When we feel good about the choices we're making and when we're engaging with the world from a place of worthiness rather than scarcity, we feel no need to judge and attack.
When we deny our stories and disengage from tough emotions, they don’t go away; instead, they own us, they define us.
When the culture of any organization mandates that it is more important to protect the reputation of a system and those in power than it is to protect the basic human dignity of the individuals who se...
When I see people stand fully in their truth, or when I see someone fall down, get back up, and say, Damn. That really hurt, but this is important to me and I’m going in again—my gut reaction is, What...
What is the hypothesis of generosity? What is the most generous assumption you can make about this person’s intentions or what this person said?
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.
We’ve all fallen, and we have the skinned knees and bruised hearts to prove it. But scars are easier to talk about than they are to show, with all the remembered feelings laid bare. And rarely do we s...
Well, no. They are both serious epidemics, but shame is a silent epidemic. People understand violence and can talk about it. We’re still afraid of shame. Even the word is uncomfortable.
We've survived and are surviving events that have torn at our sense of safety with such force that we've experienced them as trauma even if we weren't directly involved.
We want to be part of something, but we need it to be real - not conditional or fake or constantly up for negotiation.
We run from grief because loss scares us, yet our hearts reach toward grief because the broken parts want to mend. C. S. Lewis wrote, No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. We can’t rise st...
We like recovery stories to move quickly through the dark so we can get to the sweeping redemptive ending. I worry that this lack of honest accounts of overcoming adversity has created a Gilded Age of...
Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can't ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment's notice, who may be loyal to the day they...
Vulnerability is not weakness, and the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure we face every day are not optional. Our only choice is a question of engagement. Our willingness to own and engage with...
UnMarketing: Don’t try to win over the haters; you’re not the jackass whisperer.
This is the shame of the woman whose hand hides her smile because her teeth are so bad, not the grand self-hate that leads some to razors or pills or swan dives off beautiful bridges however tragic th...
The opposite of recognizing that we’re feeling something is denying our emotions. The opposite of being curious is disengaging. When we deny our stories and disengage from tough emotions, they don’t g...
The four elements of shame resilience: Name it. Talk about it. Own your story. Tell the story.
The definition of vulnerability is uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. But vulnerability is not weakness; it's our most accurate measure of courage. When the barrier is our belief about vulnera...
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 sh...