02c. 1965 ADWe can't pack down hurt, nor can we off-load it to someone else while maintaining our authenticity and integrity. Most of us have been on the receiving end of one of these outbursts. Even if we have the insight to know that our boss, friend, colleague, or partner blew up at us because something tender was triggered and it's not actually about us, it still shatters trust and respect. Living, growing up, working, or worshipping on eggshells creates huge cracks in our sense of safety and self-worth. Over time, it can be experienced as trauma.Brené Brown / quote ↗
03c. 1965 ADTalk to ourselves in the same way we'd talk to someone we'd love. Yes, you made a mistake. You're human. You don't have to do it like anyone else does. Fixing it and making amends will help. Self-loathing will not. Reach out to someone we trust--a person who has earned the right to hear our story and who has the capacity to respond with empathy.Brené Brown / quote ↗
04c. 1965 ADOur silence about grief serves no one. We can't heal if we can't grieve; we can't forgive if we can't grieve. We run from grief because loss scares us, yet our hearts reach toward grief because the broken parts want to mend.Brené Brown / quote ↗
05c. 1965 ADGrief seems to create losses within us that reach beyond our awareness--we feel as if we're missing something that was invisible and unknown to us while we had it, but is now painfully gone...Longing is not conscious wanting; it's an involuntary yearning for wholeness, for understanding, for meaning, for the opportunity to regain or even simply touch what we've lost.Brené Brown / quote ↗
06c. 1965 ADHeartbreak is an altogether different thing. Disappointment doesn't grow into heartbreak, nor does failure...It comes form the loss of love or the perceived loss of love...Heartbreak is what happens when love is lost.Brené Brown / quote ↗
07c. 1965 ADFolks write down the name of someone who fills them with frustration, disappointment, and/or resentment, and then I propose that their person is doing the best he or she can. The responses have been wide-ranging...One woman said, "If this was true and my mother was doing the best she can, I would be grief-stricken. I'd rather be angry than sad, so it's easier to believe she's letting me down on purpose than grieve the fact that my mother is never going to be who I need her to be.Brené Brown / quote ↗
08c. 1965 ADFitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.Brené Brown / quote ↗
09c. 1965 ADDr. Kristin Neff is a researcher and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She runs the Self-Compassion Research Lab, where she studies how we develop and practice self-compassion. According to Neff, self-compassion has three elements: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Here are abbreviated definitions for each of these: Self-kindness: Being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism. Common humanity: Common humanity recognizes that suffering and feelings of personal inadequacy are part of the shared human experience—something we all go through rather than something that happens to “me” alone. Mindfulness: Taking a balanced approach to negative emotions so that feelings are neither suppressed nor exaggerated. We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time. Mindfulness requires that we not “over-identify” with thoughts and feelings, so that we are caught up and swept away by negativity.Brené Brown / quote ↗
10c. 1965 ADWhen you judge yourself for needing help, you judge those you are helping. When you attach value to giving help, you attach value to needing help. The danger of tying your self-worth to being a helper is feeling shame when you have to ask for help. Offering help is courageous and compassionate, but so is asking for help.Brené Brown / quote ↗
11c. 1965 ADRequiring accountability while also extending your compassion is not the easiest course of action, but it is the most humane, and, ultimately, the safest for the community.Brené Brown / quote ↗
12c. 1965 ADNo one reaches out to you for compassion or empathy so you can teach them how to behave better. They reach out to us because they believe in our capacity to know our darkness well enough to sit in the dark with them.Brené Brown / quote ↗
13c. 1965 ADCompassion is not a virtue -- it is a commitment. It's not something we have or don't have -- it's something we choose to practice.Brené Brown / quote ↗
14c. 1965 ADThis doesn't mean that we stop helping people set goals or that we stop expecting people to grow and change. It means that we stop respecting and evaluating people based on what we think they should accomplish, and start respecting them for who they are and holding them accountable for what they're actually doing. It means that we stop loving people for who they could be and start loving them for who they are. It means that sometimes when we're beating ourselves up, we need to stop and say to that harassing voice inside, "Man, I'm doing the very best I can right now.Brené Brown / quote ↗
15c. 1965 ADAnother great example of the power of vulnerability -- this time in a corporation -- is the leadership approach taken by Lululemon's CEO, Christine Day. In a video interview with CNN Money, Day explained that she was once a very bright, smart executive who "majored in being right." Her transformation came when she realized that getting people to engage and take ownership wasn't about "the teling" but about letting them come into the idea in a purpose-led way, and that her job was creating the space for others to perform. She chracterized this change as the shift from "having the best idea or problem solving" to "being the best leader of people.Brené Brown / quote ↗
16c. 1965 ADThe reckoning is how we walk into our story; the rumble is where we own it. The goal of the rumble is to get honest about the stories we're making up about our struggles, to revisit, challenge, and reality-check these narratives.Brené Brown / quote ↗
17c. 1965 ADI now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.Brené Brown / quote ↗
18c. 1965 ADPracticing self-love means learning how to trust ourselves, to treat ourselves with respect, and to be kind and affectionate toward ourselves. This is a tall order give how hard most of us are on ourselves. I know I can talk to myself in ways that I would never consider talking to another person. How many of us are quick to think, "God, I am so stupid" and "Man, I'm such an Idiot."? Just like calling someone we love stupid or an idiot would be incongruent with practicing love, talking like that to ourselves takes a serious toll on our self-loveBrené Brown / quote ↗
20c. 1965 ADYou’ll also wonder how you can feel so brave and so afraid at the same time.Brené Brown / quote ↗
21c. 1965 ADI only share when I have no unmet needs that I'm trying to fill. I firmly believe that being vulnerable with a larger audience is only a good idea if the healing is tied to the sharing, not to the expectations I might have for the response I get.Brené Brown / quote ↗
22c. 1965 ADThe biggest potential for helping us overcome shame is this: We are “those people.” The truth is…we are the others. Most of us are one paycheck, one divorce, one drug-addicted kid, one mental health illness, one sexual assault, one drinking binge, one night of unprotected sex, or one affair away from being “those people”–the ones we don’t trust, the ones we pity, the ones we don’t let our kids play with, the ones bad things happen to, the ones we don’t want living next door.Brené Brown / quote ↗
23c. 1965 ADI see the cultural messaging everywhere that says an ordinary life is a meaningless life. . . . I know the yearning to believe that what I'm doing matters and how easy it is to confuse that with the drive to be extraordinary. I know how seductive it is to use the celebrity culture yardstick to measure the smallness of our lives. And I also understand how grandiosity, entitlement, and admiration-seeking feel like just the right balm to soothe the ache of being too ordinary and inadequate.Brené Brown / quote ↗
24c. 1965 ADThe rising strong reckoning has two deceptively simple parts: (1) engaging with our feelings, and (2) getting curious about the story behind the feelings--what emotions we're experiencing and how they are connected to our thoughts and behaviors.Brené Brown / quote ↗
