When I was in grad school I was introduced to Brené Brown through her video on empathy vs sympathy (link). If you haven’t watched it click the link and watch it now. I was changed forever and instantly fell in love. I’ve read several of her books, watched her videos, and listened to her podcast so, yeah, this woman speaks to me.
I’m not going to give away the book because I think it’s important to experience the whole thing for yourself so I’ve picked out my top 3 favorite parts of the book.
1. “Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild hearts against constant evaluation, especially our own. No one belongs here more than you.”
Okay first off – Woah! Second, I can’t tell you how many clients and people I talk to that think they aren’t good enough. I think it’s something we all struggle with. If you want to find something negative about yourself it is so easy to find because we are constantly putting ourselves down by comparing ourselves to others. You think we aren’t as pretty as the girl on Instagram who has mad photo-taking abilities. What we don’t see is that pretty girl struggling with an eating disorder. You compare yourselves to your peer who you think can do the job way better than we can and hoping our boss won’t find out how much of a fraud you are. But what you don’t see is that your peer has been through extensive trauma therapy to overcome his emotional abuse from his parents. You will never be good enough if you compare yourself to only the what seems to be perfect parts of other people. It’s impossible to live up to that standard.
No one belongs here more than you. Your life has value and that value is incomparable.
2. “But what we know now is that when we deny our emotion, it owns us. When we own our emotion, we can rebuild and find our way through the pain.”
When you deny your emotions be assured they will come up somewhere else, often when you least expect it, often at a time that seems completely out of left field. And it’s gonna be messy. Denying your emotions is like trying to shove a giant beach ball underwater. It’s slippery and you struggle to keep it down and something comes to add more stress to your beach ball than BAMB! You have a mess of water everywhere. Not only are you soaked but you have soaked everyone around you, and hit yourself in the face with a giant beach ball. Denying your emotions works like that, exploding onto you and everyone who’s close to you in that moment. Maybe you’ve lashed out at your partner for not doing the dishes when you’re really mad about the rude thing your boss said to you. It’s not appropriate, or fun, or healthy but it happens – reliably.
Not every emotion is pleasant but the more you get used to feeling those emotions the easier they are to handle. So much growth can happen from feeling your emotions, like identifying and communicating them, knowing who needs to hear about them and managing them without explosion.
3. “You will always belong anywhere you show up as yourself and talk about yourself and your work in a real way.”
Brené talks about belonging and being true to who you are. You can be in a crowd full of people who stand on the opposite side of an issue and still belong because you have chosen to stand firm in who you are. Belonging is acceptance of your truths and not changing to get people to like you.
Tell me your thoughts about these quotes in the comments! Are you ready to read this book?
If you loved these quotes from Braving the Wilderness don’t forget to share this blog on your social media!
– Salina
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