Of all the things trauma takes away from us, the worst is our willingness, or even our ability, to be vulnerable. There's a reclaiming that has to happen.
It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful. —Brother David Steindl-Rast
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’...
Funerals, in fact, are one of the most powerful examples of collective pain. They feature in a surprising finding from my research on trust. When I asked participants to identify three to five specifi...
Experience and success don’t give you easy passage through the middle space of struggle. They only grant you a little grace, a grace that whispers, This is part of the process. Stay the course. Experi...
Dehumanizing and holding people accountable are mutually exclusive. Humiliation and dehumanizing are not accountability or social justice tools, they’re emotional off-loading at best, emotional self-i...
Daring greatly is not about winning or losing. It’s about courage.
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
Cassandra Dahnke and Tomas Spath, write: Civility is claiming and caring for one’s identity, needs, and beliefs without degrading someone else’s in the process….[Civility] is about disagreeing without...
When we are in pain and fear, anger and hate are our go-to emotions.
How often we all try to solve problems by doing more of what’s not working—just doing it harder, grinding it out longer. We’ll do anything to avoid the lowest of the low—self-examination.
Are certainly other causes of illness, numbing, and hurt, but the absence of love and belonging will always lead to suffering.
When we can let go of what other people think and own our story, we gain access to our worthiness—the feeling that we are enough just as we are and that we are worthy of love and belonging.
We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands.
To practice courage, compassion, and connection is to look at life and the people around us, and say, I’m all in.
The shield required that I stay small and quiet behind it so as not to draw attention to my imperfections and vulnerabilities. It was exhausting.
The majority of shame researchers agree that the difference between shame and guilt is best understood as the differences between I am bad (shame) and I did something bad (guilt). Shame is about who w...
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: letti...
Sometimes when we dare to walk into the arena the greatest critic we face is ourselves.
So much of what we hear today about courage is inflated and empty rhetoric that camouflages personal fears about one’s likability, ratings, and ability to maintain a level of comfort and status. We ne...