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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brené Brown
Read between
November 15 - December 16, 2012
Connection is why we’re here. We are hardwired to connect with others, it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and without it there is suffering.
Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.
Those who feel lovable, who love, and who experience belonging simply believe they are worthy of love and belonging.
If we want to reignite innovation and passion, we have to rehumanize work. When shame becomes a management style, engagement dies. When failure is not an option we can forget about learning, creativity, and innovation.
When it comes to parenting, the practice of framing mothers and fathers as good or bad is both rampant and corrosive—it turns parenting into a shame minefield. The real questions for parents should be: “Are you engaged? Are you paying attention?” If so, plan to make lots of mistakes and bad decisions. Imperfect parenting moments turn into gifts as our children watch us try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time.
What we know matters, but who we are matters more. Being rather than knowing requires showing up and letting ourselves be seen. It requires us to dare greatly, to be vulnerable.
We’re tired of the national conversation centering on “What should we fear?” and “Who should we blame?” We all want to be brave.
This new definition of narcissism offers clarity and it illuminates both the source of the problem and possible solutions. I can see exactly how and why more people are wrestling with how to believe they are enough. I see the cultural messaging everywhere that says that an ordinary life is a meaningless life. And I see how kids that grow up on a steady diet of reality television, celebrity culture, and unsupervised social media can absorb this messaging and develop a completely skewed sense of the world. I am only as good as the number of “likes” I get on Facebook or Instagram.
And I also understand how grandiosity, entitlement, and admiration-seeking feel like just the right balm to soothe the ache of being too ordinary and inadequate.
What makes this constant assessing and comparing so self-defeating is that we are often comparing our lives, our marriages, our families, and our communities to unattainable, media-driven visions of perfection, or we’re holding up our reality against our own fictional account of how great someone else has it.
Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare ourselves and our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed: “Remember when…? Those were the days…”
The larger culture is always applying pressure, and unless we’re willing to push back and fight for what we believe in, the default becomes a state of scarcity. We’re called to “dare greatly” every time we make choices that challenge the social climate of scarcity.
The greatest casualties of a scarcity culture are our willingness to own our vulnerabilities and our ability to engage with the world from a place of worthiness.
there’s no equation where taking risks, braving uncertainty, and opening ourselves up to emotional exposure equals weakness.
To believe vulnerability is weakness is to believe that feeling is weakness.
Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.
Vulnerability is about sharing our feelings and our experiences with people who have earned the right to hear them. Being vulnerable and open is mutual and an integral part of the trust-building process.
Trust is a product of vulnerability that grows over time and requires work, attention, and full engagement.
We simply can’t learn to be more vulnerable and courageous on our own. Sometimes our first and greatest dare is asking for support.
‘Only when we’re brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.’”
The secret killer of innovation is shame. You can’t measure it, but it is there.
If you want a culture of creativity and innovation, where sensible risks are embraced on both a market and individual level, start by developing the ability of managers to cultivate an openness to vulnerability in their teams.
This notion that the leader needs to be “in charge” and to “know all the answers” is both dated and destructive.
Robert Hilliker says, “Shame started as a two-person experience, but as I got older I learned how to do shame all by myself.”
Connection, along with love and belonging (two expressions of connection), is why we are here, and it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.
Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.
the difference between shame and guilt is best understood as the difference between “I am bad” and “I did something bad.”
When we feel shame, we are most likely to protect ourselves by blaming something or someone, rationalizing our lapse, offering a disingenuous apology, or hiding out.
When we apologize for something we’ve done, make amends, or change a behavior that doesn’t align with our values, guilt—not shame—is most often the driving force.
Guilt is just as powerful as shame, but its influence is positive, while shame’s is destructive.
We live in a world where most people still subscribe to the belief that shame is a good tool for keeping people in line. Not only is this wrong, but it’s dangerous. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying.
shame is much more likely to be the cause of destructive and hurtful behaviors than it is to be the solution.
As long as we care about connection, the fear of disconnection will always be a powerful force in our lives,
A social wound needs a social balm, and empathy is that balm.
Self-compassion is key because when we’re able to be gentle with ourselves in the midst of shame, we’re more likely to reach out, connect, and experience empathy.
Are you owning and sharing your story? We can’t experience empathy if we’re not connecting.
Shame resilience is a strategy for protecting connection—our connection with ourselves and our connections with the people we care about.
Our fight or flight strategies are effective for survival, not for reasoning or connection.
Practice courage and reach out! Yes, I want to hide, but the way to fight shame and to honor who we are is by sharing our experience with someone who has earned the right to hear it—someone
Carl Jung said, “I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”
I loved writing for my community of readers, because preaching to the choir is easy and relatively safe. The quick and global spread of my work was exactly what I had always tried to avoid. I didn’t want the exposure, and I was terrified of the mean-spirited criticism that’s so rampant in Internet culture.
(I also stopped reading anonymous comments. If you’re not in the arena with the rest of us, fighting and getting your ass kicked on occasion, I’m not interested in your feedback.)
But for men, every rule comes back to the same mandate: “Don’t be weak.”
We ask them to be vulnerable, we beg them to let us in, and we plead with them to tell us when they’re afraid, but the truth is that most women can’t stomach it. In those moments when real vulnerability happens in men, most of us recoil with fear and
as men develop shame resilience, this changes, and men learn to respond to shame with awareness, self-compassion, and empathy.
Shame resilience—the four elements we discussed in the previous chapter—is about finding a middle path, an option that allows us to stay engaged and to find the emotional courage we need to respond in a way that aligns with our values.
We’re so desperate to get out and stay out of shame that we’re constantly serving up the people around us as more deserving prey.
We’re hard on each other because we’re using each other as a launching pad out of our own perceived shaming deficiency. It’s hurtful and ineffective, and if you look at the mean-girl culture in middle schools and high schools, it’s also contagious. We’ve handed this counterfeit survival mechanism down to our children.
the solution to being stuck in shame is not to denigrate others stuck just like us, but to join hands and pull free together.
Yes, empathy requires some vulnerability, and we risk getting back a “mind your own damn business” look, but it’s worth it.
