Quotes from Brene Brown

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

Because loving them and accepting their imperfections is much easier than turning that light of loving-kindness on myself.

This 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.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen!

Sometimes I actually think to myself, I'm dying to freak out here! Do I have enough information to freak out? Will freaking out help? The answer is always no.

I've never been in a good place without working out and paying attention to my spiritual life. When

There's nothing that makes us feel more threatened and more incited to attack and shame people than to see someone daring greatly. Someone else's daring provides an uncomfortable mirror that reflects back our own fears about showing up, creating, and letting ourselves be seen." (here

understanding emotion can be a life raft in a sea of turbulent feelings.

What's the greater risk? Letting go of what people think or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am? Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness.

Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting. In terms of teaching our children to dare greatly in the "never enough" culture, the question isn't so much "Are you parenting the right way?" as it is: "Are you the adult that you want your child to grow up to be?"

Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it's understanding the necessity of both; it's engaging. It's being all in. Vulnerability

The best definition of power comes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He described power as the ability to achieve our purpose and to effect change. If we question our need for power, think about this: How do you feel when you believe that you are powerless to change something in your life? Powerlessness is dangerous.

The story I'm making up: My emotions: My body: My thinking: My beliefs: My actions:

ways that I never imagined.

When someone shares something great that's happened to them, we can show interest and ask questions. When someone demonstrates joy when we share ours, we can express gratitude: "Thank you for celebrating this with me. It means so much that you're happy for me.

Perfectionism is more about perception than internal motivation, and there is no way to control perception, no matter how much time and energy we spend trying.

Hope is a function of struggle. If we want our children to develop high levels of hopefulness, we have to let them struggle.

my favorite quote about darkness and compassion from Pema Chödrön, who writes: "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.

Worse still, programs like these may lead employers to optimize for misleading metrics, like maximizing for "likes" or "shares" or high "net promoter scores," which are easy to earn when programs are fun and fluent but not when they're demanding. Instead of designing for recall or behavior change, we risk designing for popularity.

We do that by numbing and taking the edge off the pain with whatever provides the quickest relief. Again, we can anesthetize with a whole bunch of stuff including alcohol, drugs, food, sex, relationships, money, work, caretaking, gambling, staying busy, affairs, chaos, shopping, planning, perfectionism, constant change, and the Internet.

The delta between I am a screwup and I screwed up may look small, but in fact it's huge.

I've learned enough about privilege to know that we're at our most dangerous when we think we've learned everything we need to know about it.

The adults I interviewed who were raised by parents who used shame as a primary parenting tool had much more difficulty believing in their worthiness than the participants who experienced shame occasionally and were able to talk about it with their parents.

The stories were confabulations—lies, honestly told.