Courage and Vulnerability

When Brené Brown speaks of the wilderness in Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone , she’s not speaking of a place on a map. The wilderness isn’t “out there.” The wilderness is “in here.” It’s learning how to...

Sometimes clarity comes in the most unlikely places. It’s often hard to realize how much impact having a clear understanding of who we are and what we believe in can have on our professional lives. As many of the book reviews lately have been about p...

I’ve been working on a post which connects trust, vulnerability, and intimacy for weeks and weeks now. The post is in and of itself pretty long because it’s tying together a bunch of concepts and connecting dots from lots of books – trying to piece toget...

Individually, compassion and courage make sense. Compassion is the awareness of the suffering of others and the desire to minimize it. Courage isn’t the absence of fear but the willingness to overcome it. Putting these together, we discover a subtle f...

Reading Brown’s work in a non-sequential order makes me think of Star Wars with its episodes and prequels. In some ways it’s more like the movie Premonition  which is a magnificent film and also magnificently hard to follow. The premise of the movie...

I’ve made no secret that reading on paper has become harder. Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions  is only available in paper format, but at some point, there’s such a critical mass of people referring to James W. Pennebaker’s work th...

Perhaps the greatest challenge with life is that it’s not perfect. I’m not perfect. My wife isn’t perfect. My kids aren’t perfect. That means that at times we’ll all fail. We’re all going to miss the mark. We’re all going to experience bitter disappointmen...

In part 1  of this review of Rising Strong , I focused on the background. The topics of the progression of Brown’s work, learning from failure, the need for an integrated self image, the idea of sanctuary, how we tend to gold plate grit (our struggles), disc...

I view the life I’m living as a journey. (See Changes that Heal  for more about viewing life as a journey.) In this journey I believe that I’m trying to learn how to become a better me. That means learning how to love more genuinely and how to accep...