Quotes from Brene Brown

When we degrade and diminish our humanity, even in response to being degraded and diminished, we break our own wild hearts.

For anxiety and dread, the threat is in the future. For fear, the threat is now—in the present. Fear is a negative, short-lasting, high-alert emotion in response to a perceived threat, and, like anxiety, it can be measured as a state or trait.

When we spend our lives waiting until we're perfect or bulletproof before we walk into the arena, we ultimately sacrifice relationships and opportunities that may not be recoverable, we squander our precious time, and we turn our backs on our gifts, those unique contributions that only we can make.

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 braver and a little kinder.

The surest thing I took away from my BSW, MSW, and Ph.D. in social work is this: Connection is why we're here. We are hardwired to connect with others, it's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and without it there is suffering. I wanted to develop research that explained the anatomy of connection.

hyper-communication can mean we spend more time on Facebook than we do face-to-face with the people we care about.

La autenticidad es la práctica diaria de librarnos de lo que creemos que deberíamos ser y abrazar en cambio lo que realmente somos.

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.

Dissonance is disquieting because to hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity, and, as Albert Camus observed, we are creatures who spend our lives trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd.

Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience and transform despair into hope. Only art can take the holler of a returning soldier and turn it into a shared expression and a deep collective experience. Music, like all art, gives pain in our most wrenching emotions voice, language and form so it can be recognized and shared.

Vulnerability begets vulnerability; courage is contagious.

over making other people comfortable. It was the hardest work I've ever done and continue to do.

Setting realistic goals is a skill and a prerequisite for hope.

Quick and dirty wins the race. Perfection is the enemy of done. Good enough is really effin' good. Nicholas

Interestingly, nostalgia is more likely to be triggered by negative moods, like loneliness, and by our struggles to find meaning in our current lives.

The sorting we do to ourselves and to one another is, at best, unintentional and reflexive. At worst, it is stereotyping that dehumanizes. The paradox is that we all love the ready-made filing system, so handy when we want to quickly characterize people, but we resent it when we're the ones getting filed away.

We need to learn how to reality-check our goals and the pathways to them, and how to take the shame out of having to start over many, many times when our first plan fails.

If you are not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion, I'm not interested in or open to your feedback

Choosing to live and love with our whole hearts is an act of defiance. You're going to confuse, piss off, and terrify lots of people—including yourself. One minute you'll pray that the transformation stops, and the next minute you'll pray that it never ends. You'll also wonder how you can feel so brave and so afraid at the same time. At least that's how I feel most of the time… brave, afraid, and very, very alive.

permission slips. We each wrote down one thing that we gave ourselves permission to do or feel for this meeting. Sometimes we do it on Post-it notes, but I prefer to write in my journal so that, in addition to my meeting notes, I have a reminder of what I was feeling that day.

Just as a reminder from Chapter 4, perfectionism is not teaching them how to strive for excellence or be their best selves. Perfectionism is teaching them to value what other people think over what they think or how they feel. It's teaching them to perform, please, and prove. Unfortunately, I have many examples from my own life.

Hierarchy can work, except when those in leadership positions hold power over others—when their decisions benefit the minority and oppress the majority.

Anger becomes an acceptable substitute for fear, which is forbidden.

gratitude allows us to participate more in life. We notice the positives more, and that magnifies the pleasures you get from life. Instead of adapting to goodness, we celebrate goodness. We