Atlas of the Heart Quotes

“Exploit fears by photoshopping a picture of yesteryear to be everything people wanted it to be (but never was), seduce people into believing that a make-believe past could exist again, and give them someone to blame for ruining the picture and/or not being able to restore the mythical utopia.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Interestingly, nostalgia is more likely to be triggered by negative moods, like loneliness, and by our struggles to find meaning in our current lives.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Again, it’s counterintuitive, but acknowledging uncertainty is a function of grounded confidence, and it feels like humility to me.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Awe and wonder are essential to the human experience. 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.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“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.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“We help each other reality-check our expectations, we ask each other a lot of questions about what we think will happen or what we want to happen, and we often ask ourselves and each other: What’s this about? What are you not saying?”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Based on D’Mello’s research, too much confusion can lead to frustration, giving up, disengagement, or even boredom. Learning strategies most often used to help resolve confusion were seeking help, finding the most important information, monitoring progress, and planning a strategy.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Comfortable learning environments rarely lead to deep learning.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“If you ask me, stopping to think, engaging in careful deliberation, and revising old thinking are rare and courageous actions. And they require dealing with a healthy dose of confusion. And that’s uncomfortable.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“According to research, confusion has the potential to motivate, lead to deep learning, and trigger problem solving.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“I love how researchers Ulrich Weger and Johannes Wagemann explain it. They write, “Wonder inspires the wish to understand; awe inspires the wish to let shine, to acknowledge and to unite.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“In the midst of joy, there’s often a quiver, a shudder of vulnerability. Rather than using that as a warning sign to practice imagining the worst-case scenario, the people who lean into joy use the quiver as a reminder to practice gratitude.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“When I was growing up, there was a lot of unpredictable behavior and intense emotion. There was intense love and there was intense rage. There was intense laughter and intense hurt. But even the good times were dicey, because they could turn in an instant.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Shame is the birthplace of perfectionism. Perfectionism is not striving to be our best or working toward excellence. Healthy striving is internally driven. Perfectionism is externally driven by a simple but potentially all-consuming question: What will people think?”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“What expectations do you have going into this? What do you want to happen? Why? What will that mean to you? Do you have a movie in your head? And in this perception-driven world, the big question is always: Are you setting goals and expectations that are completely outside of your control?”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“This is not that different from what can happen to us when we are unable to articulate our emotions. We feel hopeless or we feel a destructive level of anger.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Over the past two decades, the research has taught me that, despite the catchy phrase “an attitude of gratitude,” gratitude is a practice. It’s tangible. An attitude is a way of thinking; a practice is a way of doing, trying, failing, and trying again. The research participants that I interviewed over the years described keeping gratitude journals, doing daily gratitude meditations or prayers, creating gratitude art, using gratitude”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Gratitude is an emotion that reflects our deep appreciation for what we value, what brings meaning to our lives, and what makes us feel connected to ourselves and others.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“You assume that if no one is talking about it, it must be just you.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Avoidance, the second coping strategy for anxiety, is not showing up and often spending a lot of energy zigzagging around and away from that thing that already feels like it’s consuming us. And”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“I’m not suggesting that we worry about worry, but it’s helpful to recognize that worrying is not a helpful coping mechanism, that we absolutely can learn how to control it, and that rather than suppressing worry, we need to dig into and address the emotion driving the thinking.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“That’s what anxiety feels like to me. Escalating loss of control, worst-case-scenario thinking and imagery, and total uncertainty.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“to cope successfully. This includes elements of unpredictability, uncontrollability, and feeling overloaded.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“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.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Ludwig Wittgenstein that I came across in college: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” What”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“newer research shows that when our access to emotional language is blocked, our ability to interpret incoming emotional information is significantly diminished. Likewise,”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Both disappointment and regret arise when an outcome was not what we wanted, counted on, or thought would happen. 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.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“human emotions and experiences are layers of biology, biography, behavior, and backstory. As”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Eduardo Bericat, a sociology professor at the University of Seville, says “As human beings we can only experience life emotionally.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience