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by
Brené Brown
Read between
February 27 - July 24, 2016
In fact, we learned that when faced with either-or dilemmas, the first question we should ask is, Who benefits by
forcing people to choose?
This editor takes the position that there are many truths and there are many ways of knowing. Each discovery contributes to our knowledge, and each way of knowing deepens our understanding and adds another dimension to our view of the world….
And today I proudly call myself a researcher-storyteller because I believe the most useful knowledge about human behavior is based on people’s lived experiences.
Because hiding out, pretending, and armoring up against vulnerability are killing us: killing our spirits, our hopes, our potential, our creativity, our ability to lead, our love, our faith, and our joy.
When we own our stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in stories someone
My goal for this book is to slow down the falling and rising processes: to bring into our awareness all the choices that unfurl in front of us during those moments of discomfort and hurt, and to explore the
On a cultural level, I think the absence of honest conversation about the hard work that takes us from lying facedown in the arena to rising strong has led to two dangerous outcomes: the propensity to gold-plate grit and a badassery deficit.
rarely do we see wounds that are in the process of healing. I’m not sure if it’s because we feel too much shame to let anyone see a process as intimate as overcoming hurt, or if it’s because even when we muster the courage to share our still-incomplete healing, people reflexively look away.
We like recovery stories to move quickly through the dark so we can get to the sweeping redemptive ending. I worry that this lack of honest accounts of overcoming adversity has created a Gilded Age of Failure.
Don’t get me wrong. I love and continue to champion the idea of understanding and accepting failure as part of any worthwhile endeavor. But embracing failure without acknowledging the real hurt and fear that it can cause, or the complex journey that underlies rising strong, is gold-plating grit. To strip failure of its real emotional consequences is to scrub the concepts of grit and resilience of the very qualities that make them both so important—toughness, doggedness, and perseverance.
But heartbreak knocks the wind out of you, and the feelings of loss and longing can make getting out of bed a monumental task. Learning to trust and lean in to love again can feel impossible.
in those moments when disappointment is washing over us and we’re desperately trying to get our heads and hearts around what is or is not going to be, the death of our expectations can be painful beyond measure.
To pretend that we can get to helping, generous, and brave without navigating through tough emotions like desperation, shame, and panic is a profoundly dangerous and misguided assumption. Rather than gold-plating grit and trying to make failure look fashionable, we’d be better off learning how to recognize the beauty in truth and tenacity.
Emotional stoicism is not badassery. Blustery posturing is not badassery. Swagger is not badassery. Perfection is about the furthest thing in the world from badassery.
People who wade into discomfort and vulnerability and tell the truth about their stories are the real badasses.
The truth is that falling hurts. The dare is to keep being brave and feel your way back up.
These are the rules of engagement for rising strong. 1. If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability.
2. Once we fall in the service of being brave, we can never go back.
Courage transforms the emotional structure of our being. This change often brings a deep sense of loss. During the process of rising, we sometimes find ourselves homesick for a place that no longer exists.
3. This journey belongs to no one but you; however, no one successfully goes it alone.
4. We’re wired for story.
5. Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We
“Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.”
Rising strong is the same process whether you’re navigating personal or professional struggles.
First, they recognize the central role that relationships and story play in culture and strategy, and they stay curious about their own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Second, they understand and stay curious about how emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are connected in the people they lead, and how those factors affect relationships and perception. And, third, they have the ability and willingness to lean in to discomfort and vulnerability.
Comparative suffering is a function of fear and scarcity.
But I’m a firm believer that complaining is okay as long as we piss and moan with a little perspective. 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.
You can’t engineer an emotional, vulnerable, and courageous process into an easy, one-size-fits-all formula.
Courage is contagious.
Rising strong is a spiritual practice.
“Grace will take you places hustling can’t.”
the story that I’m making up
Creativity, Inc.
Day two, or whatever that middle space is for your own process, is when you’re “in the dark”—the door has closed behind you. You’re too far in to turn around and not close enough to the end to see the light.
Experience doesn’t create even a single spark of light in the darkness of the middle space. It only instills in you a little bit of faith in your ability to navigate the dark. The middle is messy, but it’s also where the magic happens.
shame resilience
Creating is the act of paying attention to our experiences and connecting the dots so we can learn more about ourselves and the world around us.
The irony is that we attempt to disown our difficult stories to appear more whole or more acceptable, but our wholeness—
Recognizing emotion means developing awareness about how our thinking, feeling (including our physiology), and behavior are connected.
getting curious about our experience.
ersatz emotion—
I’m having an emotional reaction to what’s happened and I want to understand
There is a profound relationship—a love affair, really—between curiosity and wholeheartedness.
into our lives as true awareness, they have to be received with open hands, inquisitive minds, and wondering hearts.
Connecting the dots of our lives, especially the ones we’d rather erase or skip over, requires equal parts self-love and curiosity: How do all of these experiences come together to make up who I am?
Curiosity is a shit-starter.
Embracing the vulnerability it takes to rise up from a fall and grow stronger makes us a little dangerous. People who don’t stay down after they fall or are tripped are often troublemakers. Hard to control. Which is the best kind of dangerous possible. They are the artists, innovators, and change-makers.
we have to have some level of knowledge or awareness before we can get curious.
about her own life and feelings, and our lives and feelings, the worse
