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Most of us want Wholehearted, meaningful lives. What stops us? In Daring Greatly, Brené Brown suggests that what holds us back the most is the widespread belief that vulnerability is a weakness. If you can embrace your vulnerability, you’ll find that it’s actually your greatest strength.

In Daring Greatly, you’ll learn how to live a Wholehearted life and become a better leader, parent, and spouse in the process.

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Shame at Home

Home is where the shame cycle ultimately begins. Children are deeply vulnerable, and dependent on their caretakers. Raising a child is rooted in doubt and uncertainty. These two components are a perfect foundation for shame development. When a child experiences shame, they feel unworthy of love. This makes them feel emotionally and physically unsafe. Children who are shamed will grow into adults who both internalize, and perpetuate shame culture.

Obstacle #3: Vulnerability Armor

Shame makes you fearful of vulnerability, and therefore, each of us utilizes a common arsenal of protective armors to prevent ourselves from engaging with it.

Armor #1: Foreboding Joy

This armor is characterized by happiness, followed by a sense of impending doom. Research shows that when you are not able to be present with vulnerability, you often feel exposed when experiencing positive emotions like joy, because you are waiting for the other shoe to drop. In this sense, joy causes you to feel immediately unsafe, so you never fully experience it.

For example, you might experience fear and sadness during the process of falling in love, because you are anticipating loss.

Armor #2: Perfectionism

Perfectionism is the false belief that shame is avoidable as long as you do everything correctly. It’s used for protection, but what it really protects is your authentic self, so you don’t have to let anyone see what you perceive to be your inadequacies. The problem is, perfectionism seeks approval from external sources. With your worth dependent on something outside of yourself, you lack the self-trust to take risks, or the ability to make mistakes without sinking into shame.

For example, you might be doing everything “right” to be the perfect partner in the hopes that you will never be broken up with, and be broken up with anyway. You may blame yourself, feeling shame because you weren’t “perfect enough.”

Armor #3: Numbing

To numb is to seek something that will ease or allow you to escape your pain. Numbing can take many forms, including substance abuse, unhealthy eating habits, workaholism, and so on. Anything that you use to escape is considered numbing. It’s impossible to pick and choose what you numb, so the danger is that you will numb the entire spectrum of emotion, including the positive.

For example, you might binge a show on netflix after a hard day, or spend extra hours at work to avoid an unhappy home life. These actions don’t address the root of the problem, and they may even keep you from experiencing the positive emotions that come from living life with awareness.

What Are the Consequences of Leaving These Obstacles Unresolved?

When you are stuck in fear, shame, and lack, you cut off your ability to engage with life in a truly meaningful way. These obstacles ultimately prevent you from experiencing worthiness, connection, and belonging.

Solution #1: Develop Wholeheartedness

The best solution to the culture or practice of scarcity (the belief that there is never enough) is to develop a culture and practice of Wholeheartedness (the belief that there has always been enough). Wholeheartedness allows you to live a fully connected life, and is the antithesis to scarcity. What are the results of Wholeheartedness?

  • Wholehearted Individuals: When you believe yourself to be enough, your sense of self depends on your own approval, and not the approval of others. This allows you to show up for yourself with courage and authenticity.
  • Wholehearted Relationships: When you know your worth, you are able to truly connect with others, build meaningful relationships, and experience real belonging.
  • Wholehearted Workplaces: When you develop Wholeheartedness as an employee or leader, you are able to engage in innovative risk taking, because you know you are enough. You don’t need to compare yourself to others, or protect yourself from criticism.
  • Wholehearted Schools: Similarly to the above, Wholeheartedness facilitates meaningful engagement rooted in worthiness, which allows students to access courage, creative learning, and free themselves from comparing their learning process to the learning processes of their peers.
  • Wholehearted Families: When your home environment is rooted in Wholehearted values, you are able to demonstrate worthiness, self-compassion, and resilience to your children. Your children then grow into worthy, compassionate, and resilient adults.

Solution #2: Practice Shame Resilience

Step #1: Notice Shame and Identify Your Triggers

Observe your physical and psychological experience of shame, and identify common patterns. This serves the purpose of familiarizing you with your shame process so that you can begin to develop resilience.

Step #2: Develop Critical Awareness

Once you’ve observed and identified your shame patterns, inquire more deeply into them. Determine their value based on whether or not the thoughts, beliefs, or expectations they reveal align with reasonable reality, or stem from a desire to meet expectations outside of yourself. This is a way to practice introspective authenticity, and determine what is actually attainable.

Step #3: Reach Out and Connect

After you’ve explored critical awareness, it’s important to reach out to someone you trust, and share your experience. This demonstrates worthiness and facilitates belonging.

Step #4: Practice Speaking About Shame

The more comfortable you can become speaking about experiences of shame, the more you develop self-advocacy, which is a crucial part of practicing worthiness.

Solution #3: Embrace Vulnerability

Tool #1: Gratitude to Transform Foreboding Joy

Foreboding joy is rooted in fear and scarcity mentality. We fear the loss of it, and we worry there is a limit, or that we aren’t worthy of it. Practicing gratitude is a direct reminder that there absolutely is enough, and you yourself are also enough.

For example, notice when you experience fear during a joyful moment, and immediately speak gratitude about the moment of joy (aloud, if possible).

Tool #2: Self-Compassion to Transform Perfectionism

Perfectionism is about self-criticism. You can disarm it by practicing being kind to yourself instead of tearing yourself down.

For example, the next time you make a mistake, instead of beating yourself up, stop and say to yourself, “I did my best, and that’s okay,”

Tool #3: Mindfulness to Transform Numbing

Mindfulness is the perfect antidote to numbing, because it is about sitting with your experience as it unfolds. When you learn to be present with yourself, you can notice your numbing behaviors, and feel more empowered to make healthier choices.

For example, notice when you have the urge to distract yourself with something, whether it be media, work, or substances, and simply acknowledge to yourself that you’re experiencing discomfort.

Each of these tools can be applied to any of the common vulnerability armors.

What Are the Benefits to Developing These Solutions?

The greatest benefit is that you get to cultivate the ability to show up authentically in every area of life with courage and vulnerability. This allows you to experience love, connection, belonging, and ultimately to build a truly meaningful life.

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PDF Summary Introduction: Shame, Vulnerability, and the Path to a Wholehearted Life

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The Biggest Obstacle to Wholeheartedness: Shame

Shame is the greatest obstacle to wholehearted living.

Shame makes you feel like you’re not enough as you are, and it causes you to fear you’re not worthy of connection or belonging. It’s the result of living in a culture that encourages you to believe you must live an extraordinary life in order for it to be a meaningful one. You feel shame when the reality of your life doesn’t match your own expectations or the expectations of others.

Shame kills your courage, impedes your ability to think or act in innovative ways, and prevents you from experiencing life meaningfully. Shame thrives when kept hidden and left unchecked. In order for shame to survive, it needs you to believe you’re not connected and don’t belong.

The Best Solution For Shame: Vulnerability

Vulnerability is the cure for shame.

It’s defined by actions that leave you feeling exposed, at risk, and for which you cannot predict the outcome (such as telling someone you have a crush on them, or asking for help when you’re struggling). Vulnerability frees you from the shackles of shame by exposing the lies it tells you. Counterintuitively, when you...

PDF Summary Chapter 1: Scarcity and Our Culture of “Never Enough”

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Result #2: Comparison, or determining the value of something by ranking it alongside something else.

We do this in our culture by comparing our lives to the lives of others, or to our idea of the perfect life. Competition is healthy for growth, but over-comparison impedes growth by limiting it to a narrow standard or expectation.

Result #3: Disengagement, or a lack of willingness and ability to connect.

Our culture is full of disengagement—we are disengaged in the way we glorify hiding or detaching from pain (stoicism), as well as in our collective focus on serving the self and not the other (individualism). Disengagement prevents you from taking risks in your life, because you are detached from your willingness to be vulnerable. You’re not present enough to show up. When disengaged, you’re not able to be seen or heard, and you’re not able to truly see or hear others, which impedes your ability to connect, and activates your fear of inadequacy. When you’re not able to connect in meaningful ways, or feel like others don’t have the desire to invest time and effort into connecting with you, you doubt your worthiness of love.

Result #4: Narcissistic...

PDF Summary Chapter 2: Vulnerability Myths

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A great way to dispel is to look at the definitions of “vulnerability” and “weakness.” Merriam-Webster defines Vulnerability as “open to attack or damage.” Weakness is defined as “the inability to withstand attack or wounding.” There are important distinctions in these definitions. To be weak means to be unable to defend, whereas to be vulnerable means to be open. You are certainly capable of being harmed when you’re open, but this does not mean you are defenseless.

You may think your emotions make you weak, but your emotions on their own demonstrate neither weakness, nor strength. The way you choose to view them is what determines your experience of them. Studies show that acknowledging the ways you are vulnerable, paradoxically, makes you stronger, not weaker. If you don’t acknowledge your vulnerability, you are not prepared to protect yourself. It’s the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand, and believing what you can’t see, can’t hurt you.

How Do You Confront This Myth?

You confront it by showing up, and being willing to be vulnerable, even at the risk of pain. Examples might be joining a recreational team for a sport you’ve never played, asking...

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PDF Summary Chapter 3: Make Shame Make Sense

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Of the four terms, guilt and shame are the most relevant to wholeheartedness. Shame in particular is toxic, and prevents wholeheartedness, because it conflates your behavior with who you are, corroding your belief in your ability to grow. It also impedes action, because it makes you believe that if you do something bad, you are inherently bad, which prevents you from feeling like it’s possible to change. Therefore, shame is inherently destructive.

Categories of Shame

Brown’s research identified 12 categories of shame that fall under three core themes.

Body Image and Health
  1. Mental and physical health: Fear of not having a fit enough body, not being strong enough, not being smart enough, and so on.
  2. Addiction: Fear of never feeling happy enough, or alive enough, or peaceful enough.
  3. Sex: Fear of unworthiness, or fear of being ugly.
  4. Aging: Fear of no longer being loved and admired for looks, or fear of mind deterioration.
  5. Appearance and body image: Fear of not having the right weight, the right make-up, clothes, and so on.
Relationships

6. Motherhood or Fatherhood: Fear of being unprepared or unable to identify with the role of...

PDF Summary Chapter 4, Part 1: Vulnerability and Armor

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The greatest danger with this shield is the way you can slip into experiencing life through a lens of perpetual disappointment, to a point where you don’t even feel joy, you just expect pain. The tragedy of this is that you become starved for joy, but unable to be with the vulnerability that would allow you to access it. All you’re really doing when you feed foreboding joy is trying to avoid being surprised by pain. You would rather practice the expectation of it, than be “caught with your pants down”, so to speak.

Armor #2—Perfectionism

The self-destructive belief that you can avoid shame if you do everything in life exactly right.

  • An example would be overachieving in school to avoid the shame of not feeling worthy enough or smart enough, or people-pleasing in our relationships at our own expense, to avoid conflict or rejection.

It’s common to believe that perfectionism is protecting you, when in reality, it is preventing the world from seeing who you truly are. Perfectionism is about approval. If you struggle with perfectionism, it’s likely you were rewarded for this behavior from an early age. The risk of being rewarded for perfectionism is that you...

PDF Summary Chapter 4, Part 2: Disarming the Armor

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Practice #2—Practice Gratitude

Those who have experienced tragic loss understand the importance of appreciating what you have when you have it. You can pay your respect to the reality of loss by honoring the joy that arises in your everyday experiences.

Practice #3—Embrace the Discomfort of Softening Into Joy

It’s impossible to prepare for or avoid pain. No amount of catastrophizing in advance will protect you from loss. Every time you do this, you lose the opportunity to develop resilience. Resilience is a cornerstone of hope, and you can build resilience by really allowing yourself to sink into moments of joy, even when you are fearful it will go away.

Disarming Tool #2: Perfectionism

Embrace imperfection, strive for excellence.

No one is perfect. The healthy alternative to perfectionism is striving to be the best version of yourself, and allowing your own perception to determine this, rather than the perception of others. Perfectionism has a spectrum, but the way out is to shift from being other-focused to being self-focused. In other words, you stop thinking, “Do others think I am enough?” and start trusting that you are enough. You can shift...

PDF Summary Chapter 5: Mind the Gap, Build the Bridge

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Strategy: The method or plan for achieving a goal. You might say strategy is part of “how we want to show up”. Everyone utilizes strategy. Families utilize it to achieve life milestones like having a baby or moving across the country, religious groups use it to build their congregation, and teachers use it to facilitate student learning goals.

Culture: Culture, or as Brown calls it, “the way we do things around here,” is defined by what behavior is acceptable within the collective. You might call culture “how we show up in practice”. Culture is made up of social contracts that formulate the status quo. From a goal-oriented standpoint, it’s less about the goal or the strategy of achieving it, and more about who or what the goal serves.

When we don’t find a way to align strategy and culture, we experience a greater societal disconnect, which prevents our ability to engage with one another in wholehearted ways on the broader scale.

How Can We Gain Insight Into the Culture of Any Group?

In order to see the gap between a society’s strategy and culture, you need to first understand what the culture of that society is. You can learn a lot about any particular culture...

PDF Summary Chapter 6: Rehumanize the System

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Obstacle #2: Risk Avoidance

Creativity and learning are, by nature, unpredictable and uncertain experiences. They can only occur as a result of taking risks and being vulnerable. You need to be able to experience failure to learn and grow.

What Do These Obstacles Look Like In Our Schools and Workplaces?

Put simply, they look like cultures based in shame. These types of environments are unsustainable. They facilitate the erosion of self-esteem and self-worth. When people experience shame long enough, defense mechanisms automatically arise as protection. The number one defense mechanism that will arise in a shame-prone environment is disengagement.

How Can You Tell Shame Has Taken Over The Culture?

Usually, you are on your way to shame culture in your school or organization if you see any of the following red flags:

Red Flag #1—Blaming
  • For example, let’s say you are a high school student, and you have a teacher who doesn’t effectively teach the concepts they are covering. You then take a quiz, which you fail. Instead of acknowledging there may have been gaps in the curriculum, your teacher tells you that you need to pay better attention in...

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PDF Summary Chapter 7: Parenting With a Whole Heart

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Problem #2—Judgment

Being certain of anything to an extreme can cause you to judge others for what you perceive to be “wrong” choices. It plays on your inner doubt, because we tend to only engage in judgment when we don’t have confidence in our own methods. This impedes growth because the fear of not being perfect causes you to focus instead on at least being better than those around you, which can become a vicious shame and judgment cycle.

The ultimate problem with giving in to the craving for certainty is that it sets an unstable foundation from which to raise happy, healthy kids, and increases a parent’s fear of making irreparable mistakes.

How Parents Unintentionally Harm Their Children

Children, from a survival standpoint, are deeply vulnerable. They are dependent on those caring for them. Shame causes children to feel unlovable, which threatens their sense of, not just emotional, but physical safety. Under these conditions, for children, shame is trauma. One of the most common ways you can fall short as a parent is by failing to distinguish for your children the difference between “you are bad” and “you did something bad.”

This distinction is important...