Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly is a great book on vulnerability. The chapter I read last night on shame has been illuminating in showing how much that emotion can hold us back.
We shouldn’t be ashamed, we all engage in it. Negative self talk brings us to a place where men shut down and women feel like they aren’t heard. Through this, we can’t do much work. It is hard enough to work through mundane tasks when we feel the weight of the world on our shoulders, much less anything interesting that requires our strength.
The most interesting thing to me about this is that internal factors slows us down a lot more than the world around us. This begins to make sense when you realize just how powerful the brain is. The last part of us to die is our rationalization, meaning even when we stop breathing we are looking for an angle.
Don’t discount how powerful the brain is. When we are younger, we create the monsters under the bed. We have our parents come and show us that they aren’t there. The biggest mistake we make is to believe we grow up and stop creating them. We do it all the time, and they take different forms. We complain, scratch, kick, quit, sleep, play games, or anything else to get away from what we can carry out due to the monsters that we create.
The great thing about this is we are not trapped by what we are. We don’t need to fear our brain. We can control it. Admitting the shame is the first step to breaking out of that spiral. Simply saying it makes us better. My greatest shame with this blog has been not trusting myself to write enough. Three sentences was a way to cheat – I don’t need to give too much by just doing three sentences. Telling myself who wants to read this anyway, and making short posts kept my skin out of the game.
I want in.
From the desk of Adam Thomas 