Quotes from Brene Brown

Interestingly, admiration often leads to us wanting to improve ourselves. It doesn't, however, make us want to be like the person or thing we admire—we just want to be better versions of ourselves

Technology, for instance, has become a kind of imposter for connection, making us believe we're connected when we're really not—at least not in the ways we need to be.

Shame... cannot survive empathy.

I am a mapmaker and a traveler." It's my way of telling you that I don't have the answers. I have data, and I use that data to chart a course that I'm sharing with you and trying to navigate at the same time.

Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to one another by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and belonging.

The majority of shame researchers agree that the difference between shame and guilt is best understood as the differences between "I am bad" (shame) and "I did something bad" (guilt).

The solution is getting totally clear on the people whose opinions actually matter.

What starts as a small disagreement about an unimportant issue becomes a fight over wrongly assigned intentions and hurt feelings.

As I mentioned in the introduction, we asked around seventy-five hundred people to identify all of the emotions that they could recognize and name when they're experiencing them. The average was three: glad, sad, and mad—or, as they were more often written, happy, sad, and pissed off. Couple this extremely limited vocabulary with the importance of emotional literacy, and you basically have a crisis. It's this crisis that I'm trying to help address in this book.

We need more people who are willing to demonstrate what it looks like to risk and endure failure, disappointment, and regret—people willing to feel their own hurt instead of working it out on other people, people willing to own their stories, live their values, and keep showing up.

Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.

Our ability to accurately recognize and label emotions is often referred to as emotional granularity. In the words of Harvard psychologist Susan David, "Learning to label emotions with a more nuanced vocabulary can be absolutely transformative.

are certainly other causes of illness, numbing, and hurt, but the absence of love and belonging will always lead to suffering.

Killing Us Softly 4,6 and Katz's DVD is titled Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity.7) As

Shame is the birthplace of perfectionism.

Experience and success don't give you easy passage through the middle space of struggle. They only grant you a little grace, a grace that whispers, "This is part of the process. Stay the course." Experience doesn't create even a single spark of light in the darkness of the middle space. It only instills in you a little bit of faith in your ability to navigate the dark. The middle is messy, but it's also where the magic happens.

I Wholeheartedly believe that when we are fully engaged in parenting, regardless of how imperfect, vulnerable, and messy it is, we are creating something sacred.

What if we were willing to acknowledge our own hurt and pain, and in doing so made sure not to diminish the hurt and pain of others?

Sometimes the simple act of humanizing problems sheds an important light on them, a light that often goes out the minute a stigmatizing label is applied.

I shall not be moved.

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.

When we stop numbing and start feeling and learning again, we have to reevaluate everything, especially how to choose loving ourselves over making other people comfortable. It was the hardest work I've ever done and continue to do.

Compassionate people are boundaried people.

Painting done" means fully walking through my expectations of what the completed task will look like, including when it will be done, what I'll do with the information, how it will be used, the context, the consequences of not doing it, the costs—everything we can think of to paint a shared picture of the expectations.