The gift of imperfection pdf free download

I could help with a crisis or lend money or dispense advice. I was always happy to help others, but I would have never called my siblings to ask them for help, especially for support during a shame storm. At the time, I would have vehemently denied attaching judgment to my generous giving. But now, I understand how I derived self-worth from never needing help and always offering it. During the breakdown, I needed help. I needed support and hand-holding and advice.

Thank God! Turning to my younger brother and sisters completely shifted our family dynamics. I gained permission to fall apart and be imperfect, and they could share their strength and incredible wisdom with me. If connection is the energy that surges between people, we have to remember that those surges must travel in both directions. The Wholehearted journey is not the path of least resistance. As I conducted my interviews, I realized that only one thing separated the men and women who felt a deep sense of love and belonging from the people who seem to be struggling for it.

That one thing is the belief in their worthiness. When we can let go of what other people think and own our story, we gain access to our worthiness —the feeling that we are enough just as we are and that we are worthy of love and belonging. Our sense of worthiness—that critically important piece that gives us access to love and belonging—lives inside of our story. The greatest challenge for most of us is believing that we are worthy now, right this minute.

Not if. Not when. Right this minute. As is. In addition to letting go of the ifs and whens, another critical piece of owning our story and claiming our worthiness is cultivating a better understanding of love and belonging. Oddly enough, we desperately need both but rarely talk about what they really are and how they work.

Think about it. In this way, love is the mirror image of shame. Yet the only way to resolve shame is to talk about it. Most of us like safety, certainty, and clarity. Shame and love are grounded in vulnerability and tenderness. Belonging is another topic that is essential to the human experience but rarely discussed. We know exactly how to hustle for approval and acceptance. We know what to wear, what to talk about, how to make people happy, what not to mention—we know how to chameleon our way through the day.

One of the biggest surprises in this research was learning that fitting in and belonging are not the same thing, and, in fact, fitting in gets in the way of belonging.

Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Love and belonging will always be uncertain. Even though connection and relationship are the most critical components of life, we simply cannot accurately measure them.

Relationship and connection happen in an indefinable space between people, a space that will never be fully known or understood by us. Everyone who risks explaining love and belonging is hopefully doing the best they can to answer an unanswerable question. Myself included. Love belongs with belonging. One of the most surprising things that unfolded in my research is the pairing of certain terms.

Of this, I am actually certain. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

There are certainly other causes of illness, numbing, and hurt, but the absence of love and belonging will always lead to suffering. It took me three years to whittle these definitions and concepts from a decade of interviews. Love: We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness, and affection.

Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them—we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.

Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed, and rare.

Belonging: Belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. Because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging, but often barriers to it. Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance. It would be different if I studied the effect of bird poop on potting soil, but this stuff is personal and often painful.

Sometimes, as I turned to the data to craft definitions like the ones above, I would cry. Because loving them and accepting their imperfections is much easier than turning that light of loving-kindness on myself. Practicing self-love means learning how to trust ourselves, to treat ourselves with respect, and to be kind and affectionate toward ourselves.

This is a tall order given how hard most of us are on ourselves. I know I can talk to myself in ways that I would never consider talking to another person. Just like calling someone we love stupid or an idiot would be incongruent with practicing love, talking like that to ourselves takes a serious toll on our self-love.

Practicing Love and Belonging To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. Incongruent living is exhausting. They are priorities. The idea of self-love and self-acceptance was, and still is, revolutionary thinking for me. Well, there was quite the emotional debate in the comments section. Several folks passionately disagreed with the notion of self-love being a requirement for loving others.

Others argued that we can actually learn how to love ourselves more by loving others. When I look at my one daughter who looks so much like me, I can see myself as a little girl. This reminds me to be kinder to the little girl that lives inside me and to love and accept her as my own.

It is the love for my girls that makes me want to be a better person and to work on loving and accepting myself. However, with that being said, it is still so much easier to love my daughters…. Perhaps thinking about it this way makes more sense: Many of my patients are mothers who struggle with drug addiction. They love their children more than themselves. They destroy their lives, hate themselves, and often damage their bodies beyond repair.

They say they hate themselves, but they love their children. On the surface, one might say, yes, some of them love their children more than themselves. However, does loving your children mean that you are not intentionally poisoning them the way you poison yourself?

Perhaps our issues are like secondhand smoke. At first, it was thought to be not so dangerous and by smoking we were only hurting ourselves.

Yet [we have] come to find out, years later, secondhand smoke can be very deadly. We love others fiercely, maybe more than we think we love ourselves, but that fierce love should drive us to the depths of our selves so that we can learn to be compassionate with ourselves.

Loving and accepting ourselves are the ultimate acts of courage. If we want to take part in this revolution, we have to understand the anatomy of love and belonging; we need to understand when and why we hustle for worthiness rather than claim it; and we have to understand the things that get in the way. We encounter obstacles on every journey we make; the Wholehearted journey is no different. I really like the couple sponsoring the event, so without giving it much thought, I excitedly agreed to do it.

This was one of those things. I accepted the invitation in late and never thought about it again until , when the list of speakers was published on The UP Experience Web site. Suffice it to say that it was an overwhelmingly prestigious list of folks.

And me. One mind-opening day! On top of trying to manage feeling like a complete imposter, I was terrified about the format. The event was modeled after the TED talks www.

Seconds after I saw the list of speakers, I called my friend Jen Lemen and read the list of names to her. Do you see this list of people? Keep it real. Maybe I could do a little puppet show too. Normally it takes me a day or two to develop a talk.

I never speak from notes, but I normally have a visual presentation and an idea of what I want to say. Not this time. A puppet show would have been easier. I was paralyzed for weeks over this presentation. Nothing was working. You do these things all the time. He leaned toward me and waited.

It will just make it worse. In fact, this event was my first normal audience group. I arrived early at the swanky country club where the event was being hosted, and I introduced myself to the woman in charge. After sizing me up for what felt like an eternity, she greeted me with a stack of short pronouncements. I need your bio. I handed her my bio and that was the beginning of the end.

Is that true? I also study fear and vulnerability. She must have heard about me from someone who failed to mention the nature of my work. Now it all made sense. I know a lot about these topics because I study the things that get in the way of joy, meaning, and connection. People want how-to. Number 2: Do not mention the word shame.

People will be eating. Number 3: People want to be comfortable and joyful. Keep it joyful and comfortable. People like light and breezy. Happy is so, so good. We should all be joyful.

And have meaning. It was a train wreck. But, strangely enough, telling the story made me less anxious. In fact, the second that I finished telling Steve the story, I felt different. I finally got it. In a very powerful way, owning this story allowed me to claim who I am as a researcher and to establish my voice. I looked at Steve and smiled. Her list was symptomatic of our cultural fears.

Never have. If we really want to live a joyful, connected, and meaningful life, we must talk about things that get in the way. It was a risk, but I figured that even C-suites struggle with worthiness. A couple of weeks after the event, I got a call from the organizer. The evaluations are in and your talk finished in the top two of the day, and given what you study, you were the dark horse going in.

In Jungian circles, shame is often referred to as the swampland of the soul. We need to see that standing on the shore and catastrophisizing about what could happen if we talked honestly about our fears is actually more painful than grabbing the hand of a trusted companion and crossing the swamp. And, most important, we need to learn why constantly trying to maintain our footing on the shifting shore as we gaze across to the other side of the swamp—where our worthiness waits for us—is much harder work than trudging across.

Why cross the swamp if you can just bypass it? Most everyone reading this book knows how to eat healthy. I can tell you the Weight Watcher points for every food in the grocery store. We know how to eat healthy. We also know how to make good choices with our money. We know how to take care of our emotional needs. We have more access to information, more books, and more good science—why are we struggling like never before? All I want to do is snuff out the sizzling anxiety with a pumpkin muffin, a bag of chips, and chocolate.

I want to take care of Charlie without worrying about my own deadlines. I want to show the world how great I am at balancing my family and career. I want our yard to look beautiful. They are such outstanding citizens. There are days when I can fight the urge to be everything to everyone, and there are days when it gets the best of me. As we discussed in the last chapter, when we struggle to believe in our worthiness, we hustle for it.

If we want to develop shame resilience—the ability to recognize shame and move through it while maintaining our worthiness and authenticity—then we have to talk about why shame happens.

Honest conversations about shame can change the way we live, love, parent, work, and build relationships. We all have it. Shame is universal and one of the most primitive human emotions that we experience. The less we talk about shame, the more control it has over our lives. In fact, the definition of shame that I developed from my research is: Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.

Shame is all about fear. People often want to believe that shame is reserved for the folks who have survived terrible traumas, but this is not true. Shame is something we all experience. And while it feels as if shame hides in our darkest corners, it actually tends to lurk in all of the familiar places, including appearance and body image, family, parenting, money and work, health, addiction, sex, aging, and religion.

To feel shame is to be human. There is a real fear that we can be buried or defined by an experience that, in reality, is only a sliver of who we are. Why are you? Shame resilience is the ability to recognize shame, to move through it constructively while maintaining worthiness and authenticity, and to ultimately develop more courage, compassion, and connection as a result of our experience.

Shame needs three things to grow out of control in our lives: secrecy, silence, and judgment. When something shaming happens and we keep it locked up, it festers and grows. It consumes us. We need to share our experience.

Shame happens between people, and it heals between people. If we can find someone who has earned the right to hear our story, we need to tell it.

Shame loses power when it is spoken. In this way, we need to cultivate our story to let go of shame, and we need to develop shame resilience in order to cultivate our story. After a decade of research, I found that men and women with high levels of shame resilience share these four elements: 1.

They understand shame and recognize what messages and expectations trigger shame for them. They practice critical awareness by reality-checking the messages and expectations that tell us that being imperfect means being inadequate. They reach out and share their stories with people they trust. When I think about the men and women in my study who spoke about the transformative power of story—the folks who own and share their stories—I realize that they are also people who practice shame resilience.

Because so much of worthiness and shame resilience is about owning our stories, I want to share one of my own shame-resilience stories with you. But before I do that, I want to address two commonly asked questions about shame.

I think it will help you wrap your head and heart around this tough topic. Shame is about who we are, and guilt is about our behaviors. Guilt is just as powerful as shame, but its effect is often positive while shame often is destructive. When we see people apologize, make amends, or replace negative behaviors with more positive ones, guilt is often the motivator, not shame.

In fact, in my research, I found that shame corrodes the part of us that believes we can change and do better. Again, it is human nature to want to feel worthy of love and belonging. When we experience shame, we feel disconnected and desperate for worthiness.

In fact, shame is related to violence, aggression, depression, addiction, eating disorders, and bullying. Children who use more shame self-talk I am bad versus guilt self-talk I did something bad struggle mightily with issues of self-worth and self-loathing. Using shame to parent teaches children that they are not inherently worthy of love. Shame Researcher Heal Thyself! No matter how much you know about shame, it can sneak up on you trust me, I speak from experience.

The good news is that, with enough practice, shame resilience can also sneak up on you! The following story not only illustrates the insidious nature of shame, it also reinforces the importance of speaking about shame and telling our story.

One day I got an e-mail from a woman who liked my layout and design. I felt proud and grateful … until I got to this part of her e-mail: I really like your blog. The snap of you and your girlfriend in the theater would be the only exception … egads!

I would never add a bad photo to a blog, but I am the photographer here. The photo she was referring to was a picture that I had taken of my good friend Laura and me sitting in a dark theater waiting for the Sex and the City movie to start.

It was opening day and we were feeling goofy and excited, so I pulled out my camera and snapped a picture. I was so pissed off. I paced back and forth in the kitchen, then sat down to pound out an e-mail.

Something in my body stopped me. I read over my attack e-mails, took a deep breath, and then raced into the bedroom. I threw on my running shoes and a baseball cap and hit the pavement. I needed to get out of the house and discharge the weird energy coursing through my veins. About one mile into my walk, I called my good friend Laura, the friend who happens to appear with me in said theater picture.

Wanna hear my three responses? We have a very comfortable rhythm. We can ping words all over the place or both get really quiet. I need to think about what you just said. I can use my shame superpowers for evil in a split second.

I think your default is my courage. Tell you about it. Let it go. Delete the e-mail. What do you mean? The blue one.

The four elements of shame resilience: Name it. Talk about it. Own your story. Tell the story. Your book. I thought to myself, Holy crap. It works. A week later I was standing in front of a group of seventy graduate students who were taking my course on shame and empathy.

I was talking about the four elements of shame resilience when one of the students raised her hand and asked for an example. I set up the story by describing my blog and my new commitment to learn photography. I told them that I felt vulnerable about sharing my pictures, and I felt ashamed and belittled when I received this critical e-mail. When I told them about my deep desire to respond with cruelty, several of the students buried their heads in their hands and others just looked away.

Others looked plain scared. I was wrong. Was it really about letting yourself be open to connection and getting hurt? I started sweating. I rubbed my forehead and then looked straight at the red- faced students. I posted it online because I was excited and thought it was fun. Then someone criticized me. You traumatized her. Or found out. Or exposed. I felt liberated. The story I needed to own in order to access my worthiness was not a story of a rookie photographer struggling with criticism over a photograph.

It was the story of a pretty serious person being fun and spontaneous and goofy and imperfect and having someone poke at that vulnerability. Resilience is often a slow unfolding of understanding. What did that experience mean to me? What were the gremlins mumbling? Not only do we need to own our story and love ourselves in the process, we have to figure out the real story!

We also have to learn how we protect ourselves from shame if we want to develop worthiness. What Does Shame Look Like? When it comes to understanding how we defend ourselves against shame, I have the utmost respect for the work from the Stone Center at Wellesley. Hartling, in order to deal with shame, some of us move away by withdrawing, hiding, silencing ourselves, and keeping secrets.

Some of us move toward by seeking to appease and please. And, some of us move against by trying to gain power over others, by being aggressive, and by using shame to fight shame like sending really mean e-mails.

Most of us use all of these—at different times with different folks for different reasons. Yet all of these strategies move us away from our story. Shame is about fear, blame, and disconnection. Story is about worthiness and embracing the imperfections that bring us courage, compassion, and connection.

If we want to live fully, without the constant fear of not being enough, we have to own our story. Shame is a full-contact emotion. Men and women with high levels of shame resilience know when shame is happening. The easiest way to know shame is to cultivate an awareness of our physical shame symptoms.

Knowing this is such a gift. If you want to kick-start your shame resilience and story-claiming, start with these questions. Figuring out the answers can change your life: 1. How do you protect yourself? Who do you call to work through the mean-nasties or the cry-n-hides or the people-pleasing? Our stories are not meant for everyone.

If we have a friend, or a small group of friends, or family who embraces our imperfections, vulnerabilities, and power, and fills us with a sense of belonging, we are incredible lucky. If we have that one person or that small group of confidants, the best way to acknowledge these connections is to acknowledge our worthiness.

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you really need to do, in order to have what you want. Authenticity was simply a quality that you had or that you were lacking.

Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen. The idea that we can choose authenticity makes most of us feel both hopeful and exhausted. We feel hopeful because being real is something we value.

Most of us are drawn to warm, down-to-earth, honest people, and we aspire to be like that in our own lives. What is the anatomy of authenticity? What are the parts that come together to create an authentic self? Mindfully practicing authenticity during our most soul-searching struggles is how we invite grace, joy, and gratitude into our lives.

That theme will repeat itself throughout this book. All of the guideposts are interconnected and related to each other. My goal is to talk about them individually and collectively.

I want us to explore how each of them works on its own and how they fit together. Choosing authenticity is not an easy choice. When we choose to be true to ourselves, the people around us will struggle to make sense of how and why we are changing.

Friends and family may worry about how our authenticity practice will affect them and our relationships with them. Most of us have shame triggers around being perceived as self-indulgent or self- focused.

When I first started mindfully practicing authenticity and worthiness, I felt like every day was a walk through a gauntlet of gremlins. The pushback can be everything from eye rolls and whispers to relationship struggles and feelings of isolation. There can also be cruel and shaming responses to our authentic voices. In my research on authenticity and shame, I found that speaking out is a major shame trigger for women.

Sound informed and educated but not like a know-it-all. When looking at the attributes associated with masculinity, the researchers identified these as important attributes for men: emotional control, primacy of work, control over women, and pursuit of status. Sometimes choosing being real over being liked is all about playing it unsafe. It means stepping out of our comfort zone.

Cruelty is cheap, easy, and rampant. Especially when you attack and criticize anonymously—like technology allows so many people to do these days. When we go against the grain and put ourselves and our work out in the world, some people will feel threatened and they will go after what hurts the most—our appearance, our lovability, and even our parenting. Courage is telling our story, not being immune to criticism. Staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection.

They are likely to fester and eat away at our worthiness. I think we should be born with a warning label similar to the ones that come on cigarette packages: Caution: If you trade in your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.

Yes, there can be authenticity growing pains for the people around us, but in the end, being true to ourselves is the best gift we can give the people we love. When I let go of trying to be everything to everyone, I had much more time, attention, love, and connection for the important people in my life.

My authenticity practice can be hard on Steve and the kids—mostly because it requires time, energy, and attention. But the truth is that Steve, Ellen, and Charlie are engaged in the same struggle. We all are. Stand on your sacred ground. Saying this little mantra helps me remember not to get small so other people are comfortable and not to throw up my armor as a way to protect myself. Courage is contagious.

If authenticity is my goal and I keep it real, I never regret it. I might get my feelings hurt, but I rarely feel shame. I get going by making authenticity the priority.

How do you DIG Deep? The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself. To celebrate, I decided to facilitate an eight-week read-along of the book on my blog. I called it the Shame. Less Joy. Full read-along. Basically, the read-along was a Web-based book club. We covered one chapter per week, and I offered posts, podcasts, discussions, and creative arts exercises along the way.

The read-along is now on my blog, and people still use it—reading through the book with a group or friend is so much more powerful. In fact, shame is the birthplace of perfectionism. I know shame is a daunting word. And one of the ways it sneaks into our lives is through perfectionism. Join over An expert of the psychology of shame presents advice on how to overcome paralyzing fears and self-consciousness, and at the same time increase feelings of self-worth, gratitude, and acceptance.

What people tell us to be and what. Download or read online Summary of The Gifts of Imperfections written by Monica Thompson, published by Unknown which was released on Draws on research with hundreds of interviewees to identify the pervasive influence of cultural shame, discussing how women can recognize the ways in which shame influences their health and relationships and can be transformed into courage and connectivity. We feel uncertain and exposed.

The heart of compassion is acceptance by people of themselves and of others. In order for compassion to occur, people need to set boundaries and hold others accountable for their behavior. The key to compassion is being able to separate people from their behaviors.

It is necessary to address what people do, not who they are. Connection exists as the energy between people who feel they have been seen, heard, and valued without judgment.

People feel strengthened by this relationship and need connection to do well emotionally, physically, spiritually, and intellectually. Connections happen when people both give and receive with an open heart. Chapter 2 Love and belonging are necessary in people's lives. In order for people to experience love and belonging, they must believe they are worthy.

People who accept themselves for who they are and who stop worrying about what others think are worthy of love and belonging. At the heart of wholeheartedness is that people have to believe they are worthy now, as they are, not if or when they become or do something in the future The Gifts of Imperfection describes how we live our lives wholeheartedly looks like.

This book is written by Brene Brown, and it provides practical explanations, showing the true meaning of living with our whole hearts.

We humans are social beings and as such, we want someone to love and care for us just as much as we want to care for somebody else. Here, the author says that, if people want to live their lives 'wholeheartedly', several things need to be 'fulfilled'.

People need courage, compassion and connection to be able to live a life wholeheartedly and the author explains why we need those traits. But there are also some obstacles in reaching and living a wholehearted life, such as shame, fear and vulnerability.

Besides listing these negative traits that can and often stop us from living a wholehearted life, the author also lists ten so-called 'guideposts', which are used to help people to live a life as they are supposed to in the first place. The Gifts of Imperfection shows its readers another perspective on human life in general, a perspective that will reveal both benevolent and malevolent sides of living a life.

This book is also a guidebook that can certainly help people to observe their own lives from a different angle. Doch was, wenn wir gar nicht wissen, was wir wirklich wollen? Download now to get key insights from this book in 15 minutes. She is both a social scientist and a kitchen-table friend whom you can always count on to tell the truth, make you laugh, and, on occasion, cry with you.

And what's now become a movement all started with The Gifts of Imperfection, which has sold more than two million copies in 35 different languages across the globe. What transforms this book from words to effective daily practices are the 10 guideposts to wholehearted living. The guideposts not only help us understand the practices that will allow us to change our lives and families, they also walk us through the unattainable and sabotaging expectations that get in the way.

A small, quiet, grassroots movement that starts with each of us saying, 'My story matters because I matter. Each day we face a barrage of images and messages from society and the media telling us who, what, and how we should be.

We are led to believe that if we could only look perfect and lead perfect lives, we'd no longer feel inadequate. So most of us perform, please, and perfect, all the while thinking, "What if I can't keep all of these balls in the air? Why isn't everyone else working harder and living up to my expectations?

What will people think if I fail or give up? When can I stop proving myself? And, yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable, but that doesn't change the truth that I am worthy of love and belonging. You get the main summary along with all of the benefits and lessons the actual book has to offer. This summary is not intended to be used without reference to the original book. This book is not intended to replace the original book.

Instead, we highly encourage you to buy the full version. We live in a world constantly listening to the lies our fears and shame tell. They counteract gratitude, acceptance, and compassion—the good parts of us.

Her ten guideposts show how we can cultivate authenticity in our lives—a perfectly imperfect life. We are beginning to have a need to nurture our self-worth.