Rising Strong

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Highlights

I believe that vulnerability—the willingness to show up and be seen with no guarantee of outcome—is the only path to more love, belonging, and joy.
While vulnerability is the birthplace of many of the fulfilling experiences we long for—love, belonging, joy, creativity, and trust, to name a few—the process of regaining our emotional footing in the midst of struggle is where our courage is tested and our values are forged.
Here’s how I see the progression of my work: The Gifts of Imperfection—Be you. Daring Greatly—Be all in. Rising Strong—Fall. Get up. Try again.
When we own our stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in stories someone else is telling.
The epigraph for Daring Greatly is Theodore Roosevelt’s powerful quote from his 1910 “Man in the Arena” speech:2 It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; … who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.
To pretend that we can get to helping, generous, and brave without navigating through tough emotions like desperation, shame, and panic is a profoundly dangerous and misguided assumption.
We need to stop blaming each other and have some tough conversations about what happened so we can fix it and move forward.
People who wade into discomfort and vulnerability and tell the truth about their stories are the real badasses.
The truth is that falling hurts. The dare is to keep being brave and feel your way back up.
Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.
If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability. When we commit to showing up and risking falling, we are actually committing to falling. Daring is not saying, “I’m willing to risk failure.” Daring is saying, “I know I will eventually fail and I’m still all in.” Fortune may favor the bold, but so does failure.
Courage transforms the emotional structure of our being. This change often brings a deep sense of loss. During the process of rising, we sometimes find ourselves homesick for a place that no longer exists.
courage is an inescapable part of rising strong. 3. This journey belongs to no one but you; however, no one successfully goes it alone.
We’re wired for story. In a culture of scarcity and perfectionism, there’s a surprisingly simple reason we want to own, integrate, and share our stories of struggle. We do this because we feel the most alive when we’re connecting with others and being brave with our stories—it’s in our biology.
Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands.
The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea has a beautiful saying: “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.”
Antonio Damasio reminds us, humans are not either thinking machines or feeling machines, but rather feeling machines that think.
The most transformative and resilient leaders that I’ve worked with over the course of my career have three things in common: First, they recognize the central role that relationships and story play in culture and strategy, and they stay curious about their own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Second, they understand and stay curious about how emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are connected in the people they lead, and how those factors affect relationships and perception. And, third, they have the ability and willingness to lean in to discomfort and vulnerability.
Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world. The refugee in Syria doesn’t benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who’s going through a divorce.
Hurt is hurt, and every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy and compassion, the healing that results affects all of us.
You can’t engineer an emotional, vulnerable, and courageous process into an easy, one-size-fits-all formula.
Courage is contagious.
Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to one another by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and belonging. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning, and purpose to our lives.
Rising demands the foundational beliefs of connection and requires wrestling with perspective, meaning, and purpose.
You’re too far in to turn around and not close enough to the end to see the light.
Whether it’s ancient battle strategy or the creative process, at some point you’re in, it’s dark, and there’s no turning back.
When a group or team first comes together (form), it’s often rocky for a time while members figure out the dynamics (storm). At some point, the group finds its groove (norm) and starts to make headway (perform).
Hanging on the wall of Pixar’s Story Corner display were these three sentences: Story is the big picture. Story is process. Story is research. An image of a crown was at the top of the wall, symbolizing the axiom that “story is king.”
had learned several years before that when I’m planning payback or rehearsing a conversation where I’m being super mean or trying to make someone feel bad, I’m normally not mad, I’m hurt, feeling uncomfortably vulnerable, or feeling shame.
Comparative suffering has taught me not to discount the importance of having a process to navigate everyday hurts and disappointments. They can shape who we are and how we feel just as much as those things that we consider the big events do.
The Rising Strong Process The goal of the process is to rise from our falls, overcome our mistakes, and face hurt in a way that brings more wisdom and wholeheartedness into our lives. THE RECKONING: WALKING INTO OUR STORY Recognize emotion, and get curious about our feelings and how they connect with the way we think and behave. THE RUMBLE: OWNING OUR STORY Get honest about the stories we’re making up about our struggle, then challenge these confabulations and assumptions to determine what’s truth, what’s self-protection, and what needs to change if we want to lead more wholehearted lives. THE REVOLUTION Write a new ending to our story based on the key learnings from our rumble and use this new, braver story to change how we engage with the world and to ultimately transform the way we live, love, parent, and lead.
Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing we’ll ever do.
We own our stories so we don’t spend our lives being defined by them or denying them.
The rumble is where wholeheartedness is cultivated and change begins.
Steve Jobs believed that “creativity is just connecting things.” He believed that creating was connecting the dots between the experiences we’ve had, to synthesize new things. He argued that this is only possible if we have more experiences or devote more time to thinking about our experiences.
In navigation, the term reckoning, as in dead reckoning, is the process of calculating where you are. To do that, you have to know where you’ve been and what factors influenced how you got to where you now are (speed, course, wind, etc.).
The rising strong reckoning has two deceptively simple parts: (1) engaging with our feelings, and (2) getting curious about the story behind the feelings—what emotions we’re experiencing and how they are connected to our thoughts and behaviors.
Recognizing emotion means developing awareness about how our thinking, feeling (including our physiology), and behavior are connected.
Rising strong requires you to recognize that you’re experiencing emotion and to get curious about why:
But despite our fear, there is something in us that wants to feel all these emotional energies, because they are the juice of life. When we suppress and diminish our emotions, we feel deprived. So we watch horror movies or so-called reality shows like Fear Factor. We seek out emotional intensity vicariously, because when we are emotionally numb, we need a great deal of stimulation to feel something, anything. So emotional pornography provides the stimulation, but it’s only ersatz emotion—it doesn’t teach us anything about ourselves or the world.
“Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.”
Curiosity is an act of vulnerability and courage.
Curiosity is a shit-starter. But that’s okay. Sometimes we have to rumble with a story to find the truth.
we have to have some level of knowledge or awareness before we can get curious. We aren’t curious about something we are unaware of or know nothing about.
But as poet Mizuta Masahide wrote, “Barn’s burnt down / now / I can see the moon.”
It often takes just a single brave person to change the trajectory of a family, or of any system, for that matter.
Hurt doesn’t go away simply because we don’t acknowledge it. In fact, left unchecked, it festers, grows, and leads to behaviors that are completely out of line with whom we want to be, and thinking that can sabotage our relationships and careers.
The next day I asked Steve if exquisitely tender is an official medical term. I had heard him use it before, and it struck me as funny—like marvelously sore or fantastically achy. He explained that it’s used to describe the kind of pain that someone can’t hide even if they’re trying their best to be stoic. Then he said, “We also call it chandelier pain—like it hurts so much to the touch that people jump as high as the chandelier.”
uncontrolled eruptions of emotion sabotage the safety that most of us are trying to create, whether in our families or our organizations. If it happens often enough, chandeliering leads to eggshell environments—fear-based settings where everyone is on edge.
Living, growing up, working, or worshipping on eggshells creates huge cracks in our sense of safety and self-worth. Over time, it can be experienced as trauma.
The ego likes blaming, finding fault, making excuses, inflicting payback, and lashing out, all of which are ultimate forms of self-protection. The ego is also a fan of avoidance—assuring the offender that we’re fine, pretending that it doesn’t matter, that we’re impervious. We adopt a pose of indifference or stoicism, or we deflect with humor and cynicism.
For many of us, the first response is not to lean in to the discomfort and feel our way through, but to make it go away. We do that by numbing the pain with whatever provides the quickest relief. We can take the edge off emotional pain with a whole bunch of stuff, including alcohol, drugs, food, sex, relationships, money, work, caretaking, gambling, affairs, religion, chaos, shopping, planning, perfectionism, constant change, and the Internet. And just so we don’t miss it in this long list of all the ways we can numb ourselves, there’s always staying busy: living so hard and fast that the truths of our lives can’t catch up with us. We fill every ounce of white space with something so there’s no room or time for emotion to make itself known.
we can’t selectively numb emotions—when we numb the dark, we also numb the light. When “taking the edge off” with a couple of glasses of red wine becomes a routine, our experiences of joy and love and trust will become duller, too. With less positive emotion in our lives, we are drawn to numbing. It’s a vicious cycle, and the viciousness is as likely to be unleashed at a fancy wine-tasting party as it is with a 40 wrapped in a brown paper bag.
If we numb compulsively and chronically—it’s addiction.
Stockpiling starts like chandeliering, with us firmly packing down the pain, but here, we just continue to amass hurt until the wisest parts of us, our bodies, decide that enough is enough. The body’s message is always clear: Shut down the stockpiling or I’ll shut you down. The body wins every time.
Depression and anxiety are two of the body’s first reactions to stockpiles of hurt.
There is so much wisdom in our bodies. We just need to learn how to listen and trust what we’re hearing.
I drove over a tall, two-foot-wide, cobblestone median strip. The sound of cement scraping against the metal undercarriage of my car was horrendous. One of the cobblestone bricks dislodged and stood straight up, pushing into the plate under my car. My front and back tires were straddling the median. I couldn’t move forward and I couldn’t back up. I was high centered. One reason we deny our feelings is our fear of high centering emotionally. If I recognize my hurt or fear or anger, I’ll get stuck. Once I engage even a little, I won’t be able to move backward and pretend that it doesn’t matter, but moving forward might open a floodgate of emotion that I can’t control. I’ll be stuck. Helpless. Recognizing emotion leads to feeling it. What if I recognize the emotion and it dislodges something and I can’t maintain control? I don’t want to cry at work or on the battlefield or when I’m with my parents. Getting high centered is the worst because we feel a total loss of control. We feel powerless.
Scraping the underbelly of our emotions when we’re in a tough situation is bad enough. Getting stuck there is the definition of vulnerability and helplessness. But denying emotion is not avoiding the high curbs, it’s never taking your car out of the garage. It’s safe in there, but you’ll never go anywhere.
Pretending not to be hurt is choosing to become imprisoned by the dark emotion we have experienced—recognizing and feeling our way through the emotion is choosing freedom.
there’s growing empirical evidence that not owning and integrating our stories affects not just our emotional health but also our physical well-being.13
Umbridge wears cutesy pink suits and pillbox hats, adorns her pink office with bows and trinkets decorated with kittens, and is a fan of torturing children who misbehave. Rowling writes about her, “I have noticed more than once in life that a taste for the ineffably twee can go hand-in-hand with a distinctly uncharitable outlook on the world.”
Charlie, my fourth-grader, will sometimes say, “Be careful. I think she’s a Unikitty.” He’s referring to the cat from The LEGO Movie that was all sunshine and rainbows until she snapped and turned into Super Angry Kitty.
Being all light is as dangerous as being all dark, simply because denial of emotion is what feeds the dark.
practice. This work takes practice. Awkward, uncomfortable practice. PERMISSION SLIPS I wrote my first permission slip on a Post-it note the morning I met Oprah Winfrey for the first time and taped an episode of Super Soul Sunday.16 It said, “Permission to be excited, have fun, and be goofy.” Now my jeans pockets are often stuffed with permission slips. My team and I often start difficult team meetings by writing permission slips and sharing them before we dig into our work. We’re not going to recognize emotion if we don’t feel like we have permission to feel emotion. If you grew up in a family where emotion was not just permitted but encouraged, you may have an easier time giving yourself permission to feel it and recognize it. You may even think, I don’t need to do this—I’m good with emotion. I still think it’s an important step because writing
We are wired to be emotional beings. When that part of us is shut down, we’re not whole.
Tactical Breathing
1. Inhale deeply through your nose, expanding your stomach, for a count of four—one, two, three, four.
2. Hold in that breath for a count of four—one, two, three, four.
3. Slowly exhale all the air through your mouth, contracting your stomach, for a count of four—one, two, three, four.
4. Hold the empty breath for a count of four—one, two, three, four.
The definition of mindfulness that resonates most with what I’ve heard research participants describe is from the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley—one of my favorite online stomping grounds (greatergood.berkeley.edu): Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment. Mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them—without believing, for instance, that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment. When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune in to what we’re sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future.
Breath and mindfulness give us the awareness and space we need to make choices that are aligned with our values.
Yoda explains to Luke that the cave is dangerous and strong with the dark side of the Force. Luke looks confused and afraid, but Yoda’s response is simply, “In you must go.” When Luke asks what’s in the cave, Yoda explains, “Only what you take with you.” As Luke straps on his weapons, Yoda hauntingly advises, “Your weapons, you will not need them.” The cave is dark and thick with vines. Steam eerily rises off the ground while a large snake winds its way over a branch and a prehistoric-looking lizard perches on a limb. As Luke slowly makes his way through the cave, he is confronted by his enemy, Darth Vader. They both draw their light sabers and Luke quickly cuts off Vader’s helmeted head. The head rolls to the ground and the face guard blows off the helmet, revealing Vader’s face. Only, it isn’t Darth Vader’s face; it’s Luke’s face. Luke is staring at his own head on the ground.
The most difficult part of our stories is often what we bring to them—what we make up about who we are and how we are perceived by others. Yes, maybe we lost our job or screwed up a project, but what makes that story so painful is what we tell ourselves about our own self-worth and value.
When we decide to own our stories and live our truth, we bring our light to the darkness.
When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it.1 It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else. —Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
The minute we find ourselves facedown on the arena floor, our minds go to work trying to make sense of what’s happening. This story is driven by emotion and the immediate need to self-protect, which means it’s most likely not accurate, well thought out, or even civil. In fact, if your very first story is any of these things, either you’re an outlier or you’re not being fully honest.
embedded in this unedited narrative are the answers to three critically important questions—questions that cultivate wholeheartedness and bring deeper courage, compassion, and connection to our lives:
1. What more do I need to learn and understand about the situation?
2. What more do I need to learn and understand about the other people in the story?
3. What more do I need to learn and understand about myself?
What do we call a story that’s based on limited real data and imagined data and blended into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality? A conspiracy theory.
Social workers always use the term confabulate when talking about how dementia or a brain injury sometimes causes people to replace missing information with something false that they believe to be true. The further I got into this research, the more I agreed with Gottschall’s assessment about confabulation being an everyday human issue, not just the result of specific medical conditions.
“The stories were confabulations—lies, honestly told.”
I would argue that conspiring can become a destructive pattern over time, and sometimes a single confabulation can damage our sense of self-worth and our relationships.
The most dangerous stories we make up are the narratives that diminish our inherent worthiness. We must reclaim the truth about our lovability, divinity, and creativity.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past thirteen years, it’s this: Just because someone isn’t willing or able to love us, it doesn’t mean that we are unlovable.
Like our lovability and divinity, we must care for and nurture the stories we tell ourselves about our creativity and ability.
Gottschall argues that conspiratorial thinking “is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant, or the crazy. It is a reflex of the storytelling mind’s compulsive need for meaningful experience.”
We make up hidden stories that tell us who is against us and who is with us. Whom we can trust and who is not to be trusted. Conspiracy thinking is all about fear-based self-protection and our intolerance for uncertainty. When we depend on self-protecting narratives often enough, they become our default stories. And we must not forget that storytelling is a powerful integration tool. We start weaving these hidden, false stories into our lives and they eventually distort who we are and how we relate to others.
When unconscious storytelling becomes our default, we often keep tripping over the same issue, staying down when we fall, and having different versions of the same problem in our relationships—we’ve got the story on repeat. Burton explains that our brains like predictable storytelling. He writes, “In effect, well-oiled patterns of observation encourage our brains to compose a story that we expect to hear.”
The good news is that people aren’t born with an exceptional understanding of the stories they make up, nor does it just dawn on them one day. They practiced. Sometimes for years. They set out with the intention to become aware and they tried until it worked. They captured their conspiracies and confabulations.
The most effective way to foster awareness is by writing down our stories. Nothing fancy. The goal here is to write what Anne Lamott would call your “shitty first draft”—or your SFD, as I like to call it
The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means.
Our rational, grown-up selves are good liars. The five-year-old tyrants within us are the ones who can tell it like it is.
The core (sometimes the entirety) of my SFD is normally these six sentences with maybe a few notes. The story I’m making up: My emotions: My body: My thinking: My beliefs: My actions:
When it comes to our SFDs, it’s important that we don’t filter the experience, polish our words, or worry about how our story makes us look (which is why writing is often safer than having a conversation). We can’t get to our brave new ending if we start from an inauthentic place. So give yourself permission to wade through the sometimes-murky waters of whatever you’re thinking and feeling.
My leadership team also uses “the story I’m making up” on a regular basis. What I’ve noticed is that most of us have already done the romping and raging before we sit down and have the discussion. On occasion we also use it unrehearsed, but that came with practice.
When it comes to the process of owning our hard stories, uncertainty can be so uncomfortable that we either walk away or race to the ending. So if you come across a part of your story that you don’t understand or that makes you feel uncertain or anxious, just jot down a question mark or write yourself a note: What the heck happened here? Total confusion. Who knows? The important thing is not to skip it. Stay in the story until you touch every part of it.
You’ll know you’re being honest if you’re worried that someone might see your SFD and think you’re a total jerk or a nut job. Concerns like this are a good sign that you’re on the right track. Don’t hold back. There is no rising strong without a true accounting of the stories we make up.
It’s time to rumble. Time to unleash our curiosity. Time to poke, prod, and explore the ins and outs of our story. The first questions we ask in the rumble are sometimes the simplest:
1. What more do I need to learn and understand about the situation? What do I know objectively? What assumptions am I making?
2. What more do I need to learn and understand about the other people in the story? What additional information do I need? What questions or clarifications might help? Now we get to the more difficult questions—the ones that take courage and practice to answer.
3. What more do I need to learn and understand about myself? What’s underneath my response? What am I really feeling? What part did I play?
The difference—the delta—between what we make up about our experiences and the truth we discover through the process of rumbling is where the meaning and wisdom of this experience live.
Even though the words difference and delta can mean the same thing, I like to use the word delta for two reasons, one professional and the other personal. The triangle symbol takes us back to that three-legged stool of emotion, thought, and behavior. A true rumble affects the way we feel, think, and act—our whole selves. The personal reason is closer to my heart. The song “Delta,” on Crosby, Stills & Nash’s album Daylight Again, is one of the songs that I’ve turned to during the peaks and valleys of the past thirty years.
I learned that one of the most vulnerable parts of loving someone is trusting that they love you back, and I need to be generous in my assumptions.
Unfortunately, being low maintenance also meant not asking for what you needed and never inconveniencing anyone. So I got really good at proving that I’m as easy as the next person. And I got really good at being resentful.
I really do believe that most of us are doing the very best we can with the tools we have. I believe we can grow and get better, but I also believe that most of us are really doing our best.”
People aren’t themselves when they’re scared.
Unlike their “yes” counterparts, about 80 percent of these respondents used themselves as an example: “I know I’m not doing my best, so why should I assume others are?” or “I slack off all of the time,” or “I don’t give it 110 percent when I should.” They judged their efforts in the same exacting manner that they judged the efforts of others.
Steve said, “I don’t know. I really don’t. All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be.” His answer felt like truth to me. Not an easy truth, but truth.
What boundaries do I need to put in place so I can work from a place of integrity and extend the most generous interpretations of the intentions, words, and actions of others?
Integrity is choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them.
Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.5 —Joan Didion
Boundaries are a function of self-respect and self-love.
Disappointment is unmet expectations, and the more significant the expectations, the more significant the disappointment.
Anne Lamott said, “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.”
Nelson Mandela wrote, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”
forgiveness is not forgetting or walking away from accountability or condoning a hurtful act; it’s the process of taking back and healing our lives so we can truly live.
Within families and in other close relationships, we love each other and we hurt each other. The question becomes, What has to end or die so we can experience a rebirth in our relationships?
It seems counterintuitive, but my belief that I knew better than to shame someone sometimes left me blind to hurt I caused and unaware of when I needed to make amends.
The death of the idealized versions of our parents, teachers, and mentors—a stage in the hero’s journey—is always scary because it means that we’re now responsible for our own learning and growth. That death is also beautiful because it makes room for new relationships—more honest connections between authentic adults who are doing the best they can.
In her book The Places That Scare You, Chödrön writes: When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us…. In cultivating compassion we draw from the wholeness of our experience—our suffering, our empathy, as well as our cruelty and terror. It has to be this way. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
The brokenhearted are indeed the bravest among us—they dared to love, and they dared to forgive. C. S. Lewis captured this so beautifully in one of my favorite quotes of all time: To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
diverse research institutions in the United States. I’ve learned enough about privilege to know that we’re at our most dangerous when we think we’ve learned everything we need to know about it.
Maybe looking away is about privilege. I need to think harder and longer about my choices and recognize that choosing whom I see and whom I don’t see is one of the most hurtful functions of privilege.
In Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Connection, she explains that we all have patterned ways of managing anxiety—some of us over-function and others under-function.2 Over-functioners tend to move quickly to advise, rescue, take over, micromanage, and basically get in other people’s business rather than looking inward. Under-functioners tend to get less competent under stress: They invite others to take over and often become the focus of worry or concern. On the outside, over-functioners appear to be tough and in control, and under-functioners can seem irresponsible or fragile. Many of these behaviors are learned and line up with the roles we play in our families. It’s not uncommon for firstborns to be over-functioners, as is certainly the case for me.
Over-functioning: I won’t feel, I will do. I don’t need help, I help. Under-functioning: I won’t function, I will fall apart. I don’t help, I need help.
“She wasn’t afraid of people in need because she wasn’t afraid of needing others,” my mom explained. “She didn’t mind extending kindness to others, because she herself relied on the kindness of others.”
When you judge yourself for needing help, you judge those you are helping. When you attach value to giving help, you attach value to needing help.
The danger of tying your self-worth to being a helper is feeling shame when you have to ask for help.
Offering help is courageous and compassionate, but so is asking for help.
May you always do for others and let others do for you. — Bob Dylan
• I trust people who will ask for help or support.
• If someone asks me for help, I’m more likely to trust them because they’re willing to be vulnerable and honest with me.
I define connection as “the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.”
Dependence starts when we’re born and lasts until we die. We accept our dependence as babies, and ultimately, with varying levels of resistance, we accept help as we get to the end of our lives. But in the middle of our lives, we mistakenly fall prey to the myth that successful people are those who help rather than need, and broken people need rather than help.
There’s a huge difference between I screwed up (guilt) and I am a screwup (shame). The former is acceptance of our imperfect humanity. The latter is basically an indictment of our very existence.
It’s always helpful to remember that when perfectionism is driving, shame is riding shotgun. Perfectionism is not healthy striving. It is not asking, How can I be my best self? Instead, it’s asking, What will people think?
Comparison kills creativity and joy.
The ability to point to specific behaviors rather than just using the word trust can also help us rumble with our stories of falling. The more specific we can be, the more likely it is that we can create change.
I love the BRAVING checklist because it reminds me that trusting myself or other people is a vulnerable and courageous process. Boundaries—You respect my boundaries, and when you’re not clear about what’s okay and not okay, you ask. You’re willing to say no. Reliability—You do what you say you’ll do. At work, this means staying aware of your competencies and limitations so you don’t overpromise and are able to deliver on commitments and balance competing priorities. Accountability—You own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends. Vault—You don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share. I need to know that my confidences are kept, and that you’re not sharing with me any information about other people that should be confidential. Integrity—You choose courage over comfort. You choose what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy. And you choose to practice your values rather than simply professing them. Nonjudgment—I can ask for what I need, and you can ask for what you need. We can talk about how we feel without judgment. Generosity—You extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others.
If you reread this checklist and change the pronouns, you’ll see that BRAVING also works as a powerful tool for assessing our level of self-trust. B—Did I respect my own boundaries? Was I clear about what’s okay and what’s not okay? R—Was I reliable? Did I do what I said I was going to do? A—Did I hold myself accountable? V—Did I respect the vault and share appropriately? I—Did I act from my integrity? N—Did I ask for what I needed? Was I nonjudgmental about needing help? G—Was I generous toward myself?
the trilogy of “goals, pathways, and agency.”4 Hope happens when we can set goals, have the tenacity and perseverance to pursue those goals, and believe in our own abilities to act.
I believe that what we regret most are our failures of courage, whether it’s the courage to be kinder, to show up, to say how we feel, to set boundaries, to be good to ourselves.
“People who wade into discomfort and vulnerability and tell the truth about their stories are the real badasses.”
In her book The Rise, Sarah Lewis writes, “The word failure is imperfect. Once we begin to transform it, it ceases to be that any longer. The term is always slipping off the edges of our vision, not simply because it’s hard to see without wincing, but because once we are ready to talk about it, we often call the event something else—a learning experience, a trial, a reinvention—no longer the static concept of failure.”
Failure can become nourishment if we are willing to get curious, show up vulnerable and human, and put rising strong into practice.
Men and women with high levels of shame resilience: 1. Understand shame and recognize what messages and expectations trigger shame for them. 2. Practice critical awareness by reality-checking the messages and expectations that tell us that being imperfect means being inadequate. 3. Reach out and share their stories with people they trust. 4. Speak shame—they use the word shame, they talk about how they’re feeling, and they ask for what they need.
Jungian analyst James Hollis writes, “Perhaps Jung’s most compelling contribution is the idea of individuation, that is, the lifelong project of becoming more nearly the whole person we were meant to be—what the gods intended, not the parents, or the tribe, or, especially, the easily intimidated or the inflated ego. While revering the mystery of others, our individuation summons each of us to stand in the presence of our own mystery, and become more fully responsible for who we are in this journey we call our life.”
We know that genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger. In order to teach our children about rising strong, we first need to teach them the truth about their history. I’ve told both of my kids, “Drinking may not be the same for you as it is for your friends. Here’s what you need to know and understand.”
To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. —Aristotle
When cheap-seat criticism becomes the loudest, most prevalent type of criticism we encounter, it pushes out the idea that thoughtful criticism and feedback can be and often are useful. We stop teaching people how to offer constructive, helpful feedback and critiques, and, in order to save ourselves, we shut down all incoming data. We start to exist in echo chambers where nothing we do or say is challenged.
When we stop caring what people think, we lose our capacity for connection. But when we are defined by what people think, we lose the courage to be vulnerable.
Our identities are always changing and growing, they’re not meant to be pinned down. Our histories are never all good or all bad, and running from the past is the surest way to be defined by it. That’s when it owns us.
I’m slowly learning how to straddle the tension that comes with understanding that I am tough and tender, brave and afraid, strong and struggling—all of these things, all of the time.
We can’t be “all in” if only parts of us show up. If we’re not living, loving, parenting, or leading with our whole, integrated hearts, we’re doing it halfheartedly.
There is no greater threat to the critics and cynics and fearmongers Than those of us who are willing to fall Because we have learned how to rise.
Revolution might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance. Choosing to live and love with our whole hearts is an act of defiance. You’re going to confuse, piss off, and terrify lots of people—including yourself. One minute you’ll pray that the transformation stops, and the next minute you’ll pray that it never ends. You’ll also wonder how you can feel so brave and so afraid at the same time. At least that’s how I feel most of the time … brave, afraid, and very, very alive.
“The story I’m making up is …”
After listening to everyone rumble with both their pain and their privilege, the white woman who wrote the “you don’t know me” note said, “I get it, but I can’t spend my life focusing on the negative things—especially what the black and Hispanic students are talking about. It’s too hard. Too painful.” And before anyone could say a word, she had covered her face with her hands and started to cry. In an instant, we were all in that marshy, dark delta with her. She wiped her face and said, “Oh my God. I get it: I can choose to be bothered when it suits me. I don’t have to live this every day.”
MANIFESTO OF THE BRAVE AND BROKENHEARTED There is no greater threat to the critics and cynics and fearmongers Than those of us who are willing to fall Because we have learned how to rise With skinned knees and bruised hearts; We choose owning our stories of struggle, Over hiding, over hustling, over pretending. When we deny our stories, they define us. When we run from struggle, we are never free. So we turn toward truth and look it in the eye. We will not be characters in our stories. Not villains, not victims, not even heroes. We are the authors of our lives. We write our own daring endings. We craft love from heartbreak, Compassion from shame, Grace from disappointment, Courage from failure. Showing up is our power. Story is our way home. Truth is our song. We are the brave and brokenhearted. We are rising strong.
TEN GUIDEPOSTS FOR WHOLEHEARTED LIVING 1. Cultivating authenticity: letting go of what people think 2. Cultivating self-compassion: letting go of perfectionism 3. Cultivating a resilient spirit: letting go of numbing and powerlessness 4. Cultivating gratitude and joy: letting go of scarcity and fear of the dark 5. Cultivating intuition and trusting faith: letting go of the need for certainty 6. Cultivating creativity: letting go of comparison 7. Cultivating play and rest: letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth 8. Cultivating calm and stillness: letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle 9. Cultivating meaningful work: letting go of self-doubt and “supposed to” 10. Cultivating laughter, song, and dance: letting go of being cool and “always in control”
Love and belonging are irreducible needs of all men, women, and children. We’re hardwired for connection—it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The absence of love, belonging, and connection always leads to suffering.
A strong belief in our worthiness doesn’t just happen—it’s cultivated when we understand the guideposts as choices and daily practices.
The wholehearted identify vulnerability as the catalyst for courage, engagement, and a clear sense of purpose. In fact, the willingness to be vulnerable emerged as the single clearest value shared by all of the women and men whom I would describe as wholehearted. They attribute everything—from their professional success to their marriages to their proudest parenting moments—to their ability to be vulnerable.
Myth #1: Vulnerability is weakness. Myth #2: “I don’t do vulnerability.” Myth #3: We can go it alone. Myth #4: Trust comes before vulnerability.
Shame derives its power from being unspeakable.
The courage to be vulnerable means taking off the armor we use to protect ourselves, putting down the weapons that we use to keep people at a distance, showing up, and letting ourselves be seen.