The Gifts of Imperfection review

THE
GIFTS OF
Imperfection

Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed
to Be and Embrace Who You Are

by Brené Brown, Ph.D., L.M.S.W.

Printed in the United States of America

Editor’s note

The names, details, and circumstances may have been changed to protect the privacy of those

mentioned in this publication.

This publication is not intended as a substitute for the advice of health care professionals.

Quotes from the Gifts of Imperfection

“We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”

― Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

“Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.”

― Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

“We're a nation hungry for more joy: Because we're starving from a lack of gratitude.”

― Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

“The universe is not short on wake-up calls. We’re just quick to hit the snooze button.”

― Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Wholehearted Living

Courage, Compassion, and Connection: The Gifts of Imperfection

Exploring the Power of Love, Belonging, and Being Enough

The Things That Get in the Way

Guidepost #1

Cultivating Authenticity:

Letting Go of What People Think

Guidepost #2

Cultivating Self-Compassion:

Letting Go of Perfectionism

Guidepost #3

Cultivating a Resilient Spirit:

Letting Go of Numbing and Powerlessness

Guidepost #4

Cultivating Gratitude and Joy:

Letting Go of Scarcity and Fear of the Dark

Guidepost #5

Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith:

Letting Go of the Need for Certainty

Guidepost #6

Cultivating Creativity:

Letting Go of Comparison

Guidepost #7

Cultivating Play and Rest:

Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth

Guidepost #8

Cultivating Calm and Stillness:

Letting Go of Anxiety as a Lifestyle

Guidepost #9

Cultivating Meaningful Work:

Letting Go of Self-Doubt and “Supposed To”

Guidepost #10

Cultivating Laughter, Song, and Dance:

Letting Go of Being Cool and “Always in Control”

Final Thoughts

About the Research Process: For Thrill-Seekers and Methodology Junkies

Notes

About the Author

The Gifts of Imperfection Preface

Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we

will ever do.

Once you see a pattern, you can’t un-see it. Trust me, I’ve tried. But when the

same truth keeps repeating itself, it’s hard to pretend that it’s just a coincidence.

For example, no matter how hard I try to convince myself that I can function on

six hours of sleep, anything less than eight hours leaves me impatient, anxious,

and foraging for carbohydrates. It’s a pattern. I also have a terrible

procrastination pattern: I always put off writing by reorganizing my entire house

and spending way too much time and money buying office supplies and

organizing systems. Every single time.

One reason it’s impossible to un-see trends is that our minds are engineered

to seek out patterns and to assign meaning to them. Humans are a meaningmaking species. And, for better or worse, my mind is actually fine-tuned to do

this. I spent years training for it, and now it’s how I make my living.

As a researcher, I observe human behavior so I can identify and name the

subtle connections, relationships, and patterns that help us make meaning of our

thoughts, behaviors, and feelings.

I love what I do. Pattern hunting is wonderful work and, in fact, throughout my

career, my attempts at un-seeing were strictly reserved for my personal life and

those humbling vulnerabilities that I loved to deny. That all changed in

November 2006, when the research that fills these pages smacked me upside the

head. For the first time in my career, I was desperate to un-see my own

research.

Up until that point, I had dedicated my career to studying difficult emotions

like shame, fear, and vulnerability. I had written academic pieces on shame,

developed a shame-resilience curriculum for mental health and addictions

professionals, and written a book about shame resilience called I Thought It

Was Just Me.1

In the process of collecting thousands of stories from diverse men and women

who lived all over the country—ranging in age from eighteen to eighty-seven—I

saw new patterns that I wanted to know more about. Yes, we all struggle with

shame and the fear of not being enough. And, yes, many of us are afraid to let

our true selves be seen and known. But in this huge mound of data there was

also story after story of men and women who were living these amazing and

inspiring lives.

I heard stories about the power of embracing imperfection and vulnerability. I

learned about the inextricable connection between joy and gratitude, and how

things that I take for granted, like rest and play, are as vital to our health as

nutrition and exercise. These research participants trusted themselves, and they

talked about authenticity and love and belonging in a way that was completely

new to me.

I wanted to look at these stories as a whole, so I grabbed a file and a Sharpie

and wrote the first word that came to my mind on the tab: Wholehearted. I

wasn’t sure what it meant yet, but I knew that these stories were about people

living and loving with their whole hearts.

I had a lot of questions about Wholeheartedness. What did these folks value?

How did they create all of this resilience in their lives? What were their main

concerns and how did they resolve or address them? Can anyone create a

Wholehearted life? What does it take to cultivate what we need? What gets in

the way?

As I started analyzing the stories and looking for re-occurring themes, I

realized that the patterns generally fell into one of two columns; for simplicity

sake, I first labeled these Do and Don’t. The Do column was brimming with

words like worthiness, rest, play, trust, faith, intuition, hope, authenticity, love,

belonging, joy, gratitude, and creativity. The Don’t column was dripping with

words like perfection, numbing, certainty, exhaustion, self-sufficiency, being

cool, fitting in, judgment, and scarcity.

I gasped the first time I stepped back from the poster paper and took it all in.

It was the worst kind of sticker shock. I remember mumbling, “No. No. No.

How can this be?”

Even though I wrote the lists, I was shocked to read them. When I code data, I

go into deep researcher mode. My only focus is on accurately capturing what I

heard in the stories. I don’t think about how I would say something, only how the

research participants said it. I don’t think about what an experience would mean

to me, only what it meant to the person who told me about it.

I sat in the red chair at my breakfast room table and stared at these two lists

for a very long time. My eyes wandered up and down and across. I remember at

one point I was actually sitting there with tears in my eyes and with my hand

across my mouth, like someone had just delivered bad news.

And, in fact, it was bad news. I thought I’d find that Wholehearted people

were just like me and doing all of the same things I was doing: working hard,

following the rules, doing it until I got it right, always trying to know myself

better, raising my kids exactly by the books …

After studying tough topics like shame for a decade, I truly believed that I

deserved confirmation that I was “living right.”

But here’s the tough lesson that I learned that day (and every day since):

How much we know and understand ourselves is critically important, but there is

something that is even more essential to living a Wholehearted life: loving ourselves.

Knowledge is important, but only if we’re being kind and gentle with

ourselves as we work to discover who we are. Wholeheartedness is as much

about embracing our tenderness and vulnerability as it is about developing

knowledge and claiming power.

And perhaps the most painful lesson of that day hit me so hard that it took my

breath away: It was clear from the data that we cannot give our children what

we don’t have. Where we are on our journey of living and loving with our

whole hearts is a much stronger indicator of parenting success than anything we

can learn from how-to books.

This journey is equal parts heart work and head work, and as I sat there on

that dreary November day, it was clear to me that I was lacking in my own heart

work.

I finally stood up, grabbed my marker off the table, drew a line under the

Don’t list, and then wrote the word me under the line. My struggles seemed to

be perfectly characterized by the sum total of the list.

I folded my arms tightly across my chest, sunk deep down into my chair, and

thought, This is just great. I’m living straight down the shit list.

I walked around the house for about twenty minutes trying to un-see and undo

everything that had just unfolded, but I couldn’t make the words go away. I

couldn’t go back, so I did the next best thing: I folded all of the poster sheets

into neat squares and tucked then into a Rubbermaid tub that fit nicely under my

bed, next to my Christmas wrap. I wouldn’t open that tub again until March of

2008.

Next, I got myself a really good therapist and began a year of serious soul

work that would forever change my life. Diana, my therapist, and I still laugh

about my first visit. Diana, who is a therapist to many therapists, started with the

requisite, “So what’s going on?” I pulled out the Do list and matter-of-factly

said, “I need more of the things on this list. Some specific tips and tools would

be helpful. Nothing deep. No childhood crap or anything.”

It was a long year. I lovingly refer to it on my blog as the 2007 Breakdown

Spiritual Awakening. It felt like a textbook breakdown to me, but Diana called it

a spiritual awakening. I think we were both right. In fact, I’m starting to question

if you can have one without the other.

Of course, it’s not a coincidence that this unraveling happened in November

2006. The stars were perfectly aligned for a breakdown: I was raw from being

newly sugar and flour free, I was days away from my birthday (always a

contemplative time for me), I was burned out from work, and I was right on the

cusp of my midlife unraveling.

People may call what happens at midlife “a crisis,” but it’s not. It’s an

unraveling—a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to

live, not the one you’re “supposed” to live. The unraveling is a time when you

are challenged by the universe to let go of who you think you are supposed to be

and to embrace who you are.

Midlife is certainly one of the great unraveling journeys, but there are others

that happen to us over the course of our lives:

marriage

divorce

becoming a parent

recovery

moving

an empty nest

retiring

experiencing loss or trauma

working in a soul-sucking job

The universe is not short on wake-up calls. We’re just quick to hit the snooze

button.

As it turned out, the work I had to do was messy and deep. I slogged through

it until one day, exhausted and with mud still wet and dripping off of my

traveling shoes, I realized, “Oh, my God. I feel different. I feel joyful and real.

I’m still afraid, but I also feel really brave. Something has changed—I can feel

it in my bones.”

I was healthier, more joyful, and more grateful than I had ever felt. I felt

calmer and grounded, and significantly less anxious. I had rekindled my creative

life, reconnected with my family and friends in a new way, and most important,

felt truly comfortable in my own skin for the first time in my life.

I learned how to worry more about how I felt and less about “what people

might think.” I was setting new boundaries and began to let go of my need to

please, perform, and perfect. I started saying no rather than sure (and being

resentful and pissed off later). I began to say “Oh, hell yes!” rather than “Sounds

fun, but I have lots of work to do” or “I’ll do that when I’m _________ (thinner,

less busy, better prepared).”

As I worked through my own Wholehearted journey with Diana, I read close

to forty books, including every spiritual awakening memoir I could get my hands

on. They were incredibly helpful guides, but I still craved a guidebook that

could offer inspiration, resources, and basically serve as a soul traveler’s

companion of sorts.

One day, as I stared at the tall pile of books precariously stacked on my

nightstand, it hit me! I want to tell this story in a memoir. I’ll tell the story of

how a cynical, smart-ass academic became every bit of the stereotype that she

spent her entire adult life ridiculing. I’ll fess up about how I became the middleaged, recovering, health-conscious, creative, touchy-feely spirituality-seeker

who spends days contemplating things like grace, love, gratitude, creativity,

authenticity, and is happier than I imagined possible. I’ll call it Wholehearted.

I also remember thinking, Before I write the memoir, I need to use this

research to write a guidebook on Wholehearted living! By mid-2008, I had

filled three huge tubs with notebooks, journals, and mounds of data. I had also

done countless hours of new research. I had everything I needed, including a

passionate desire to write the book that you’re holding in your hands.

On that fateful November day when the list appeared and I sunk into the

realization that I wasn’t living and loving with my whole heart, I wasn’t totally

convinced. Seeing the list wasn’t enough to fully believe in it. I had to dig very

deep and make the conscious choice to believe … to believe in myself and the

possibility of living a different life. A lot of questioning, countless tears, and a

huge collection of joyful moments later, believing has helped me see.

I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is

the bravest thing that we will ever do.

I now see that cultivating a Wholehearted life is not like trying to reach a

destination. It’s like walking toward a star in the sky. We never really arrive,

but we certainly know that we’re heading in the right direction.

I now see how gifts like courage, compassion, and connection only work

when they are exercised. Every day.

I now see how the work of cultivating and letting go that shows up in the ten

guideposts is not “to-do list” material. It’s not something we accomplish or

acquire and then check off our list. It’s life work. It’s soul work.

For me, believing was seeing. I believed first, and only then I was able to see

how we can truly change ourselves, our families, and our communities. We just

have to find the courage to live and love with our whole hearts. It’s an honor to

make this journey with you!

The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are Reviews

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