YOUR KINDLE NOTES FOR:
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable
Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
by Brené Brown
Free Kindle instant preview: http://amzn.asia/6mCVCRS
18 Highlights
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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.
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Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage,
compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is
left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes
afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.
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Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experiences.
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What we know matters, but who we are matters more. Being rather than knowing requires showing up and
letting ourselves be seen. It requires us to dare greatly, to be vulnerable. The first step of that journey is
understanding where we are, what we’re up against, and where we need to go. I think we can best do that by
examining our pervasive “Never Enough” culture.
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For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I
don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we
even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining,
complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of.…Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet
touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the
time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day.
We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack.…This internal condition of
scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our
arguments with life.…(43–45). Scarcity is the “never enough” problem. The word scarce is from the Old
Norman French scars,
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Vulnerability is the core of all emotions and feelings. To feel is to be vulnerable. To believe vulnerability is
weakness is to believe that feeling is weakness. To foreclose on our emotional life out of a fear that the costs
will be too high is to walk away from the very thing that gives purpose and meaning to living.
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I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.
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Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re
never weakness.
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Vulnerability is about sharing our feelings and our experiences with people who have earned the right to hear
them. Being vulnerable and open is mutual and an integral part of the trust-building process.
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Trust is a product of vulnerability that grows over time and requires work, attention, and full engagement. Trust
isn’t a grand gesture—it’s a growing marble collection.
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“Oh, the twinkle light quote. It’s one of my favorites: ‘Only when we’re brave enough to explore the darkness
will we discover the infinite power of our light.’”
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Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of
love and belonging.
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Here are some of the responses we received when we asked people for an example of shame: Shame is getting
laid off and having to tell my pregnant wife. Shame is having someone ask me, “When are you due?” when I’m
not pregnant. Shame is hiding the fact that I’m in recovery. Shame is raging at my kids. Shame is bankruptcy.
Shame is my boss calling me an idiot in front of the client. Shame is not making partner. Shame is my husband
leaving me for my next-door neighbor.
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Shame is my wife asking me for a divorce and telling me that she wants children, but not with me. Shame is my
DUI. Shame is infertility. Shame is telling my fiancé that my dad lives in France when in fact he’s in prison.
Shame is Internet porn. Shame is flunking out of school. Twice. Shame is hearing my parents fight through the
walls and wondering if I’m the only one who feels this afraid.
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The statistics on post-traumatic-stress-related suicides, violence, addiction, and risk-taking all point to this
haunting truth: For soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, coming home is more lethal than being in combat.
From the invasion of Afghanistan to the summer of 2009, the US military lost 761 soldiers in combat in that
country. Compare that to the 817 who took their own lives over the same period. And this number doesn’t
account for deaths related to violence, high-risk behaviors, and addiction. Craig Bryan, a University of Texas
psychologist and suicide expert who recently left the air force, told Time magazine that the military finds itself
in a catch-22: “We train our warriors to use controlled violence and aggression, to suppress strong emotional
reactions in the face of adversity, to tolerate physical and emotional pain, and to overcome the fear of injury and
death. These qualities are also associated with increased risk for suicide.” Bryan then explained that the military
can’t decrease the intensity of that conditioning “without negatively affecting the fighting capability of our
military.”
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As parents, we may have less control than we think over temperament and personality, and less control than we
want over the scarcity culture. But we do have powerful parenting opportunities in other areas: how we help our
children understand, leverage, and appreciate their hardwiring, and how we teach them resilience in the face of
relentless “never enough” cultural messages. In terms of teaching our children to dare greatly in the “never
enough” culture, the question isn’t so much “Are you parenting the right way?” as it is: “Are you the adult that
you want your child to grow up to be?”
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In other words, if we want our children to love and accept who they are, our job is to love and accept who we
are. We can’t use fear, shame, blame, and judgment in our own lives if we want to raise courageous children.
Compassion and connection—the very things that give purpose and meaning to our lives—can only be learned if
they are experienced. And our families are our first opportunities to experience these things.
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Research indicates that parenting is a primary predictor of how prone our children will be to shame or guilt. In
other words, we have a lot of influence over how our kids think about themselves and their struggles.