More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 20 - April 30, 2025
You have the power to choose to examine forgiveness and trust through a nonbinary lens instead of an all-or-nothing lens.
Perfectionists encounter significant resistance when it comes to self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness threatens our heightened sense of accountability, and (more simply) we don’t know how to forgive ourselves.
Self-forgiveness is about being able to reserve some room in your identity for a new adaptation of yourself to appear.
Forgiveness also looks like responding to the you who’s showing up now, not the you from the past (keeping in mind that “one hour ago” counts as the past).
Don’t think of gratitude as the key to joy. Gratitude is a gas pedal for joy; self-forgiveness is the key that turns everything else on.
When you’re connected to yourself and you’re present, you don’t need certainty. When you trust yourself, you understand that no matter what changes around you, there are a thousand right paths to the true self within you.
You are an expansive, powerful, large, ever-changing force in the world, like an ocean—not some tiny forgotten room in an old run-down house. The larger you allow yourself to be, the easier it is to find your way back to yourself.
There is no one right way to be who you are. There’s no “one right door” to enter before you get to you any more than there’s one right place to dive into the ocean.
Adaptive perfectionists cycle through change vigorously because we love pushing ourselves to grow, and you can’t grow without changing.
Trusting yourself looks like finding the courage to override the constant temptations to minimize the small but meaningful steps you’re taking to honor your intuition.
When you’re in an adaptive space, you allow what’s perfect for you to change because you know that the perfection is coming from inside of you.
When you’re in a maladaptive space, you’re not connected to your wholeness (perfection), so you try to outsource perfection. Your world becomes superficially perfect while you’re miserable on the inside.
Your most authentic life probably won’t look the way you were expecting it to look. Trusting yourself looks like giving yourself permission to enjoy and embrace the surprises that come.
We have always started long before we even realized we started. The gestation periods can be long and un-notable; the blocks are the path. If you are feeling like you aren’t doing it, or like you’re waiting for the real work to begin, please remember in this moment, you are doing it.
What you want will continue to present as intangible for a significant, probably painful amount of time. Remember that your worst day of actively working towards what you want in this life is going to be better than your best day of a life in which you are denying yourself your truest desire.
There will always be other people around you who seem to be able to “decide and do” while you have to grind away slowly.
As appealing as it may seem to be able to generate immediate results, there are costs associated with getting what you want quickly. As Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar puts it, “Talent and success without the moderating effect of failure can be detrimental, even dangerous.”[8]
What do you want? may be a basic question, but it’s not as basic as Are your fundamental human needs being met?
You don’t remove the block that trauma creates by removing yourself from the traumatic situation; removing yourself only stops the bleeding. Stopping the bleeding is not the same as healing the wound.
Perhaps the best definition I’ve heard comes from Dr. Maya Angelou, who said of engaging in community care: “In doing so, your life is enlarged. You belong to everybody, and everybody belongs to you.”
Expressions like “You’re your own worst enemy” and “Get out of your own way” allude to the self-sabotaging nature of resistance: we internally fight against what we know is right for us.
You want to write a book, start a company, stop smoking, connect more meaningfully with your kids, create art, breathe deeply, go to bed earlier, mail a letter, eat a salad, do anything that’s not explicitly self-destructive? Expect resistance.
Steven Pressfield describes resistance well: Resistance is an impartial force of nature, like gravity . . . The apparition of resistance is by definition a good sign, because resistance never appears except when preceded by a dream.
Where there is a dream, there is resistance. Thus: where we encounter resistance, somewhere nearby is a dream.[9]
The bigger the dream, the bigger the shadow (the more resistance there is). Resistance is a good thing; it means you’re on to something real.
The remedy to resistance is not discipline; it’s pleasure. Pleasure is an antidote for so much. Find what brings you real pleasure and you will find your way home to yourself.
I’ve loved every job I’ve ever had because I found a way to listen in every job I’ve ever had. You can only imagine my joy when I became a professional listener for a living.
We get so swept away in our efforts to uncover the meaning of life, drunk on existentialism. It’s so simple: all people want is connection.
The external achievements you’re working on that you think are going to certify your belonging with others: the career moves, the body, the fill-in-the-blank achievement before fill-in-the-blank age? I say this with all the love in my heart: nobody cares.
The energy you bring into the room with you is more valuable than anything you could ever do.
We’re all connected to a degree so immense that our minds cannot comprehend it.
Acknowledging that we can feel one another’s energy helps us understand how much power there is in our own energy.
Those “one more” type of moments happen every day, a hundred times a day, with the people who are still physically in our lives now, and with ourselves; we’re just not present for them. Everything you need to be present, you already have.
There’s perfection inside you, there’s completeness, and there’s freedom. There’s a place where your mistakes can’t touch who you are and where the past simply does not fucking matter.
We all lose control over and over again, and we all have the same choice to make. We either fight to regain the illusion of control, or we work to align with our power.
You’ll have moments where you forget everything in this book; that’s fine. I’ll have moments where I forget everything in this book and I wrote the damn thing. Don’t build your story from the part where you forget; build your story from the part where you remember.
Whether you are or are not something is a binary way of thinking. While binary logic can be helpful in certain circumstances, it is otherwise too simplistic to apply to human beings with consistent accuracy.
Labels are not who you are. Labels represent our desire to contain our experiences with some degree of reliability.
Dethrone the idea that anyone else could ever begin to instruct you on how to be who you are. As well-intentioned as others may be, as ever-bursting with love or credentials or authority or experience that others may be, you are the one who knows.
