Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience, and transform despair into hope.
And, if that’s not news enough, here’s something else: Hope is learned! Snyder suggests that we learn hopeful, goal-directed thinking in the context of other people. Children most often learn hope fro...
An experience of collective pain does not deliver us from grief or sadness; it is a ministry of presence. These moments remind us that we are not alone in our darkness and that our broken heart is con...
The best marriages are the ones where we can go out in the world and really put ourselves out there. A lot of times we'll fail, and sometimes we'll pull it off. But good marriages are when you can go...
The difficult thing is that vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you and the last thing I'm willing to show you. In you, it's courage and daring. In me, it's weakness.
If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people's choices. If I feel good about my body, I don't go around making fun of other people's weight or appearance. We're hard o...
I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limite...
When we’re kind to ourselves, we create a reservoir of compassion that we can extend to others. Our children learn how to be self-compassionate by watching us, and the people around us feel free to be...
When we own our stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in stories someone else is telling.
When we hear people referred to as animals or aliens, we should immediately wonder, Is this an attempt to reduce someone’s humanity so we can get away with hurting them or denying them basic human rig...
We’re all grateful for people who write and speak in ways that help us remember that we’re not alone.
We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.
We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both. Not at the same time.
Until we teach our children that they need to be concerned with how they look and with what other people think, they dance.
This notion that the leader needs to be in charge and to know all the answers is both dated and destructive. Its impact on others is the sense that they know less, and that they are less than. A recip...
There will be times when standing alone feels too hard, too scary, and we’ll doubt our ability to make our way through the uncertainty. Someone, somewhere, will say, Don’t do it. You don’t have what i...
The secret killer of innovation is shame. You can’t measure it, but it is there. Every time someone holds back on a new idea, fails to give their manager much needed feedback, and is afraid to speak u...
The problem is, when we stop caring what people think and stop feeling hurt by cruelty, we lose our ability to connect. But when we’re defined by what people think, we lose the courage to be vulnerabl...
The problem is that when we don’t care at all what people think and we’re immune to hurt, we’re also ineffective at connecting. Courage is telling our story, not being immune to criticism. Staying vul...
The opposite of never enough isn’t abundance or more than you could ever imagine. The opposite of scarcity is enough, or what I call Wholeheartedness.