Quotes by Brené Brown

Compassion is not a virtue -- it is a commitment. Its not something we have or dont have -- its something we choose to practice.

This doesnt 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 theyre actually doing. It means that we stop loving people for who they could be and start loving them for who they are. It means that sometimes when were beating ourselves up, we need to stop and say to that harassing voice inside, Man, Im doing the very best I can right now.

Another great example of the power of vulnerability -- this time in a corporation -- is the leadership approach taken by Lululemons CEO, Christine Day. In a video interview with CNN Money, Day explained that she was once a very bright, smart executive who majored in being right. Her transformation came when she realized that getting people to engage and take ownership wasnt about the teling but about letting them come into the idea in a purpose-led way, and that her job was creating the space for others to perform. She chracterized this change as the shift from having the best idea or problem solving to being the best leader of people.

The reckoning is how we walk into our story; the rumble is where we own it. The goal of the rumble is to get honest about the stories were making up about our struggles, to revisit, challenge, and reality-check these narratives.

I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.

Practicing self-love means learning how to trust ourselves, to treat ourselves with respect, and to be kind and affectionate toward ourselves. This is a tall order give how hard most of us are on ourselves. I know I can talk to myself in ways that I would never consider talking to another person. How many of us are quick to think, God, I am so stupid and Man, Im such an Idiot.? Just like calling someone we love stupid or an idiot would be incongruent with practicing love, talking like that to ourselves takes a serious toll on our self-love

Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love.

You’ll also wonder how you can feel so brave and so afraid at the same time.

I only share when I have no unmet needs that Im trying to fill. I firmly believe that being vulnerable with a larger audience is only a good idea if the healing is tied to the sharing, not to the expectations I might have for the response I get.

The biggest potential for helping us overcome shame is this: We are “those people.” The truth is…we are the others. Most of us are one paycheck, one divorce, one drug-addicted kid, one mental health illness, one sexual assault, one drinking binge, one night of unprotected sex, or one affair away from being “those people”–the ones we don’t trust, the ones we pity, the ones we don’t let our kids play with, the ones bad things happen to, the ones we don’t want living next door.

I see the cultural messaging everywhere that says an ordinary life is a meaningless life. . . . I know the yearning to believe that what Im 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.

The rising strong reckoning has two deceptively simple parts: (1) engaging with our feelings, and (2) getting curious about the story behind the feelings--what emotions were experiencing and how they are connected to our thoughts and behaviors.

What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.

The real questions for parents should be: Are you engaged? Are you paying attention? If so, plan to make lots of mistakes and bad decisions. Imperfect parenting moments turn into gifts as our children watch us try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time. The mandate is not to be perfect and raise happy children. Perfection doesnt exist, and Ive found what makes children happy doesnt always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.

There is no question that engagement requires sacrifice, but thats what we signed up for when we decided to become parents.

Fear of the Dark I’ve always been prone to worry and anxiety, but after I became a mother, negotiating joy, gratitude, and scarcity felt like a full-time job. For years, my fear of something terrible happening to my children actually prevented me from fully embracing joy and gratitude. Every time I came too close to softening into sheer joyfulness about my children and how much I love them, I’d picture something terrible happening; I’d picture losing everything in a flash. At first I thought I was crazy. Was I the only person in the world who did this? As my therapist and I started working on it, I realized that “my too good to be true” was totally related to fear, scarcity, and vulnerability. Knowing that those are pretty universal emotions, I gathered up the courage to talk about my experiences with a group of five hundred parents who had come to one of my parenting lectures. I gave an example of standing over my daughter watching her sleep, feeling totally engulfed in gratitude, then being ripped out of that joy and gratitude by images of something bad happening to her. You could have heard a pin drop. I thought, Oh, God. I’m crazy and now they’re all sitting there like, “She’s a nut. How do we get out of here?” Then all of the sudden I heard the sound of a woman toward the back starting to cry. Not sniffle cry, but sob cry. That sound was followed by someone from the front shouting out, “Oh my God! Why do we do that? What does it mean?” The auditorium erupted in some kind of crazy parent revival. As I had suspected, I was not alone.

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.

One of the reasons we judge each other so harshly in this world of parenting is because... we perceive anyone else whos doing anything differently than what were doing as criticizing our choices.

[I] never talk about gratitude and joy separately, for this reason. In 12 years, Ive never interviewed a single person who would describe their lives as joyful, who would describe themselves as joyous, who was not actively practicing gratitude.

Caring about the welfare of children and shaming parents are mutually exclusive endeavors.