I have been listening to an audiobook by Brene Brown called The Power of Vulnerability. I’m only about an hour into a 7 hour listen, but my brain is firing and I want to both listen to more as well as appreciate the nuggets of gold I have already been offered.
Brene Brown is a researcher of shame and vulnerability. Her story of being brought up to “not do vulnerability” resonates strongly with me. Her descriptions of her struggles with feeling imposter syndrome, with wanting people to like her, with agreeing with others to fit in all seems very close.
Learnings So Far
So far, what I’ve taken from the audiobook is this:
- Many people in our culture (she talks about American culture, but I think Australian culture is reasonably similar) live in a culture of deep scarcity. “I’m not _______ enough. I don’t have enough _________,” Replace the blanks with whatever words you like, such as productive, extraordinary, interesting etc.
- People need to feel love and belonging.
- Some people do feel like they are enough and have a sense of love and belonging. These people are what Brown refers to as “wholehearted”. According to Brown’s research, about 20% of the population are wholehearted, and while about 25% of them were brought up in a wholehearted environment, the rest were not, and have made choices to become that way.
Wholehearted people have 10 habits in common. More on that later.
There are so many aspects to this that are intriguing for me. Scarcity culture succinctly describes the feeling of something being missing that drives us to try to do more, consume more, be more and it is the thing that Jon and I are trying to move away from.
I feel like this culture of scarcity is a feeling that I have and I also try hard to move on from. It is sometimes a feeling of inadequacy of not doing enough or not doing enough soon enough. There is a mixture of shame and guilt in there too, like there is something wrong with me for trying to be different, for being different, and also for telling the world that I’m different and that they could be too.
Brown talks about shame gremlins who hang out inside of you. They tell you how wrong you are, as well as telling you that you can’t really change. But apparently through talking about the shame that we feel, we can quieten the gremlins and take back our power to feel love for ourselves. And once we love ourselves, we can also love others. I’m looking forward to learning more.