Gifts of Imperfection
The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown.
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
This book emphasises the importance of self-acceptance and caring connection. We should be vulnerable and tell our stories of struggle.
Brown advocates for wholehearted living. This is about seeing ourselves as lovable and worthy of belonging. There is a lot of importance on the truth and our innate lovability, worthiness, and resilience.
We need to work on readjusting our thinking and perspectives. We should embrace our imperfections, and engage with them.
🎨 Impressions
Brown has researched the topics of vulnerability, shame and enoughness extensively. With this wide understanding, it was a fascinating perspective to hear about how we can live better through understanding these ideas and the impact they have on or lives. This is a short, easy read and covers many important topics about living a better life. It doesn't offer the usual self-help how-to tips; instead it is more of an exploration of they key understanding and gaining perspective.
How I Discovered It
This book had its ten year anniversary in 2020, so picked up a copy.
Who Should Read It?
If you are struggling to live authentically, or if you are struggling with sharing the truth or getting vulnerable, this book will show you the value in doing so.
☘️ How the Book Changed Me
Brown discusses ten guiding elements living wholeheartedly. These should be viewed as action points and used in our daily lives.
1. Be authentic
2. Give ourselves self-compassion
3. Build our resilience
4. Feel grateful and notice its connection to joy
5. Develop our intuition and trust
6. Express our creativity
7. Play and rest
8. Make time for calm and stillness
9. Seek meaningful work
10. Laugh, sing and dance
Key Messages:
We should always choose authenticity and worthiness over shame and guilt.
We're living in a culture of shaming ourselves and others. We can defy this with the freedom that comes when we stop pretending that everything is okay when it isn't.
Brown invites us to own our stories, and embrace lives that are messy, imperfect, wild, wonderful, heart-breaking, grace-filled, and joyful. To live wholeheartedly is to feel brave, afraid, and, most importantly, alive.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest things that we will ever do.
Comparison is the thief of happiness.
If we really want to live a joyful, connected, and meaningful life, we must talk about things that get in the way.
📒 Summary + Notes
Wholehearted living is about…cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, ‘No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough’. It’s going to bed at night thinking, ‘Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.
Wholeheartedness is as much about embracing our tenderness and vulnerability as it is about developing knowledge and claiming power. Cultivating a wholehearted life is not like trying to reach a destination. It is walking towards a star in the sky.
Shame
Shame is the fear of being unlovable - it is the opposite of owning out story and feeling worthy. Shame is the intensely painful experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.
Shame Resilience
We all have it - shame is a universal human emotions that we experience. People who don't experience shame have the lack of capacity for empathy and human connection.
We are all afraid to talk about shame.
The less we talk about shame, the more control it has over our lives.
We can cultivate high levels of shame resilience through:
Understanding shame and recognising what messages and expectations trigger shame for them.
The practice of critical awareness by reality checking the messages and expectations that tell us that being imperfect means being inadequate.
They reach out and share their stories with people they trust.
They speak shame - they use the word shame, they talk about how they are feeling, and they ask for that they need.
Questions to ask yourself to kickstart your shame resilience and story-claiming.
Who do you become when you're backed into that shame corner
How do you protect yourself
Who do you call to work through bad experiences, people-pleasing
What is the most courageous thing you could do for yourself when you feel small and hurt
Authenticity
Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we are supposed to be and embracing who you are.
Being authentic means:
cultivating the courage to be imperfect, to set boundaries, ant to allow ourselves to be vulnerable
exercising the compassion that comes from knowing that we are all made of strength and struggle
nurturing the connection and sense of belonging that can only happen when we believe that we are enough
Authenticity demands wholehearted living and loving - even when it is hard, even when we are wrestling with the same and fear of not being good enough, and especially when the joy is so intense that we're afraid to let ourselves feel it.
Mindfully practicing authenticity during or most soul-searching struggles is how we invite grace, joy, gratitude into our lives.
Make authenticity the number one goal. Then when you go into a situation feeling vulnerable, you will have no regrets by keeping it real. You may feel hurt but you won't feel shame. If the goal is authenticity and you are not liked, that is ok. If the goal is being liked, and they don't that then becomes a problem.
Perfectionism
Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be your best. Perfectionism is not about healthy achievement and growth. Perfectionism is the belief that if we live perfect, look perfect and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgement and shade. It is therefore a shield. We think it will protect us but it is the thing preventing us from taking he flight.
Perfectionism is not self-improvement. Perfectionism is, at its core, about truing to earn approval and acceptance. Most perfectionists where raised being praised for achievement and performance. Somewhere along the way we adopt this dangerous and deliberating belief system: I am what I accomplish and how well I accomplish it. Healthy striving is self-focused - How can I improve? Perfectionism is other focused - what will they think?
Perfectionism is addictive because when we invariably do experience shame, judgement and blame, we often believed its because we weren't perfect enough. So rather than questioning the faulty logic of perfectionism, we become even more entrenched in our quest to live, look and do everything right.
To be able to overcome perfectionism, we need to be able to acknowledge our vulnerabilities t the universal experience of shame, judgement and blame; develop shame resilience; and practice self-compassion. When we become more loving and compassionate with ourselves and we begin to practice shame resilience, we can embrace our imperfections.
Perfectionism exists along a continuum, We all have perfectionist tendencies. For some it may only emerge when feeling particularly vulnerable. For others, it can be compulsive, chronic, deliberating similar to addiction.
Resilience
Five most common factors of resilient people (from research):
More resourceful and have goof problem-solving skills
They are more likely to seek help
They hold the belief that they can so something that will help them mange their feelings and to cope
They have social support available to them
They are connected with others, such as family and friends
But also a spiritual sense is also essential for resilience. For cultivating hope, practicing critical awareness and letting go of numbing and taking the edge off vulnerability, discomfort and pain.
Hopelessness is dangerous because it leads to feelings of powerlessness. Power is the ability to effect change. How do you feel when you believe that you are powerless to change something in your life?
Powerlessness is dangerous. For most, the inability to change is a desperate feeling. We need resilience, and hope and spirit that can carry us through doubt and fear. We need to believe that we can effect change if we want to live and love with our whole hearts.
