Casandra Brené Brown was born in 1965 in San Antonio, Texas. She is a researcher and self-declared storyteller and as a research professor holds the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair at the University of Houston. She proudly identifies as a Texan, having lived in the state for most of her life. Brown was “a college drop-in and drop-out for a number of years” (163), alternating classes with waiting tables, European travel, and tennis-playing. It was only in her late 20s that she discovered social work and dedicated herself to a graduate program and doctorate in the subject. Brown states that her lengthy road to finding her path is one of the key reasons why she “ended up studying human behavior and emotion for a living” (163).

She found her way into researching wholeheartedness via a qualitative research method called grounded theory, developed by Barney Glaser. Adopting Glaser’s method meant that Brown approached her research questions with as few preconceived hypotheses as possible so that the data emerging from the case studies informed her findings. Brown’s work led her to consider the fundamental nature of human connection. To explore this, she dedicated eight years to researching one of the key obstacles to connection—shame.