Key takeaways: Shame is an epidemic that holds us back – and vulnerability are empathy are crucial to overcoming it. We should strive for our loved ones and ourselves to dare greatly.
- As much as I would be frustrated to not get my work out to the world, there was a part of me that was working hard to engineer staying small – staying right under the radar
- Vulnerability is not weakness – that myth is profoundly dangerous
- I define Vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty
- After 12 years of research, I believe Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage
- Vulnerability is the birthplace of creativity, innovation, and change; I didn’t learn about all these things from studying vulnerability, I learned them from studying shame.
- We call shame the swampland of the soul
- She reads the quote: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt
- That’s what life is about – daring greatly, being in the arena; when you put your hand on the door to enter the arena and you think “I’m going in” shame is the gremlin that says “nope, you’re not good enough [bad memory, negative thought here]” – shame is that thing, if we could quiet down and walk in and say I’m going to do this, and we look up and see the critic, 99% of the time it’s us. Shame drives two big tapes – never good enough, and who do you think you are?
- Shame is “I am bad” – guilt is “I did something bad”; there is a huge difference between shame and guilt, shame is correlated with addiction, depression, etc. but guilt is inversely correlated, it is adaptive
- Shame feels the same for men and women but is organized by gender; for women, shame is do it all, do it perfectly, and never let them see you sweat; shame for women is a web of unattainable competing expectations about who we’re supposed to be.
- For men, shame is not being perceived as weak; when we reach out and we’re vulnerable, we get the shit beat out of us
- Shame is an epidemic in our culture; empathy is the antidote to shame
- If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially – secrecy, silence, and judgment; if you put it in a petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive; if we’re going to find our way back to each other, vulnerability will be our path
- We want the people we love and appreciate to dare greatly