, Professor Rhodes asked us what our community would do in certain situations. After discussing these situations among the class, we realized that certain communities could handle certain situations better than others. My group used their imagination and built a community on the moon. Our solution for everything was to send everyone back to earth. I really enjoyed this in-class activity and it really made me realize how it would be impossible to make a perfect community because of the amount of conflict that arises everyday throughout our society.

I started to think about our readings while thinking about this in-class activity. Our textbook, Generalist Practice with Organizations and Communities, discusses the different types of communities that exist. It was interesting to think back about the different communities people decided to create or how many groups combined different types of existing communities. Our textbook also discusses community resource systems and gives a list of a variety amount of resource systems and organizations that could exist in a single city (Figure 8.2 p. 298). Examples listed were different government units, professional groups, social services groups, consumer groups and many others. After looking these over, I realized how many resources that are influential in a community that did not even cross my mind when creating one.

Observation:

I realized this past week how many people are unaware of current news and events.