Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

by Brené Brown

people would do almost anything to not feel pain, including causing pain and abusing power, and I understood that there were very few people who could handle being held accountable for causing hurt without rationalizing, blaming, or shutting down.

I’ve learned that power is not bad, but the abuse of power or using power over others is the opposite of courage; it’s a desperate attempt to maintain a very fragile ego. It’s the desperate scramble of self-worth quicksand. When people are hateful or cruel or just being assholes, they’re showing us exactly what they’re afraid of.

To form meaningful connections with others, we must first connect with ourselves, but to do either, we must first establish a common understanding of the language of emotion and human experience.

Remembering that leaders don’t have all the answers, but ask important questions

There is no courage without vulnerability. Courage requires the willingness to lean into uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

In my most recent research on courage and leadership, the ability to embrace vulnerability emerged as the prerequisite for all of the daring leadership behaviors.

In a world where perfectionism, pleasing, and proving are used as armor to protect our egos and our feelings, it takes a lot of courage to show up and be all in when we can’t control the outcome.

Comparison is actually not an emotion, but it drives all sorts of big feelings that can affect our relationships and our self-worth.

Comparison is a creativity killer, among other things.

Comparison is the crush of conformity from one side and competition from the other—it’s trying to simultaneously fit in and stand out.

“When we engage in upward social comparison, we compare ourselves to someone who is (perceived to be or performing) better than we are. In contrast, when we engage in downward social comparison, we compare ourselves to someone who is (perceived to be or performing) worse than we are. The direction of the comparison doesn’t guarantee the direction of the outcome. Both types of social comparison can result in negative and positive effects.”

My new strategy is to look at the person in the lane next to me, and say to myself, as if I’m talking to them, Have a great swim. That way I acknowledge the inevitable and make a conscious decision to wish them well and return to my swim. So far, it’s working pretty well.

We feel admiration when someone’s abilities, accomplishments, or character inspires us, or when we see something else that inspires us, like art or nature. Interestingly, admiration often leads to us wanting to improve ourselves.

Envy occurs when we want something that another person has. Jealousy is when we fear losing a relationship or a valued part of a relationship that we already have.

Disappointment is unmet expectations. The more significant the expectations, the more significant the disappointment.

when I’m on my own for a weekend with the kids, I clear the expectations deck. Back then, however, when Steve and I were both home, we set all kinds of wild expectations about getting stuff done. What we never did was reality-check our expectations or make them explicit. We just tended to blame each other for our disappointment when our expectations weren’t realized. Now, before weekends, vacations, or even busy school or workweeks, we talk about expectations. We specifically ask each other, “What do you want this weekend to look like?” I might say, “This is going to be a busy weekend. I’m down for whatever we need to do, but I would like to swim at least one day and play pickleball for a couple of hours on Saturday.”

The therapist asked me if I had shared my expectations with Steve, or explained to him how we did it in our family and asked him to celebrate with me that way because it meant a lot to me. I rolled my eyes and said, “If I have to ask, it’s not worth it.” She tilted her head and said, “If you’re not asking for what’s important to you, maybe it’s because you don’t think you are worth it.” Shut up. You don’t know me. You’re fired.

We were packing for spring break at Disney World when Steve, who was looking in my bag, said, “Babe, should we reality-check expectations for the week?” Somewhat frustrated, I replied, “No. I think we’re good, babe.” Steve pointed to the three books I had stuffed into my carry-on bag and said, “Tell me about those.” As I started to explain that I wanted to sleep late, relax, and read some good mysteries over the course of our week away, I suddenly heard what I was saying. Who am I kidding? We’re going to be at Disney World with five kids for seven days! The only thing I’d be reading was the sign that says You Must Be This Tall to Ride This Ride. Sure enough, we were out the door by eight o’clock every morning of that vacation and I didn’t read a thing, but we had a great time—once I had reality-checked my expectations with Steve’s help.

When someone shares their hopes and dreams with us, we are witnessing deep courage and vulnerability. Celebrating their successes is easy, but when disappointment happens, it’s an incredible opportunity for meaningful connection.

With disappointment, we often believe the outcome was out of our control (but we’re learning more about how this is not always the case). With regret, we believe the outcome was caused by our decisions or actions.

Interestingly, research shows that in the short term, we tend to regret bad outcomes where we took action. However, when we reflect back over the long term, we more often regret the actions we didn’t take—what we didn’t do—and we think of those as missed opportunities.

90 percent of regrets fall into one of six categories: education, career, romance, parenting, self-improvement, and leisure, I’ve heard many research participants echo Saunders in regretting failures of kindness. I know that some of my own biggest regrets include failures of kindness, including failures of self-kindness.

Both awe and wonder are often experienced in response to nature, art, music, spiritual experiences, or ideas. In the midst of these moments, we can feel overwhelmed by the vastness of something that is almost incomprehensible—it almost feels like what we’re witnessing can’t be true—like we’re seeing something that doesn’t fit with how we move through and understand our everyday lives.

Wonder fuels our passion for exploration and learning, for curiosity and adventure. Researchers have found that awe “leads people to cooperate, share resources, and sacrifice for others” and causes them “to fully appreciate the value of others and see themselves more accurately, evoking humility.” Some researchers even believe that “awe-inducing events may be one of the fastest and most powerful methods of personal change and growth.”

Curiosity seems to be both a trait and a state. You can be a curious person and, regardless of having this trait or not, you can feel curious about something in the moment. Interest is more of a state (“interested” is not who we are but how we are at a specific time).

Curiosity seems to involve both feeling (emotion) and thinking (cognition), while interest is really more about thinking.

Interest is a cognitive openness to engaging with a topic or experience. Curiosity is recognizing a gap in our knowledge about something that interests us, and becoming emotionally and cognitively invested in closing that gap through exploration and learning. Curiosity often starts with interest and can range from mild curiosity to passionate investigation.

Choosing to be curious is choosing to be vulnerable because it requires us to surrender to uncertainty.

Einstein said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.” Curiosity’s reason for existing is not simply to be a tool for acquiring knowledge; it reminds us that we’re alive. Researchers are finding evidence that curiosity is correlated with creativity, intelligence, improved learning and memory, and problem solving.

The bittersweet side of appreciating life’s most precious moments is the unbearable awareness that those moments are passing.

Bittersweet is a mixed feeling of happiness and sadness. As someone who feels bittersweet about a lot of things—especially related to Ellen and Charlie—I was curious about this emotion.

What all of the comments have in common is sadness about letting go of something, mixed with happiness and/or gratitude about what’s been experienced and/or what’s next.

We define nostalgia as a yearning for the way things used to be in our often idealized and self-protective version of the past.

The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions—especially the wrong ones—is the unpleasant feeling that Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.”

Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent with each other, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.” Dissonance produces mental discomfort that ranges from minor pangs to deep anguish;

Dissonance is disquieting because to hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity, and, as Albert Camus observed, we are creatures who spend our lives trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd. At the heart of it, Festinger’s theory is about how people strive to make sense out of contradictory ideas and lead lives that are, at least in their own minds, consistent and meaningful.

Compassion is a daily practice and empathy is a skill set that is one of the most powerful tools of compassion.

Compassion is a “virtuous response that seeks to address the suffering and needs of a person through relational understanding and action.”

Compassion is fueled by understanding and accepting that we’re all made of strength and struggle—no one is immune to pain or suffering.

Compassion is not a practice of “better than” or “I can fix you”—it’s a practice based in the beauty and pain of shared humanity.

In cultivating compassion we draw from the wholeness of our experience—our suffering, our empathy,

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.

Compassion does not mean immersing ourselves in the suffering of others to the point of anguish. Compassion is the tender readiness of the heart to respond to one’s own or another’s pain without despair, resentment, or aversion.

Empathy, the most powerful tool of compassion, is an emotional skill set that allows us to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding.

This is one reason we need to dispel the myth that empathy is “walking in someone else’s shoes.” Rather than walking in your shoes, I need to learn how to listen to the story you tell about what it’s like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn’t match my experiences.