When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated. This is why we sometimes attack who they are, which is far more hurtful than addressing a behavior or a choice.
If you own this story you get to write the ending.
Those who have a strong sense of love and belonging have the courage to be imperfect.
Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.
Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.
The opposite of “never enough” isn’t abundance or “more than you could ever imagine.” The opposite of scarcity is enough…
Rather than risking feeling disappointed, they’re choosing to live disappointed.
I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.
Given the dark fears we feel when we experience loss, nothing is more generous and loving than the willingness to embrace grief in order to forgive. To be forgiven is to be loved.
Even to me the issue of “stay small, sweet, quiet, and modest” sounds like an outdated problem, but the truth is that women still run into those demands whenever we find and use our voices.
Women most often experience shame as a web of layered, conflicting, and competing social-community expectations. The expectations dictate who we should be, what we should be, how we should be.
Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.
We cannot grow when we are in shame, and we can’t use shame to change ourselves or others.
Creativity is the way I share my soul with the world.
When you look away from a homeless person, you diminish their humanity and your own.
Maybe looking away is about privilege. I need to think harder and longer about my choices and recognize that choosing whom I see and whom I don’t see is one of the most hurtful functions of privilege.
Denying emotion is not avoiding the high curbs, it’s never taking your car out of the garage. It’s safe in there, but you’ll never go anywhere.
Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.
Courage originally meant “To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.
Ordinary courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line. In today’s world, that’s pretty extraordinary.
When shame becomes a management style, engagement dies. When failure is not an option we can forget about learning, creativity, and innovation .
Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.
Courage has a ripple effect. Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver. And our world could stand to be a little kinder and braver.
You can’t claim to care about the welfare of children if you’re shaming other parents for the choices they’re making.
It’s in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous.
Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.
If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.
Our silence about grief serves no one. We can’t heal if we can’t grieve; we can’t forgive if we can’t grieve. We run from grief because loss scares us, yet our hearts reach toward grief because the broken parts want to mend.
Heartbreak is an altogether different thing. Disappointment doesn’t grow into heartbreak, nor does failure…It comes form the loss of love or the perceived loss of love…Heartbreak is what happens when love is lost.
Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.
Requiring accountability while also extending your compassion is not the easiest course of action, but it is the most humane, and, ultimately, the safest for the community.
No one reaches out to you for compassion or empathy so you can teach them how to behave better. They reach out to us because they believe in our capacity to know our darkness well enough to sit in the dark with them.
Compassion is not a virtue — it is a commitment. It’s not something we have or don’t have — it’s something we choose to practice.
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 we’re 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.
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.
What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.
There is no question that engagement requires sacrifice, but that’s what we signed up for when we decided to become parents.
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 who’s doing anything differently than what we’re doing as criticizing our choices.
Caring about the welfare of children and shaming parents are mutually exclusive endeavors.
I’ve found what makes children happy doesn’t always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.
We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.
I don’t have to chase extraordinary moments to find happiness – it’s right in front of me if I’m paying attention and practicing gratitude.
Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language — it’s from the Latin word cor, meaning heart — and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.
When you shut down vulnerability, you shut down opportunity
If we don’t allow ourselves to experience joy and love, we will definitely miss out on filling our reservoir with what we need when. . . . hard things happen.
When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.
If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.
Until we can receive with an open heart, we’re never really giving with an open heart. When we attach judgment to receiving help, we knowingly or unknowingly attach judgment to giving help.
Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare ourselves and our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.
Until we can receive with an open heart, we are never really giving with an open heart.
Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.
Perfectionism is a self destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.
To know shame is to be human. And to have the capacity for empathy is also to be human.
Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it- it can’t survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes.
You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviors.
If you want to make a difference, the next time you see someone being cruel to another human being, take it personally. Take it personally because it is personal!
When you judge yourself for needing help, you judge those you are helping. When you attach value to giving help, you attach value to needing help.
The willingness to show up changes us, It makes us a little braver each time.
Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.
Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.
Everyone wants to know why customer service has gone to hell in a handbasket. I want to know why customer behavior has gone to hell in a handbasket.