Quotes from Brene Brown

90 percent of regrets fall into one of six categories: education, career, romance, parenting, self-improvement, and leisure, I've heard many research participants echo Saunders in regretting failures of kindness.

Vulnerability is the core of all emotions and feelings. To feel is to be vulnerable. To believe vulnerability is weakness is to believe that feeling is weakness. To foreclose on our emotional life out of a fear that the costs will be too high is to walk away from the very thing that gives purpose and meaning to living.

participants who thought they were not susceptible or vulnerable to deceptive advertising were, in fact, the most vulnerable. The researchers' explanation for this phenomenon says it all: "Far from being an effective shield, the illusion of invulnerability undermines the very response that would have supplied genuine protection.

lean into the discomfort that comes with straddling compassion and boundaries

Joseph Chilton Pearce writes, "What we are teaches the child more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.

that ability to recognize shame when we experience it, and move through it in a constructive way that allows us to maintain our authenticity and grow from our experiences.

am enough (worthiness versus shame). I've had enough (boundaries versus one-uping and comparison). Showing up, taking risks, and letting myself be seen is enough (engagement versus disengagement).

Me too" says I may not have had the exact same experience as you, but I know this struggle, and you are not alone. Sympathy says Wow, that's bad, I feel so sorry for you. I don't know or understand what your experience is like, but I'll grant you that it looks pretty bad and I don't want to know.

Rumbling with Vulnerability Living into Our Values Braving Trust Learning to Rise

There are a million cheap seats in the world today filled with people who will never be brave with their lives but who will spend every ounce of energy they have hurling advice and judgement at those who dare greatly

The greatest gift of having done this work (the research and the personal work) is that I can recognize shame when it's happening. First, I know my physical symptoms of shame—the dry mouth, time slowing down, tunnel vision, hot face, racing heart. I know that playing the painful slow-motion reel over and over in my head is a warning sign.

If we believe empathy is finite, like pizza, and practicing empathy with someone leaves fewer slices for others, then perhaps comparing levels of suffering would be necessary. Luckily, however, empathy is infinite and renewable. The more you give, the more we all have. That means all pain can be met with empathy—there's no reason to rank and ration.

Brandolini's law: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

Children experience shame as the threat of being unlovable.

With that sense of "enough" comes an embrace of worthiness, boundaries, and engagement.

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. I

Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure. In the realm of the political,among the religious, in our families, and in our romantic lives, we see little indication that love informs decisions, strengthens our understanding of community, or keeps us together. This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love's promise.

Which means we don't "fix it" by cutting people down to size and reminding folks of their inadequacies and smallness. Shame is more likely to be the cause of these behaviors, not the cure.

There are a million cheap seats in the world today filled with people who will never be brave with their lives but who will spend every ounce of energy they have hurling advice and judgment at those who dare greatly.

Now as adults we realize that to live with courage, purpose, and connection—to be the person whom we long to be—we must again be vulnerable. We must take off the armor, put down the weapons, show up, and let ourselves be seen.

What surprised me the most when I was growing up was how little other people seemed to understand or even think about the connection between feelings, thinking, and behavior. I remember often thinking, Oh, God. Do you not see this coming? I didn't feel smarter or better, just weirder and pained by the amount of hurt that we are capable of causing one another. The observation powers were partly survival and partly how I'm wired.

Give me the courage to show up and let myself be seen.

We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation. This is not the same as being alone. It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation. In the extreme, psychological isolation can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation. People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.