summary ofDaring GreatlyBook by Brené Brown, PhD

first KEY POINT

How to live “wholeheartedly”

We are ashamed and afraid to be “ordinary.” We are scared because we feel “never good enough,” “never perfect enough,” “never thin enough,” “never powerful enough,” “never successful enough,” “never smart enough,” “never certain enough,” “never safe enough,” and “never extraordinary enough.”

This sense of shame fuels our culture's scarcity mindset, as everyone becomes acutely focused on what's missing. There's a constant sense of something being limited or insufficient. We spend considerable time tallying what we possess, desire, and lack, and how it compares to others' possessions, needs, and desires. Our lives, relationships, families, and communities are measured against impossible, media-promoted ideals of flawlessness.According to Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money, scarcity is the “never enough” dilemma. She states, "Our initial thought upon waking is, 'I didn’t sleep enough.'" Followed by 'I don’t have enough time.' Whether factual or not, this notion of insufficiency automatically pops into our minds without us even pausing to scrutinize it.The majority of our days and lives are consumed in articulating, lamenting, fretting, or stressing over our lack of something. From the moment we wake, before our feet even hit the floor, we feel deficient and deprived of something.And as we end our day, our minds are bombarded with a tally of what we failed to acquire or accomplish. We fall asleep burdened by these thoughts and awaken to this scarcity narrative. The scarcity mindset is at the core of envy, greed, bias, and conflicts with life.We can deal with the shame and the culture of scarcity it causes by not necessarily living in abundance, but by living “wholeheartedly” ― by being vulnerable and worthy; by facing uncertainty, exposure, and emotional risks, and understanding that we, in our individual capacities, are more than enough.