Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

by Brené Brown

I’ve come to believe that we all want to show up and be seen in our lives. This means we will all struggle and fall; we will know what it means to be both brave and brokenhearted.

Rising strong after a fall is how we cultivate wholeheartedness in our lives; it’s the process that teaches us the most about who we are.

We’re sick of being afraid and we’re tired of hustling for our self-worth.

When we own our stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in stories someone else is telling.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both. Not at the same time.

when we’re defined by what people think, we lose the courage to be vulnerable.

we need to be selective about the feedback we let into our lives.

if you’re not in the arena getting your ass kicked, I’m not interes...

“Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.” What we understand and learn about rising strong is only rumor until we live it and integrate it through some form of creativity so that it becomes part of us.

Hurt is hurt, and every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy and compassion, the healing that results affects all of us.

“Grace will take you places hustling can’t.”

The big question is whether you are going to

be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure. —Joseph Campbell

Our job is not to deny the story, but to defy the ending—to rise strong, recognize our story, and rumble with the truth until we get to a place where we think, Yes. This is what happened. This is my truth. And I will choose how this story ends.

Like our lovability and divinity, we must care for and nurture the stories we tell ourselves about our creativity and ability. Just because we didn't measure up to some standard of achievement doesn't mean that we don't possess gifts and talents that only we can bring to the world. Just because someone failed to see the value in what we can create or achieve doesn't change its worth or ours.

When unconscious storytelling becomes our default, we often keep tripping over the same issue, staying down when we fall, and having different versions of the same problem in our relationships—we’ve got the story on repeat.

Integrity is choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them.

Boundaries are a function of self-respect and self-love.

Hope is a function of struggle.

You can do everything right. You can cheer yourself on, have all the support you can find in place, and be 100 percent ready to go, and still fail.

But if you can look back during your rumble and see that you didn’t hold back—that you were all in—you will feel very different than someone who didn’t fully show up. You may have to deal with the failure, but you won’t have to wrestle with the same level of shame that we experience when our efforts were halfhearted.

Respecting the passion and commitment of people means respecting their items on the agenda.

Curiosity, clean communication, circling back, and rumbling become part of the culture. Just like people, when organizations own their stories and take responsibility for their actions, they get to write the new endings. When they deny their stories, people on the outside, like the media, take over the story’s authorship to write new narratives that could come to define the organization.