I don’t know if you’re familiar with Brené Brown, but she’s a research professor whose bestselling books and viral TED Talks spare no truths and get us to re-examine the way we show up in the world. It was really hard to choose just 5 quotes, but here are some really great ones and I hope they’ll resonate with you.
1. “I want to be in the arena. I want to be brave with my life. And when we make the choice to dare greatly, we sign up to get our asses kicked. We can choose courage, or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both. Not at the same time.”
2. “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 heart against constant evaluation, especially our own. No one belongs here more than you.”
3. “It wasn’t always a choice; we were born curious. But over time, we learn that curiosity, like vulnerability, can lead to hurt. As a result, we turn to self-protecting—choosing certainty over curiosity, armour over vulnerability, and knowing over learning.”
4. “Our culture teaches us about shame—it dictates what is acceptable and what is not. We weren’t born craving perfect bodies. We weren’t born afraid to tell our stories. We weren’t born with a fear of getting too old to feel valuable. We weren’t born with a Pottery Barn catalogue in one hand and heart-breaking debt in the other. Shame comes from outside of us—from the messages and expectations of our culture. What comes from the inside of us is a very human need to belong, to relate.”
5. “Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.”
I hope those resonate for you and if you’re listening to this…you were meant to hear them.
Bailey.
