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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brené Brown
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January 1 - January 6, 2019
Sometimes the most dangerous thing for kids is the silence that allows them to construct their own stories—stories that almost always cast them as alone and unworthy of love and belonging.
I walked over to the desk in my room, sat down, and wrote myself a permission slip on a Post-it note from my computer bag. It simply said, “Permission to be excited and goofy and to have fun.” It would be the first of hundreds of permission slips I would go on to write for myself. I still write them today and I teach everyone who will give me five minutes of their time the power of this intention-setting method. It totally works. But as with the permission slips you give your kids, they may have permission to go to the zoo, but they still need to get on the bus. Set the intention. Follow
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Belonging so fully to yourself that you’re willing to stand alone is a wilderness—an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. The wilderness can often feel unholy because we can’t control it, or what people think about our choice of whether to venture into that vastness or not. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.
Joseph Campbell wrote, “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”
Pain will subside only when we acknowledge it and care for it. Addressing it with love and compassion would take only a minuscule percentage of the energy it takes to fight it, but approaching pain head-on is terrifying.
Dehumanizing and holding people accountable are mutually exclusive. Humiliation and dehumanizing are not accountability or social justice tools, they’re emotional off-loading at best, emotional self-indulgence at worst. And if our faith asks us to find the face of God in everyone we meet, that should include the politicians, media, and strangers on Twitter with whom we most violently disagree. When we desecrate their divinity, we desecrate our own, and we betray our faith.
But then, if it’s the case that we can care about citizens and the police, shouldn’t the rallying cry just be All Lives Matter? No. Because the humanity wasn’t stripped from all lives the way it was stripped from the lives of black citizens. In order for slavery to work, in order for us to buy, sell, beat, and trade people like animals, Americans had to completely dehumanize slaves. And whether we directly participated in that or were simply a member of a culture that at one time normalized that behavior, it shaped us. We can’t undo that level of dehumanizing in one or two generations. I
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Black Lives Matter is a movement to rehumanize black citizens in the hearts of those of us who have consciously or unconsciously bought into the insidious, rampant, and ongoing devaluation of black lives. All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery.
I believe, and tell my students, one of the most courageous things to say in an uncomfortable conversation is “Tell me more.” Exactly when we want to turn away and change the topic, or just end the conversation, or counter, as you say, we also have the opportunity to ask what else we need to know to fully understand the other person’s perspective. Help me understand why this is so important to you, or help me understand why you don’t agree with a particular idea. And then we have to listen. Really listen. Listen to understand, not about agreeing or disagreeing. We have to listen to understand
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It’s helpful to keep in mind Alberto Brandolini’s Bullshit Asymmetry Principle or what’s sometimes known as Brandolini’s law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
I don’t know about you, but I want to know if I’m saying something that’s hurtful. I want to be kind and thoughtful with my words because I’m keenly aware of how much they matter. Will it be awkward? Yes. Is it frustrating to have to teach
people why their words are hurtful to you? Yes. Does talking about these issues require a venture into the wilderness? Yes. But it also requires that we stay vulnerable, and that’s hard to do when we turn words into weapons.
So if we love the idea of humankind but people in general are constantly on our nerves, and we can’t cover everything we don’t like in leather, how do we cultivate and grow our belief in inextricable human connection internally? The answer that emerged from my research shocked me. Show up for collective moments of joy and pain so we can actually bear witness to inextricable human connection.
Turn on the lights in the theater and ask the Harry Potter fans and their parents to discuss the pros and cons of
public schools versus private schools versus homeschooling, Voldemort will look friendly. If you gathered the men and women of FM 1960 in a room away from the time and context of the Challenger tragedy and asked them whether the U.S. government should put more money into defense spending, social welfare programs, or space exploration, do you think you’d see a lot of random hugging and patting on the back? Turn the Garth Brooks concert into a political rally, and it’s likely you’ll see singing turn into a screaming match. All of these scenarios will more than likely fuel disconnection and
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Common enemy intimacy is counterfeit connection and the opposite of true belonging. If the bond we share with others is simply that we hate the same people, the intimacy we experience is often intense, immediately gratifying, and an easy way to discharge outrage and pain. It is not, however, fuel for real connection. It’s fuel that runs hot, burns fast, and leaves a trail of polluted emotion. And if we live with any level of self-awareness, it’s also the kind of intimacy that can leave us with the intense regrets of an integrity hangover.
Vault: Learning how to keep confidences, to recognize what’s ours to share and what’s not. The challenge is to stop using gossip, common enemy intimacy, and oversharing as a way to hotwire connection.
Many of us armor up early as a way to protect ourself as children. Once we grow into adults, we start to realize that the armor is preventing us from growing into our gifts and ourself. Just like we can strengthen our courage muscle for a stronger back by examining our need to be perfect and please others at the expense of our own life, we can exercise the vulnerability muscle that allows us to soften and stay open rather than attack and defend. This means getting comfortable with vulnerability. Most of the time we approach life with an armored front for two reasons: 1) We’re not comfortable
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