Quotes from Brene Brown

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.

Our world needs us to show up and stand up for our beliefs. I just hope we're civil and respectful. When we degrade and diminish our humanity, even in response to being degraded and diminished, we break our own wild hearts.

I 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.

We humans have a tendency to define things by what they are not. This is especially true of our emotional experiences.

Tonight we will exhale and teach. Now it's time to inhale. There is the in-breath and there is the out-breath, and it's easy to believe that we must exhale all the time, without ever inhaling. But the inhale is absolutely essential if you want to continue to exhale.

The place of true belonging, it's the bravest and most sacred place you'll stand.

Serpentining is the perfect metaphor for how we spend enormous energy trying to dodge vulnerability when it would take far less effort to face it straight on.

eventually our anxiety is compounded and made unbearable by our belief that if we were just smarter, stronger, or better, we'd be able to handle everything.

I believe the most useful knowledge about human behavior is based on people's lived experiences.

shaming someone we love around vulnerability is the most serious of all security breaches. Even if we apologize, we've done serious damage because we've demonstrated our willingness to use sacred information as a weapon.

As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio reminds us, humans are not either thinking machines or feeling machines, but rather feeling machines that think.

to the conspiratorial mind, shit never just happens,' the complexities of human life are reduced to produce theories that are 'always consoling in their simplicity" bad things do not happen because of a wildly complex swirl of abstract historical and social variables. They happen because bad men live to stalk our happiness. And you can fight, and possibly even defeat, bad men. If you can read the hidden story

I believe that vulnerability—the willingness to show up and be seen with no guarantee of outcome—is the only path to more love, belonging, and joy.

One woman said, "Shame is hating yourself and understanding why other people hate you too.

As researcher and writer Sherry Turkle says, "Boredom is your imagination calling to you.

I can always tell about the health of a culture of an organization by how much gossiping is happening

Yes, if we care enough and dare enough, we will experience disappointment. But in those moments when disappointment is washing over us and we're desperately trying to get our heads and hearts around what is or is not going to be, the death of our expectations can be painful beyond measure.

One of the outcomes of attempting to ignore emotional pain is chandeliering. We think we've packed the hurt so far down that it can't possibly resurface, yet all of a sudden, a seemingly innocuous comment sends us into a rage or sparks a crying fit. Or maybe a small mistake at work triggers a huge shame attack. Perhaps a colleague's constructive feedback hits that exquisitely tender place and we jump out of our skin.

Judging has become such a part of our thinking patterns that we are rarely even aware of why and how we do it. It takes a great deal of conscious thinking or mindfulness to even bring the habit of judging into our awareness.

Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs. —Joan Didion

when men feel that rush of inadequacy and smallness, they normally respond with anger and/or by completely turning off.

If we want to reignite innovation and passion, we have to rehumanize work.

To pretend that we can get to helping, generous, and brave without navigating through tough emotions like desperation, shame, and panic is a profoundly dangerous and misguided assumption.

Music always makes me feel less alone in the mess.