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4293799
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1. People Are Hard to Hate Close Up. Move In. 2. Speak Truth to Bullshit. Be Civil. 3. Hold Hands. With Strangers. 4. Strong Back. Soft Front. Wild Heart.
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Brené Brown |
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21cb844
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Not enough of us know how to sit in pain with others. Worse, our discomfort shows up in ways that can hurt people and reinforce their own isolation. I have started to believe that crying with strangers in person could save the world.
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Brené Brown |
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856ba3b
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When we stop caring about what people think, we lose our capacity for connection. When we become defined by what people think, we lose our willingness to be vulnerable. If we dismiss all the criticism, we lose out on important feedback, but if we subject ourselves to the hatefulness, our spirits gets crushed. It's a tightrope, shame resilience is the balance bar, and the safety net below is the one or two people in our lives who can help us..
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Brené Brown |
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8f7f150
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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.
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Brené Brown |
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d63dad5
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Of this, I am actually certain. After collecting thousands of stories, I'm willing to call this a fact: A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all women, men, and children. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don't function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.
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Brené Brown |
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92f8d94
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We are complex beings who wake up every day and fight against being labeled and diminished with stereotypes and characterizations that don't reflect our fullness. Yet when we don't risk standing on our own and speaking out, when the options laid before us force us into the very categories we resist, we perpetuate our own disconnection and loneliness. When we are willing to risk venturing into the wilderness, and even becoming our own wilder..
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Brené Brown |
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4eec1a9
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True belonging is not passive. It's not the belonging that comes with just joining a group. It's not fitting in or pretending or selling out because it's safer. It's a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are. We want true belonging, but it takes tremendous courage to knowingly walk into hard moments.
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true-belonging
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Brené Brown |
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7ae046b
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I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. With that definition in mind, let's think about love. Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can't ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment's notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow- that's vulnerability. Love is uncertain. It's incredibly risky. And loving someone leaves us ..
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inspirational
daring-greatly
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Brené Brown |
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9aa911a
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I don't trust a theologian who dismisses the beauty of science or a scientist who doesn't believe in the power of mystery.
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Brené Brown |
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7e9d591
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Ads sell a great deal more than products. They sell values, images, and concepts of success and worth.
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Brené Brown |
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f4f7c87
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Pain is unrelenting. It will get our attention. Despite our attempts to drown it in addiction, to physically beat it out of one another, to suffocate it with success and material trappings, or to strangle it with our hate, pain will find a way to make itself known.
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Brené Brown |
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c429f8c
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We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can't have both. Not at the same time.
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Brené Brown |
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06e857f
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When I let go of trying to be everything to everyone, I had much more time, attention, love, and connection for the important people in my life.
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Brené Brown |
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bc35f14
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Just because we didn't measure up to some standard of achievement doesn't mean that we don't possess gifts and talents that only we can bring to the world. Just because someone failed to see the value in what we can create or achieve doesn't change its worth or ours.
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Brené Brown |
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a481efe
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When we spend our lives waiting until we're perfect or bulletproof before we walk into the arena, we ultimately sacrifice relationships and opportunities that may not be recoverable, we squander our precious time, and we turn our backs on our gifts, those unique contributions that only we can make. Perfect and bulletproof are seductive, but they don't exist in the human experience.
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Brené Brown |
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3298414
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We risk missing out on joy when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.
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Brené Brown |
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e2dd9a7
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If we can find someone who has earned the right to hear our story, we need to tell it. Shame loses power when it is spoken. In this way, we need to cultivate our story to let go of shame, and we need to develop shame resilience in order to cultivate our story.
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Brené Brown |
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fb0b97a
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I assumed that people weren't doing their best so I judged them and constantly fought being disappointed, which was easier than setting boundaries. Boundaries are hard when you want to be liked and when you are a pleaser hellbent on being easy, fun, and flexible.
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Brené Brown |
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09eec33
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For me, vulnerability led to anxiety, which led to shame, which led to disconnection, which led to Bud Light.
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Brené Brown |
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87f2911
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In Jungian circles, shame is often referred to as the swampland of the soul. I'm not suggesting that we wade out into the swamp and set up camp. I've done that and I can tell you that the swampland of the soul is an important place to visit, but you would not want to live there. What I'm proposing is that we learn how to wade through it. We need to see that standing on the shore and catastrophisizing about what could happen if we talked hon..
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Brené Brown |
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ed5c494
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Yes, I agree with Tennyson, who wrote, " 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." 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."
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Brené Brown |
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bf00186
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Connection is why we're here. We are hardwired to connect with others, it's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and without it there is suffering.
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Brené Brown |
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4d54d81
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Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we're supposed to be and embracing who we are.
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Brené Brown |
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1a01cdf
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Even in the context of suffering--poverty, violence, human rights violations--not belonging in our families is still one of the most dangerous hurts. That's because it has the power to break our heart, our spirit, and our sense of self-worth. It broke all three for me. And when those things break, there are only three outcomes, something I've borne witness to in my life and in my work: 1. You live in constant pain and seek relief by numbing..
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Brené Brown |
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182fb28
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Hope is really a thought.
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Brené Brown |
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47dd7a8
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Grace will take you places hustling can't.
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Brené Brown |
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dec56f7
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I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.
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Brené Brown |
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e6d347c
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We're all grateful for people who write and speak in ways that help us remember that we're not alone.
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Brené Brown |
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1bcbc3e
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People may call what happens at midlife "a crisis," but it's not. It's an unraveling--a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you're "supposed" to live. The unraveling is a time when you are challenged by the universe to let go of who you think you are supposed to be and to embrace who you are."
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Brené Brown |
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31e87f6
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One of the greatest challenges of becoming myself has been acknowledging that I'm not who I thought I was supposed to be or who I always pictured myself being.
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Brené Brown |
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cc45e92
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Our stories are not meant for everyone. Hearing them is a privilege, and we should always ask ourselves this before we share: "Who has earned the right to hear my story?" If we have one or two people in our lives who can sit with us and hold space for our shame stories, and love us for our strengths and struggles, we are incredibly lucky."
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Brené Brown |
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8f0bbf2
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Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It's going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn't change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.
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Brené Brown |
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d13bee9
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As I look back on what I've learned about shame, gender, and worthiness, the greatest lesson is this: If we're going to find our way out of shame and back to each other, vulnerability is the path and courage is the light. To set down those lists of what we're supposed to be is brave. To love ourselves and support each other in the process of becoming real is perhaps the greatest single act of daring greatly.
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Brené Brown |
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e1e4de0
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Now I understand that in order to feel a true sense of belonging, I need to bring the real me to the table and that I can only do that if I'm practicing self-love. For years I thought it was the other way around: I'll do whatever it takes to fit in, I'll feel accepted, and that will make me like myself better. Just typing those words and thinking about how many years I spent living that way makes me weary. No wonder I was tired for so long!
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Brené Brown |
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6be7b40
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There is no intimacy without vulnerability. Yet another powerful example of vulnerability as courage.
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Brené Brown |
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caefa7a
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Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving for excellence. Perfectionism is not about healthy achievement and growth. Perfectionism is a defensive move. It's the belief that if we do things perfectly and look perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame.
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Brené Brown |
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7af5272
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Research shows that playing cards once a week or meeting friends every Wednesday night at Starbucks adds as many years to our lives as taking beta blockers or quitting a pack-a-day smoking habit.
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Brené Brown |
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4cf92c4
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We can talk about courage and love and compassion until we sound like a greeting card store, but unless we're willing to have an honest conversation about what gets in the way of putting these into practice in our daily lives, we will never change. Never, ever.
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Brené Brown |
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24eeadc
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If we want to live a Wholehearted life, we have to become intentional about cultivating sleep and play, and about letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth.
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Brené Brown |
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60da1a8
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When we're anxious, disconnected, vulnerable, alone, and feeling helpless, the booze and food and work and endless hours online feel like comfort, but in reality they're only casting their long shadows over our lives.
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Brené Brown |
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1177213
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And if our faith asks us to find the face of God in everyone we meet, that should include the politicians, media, and strangers on Twitter with whom we most violently disagree. When we desecrate their divinity, we desecrate our own, and we betray our faith.
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Brené Brown |
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0789c95
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Belonging so fully to yourself that you're willing to stand alone is a wilderness -- an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. The wilderness can often feel unholy because we can't control it, or what people think about our choice of whether to venture into that vastness or not. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and ..
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Brené Brown |
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7568ca8
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Funerals, in fact, are one of the most powerful examples of collective pain. They feature in a surprising finding from my research on trust. When I asked participants to identify three to five specific behaviors that their friends, family, and colleagues do that raise their level of trust with them, funerals always emerged in the top three responses. Funerals matter. Showing up to them matters. And funerals matter not just to the people gri..
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Brené Brown |
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afc49db
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When we own our stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in stories someone else is telling.
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Brené Brown |