We innately seek connection and belonging. Brené Brown describes this as the desire to live “Wholeheartedly.” Wholehearted living is characterized by behavior or beliefs that facilitate meaningful engagement and growth.
However, Wholehearted living is impeded by shame, which prevents you from accessing or expressing the vulnerability necessary for true connection. In Daring Greatly, you’ll learn:
Human beings need three things in order to feel happy and healthy: love, connection, and belonging. Unfortunately, we all face a number of obstacles on the path to meeting these needs, including our culture of scarcity, shame, and fear of vulnerability.
We’ll cover each of the obstacles, then look at Brown’s solutions for overcoming them in your own life and becoming Wholehearted.
The most prominent obstacle is the mentality of scarcity embedded in our culture. Cultures of scarcity are infused with a constant sense or expectation of lack. There is “never enough” of anything, a constant focus on filling what feels like an empty cup. This has occurred in response to chronic, collective trauma on the broader scale, and has resulted in cultural post-traumatic stress. It manifests in three ways.
Shame is characterized by fear of not being worthy of love, connection, or belonging. In other words, it’s the internalized manifestation of “never enough” culture.
For example, sometimes one generation will shame another generation for their mistakes or perceived inadequacies. Consider the way the “Boomer” generation sees the “Millennial” generation as not being responsible or hard working enough (or vice versa, with Millennials viewing Boomers as not being flexible or adaptable enough).
Disengagement is lack of connection, whether it be a lack of willingness to connect, or an inability to connect. It is a type of burnout that arises from unsuccessfully seeking meaningful presence within a culture that is profoundly focused on what is not present.
For example, students and teachers alike struggle to meaningfully connect with one another, whether it be due to large class sizes that don’t allow for personal engagement or material taught for the purpose of passing a standardized test.
To compare is to rank someone or something against another, and allow that ranking to determine value. Scarcity culture breeds comparison, because everyone is always comparing what they have (or lack) to what others have (or lack), whether that be material or emotional.
For example, you are bombarded on a daily basis with messages and images that encourage you to compare who you are, and what you have with that of others. Consider the woman who is constantly seeking the “perfect” body because she is comparing her body to pictures of women in magazines.
Shame is the most pervasive effect of scarcity culture. It causes you to fear that you will never be enough, and as a result, to fear that you are unworthy of belonging. Shame is woven into every aspect of our lives.
You are confronted daily by cultural messaging that tells you that you are not good enough, not smart enough, not good-looking enough, and so on. You are told that all the ways in which you are not enough will end in rejection. As a result, you internalize the expectations of others, build a false self based on those expectations, and develop a deepening sense of inadequacy.
Healthy love is cultivated with vulnerability and trust. Intimacy is not possible without those things. Shame prevents vulnerability, and erodes trust. It is especially damaging in an intimate relationship, because when employed, it twists the sacredness of vulnerability into a weapon. Once this occurs, trust is damaged. If it becomes chronic, you have a recipe for destroying the entire foundation of intimacy.
Many work environments are shame-prone, as shame is often used as a management tool. This type of environment is unsustainable, and detrimental to employee self-esteem. If shame permeates a work culture for long enough, people eventually begin to throw up protective mechanisms. The most common result of this is disengagement, which causes risk aversion and impedes workplace innovation.
Shame-prone school environments are similar to shame-prone work environments, and they’re subject to the same pitfalls and destructive results. If students experience too much chronic shame they will eventually disengage from the learning process. This results in less connection to material and less of a willingness to be vulnerable enough to take risks. Learning requires both risk and meaningful engagement.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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,”
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.
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.
Connection is the cornerstone of the human experience and something every human being needs to be happy. Daring Greatly teaches that the biggest obstacle to experiencing connection is shame. In order to move through shame, and find connection, you need to have the courage to engage with vulnerability. This practice is called Wholehearted Living. To live “Wholeheartedly” means to dare greatly, to know you’re worthy of a fully connected life, and to build a relationship with life that reflects that knowledge.
Wholehearted living is based on five core ideals.
Ideal #1: Human beings are biologically wired to need love, connection, and belonging to survive. When you don’t get these things, you experience pain and suffering.
Ideal #2: People who feel a sense of love, connection, and belonging believe they are worthy of it. In contrast, people who don’t believe themselves worthy of love, connection, and belonging are unlikely to feel these things.
Ideal #3: The feeling of worthiness is not inherent, it’s learned. You learn your worth through embodying worthiness in daily habits and practices. Those who feel worthy have developed and practiced tools that allow them to hold on to their sense of worthiness no matter what life throws at them.
Ideal #4: People who live wholeheartedly cultivate compassion, bravery, and connection in every aspect of their lives. Courage and compassion are both prerequisites for connection. They serve you best when you engage with them in every area of your life.
Ideal #5: The main commonality amongst wholehearted people is the willingness to be vulnerable. Just as courage and compassion are necessary stepping stones to connection, vulnerability is the foundation for anything Wholehearted. You need vulnerability to be courageous, to be compassionate, and to connect.
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.
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 have the courage to be vulnerable by opening up to others, you begin to dismantle shame-based beliefs around vulnerability. Choosing to be openly vulnerable says, “I am not alone. I am worthy of connection. I am worthy of being seen.”
If you want to live a wholehearted life, you have to have the courage to show up and be vulnerable. Not only is it the cure for shame, but vulnerability is the prerequisite for a truly meaningful life. In Daring Greatly, Brown teaches you how to move through shame by continually reinforcing and unpacking the relationship between shame, vulnerability, connection, and belonging.
In the first four chapters, you’ll deepen your understanding of the obstacles and solutions to wholehearted living: scarcity culture (Chapter 1), vulnerability myths (Chapter 2), shame (Chapter 3), and protective “armor” (Chapter 4). In the final 3 chapters, you’ll explore these obstacles in greater societal contexts: culture (Chapter 5), work and education (Chapter 6), and parenting (Chapter 7), as well as discuss their possible solutions.
We want to take risks, but because we live in a culture of scarcity, the fear of not being enough makes us prioritize protecting our sense of self. One of the ways we do this is by projecting an ideal image of ourselves out to the world. In Chapter 1, we look at the ways in which this mentality is an obstacle to wholehearted living, as well as what can be done to resolve it.
A culture of scarcity is a culture preoccupied with lack, in which the focus is on your inadequacies, and there is a perpetual felt sense of “never enough.” The preoccupation with scarcity may well be the biggest cultural influence of our time. We’re afraid we’re not enough, and we respond to this by trying to prove how extraordinary we are.
As a collective, we have experienced (and continue to experience) local, national, and global trauma that has stolen our sense of safety. Culturally, we’re traumatized, and it manifests as a hyper-vigilant, pervasive, underlying worry. As a way to control, we hold up an idealized image of ourselves, our lives, our days (in other words, Instagram-worthy), and when the reality doesn’t hold up, we experience suffering. From a cultural standpoint, this creates four problematic results.
Shame is apparent in our culture in the way we use criticism as a weapon or a means of disempowering others, in the way our sense of worthiness is dependent on validation, and in the way we reward perfectionism and punish mistakes. Shame makes you seek confirmation outside of yourself to prove your worthiness, instead of trusting that you’re worthy regardless of your flaws. You’ll explore shame more deeply in Chapter 3.
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.
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.
The more you compare your life to the ideal life, the more inadequate you will feel. The more inadequate you feel, the more you attach yourself to the ideal. It’s a vicious cycle, and we’ve gotten so caught up in it, that we’ve begun to display more and more “narcissistic” behavior as a collective. We demonstrate behaviors like hyper prioritization of our own needs, putting others down to make ourselves feel more important, or basic dismissiveness. Instead of looking more closely at the root of these behaviors, we chalk them up to us all being a bunch of hopeless narcissists.
Narcissistic behavior is learned behavior, which means it is not the problem, but the result of a problem. Narcissists, deep down, behave the way they do out of fear and shame. They want to be seen as extraordinary, because they believe that is what they need to be to belong. We also have a tendency to demonize these traits, which reinforces the mentality of scarcity.
Your behavior is not who you are. When the world defines you by your behavior, you are more ashamed or afraid to ask for help. Our culture sees shame as a solution, but shame is the root of the problem, and the way we currently hold that problem impedes our ability to actualize a real solution.
How do we address the root of the problem? The antithesis to scarcity, according to Brown, is Wholeheartedness. Wholeheartedness revolves around the willingness to be vulnerable and the belief that you are already enough.
For example, you can take steps to be more vulnerable by:
Each of these reflects a willingness to expose yourself, and demonstrates a belief in your worthiness regardless of the outcome of the experience.
The price of giving in to scarcity mentality is you become unable to embrace vulnerability or believe in your worth. If you want to live a wholehearted life, you need to confront these blocks, and move beyond the feeling of “never enough.”
Reflect on the obstacles keeping you from believing in your own inherent worth and the effect these obstacles have on your life.
Write down some of your “Never Enough” thoughts. Where in your life do you feel like you aren’t enough? Examples might be “I never feel successful enough” or “I never feel smart enough.”
Why do you feel this way? Do you compare yourself to others or compare your life to the “ideal” lives portrayed in the media?
How do your “never enough” thoughts affect your behavior? (For example, do you find yourself trying to hide the parts of you that feel inadequate? Or curating an ideal image of yourself for the world? Perhaps creating an overblown expression of yourself on social media, or putting a persona on in the workplace?)
How do these behaviors affect how you feel about yourself?
What kinds of experiences or activities help you feel most meaningfully connected? What is one new experience you can engage in today that will support your belief that you’re already “enough,” just as you are?
Vulnerability gives you the power to move beyond shame and scarcity. As a culture, we have many false beliefs about vulnerability that reinforce our focus on scarcity. Embracing vulnerability requires you to distinguish the myths from the truth. In this chapter, we identify and dismantle four common myths about vulnerability.
This myth revolves around viewing vulnerability as a deficiency. When you view vulnerability this way, it comes from the belief that experiencing “negative” emotions means you’re weak. This belief is ultimately quite dangerous. Why? It causes you to avoid your vulnerability, which results in the expectation that others do the same. When they don’t, you feel superior, and see them as weak. Seeing yourself and others through a lens of contempt prevents you from connecting in meaningful ways.
To be vulnerable is to be present with the full spectrum of your emotional experience. You can’t experience joy without being aware of the possibility of sorrow, or experience sorrow without being aware of the absence of joy. In that vein, even positive experiences of vulnerability may remind you of darker emotions that you want to reject (grief, shame, rage, etc). Negative emotions make you feel weak and fearful, and because vulnerability opens you up to these emotions, you may see vulnerability as the problem. It doesn’t discriminate between positive or negative feelings. In order to reject negative emotion, you need to reject vulnerability. In order to reject vulnerability, you need to reject all emotions. You can only access that lighter end of the spectrum if you’re willing to be with the full spectrum.
Vulnerability, in reality, is a neutral experience. You experience it no matter what. You do get to choose whether or not you embrace it, but you can’t embrace it if you see it as weakness.
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.
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 someone on a date, or applying for a job you don’t feel totally qualified for.
Vulnerability makes you stronger, not weaker. Simply choosing to show up builds courage, and courage is the foundation for embracing vulnerability.
Another common myth about vulnerability is that you can opt out of it. This is not true. Why?
You are vulnerable just by being alive. You could spend your whole life trying to avoid vulnerability, and you still wouldn’t escape it, because life is fragile by nature. It can be taken from you in an instant. All you do when you “opt out” of vulnerability is put on a mask. The mask might look like apathy, people-pleasing, comedic deflection, and so on. Its purpose is to protect you, but the mask is not who you are, and wearing it prevents you from connecting to and expressing your authentic self. This blocks your path to connecting with others and experiencing belonging.
You can’t control whether or not you experience vulnerability, but you can control how you engage with it. You’ll learn more about this in later chapters.
Part of the reason people feel repelled by vulnerability may actually be due to confusing it with oversharing.
Oversharing is compulsive sharing with little to no consideration for consent or boundaries. This type of sharing actually causes people to feel disconnected and unsafe. Therefore, it prevents you from engaging with true vulnerability, and is a breeding ground for manipulative behavior. When you have a habit of oversharing, you are more likely to use vulnerability as a tactic to simply get your needs met, as opposed to engaging with vulnerability for the purpose of meaningful connection.
Vulnerability is reciprocal sharing built on mutual consent and healthy boundaries. It’s something you do with people you have established trust with. Sharing in this way allows you to feel safe and connected to one another.
You can be mindful not to confuse healthy vulnerability with unhealthy oversharing. Trust is the foundation of healthy vulnerability. It’s a requirement for vulnerability, and also requires vulnerability in order to be built. Building trust is a gradual, deliberate process. In every moment, you have the opportunity to strengthen or erode it. When you take the opportunity to show up in your relationships, you build trust.
The greatest threat to trust is disengagement. When you stop caring, stop connecting, or stop taking opportunities to show up, trust dissipates.
One of the most romanticized myths in our culture is the notion that we can “go it alone.” We admire loners for what we perceive to be their personal strength. Unfortunately, living life without support generally causes suffering. Why? Research shows that you need and desire support from others, and vulnerability requires that you be willing to ask for or receive support. If you don’t learn to receive without judging yourself, you won’t be able to give without judgment, either. Not being able to give and receive meaningfully keeps you stuck in the middle, neither giving nor receiving in ways that feel fulfilling, and therefore perpetuating the belief that you are better off alone.
You confront it by having the courage to sit with the discomfort that arises at the idea of reaching out to connect. When you lean in to your discomfort, and have the courage to ask for help, you gradually teach yourself that it is safe to be vulnerable with others. You learn that you don’t have to “go it alone”.
You can also confront it by paying attention to how you feel when you see others being vulnerable. Despite seeing our own vulnerability as weakness, we’re often inspired when we see it in others. When we see others have the courage to be vulnerable, we’re more likely to follow suit. A great example of this is in the workplace. If a person in a position of power has the courage to do something vulnerable, like take accountability for a mistake, or admit fears, it encourages others to do the same. The result is a more connected, engaged, and inspired workplace.
You will always be at risk of experiencing pain, and everything that adds meaning to life has vulnerability as a prerequisite. If you want to experience the joys of being alive, you must be willing to confront your fear of pain.
Consider the myths that resonate with you and the steps you can take to confront them.
In what ways do these myths resonate? For example, are you someone who prefers to “go it alone,” or who considers vulnerability avoidable? Do you view darker emotions as weaknesses?
Think about one myth you most relate to. How do you think you came to believe it? Can you recall an early experience that may have influenced your belief?
What is one action you can take today to challenge that myth?
In chapter 1, you learned that vulnerability is a requirement for living a wholehearted life, and identified shame as a core obstacle to vulnerability. In chapter 3, you’ll take a deep dive into shame. You’ll explore:
Shame is the fear of not being worthy of connection and belonging. It is the fear that you are not enough and will be rejected for your weaknesses. It overtakes the prefrontal cortex, and initiates your fight or flight response. Instead of being able to think critically or analyze the legitimacy of a threat, you are thrust into survival mode.
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.
Brown’s research identified 12 categories of shame that fall under three core themes.
What shame feels like is, for the most part, universal to all. That being said, the societal norms and cultural messaging at the root of shame tend to be gender-specific.
The expectation for women in our society is “be perfect, and make it look easy.” They’re caught in a catch-22. Be sexy, but only at the right times. Be honest, but don’t upset anyone. Be yourself, but only the good parts. Every choice leads to shame.
Women experience the most shame around appearance and body image, with motherhood clocking in at the number two spot. And it doesn’t even matter if you don’t have kids—the value of a woman in our culture is still tied to motherhood. Single women are often asked when they will be finding a spouse, and the only reason this question is asked is because marriage is seen as the first step to becoming a mother. Once married, the question becomes, “When are you having kids?” Once you have kids, the judgment begins, and the arising of shame is inevitable.
It doesn’t matter if we intellectually understand that these expectations may be sexist or destructive, we still abide by them, and shame is what keeps them thriving. Later in the chapter, you’ll learn how to confront shame and find new ways to show up.
No matter the category of shame, the message for men is “weakness is not an option.” What, for men, falls under the umbrella of weakness?
If you’re a man in our society, you are expected to show no weakness, but you are also expected to be seen as powerful at all times. It often results in a dichotomy akin to the insecure man with the loud, expensive car. The misguided belief is this: If you’re loud, aggressive, and powerful, no one will see your weak spots. Research notes that for men, the experience of fear or shame is very physiological, and their reactions to it are often very visceral, as opposed to women, who may process those emotions more cerebrally. Men generally have one of two reactions when they feel shame.
Anger is considered one of the only acceptable emotions for men to feel and express. When they experience the pain or fear of shame, expressing anger is a way for them to regain their sense of power.
An example might be a young man in high school being bullied by his peers. Let’s say his peers call him names meant to diminish his masculinity and highlight his “weakness” (a common one is “pussy”). He might, to save face, get into a physical fight with these peers. If he can shut them up with his anger, it has a twofold effect: he has “proven them wrong” and he is now the one with the power.
If a man doesn’t want to express anger, he will typically shut his emotions down entirely as an alternative. Numbness involves suppressing emotions partially or completely.
For example, this might look like the man who, when faced with conflict at home, retreats to his office and shuts the door. Or, the man who, to avoid inner conflict, smokes a ton of weed to deaden his emotional reactivity.
Research also shows women are actually major reinforcers of male shame. How so? They enact their own double standard, and criticize men for their lack of vulnerability, while simultaneously fearing that same vulnerability when it’s revealed. This fear can often communicate disillusionment, or even disgust, driving home the notion that expressing vulnerability is shameful. The message received? Pretend to be vulnerable, but never be truly vulnerable.
Another surprising thing discovered in research groups was the evidence that men feel quite vulnerable when it comes to sex. Why? Men are socialized to believe themselves responsible for making the first move sexually. Therefore, being sexually rejected is considered the ultimate male shame. Women are often concerned about how they are being physically perceived by men in a sexual scenario, but it turns out, men are more concerned with the emotional aspect of the experience.
Considering all this, it’s fair to say that part of the shame problem in romantic relationships is the fear and misunderstanding in the space between the male and female experience of shame. Later, when you learn about solutions, you’ll revisit this gap.
There are significant consequences to being part of a culture where shame is rampant. You internalize it, believe what it tells you about who you are, and act on those beliefs. Or, you fight against what it tells you and spend your life trying to prove it wrong. Either way, it controls you and prevents you from accessing a strong sense of self-worth.
You are unable to connect to your wholeheartedness. The effect of this is threefold:
There are three main antidotes to shame.
What is possible when your self-worth isn’t constantly at risk?
It’s crucially important that you learn to separate failure from your self-worth if you want to live a wholehearted life. Failure is unavoidable, and if you allow every mistake you make to diminish you, you’ll never lead a life that feels fully expressed.
Guilt, you might be surprised to find, is a healthier way to process your behavior, because it distinguishes your behavior as separate from who you are, allowing you the space to grow. It’s also actionable, because the discomfort of your actions not matching your values motivates conscious change. This discomfort ultimately supports wholeheartedness.
How do you allow yourself to share shame with others when you’re afraid of their judgment or rejection? Shame resilience. Shame resilience is the ability to recognize when you’re experiencing shame, to move away from that lens, and to consciously engage with empathy. Shame resilience is the key to embracing your vulnerability.
There are four steps to practicing shame resilience.
Given that shame has biological roots, this first step is about noticing your experience of it. It’s often helpful to try being present with the physical experience first. For example, how does your body feel when you’re feeling shame? Is there a tightness in your chest? A sensation of hot or cold? Are these physical responses a reaction to a specific thought or external message?
You can also use context clues to determine when you’re in a state of shame. Are you behaving differently around different people? If so, notice how you feel in each environment. Do you feel present? Disconnected?
The benefit of becoming aware within your experience of shame is that you’ll begin to notice repeating patterns, familiarize yourself with the associated sensations, and identify their triggers. This allows you to demystify the origin of your shame, and empowers you to move to the next step of developing resilience.
This step is about taking a closer look at the thoughts, beliefs, or expectations that trigger your shame, and shining a critical light upon them.
Are the messages based in reality, or are they unreasonable? Would conceding to them align with who you are, or would you be living up to someone else’s expectations?
Practicing critical awareness allows you to differentiate between what is attainable and unattainable, or authentic and inauthentic. Once you do this within yourself, you’re ready to check in with others that you trust (detailed in the next step).
When you’re in shame, empathy is an important part of the antidote, and you need to connect with others in order to facilitate that. Once you have developed critical awareness around an experience, you can reach out to a trusted friend or family member and share how you’re feeling. This is critical because it supports you to know that you are worthy of being heard, and that you are not alone.
The final step is to become comfortable with speaking about shame, not just for the purpose of receiving empathy, but to advocate for your needs. This allows you to practice worthiness, which is a cornerstone of Wholeheartedness.
Shame wants you to stay silent and feel alone. The very experience of shame causes you to question your worthiness for being seen. When you speak about shame, you are communicating to yourself and others: “I am worthy of love, connection, and belonging.”
How does practicing shame resilience positively impact your relationships? As discussed earlier, there seems to be a lack of understanding between men and women in regards to shame. That misunderstanding hinders intimacy. Being able to engage in shame resilience alone, as well as together, allows men and women to build a bridge to one another (instead of remaining polarized in a gendered cycle of fear or false assumptions).
Shaming a loved one is one of the most serious trust violations you can engage in. Each time you misuse the trust and vulnerability you’ve cultivated by engaging in shaming behavior, you have done something that will be difficult to repair. When you practice shame resilience, you begin to reach towards others instead of moving against or away from others.
Shame resilience allows you to cultivate real, loving connections, where you engage in open, honest communication, and allow yourself to be truly seen and known. Love, like shame resilience, is a practice, and when you develop resilience, you have the ingredients to feel deep connection and belonging in your relationships. Along those lines, the most valuable result of developing shame resilience is your ability to become “real”. To be “real” is to reveal yourself to others in all your power and vulnerability, and feel that you are known, that you are loved, and that you belong.
Shame is the greatest obstacle to experiencing a Wholehearted life. In order to move beyond shame, you need to be willing to embrace vulnerability, and develop shame resilience. This allows you to show up authentically and facilitates meaningful connection, self-worth, and belonging.
Identify a recent experience in your life where you felt shame and the impact it had on you.
Describe your experience of it. How did it feel in your body? What messages did it communicate to you about yourself?
Now, let’s take a look at this experience again, but with critical awareness. Are the shame messages rational or realistic? Is there a gap between how you want to be seen, and what you think others expect of you?
Considering this experience further, did you feel willing to engage with others about it? How did you think others might see you if you were to share your shame?
A crucial element of shame resilience is speaking about your experience. What are some ways you can share your experience when you encounter shame in the future? Who in your life might you feel willing to reach out to?
In the previous chapter, you learned about shame, and how it is an obstacle to vulnerability, preventing you from experiencing a wholehearted life. In part one of this chapter, you’ll learn about another significant obstacle to vulnerability: the “armor” you wear for protection. In part two, you’ll explore how to remove this false protection and embrace the vulnerability you’ve been shielding.
Vulnerability isn’t something that feels safe to lead with—most would prefer to keep it hidden (though it’s equally common to admire when others lead with it). We are afraid of what makes us feel most vulnerable, and we are especially afraid of allowing others to see those areas. If you don’t trust that you’re worthy of being seen as you are, your fear can cause you to live with protective armor to a point where, not only do your loved ones not know who you truly are, but you might not even know who you truly are.
Everyone protects the masks they wear, and often in similar ways. You can call this our Common Vulnerability Armor.
The feeling you get when you’re happy, but the happiness is followed quickly by a sense of dread.
Research shows that, rather than feeling most vulnerable when experiencing negative emotions, you may actually feel most vulnerable when experiencing positive emotions---particularly joy. Brown actually describes joy as being one of the most difficult emotional experiences to fully access, because when you are unable to face your vulnerability, you are also unable to meet joy with gratitude or excitement, or any positive emotion. You instead feel unsafe and suspicious. You literally begin to dread the experience of joy and plan for disaster. “Too good to be true” becomes an internalized mantra.
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.
The self-destructive belief that you can avoid shame if you do everything in life exactly right.
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 eventually come to see your identity as directly determined by your accomplishments or validation from external sources. Striving for perfection is a recipe for anxiety, depression, and addiction. It causes you to feel unable to take risks, make mistakes, or disappoint people without becoming debilitated by shame. Perfectionism is also addictive because you associate your experiences of shame with not being good enough. This becomes a vicious cycle of blaming yourself for your shame, which causes more shame, which causes you to strive even harder to be perceived by others as perfect.
The reaching for anything that will allow you to escape from pain.
Interestingly, it seems that we all engage in numbing. Perhaps not to the point of addiction, but certainly enough that we engage in behaviors that devalue our resilience and suppress our vulnerability. Why are we numbing ourselves? It’s more than just avoidance of pain or feelings of inadequacy. We are desperate to experience either less or more of ourselves. So desperate, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us that drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death in the United States.
Force #1—Anxiety
Anxiety arises as a result of social discomfort, and constant, unpredictable societal expectations.
Force #2—Disconnection
Often mixed up with depression in the research, but encompasses a number of experiences ranging from feelings of meaninglessness, disengagement, and social isolation. Disconnection creates deep pain because of our biological need for connection. Combine this with the unworthiness at the core of shame, and there is a high probability of numbing.
Force #3—Shame
This comes into play when you become so overwhelmed by the above factors that you begin to internalize everything as a result of your own weakness or inherent inability to cope (in other words, “if I could just get it together..”)
Numbing is dangerous because it prevents, once again, not just negative emotions, but positive ones as well. It’s not possible to numb selectively.
The above are pieces of armor everyone utilizes, but there are additional forms of protection you can pick up as well, though these are less common. They’re called Shields.
Viking: Being the one with the power, usually through aggression and control. Never revealing vulnerabilities.
Victim: Being the one without the power, due to inherent weakness. Always feeling weak.
Those who use this shield see people in black and white (predators or prey, fighters or runners, strong or weak, and so on), and as a result, tend toward either the viking or victim mentality. Most of the time, those with viking mentality have led difficult lives in which they were forced to “eat or be eaten,” so to speak. This can be a result of surviving trauma (for example, abusive households), but also a result of education they may have received in their chosen career path (such as military or law enforcement). Those in professions correlated with viking versus victim mentality often have high rates of trauma-related behavior, like violence or addiction.
This is very prominent in our military veterans upon returning home from the battlefield. Experts on the subject acknowledge the lose-lose nature of military training, which emphasizes suppression of pain (both emotional and physical), and bypassing fear, in order to create a controlled internal state in combat. While it works for the battlefield, the high level of internal pressure also increases depression, addiction, and suicidal inclinations. Even in lower risk professions, like the field of law, the mentality is the same, and results in the same adverse effects.
Men make up the majority with this worldview, as men are typically more likely to be socialized to “win or lose,” but women are not immune.
Something that emerged in the research was that people who came to this perspective as a result of hardship didn’t see the resulting difficulties in their lives (such as addiction or anger management issues) as negative results related to this mentality, but instead saw them as misfortunes caused by the terrible nature of life, and therefore as confirmation that the mentality is both necessary and sound.
If you’re not of the “viking” mentality, you are still negatively impacted. Why? Believing yourself to be a “victim” only reinforces the dichotomy of extremes--you are either the one with the power, or without. This is limiting no matter which end of the spectrum you identify with. It leaves no room for the courage or vulnerability required for meaningful growth and change.
As detailed in chapter 2, oversharing is one of those things that is often seen as vulnerability, but in fact impedes true vulnerability, preventing healthy trust, connection, and engagement. There are two forms of oversharing in the context of shielding.
This shield is characterized by sharing vulnerability with people you have not built a trusted connection with. You are, perhaps, hoping to establish fast intimacy by bonding through sharing of personal pain. Unfortunately, if there isn’t an established relationship in which there is trust and empathy that goes both ways, the reaction to sharing vulnerability can reinforce shame. It has the effect of being blasted with something intense and unexpected, and it usually results in feelings of rejection (for the sharer) and feeling overwhelmed (for the receiver). It can even cause the receiver to feel like they’ve been conned in some way. No matter the specific impact, a vulnerability blast usually results in disconnection and disengagement, which creates or reinforces shame.
The previous form of oversharing is a misguided attempt to use vulnerability as a tool for fast connection. The hit and run uses vulnerability for the purpose of manipulation. Another phrase for it is attention-seeking. It’s characterized by sharing intense information without regard for boundaries, with the intention of getting a reaction from others, whether it be sympathy, attention, or something else. It usually reeks of desperation, and people tend to get the “hit” they need and disappear without building any real connection.
Zigzagging is what you do when you expend tons of energy avoiding vulnerability instead of just dealing with it, which often requires far less energy. What are some common forms of zigzagging?
This is a shield commonly used when you “don’t do vulnerability.” The vulnerability of others makes you uncomfortable, creating a mirror that reveals your insecurities and fears to you, and you attack or shame to protect yourself. This shield has four faces.
Knee-jerk reactions to vulnerability that include dismissing the validity of someone’s painful experience, or being jaded as a personality trait.
Mean, attacking language used to demean and judge the motivations or expressions of others.
A specific form of cynicism that deplores the idea of enthusiasm, sees excitement or vulnerability as stupid or uncool, and values not caring too much about anything. Extremely common in middle schools and high schools.
Actions, words, or behaviors used to intentionally cut down others, often with relish.
You will not be able to remove your armor or shields until you are able to believe you are enough without them. You need to give yourself permission to let the walls down, and trust in your worthiness. How do you give yourself permission to remove the protection? The good news is that each of these armor mechanisms can be overridden by taking actions that demonstrate worthiness. You can use the following tools to disarm your protective thoughts and behaviors.
Instead of catastrophizing when joy arises, shift your perception, and allow the accompanying feeling of vulnerability to remind you what you have to be grateful for.
Brown notes that gratitude is a common practice for the research participants who are able to embrace the vulnerability attached to joy. On an even deeper level, these same participants seem to see conscious gratitude and embracing joy as practices that allow you to trust in a greater thread of connection between yourself and your human experience, as well as yourself and a higher power.
The motivating forces for foreboding joy are, unsurprisingly, fear and scarcity. You fear loss of joy, or fear your ability to recover from pain. You worry that joy has a limit, that there isn’t enough, or you aren’t good enough to receive it. Being joy averse has a great deal to do with feelings of unworthiness, so in this vein, practicing gratitude is a reminder that not only is there enough, but you are enough.
There are three effective ways to practice embracing joy.
Joy is not this extraordinary, constant state you can live in. Joy arises in the most mundane moments of your life, and scarcity mentality has you missing them, because you’re too focused on having a heightened experience, instead of being present with the experience that already exists in front of you.
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.
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.
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 the above by cultivating self-compassion, developing shame resilience, and speaking your truth. Put another way, you can give yourself and your imperfections a damn rest, and maybe even see the beauty in them.
Dr. Kristen Neff defines three core components of self-compassion you can engage with to recover from perfectionism:
Resist the urge to engage in self-criticism. Practice being kind and supportive to yourself when experiencing moments of suffering or fears of not being enough.
Know that we are all in this together. There is nothing you can experience that has not been experienced by others, and you are never alone, even when it feels like it.
Choose to react to negative emotions with a balanced presence. Understand that you don’t have to identify with them. When you over-identify, there is a tendency to be extreme, which causes you to either suppress, or blow up your emotions. Mindfulness allows you to stay centered, instead of being taken for a ride by your negative thoughts and feelings.
You can disarm numbing by practicing mindfulness, healthy boundaries, and leaning into discomfort.
Mindfulness is quite simple. It’s about being present with your feelings and allowing yourself to really feel them. You can use mindfulness to notice, without judgment, that you are engaging in, or are about to engage in numbing behaviors. An example of this might be noticing that you’re experiencing anxiety, and then observing the impulse to binge-watch something on Netflix. When you are able to notice these things in the moment, you then have the ability to make a new choice.
Boundaries are about understanding and honoring your limitations, both internally and with others. With yourself, this might look like knowing a certain habit or behavior leads to numbing, and lovingly redirecting yourself to a healthier habit or behavior (for example, you want to smoke weed to avoid emotions, but instead, you write in a journal, or exercise). With others, this might look like knowing being around a certain person or in a certain environment is going to make you feel bad, so you choose not to be around that person or environment (for example, you don’t like bars, but your friend invites you to go. You let your friend know you’re grateful for the invite, but you’re going to pass on this one. Maybe you even offer an alternative activity you would both enjoy).
Leaning in means practicing being present with, or even moving towards emotions that cause discomfort, rather than avoiding them. This is not to say you should push yourself to remain in toxic environments, but leaning in is a great tool for working with challenging, but potentially transformative emotions like anxiety or frustration.
Practicing these tools allows you to fully experience your life, in all its shades, and develop a more engaged, wholehearted relationship with yourself and others.
You can disarm this false dichotomy by utilizing the practices of restructuring your ideas of success, embracing vulnerability, and pursuing support.
What this looks like is examining your concept of success. What does success mean to you? If you have a victim/viking mentality, you will often find that your idea of success has arisen as a result of being in survival mode, rather than reflecting a personal value system. You can dismantle this by identifying your own personal idea of success.
You need to feel connection and belonging to survive, and you can’t experience that without being open to vulnerability. Vulnerability is something that can be practiced.
According to Brown, those who successfully made the shift from viking vs victim to wholeheartedness all credit the development of safe, healthy connections.
Another way to develop trust and meaningful connection, especially if you have significant trauma at the root of your shielding, is to locate a good therapist or counseling program. This serves the purpose of providing professional psychological support or treatment, as well as provides a safe environment to begin building healthy, trusting connections.
Oversharing, which has two types of expression, require slightly different disarming approaches.
You disarm this version of oversharing by developing awareness around your needs, and establishing appropriate boundaries for your sharing. You can do this by keeping three rules in mind:
If you’re not sure whether or not to share, consider these questions before you do:
Disarming the vulnerability blast can be done in the same way as above--checking your intentions, expectations, and fears prior to sharing--as well as asking yourself these additional questions:
The best way to disarm this shield is by:
Maintaining presence and forward motion. You can resist the temptation to avoid, stay with whatever is arising that makes you uncomfortable, and confront it head on.
Injecting a healthy sense of humor. Laughter serves as both a reminder to breathe, as well as a tension release. Humor is a great way to disarm resistance and engage with vulnerability.
This is a tricky one to disarm, because at the root, the “too cool” shield is about caring too much about what others think. There are two sides to the coin here. You don’t want to overly identify with what others think, because vulnerability is impeded, but dismissing what others think prevents connection. You can address this by practicing the steps of shame resilience, as detailed in Chapter 3, notably, critical awareness, and reaching out.
Moving away from shielding and towards vulnerability is possible only when you believe you are enough. To sum it up simply, the solution looks like:
You can do this by deciding you are enough as you are.
You need to set healthy internal boundaries that allow you to be separate and whole. You can do this by determining you’ve had enough.
You can do this by allowing it to be enough for you to show up, embrace discomfort, and show people who you really are, even when it’s scary and feels vulnerable.
You can’t live wholeheartedly without experiencing and expressing vulnerability, and you can’t do either of those things if you’re armoring yourself with habits, beliefs, or behaviors that erect a barrier between you and the rest of the world, or internal barriers that prevent you from being fully present with yourself. If you want to be fully connected, you must remove those barriers, and engage with difficult experiences and emotions from a place of resilience.
Think about your own Vulnerability Arsenal, and how you use it to protect yourself.
Where do the methods of Foreboding Joy, Perfectionism, or Numbing show up in your life?
Now imagine you have the power to make a different choice when these defense mechanisms show up. What can you do to create a healthy shift or change that demonstrates worthiness and/or vulnerability?
In the previous four chapters, you learned the core obstacles to living a wholehearted life, and a number of ways to overcome these obstacles. In the final three chapters, you will explore the greater context of these concepts as they relate to some of the most significant areas of modern society: culture, education, work, and parenting.
In order to transform a culture into a wholehearted one, you need to address the discrepancy between your ideal values and the values you actually demonstrate. In chapter 5, you will identify how you want to show up, as well as how you show up in practice, and explore the importance of closing the gap between the two (on a personal and collective scale).
To mind the gap is to have a clear understanding of where you’re at, a clear vision of where you want to be, and the willingness to traverse the space between. In the context of Daring Greatly, “mind the gap” is a message for the leaders of our society (parents, educators, innovators, and so on) that the discomfort caused by the gap between how you want to show up, and how you actually show up is necessary and transformative.
There are two gaps to close in our culture.
The gap is characterized by a disconnect between the strategies we use to achieve cultural goals, and the actual cultural environment in reality.
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.
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 by asking some key questions.
According to Brown, the biggest cause of problems in our families, our schools, and our greater communities is disengagement. The root of this is the gap between who we say we want to be, and how we actually show up. These two ends of the spectrum reflect aspirational values versus practiced values.
Aspirational values reflect how you want to show up, how you see yourself, or values you want to live by.
Practiced values reflect how you actually show up, how others receive you, and values you demonstrate through your actions or behaviors.
Social contract disengagement: This type of disengagement occurs when, in various areas of society, your aspirational values do not match up with your practiced values.
School: Students disengage when the relationship between student and teacher is not reciprocal.
Work: You end up with a disconnected work environment when the relationship between the employees and the employer is not one of mutual respect and engagement.
Politics: When lawmakers create rules they don’t follow, or claim to stand for values they don’t demonstrate in practice, voters lose trust and disengage.
Family: When parents hold their children to standards or require behaviors they aren’t demonstrating themselves, kids lose investment in the standards being set, and perhaps eventually, the relationships with their parents, too.
Religion: Religious leaders who preach about spiritual values, but don’t hold themselves to those values, communicate to devotees that those values are not actually important. Additionally, religious leaders who utilize fear and punishment as tools for enforcing compliance to those values corrode the very notion of faith, as faith requires vulnerability, and fear impedes it.
Aligning who you want to be with how you show up practice keeps you meaningfully engaged and connected individually and as a society. When all areas of culture have aspirational values that match practiced values, a shift can be made from a disengaged, shame ridden culture, to a culture of Wholeheartedness, where everyone feels a sense of value and belonging.
If you want our cultural environment (what our collective experience actually is) to match the intention behind our strategies (what we want the collective experience to be), we need to, on a broad scale, find a way to align our aspirational values with our practiced values. This means engaging in thoughts and behaviors that reflect Wholehearted values, and steadily developing this broader alignment in our homes, schools, and other organizations.
Culture doesn’t always reflect the values you want to embody, leaving a disconnect where you need conscious engagement. If you want to address this, you need to look more closely at the areas of society where there is evidence of disengagement, and identify where your aspirational values and practiced values are out of alignment. You can close these gaps by practicing Wholehearted values. In Chapter 6, you’ll explore in more detail what it takes to do that, and who is responsible for taking action.
Think about our culture and the norms we’ve come to expect (perhaps consider one area--education, politics, workplace, family, and so on).
What do we praise? What do we reject?
Think about how these norms relate to you. Are there certain behaviors you’ve learned to avoid, or behaviors you know will garner you positive attention?
Consider this same area, or another area that resonates personally for you. What are some of your aspirational values? Are there any aspirational values that you have difficulty practicing consistently?
What is one thing you can do today to traverse that value gap?
In chapter 5, you learned that if you want to develop a culture of wholeheartedness, you need to traverse the gap between the values you aspire to embody and the values you embody in practice. In other words, you need to rehumanize the leaders, systems, and structures which make up our modern society. In chapter 6, you’ll learn about:
In order to create effective change, you need to disrupt the status quo of the current system. The impetus to affect change in a culture often lies with its leaders.
Brown defines a leader as someone who sees possibilities and potentials, and makes themselves responsible for actualizing them. Anyone who is willing to step into that responsibility has the potential to lead.
To be a true leader, you need to innovate. People have such a fear of not being good enough, innovation is challenging to nurture in the workplace. People are deriving too much of their worth from external validation, and as a result, feel unable to take the risks needed to cultivate innovative ideas.
Disengagement is a protective response. It occurs when the fear of pain overrides the desire to connect. You can only experience so much shame before you need to disengage. Disengagement corrodes your willingness to show up and connect meaningfully. If, over time, you continually allow how others respond to your ideas to determine how you feel about yourself, and people reject your ideas, you lose the courage necessary to connect with and express your creativity.
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.
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.
Usually, you are on your way to shame culture in your school or organization if you see any of the following red flags:
Inadequate or nonexistent feedback. Workplaces that lack shame resilience typically do not have the uncomfortable conversations necessary for growth. There are two components to this:
Support and uplift organizations and leaders who demonstrate willingness to build shame-resilient communities.
Be observant and notice where shame may be developing and spreading.
Support those within the culture to stay engaged through honest discussions about common struggles and potential solutions.
Make sure those running an organization can differentiate shame from guilt, and are able to guide their team in a way that feels empowering and engaging.
Another crucial component of rehumanizing our cultural environments is normalizing Wholehearted feedback.
Wholehearted feedback has four core qualities.
This kind of feedback is transformative, because it facilitates a mutually productive dynamic for professional development. When you are transparent, solution or strength-focused, and fully present, you set the stage for the kind of vulnerability that encourages creative growth.
Discomfort is normal and necessary for growth. If you resist the discomfort, there is no impetus for change. If you embrace it, you can use the discomfort to identify the path from where you are, to where you want to be.
This approach isn’t about focusing only on the positive and ignoring what needs work, but about taking stock of strengths in order to utilize those strengths to improve areas that need work.
Vulnerability is inherently present in any feedback process, whether the process is wholehearted or not. Feedback is vulnerable for both parties, whether on the giving or receiving end, because both parties are engaging with risk and uncertainty during the process. It’s important to resist the urge to armor yourself during this process. It’s more productive to be present with uncertainty and meet one another with equal vulnerability.
(Shortform note: To learn more about how to be a Wholehearted leader, read our summary of Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead.)
If we want to build a culture of Wholeheartedness in our schools, workplaces, and other significant areas of society, we need support leaders to identify where we have been perpetuating shame, engage in Wholehearted feedback, establish shame resilience habits, and build environments that nurture conscious, innovative connection.
Consider your school or workplace, and your experience of that environment.
Based on what you’ve read in the chapter, what can you notice about the culture? Do you see any elements of shame culture? Wholehearted culture? Describe.
Is feedback common or uncommon? If common, does it reflect shame or Wholeheartedness? How so? If uncommon, what do you think is the effect of that on the environment?
We’ve spent the previous chapters exploring the obstacles and solutions to wholehearted living as they relate to your individual experience, as well as the experience of the greater collective. Now let’s zoom in again, and take a look at how you can raise your children to live wholeheartedly.
Children are the future, so if we want our future to be Wholehearted, we must raise kids with Wholehearted values. Who you are is what will determine who your child becomes. In this final chapter, we discuss:
Raising a child is an uncertain experience. We tend to want certainty and structure, but wholehearted parenting is more about embracing the unknown. Being wholehearted doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing all the time, it means learning and growing and making room for mistakes. Unfortunately, the foundation of uncertainty is the perfect environment for shame and judgment to grow. Parenting is wrapped up in doubt, which makes it easy to listen to the fear of not being a good enough parent, and become militant about your chosen methods, or be in constant anxiety about doing the wrong thing.
As mentioned, as much as we crave certainty, it poses many obstacles to growth.
This is characterized by being so attached to our own methods of doing things that we see them as the only way. This is a problem because when we see others doing things in different ways, it causes us to see those different methods as direct criticism of our own--a great recipe for shame. Once we become inflexible, we can’t show up meaningfully, because we’re not able to be present and adapt to changing circumstances.
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.
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 because we are not our behavior. Children are even more vulnerable than adults to internalizing negative self-talk, which makes it crucial to help them understand that how they behave is not a reflection of who they are, but rather a tool for understanding how they feel, which allows them to access the power to choose how they react to how they feel. Example:
In a similar vein, one of the most insidious things you can pass to your children is perfectionism.
Perfectionism is the drive to perform to the standards of others rather than your own.
Perfectionism cultivates people-pleasing behavior, the need for external approval or validation, and sets the foundation for long-term scarcity mentality. In other words, it creates a breeding ground for chronic, debilitating shame, and prevents the development of self-compassion--a crucial prerequisite to meaningful engagement.
As a parent, it’s tempting to armor yourself. A parent is in a near-constant state of vulnerability, and it’s challenging to navigate. That being said, parents are in the best position to set a child up with a strong sense of self. Your sense of belonging, self-esteem, self-worth, and so on, are most heavily influenced by the environment you grow up in. Specifically, by your experience watching your parents and their behavior. In order to learn compassion and connection, you must be able to first experience them directly from someone else. If you want your children to feel whole, you need to feel whole yourself.
Without worthiness, children will be deeply vulnerable to shame messages at home, at school, and in the greater community. However, they can’t learn it on their own. If you want your children to have worthiness, you must demonstrate your own worthiness.
As detailed earlier in the book, shame resilience is the ability to confront and move through experiences of shame without sacrificing self-worth. Shame resilience can be developed in your children through open, honest dialogue about shame. Children whose parents refrain from using shame as a disciplinary tool, and instead teach self-compassion, often have a better foundation for shame resilience.
Before we talk about cultivating hope, we need to define it.
While emotions are an important component of hopefulness, hope is more of a thought process, action, or mentality than a feeling. Hope is characterized by the ability to identify goals we desire to achieve, the ability to see a pathway to achieving those goals, and belief in your ability to achieve those goals.
Hope is learned. Those who learn hope are given the space to struggle. As a result of struggle, they develop confidence in their ability to overcome adversity.
You can teach your children hopefulness by engaging in relationships with them that are reliable, supportive, and have healthy boundaries.
A great way to do this is to teach the difference between “fitting in” and “belonging.”
Fitting in is actually a barrier to belonging. It is adapting your behavior to the wants and expectations of others in order to gain approval. It requires you to alter who you are to be accepted.
To belong is to feel a deep sense of being connected to something greater than yourself. You access belonging when you are true to yourself, regardless of whether or not others find that acceptable, and being true to yourself allows you to connect with those who will accept you unconditionally.
Earlier, you learned the negative impact of perfectionism on children. You can replace perfectionism with healthy striving, and that will facilitate motivation for growth. Healthy striving is not based on catering to the expectations of others, but on the drive to be the best version of yourself, as motivated by your own standards.
Another spectrum we explored in chapter 3 is the distinction between guilt and shame. Guilt is ultimately healthier to engage with than shame, and a better tool to explore with your children. Why? As mentioned in the chapter, the difference between shame and guilt is “I’m bad” (shame) versus “I did something bad” (guilt). Shame impedes action and growth, but guilt facilitates self-awareness and initiative for growth.
Developing a culture of Wholeheartedness requires that you embody and teach your children to embody the values of Wholeheartedness. You can do this by practicing and teaching conscious vulnerability, shame resilience, and the willingness to keep showing up (even when you fail or are afraid).
If you’re a parent, bring to mind some examples you can think of where you, or your child, demonstrated wholeheartedness.
How did these experiences feel? Joyful? Uncomfortable? How do you think it impacted the relationship between you? If you’re not a parent yourself, consider an experience with your own parents.
Consider examples where there was an opportunity to practice wholeheartedness, but perhaps you made a misstep. For example, accidentally teaching a lesson via shame instead of guilt? Encouraging perfectionism? Which of the six shame resilience development tools could you apply next time this occurs?