Although her voice annoys me a bit in the actual video, the message is the focus.

[Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. She spent the first five years of her decade-long study focusing on shame and empathy, and is now using that work to explore a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness.]

“Shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection. “Is there something about me that if other people know it and see it that I won't be worthy of connection?” The things I can tell you about it, it's universal, we all have it, the only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. No one wants to talk about it and the less you talk about it the more you have it...What underpinned this....was excruciating vulnerability. This idea that in order for connection to happen we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen...

And you know how I feel about vulnerability, I hate vulnerability...I was going to deconstruct shame and I was going to outsmart it...

Here's what I can tell you it boils down to...My one year (to understand shame) turned into 6 years...and I kind of got a handle on it. This is what shame is this is how it works. I wrote a book, I published a theory...but something was not okay. And what it was is that if I roughly took the people I interviewed and divided them into people who really have a sense of worthiness, that's what this comes down to, a sense of worthiness, they have a strong sense of love and belonging. And folks who struggle for it, and folks who are always wondering if they're good enough, there was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it, and that was that the people who had a strong sense of love and belonging believed they are worthy of love and belonging. They believe they're worthy. And to me the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we are not worthy of connection, is something that I felt I must personally and professionally understand better.”

- Brene Brown, “The Power of Vulnerability”

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html