Quotes About Vulnerability

If we can learn how to feel our way through these experiences and own our stories of struggle, we can write our own brave endings. When we own our stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in stories someone else is telling.

We invite compassion into our lives when we act compassionately toward ourselves and others, and we feel connected in our lives when we reach out and connect.

Unfortunately, being low maintenance also meant not asking for what you needed and never inconveniencing anyone.

Shame keeps worthiness away by convincing us that owning our stories will lead to people thinking less of us. Shame is all about fear. We're afraid that people won't like us if they know the truth about who we are, where we come from, what we believe, how much we're struggling, or, believe it or not, how wonderful we are when soaring (sometimes it's just as hard to own our strengths as our struggles).

I gave him a nervous smile and said "Say more." Another favorite rumble tool. Asking someone to "say more" often leads to profoundly deeper and more productive rumbling. Context and details matter. Peel the onion. Stephen Covey's sage advice still stands: "Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

We need to have owned our stories before sharing them is experienced as a gift. A story is only ready to share when the presenter's healing and growth is not dependent on the audience's response to it.

Staying real" is one of the most courageous battles that we'll ever fight.

When we give ourselves permission to be imperfect, when we find self-worth despite our imperfections, when we build connection networks that affirm and value us as imperfect beings, we are much more capable of change.

Choosing to own our vulnerability and do it consciously means learning how to rumble with this emotion and understand how it drives our thinking and behavior so we can stay aligned with our values and live in our integrity. Pretending that we don't do vulnerability means letting fear drive our thinking and behavior without our input or even awareness, which almost always leads to acting out or shutting down.

The trick for staying out of resentment is maintaining better boundaries - blaming others less and holding myself more accountable for asking for what I need and want.

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—

Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. 1

choose courage, you will absolutely know failure, disappointment, setback, even heartbreak. That's why we call it courage. That's why it's so rare.

The difference between leading from hurt and leading from heart is not what you've experienced or are currently experiencing, it's what you do with that pain and hurt.

But the feeling of scarcity does thrive in shame-prone cultures that are deeply steeped in comparison and fractured by disengagement.

it's our fear of the unknown and our fear of being wrong that create most of our conflict and anxiety.

Yes, there can be no innovation, learning, or creativity without failure. But failing is painful. It fuels the "shouldas and couldas," which means judgment and shame are often lying in wait.

And they all share the same formula of shame, comparison, and disengagement. Scarcity bubbles up from these conditions and perpetuates them until a critical mass of people start making different choices and reshaping the smaller cultures they belong to.

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 get 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 reality-check the criticism and cynicism. I

Our ability to be daring leaders will never be greater than our capacity for vulnerability

If we want to reclaim the essential part of our lives and reignite our passion and purpose, we have to learn how to own and engage with our vulnerability and how to feel the emotions that come with it.

My decision to dare greatly didn't stem from self-confidence as much as it did from faith in my research. I know I'm a good researcher, and I trusted that the conclusions I had drawn from the data were valid and reliable.

Researchers Tamara Ferguson, Heidi Eyre, and Michael Ashbaker have found that "unwanted identity" is one of the primary elicitors of shame. They explain that unwanted identities are characteristics that undermine our vision of our ideal selves.

Still, as much as it's time to confront these and other issues, we have to acknowledge that our lack of tolerance for vulnerable, tough conversations is driving our self-sorting and disconnection.