Writer and shame researcher Brené Brown encourages readers to make the choice to live authentically, embrace their imperfections, and be who they are—not what others want them to be—in this guidepost from her guide to living a Wholehearted life.

Guidepost #1

Cultivating Authenticity
Letting Go of What People Think

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.
—Margaret Young

Before I started doing my research, I always thought of people as being either authentic or inauthentic. Authenticity was simply a quality that you had or that you were lacking. I think that’s the way most of us use the term: “She’s a very authentic person.” But as I started immersing myself in the research and doing my own personal work, I realized that, like many desirable ways of being, authenticity is not something we have or don’t have. It’s a practice—a conscious choice of how we want to live.

Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.

There are people who consciously practice being authentic, there are people who don’t, and there are the rest of us who are authentic on some days and not so authentic on other days. Trust me, even though I know plenty about authenticity and it’s something I work toward, if I am full of self-doubt or shame, I can sell myself out and be anybody you need me to be.

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. We feel exhausted because without even giving it too much thought, most of us know that choosing authenticity in a culture that dictates everything from how much we’re supposed to weigh to what our houses are supposed to look like is a huge undertaking.

Given the magnitude of the task at hand—be authentic in a culture that wants you to “fit in” and “people-please”—I decided to use my research to develop a definition of authenticity that I could use as a touchstone. What is the anatomy of authenticity? What are the parts that come together to create an authentic self? Here’s what I developed:

Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.

Choosing authenticity means
• cultivating the courage to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable;
• exercising the compassion that comes from knowing that we are all made of strength and struggle; and
• nurturing the connection and sense of belonging that can only happen when we believe that we are enough.

Authenticity demands Wholehearted living and loving—even when it’s hard, even when we’re wrestling with the shame and fear of not being good enough, and especially when the joy is so intense that we’re afraid to let ourselves feel it.

Mindfully practicing authenticity during our most soul-searching struggles is how we invite grace, joy, and gratitude into our lives.

You’ll notice that many of the topics from the ten guideposts are woven throughout the definition. 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. We’ll spend the rest of the book unpacking terms like perfection so that we can understand why they’re so important and what often gets in our way of living a Wholehearted life.

Choosing authenticity is not an easy choice. E. E. Cummings wrote, “To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight—and never stop fighting.” “Staying real” is one of the most courageous battles that we’ll ever fight.

When we choose to be true to ourselves, the people around us will struggle to make sense of how and why we are changing. Partners and children might feel fearful and unsure about the changes they’re seeing. Friends and family may worry about how our authenticity practice will affect them and our relationships with them. Some will find inspiration in our new commitment; others may perceive that we’re changing too much—maybe even abandoning them or holding up an uncomfortable mirror.

It’s not so much the act of authenticity that challenges the status quo—I think of it as the audacity of authenticity. Most of us have shame triggers around being perceived as self-indulgent or self-focused. We don’t want our authenticity to be perceived as selfish or narcissistic. When I first started mindfully practicing authenticity and worthiness, I felt like every day was a walk through a gauntlet of gremlins.
Their voices can be loud and unrelenting:

“What if I think I’m enough, but others don’t?”
“What if I let my imperfect self be seen and known, and nobody likes what they see?”
“What if my friends/family/co-workers like the perfect me better . . . you know, the one who takes care of everything and everyone?”

Sometimes, when we push the system, it pushes back. 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. Here’s how the research participants described the struggle to be authentic:

• Don’t make people feel uncomfortable but be honest.
• Don’t upset anyone or hurt anyone’s feelings but say what’s on your mind.
• Sound informed and educated but not like a know-it-all.
• Don’t say anything unpopular or controversial but have the courage to disagree with the crowd.

I also found that men and women struggle when their opinions, feelings, and beliefs conflict with our culture’s gender expectations. For example, research on the attributes that we associate with “being feminine” tells us that some of the most important qualities for women are thin, nice, and modest.¹ That means if women want to play it totally safe, we have to be willing to stay as small, quiet, and attractive as possible.

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.² That means if men want to play it safe, they need to stop feeling, start earning, and give up on meaningful connection.

The thing is . . . authenticity isn’t always the safe option. Sometimes choosing being real over being liked is all about playing it unsafe. It means stepping out of our comfort zone. And trust me, as someone who has stepped out on many occasions, it’s easy to get knocked around when you’re wandering through new territory.

It’s easy to attack and criticize someone while he or she is risk-taking—voicing an unpopular opinion or sharing a new creation with the world or trying something new that he or she hasn’t quite mastered. Cruelty is cheap, easy, and rampant. It’s also chicken-shit. Especially when you attack and criticize anonymously—like technology allows so many people to do these days.

As we struggle to be authentic and brave, it’s important to remember that cruelty always hurts, even if the criticisms are untrue. 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.
The problem is that when we don’t care at all what people think and we’re immune to hurt, we’re also ineffective at connecting. 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.

If you’re like me, practicing authenticity can feel like a daunting choice—there’s risk involved in putting your true self out in the world. But I believe there’s even more risk in hiding yourself and your gifts from the world. Our unexpressed ideas, opinions, and contributions don’t just go away. 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.

Sacrificing who we are for the sake of what other people think just isn’t worth it. 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.

DIG Deep
Get Deliberate: Whenever I’m faced with a vulnerable situation, I get deliberate with my intentions by repeating this to myself: “Don’t shrink. Don’t puff up. Stand on your sacred ground.” I think there’s something deeply spiritual about standing your 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.

Get Inspired: I’m inspired by everyone who shares their work and opinions with the world. Courage is contagious. My friend Katherine Center says, “You have to be brave with your life so that others can be brave with theirs.”

Get Going: I try to make authenticity my number one goal when I go into a situation where I’m feeling vulnerable. 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. When acceptance or approval becomes my goal, and it doesn’t work out, that can trigger shame for me: “I’m not good enough.” If the goal is authenticity and they don’t like me, I’m okay. If the goal is being liked and they don’t like me, I’m in trouble. I get going by making authenticity the priority.

How do you DIG Deep?

Excerpted from The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown, Ph.D. Brown is a writer and research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. A dynamic speaker, she frequently presents on the topic of shame resilience at conferences and public events. Visit her popular blog ordinarycourage.com to learn more.


The Gifts of Imperfection

Softcover, 160 pages

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?

In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown, Ph.D., a leading expert on shame, authenticity and belonging, shares what she's learned from a decade of research on the power of Wholehearted Living -- a way of engaging with the world from a place of worthiness.

In her ten guideposts, Brown engages our minds, hearts, and spirits as she explores how we can cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough, and to go to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am sometimes afraid, but I am also brave. And, yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable, but that doesn't change the truth that I am worthy of love and belonging.

List Price: $14.95
Online Price: $13.45

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Marya Hornbacher, best-selling author of Sane, Wasted, and Madness, recognizes the struggle many non-religious people in recovery experience when it comes to the concept of a Higher Power. Using the story of her personal journey, Hornbacher offers a fresh approach to cultivating a spiritual life along one’s own chosen path.

Using the cycle of a year’s passage, we will explore ten spiritual concepts in the context of the seasons of a life and in the practice of the Twelve Steps, looking at how they can be understood by someone who does not believe in a God. Rather than arguments for any theory or philosophy of spirituality, these are explorations of the experience of waiting itself as a spiritual practice.

I walked through the door of the convent. It was a silent Catholic order; no one would speak to me during the time I was going to spend there. I paused in the foyer to listen for something—nuns, God, mice—but there was no sound. The nuns, surely, were somewhere in the building; perhaps God was as well. At least, that was my hope.

 The rooms were simple. In the kitchen, I found a long, rough-hewn wooden table with wooden chairs. On the table was a bowl of soup and some bread. This meal was meant for me. I sat down and ate it, after glancing around to see if there might be directions as to what one did prior to eating in a convent—presumably one might pray?—but there were no directions. So I simply ate. When I was done, I washed my bowl and spoon and set them in the rack to dry, and then went to explore the rest of the rooms.

 I found a small chapel. The fading light of late day came through the stained-glass windows and cast the pews and stone floor with a bright motley of color. Beyond the chapel, I found a library: the walls were lined floor to ceiling with books, except for one long wall of windows that looked out on an orderly garden, vegetables and flowers in neat boxes and rows. Beyond the garden, there was a labyrinth, the long shadows of trees falling across it.

 I scanned the books. I pulled one out, I don’t remember which one. I sat down in a chair with the book unopened on my lap. I looked out the window as the light faded and dusk fell.

 I had lost, more or less, everything.

 I say that in a very qualified sense: I had a place to live, food to eat. I had clothes and the usual things one needs to survive. But I had lost what was most familiar, what was safest, what I knew best: I had lost an addiction. That addiction had been the center of my existence since I was a child. It had been my guiding principle, my closest companion, the thing I turned to for comfort, for answers, for assurance that I would be all right. It had been my god.

 It had nearly killed me.

 I fought like hell to keep it. I kicked and screamed and swore and sobbed. I begged to be allowed to hold it just a little while longer. But in the end, I had to let it go.

 And without it, I was quite lost.

 I didn’t know why I had come to the convent. It was an impulse; someone had told me there was a convent in a nearby city, an order of nuns who had taken a vow of silence and who allowed guests to stay. In that moment, the idea of going somewhere to be entirely silent appealed to some part of me I couldn’t explain. Maybe I thought that if things got quiet enough, I would hear God.

 Night fell over the convent. I sat there in the dark, watching the moon scatter light over the orderly garden. There was no sound except that of my own breath.

I set the book on a table, picked up my small bag, and found the stairs up to the room where I was to sleep. In this room, there was a narrow bed, a simple desk, and a prayer bench, the velvet kneeling rail well worn. I set my bag on the floor and studied the prayer bench awhile. Then I lay down on my back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

I was at the lowest point in my life. I had lost all I thought I needed. I did not know how to go on.

It was an enormous, sudden peace.

I knew, very quietly, that I would not find God in this place. I knew it was possible I would not find God at all. And so I could not explain the overwhelming peace I felt. I could not explain how I knew, absolutely, that it would be all right.

I remembered the words of Julian of Norwich: And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

I could not have articulated it at that time, but what I felt that night is what I would now call grace. I felt faith. I heard something. Not the voice of God, not the beating wings of angels. Not the murmur of nuns at prayer, not even the scuttle of mice.

What I heard was the stirring of my own spirit coming to life.

The spirit, it seems to me, grows noisy and goes silent by turns over the course of one’s life. There are ways in which we silence it. Many of us have silenced it through addiction, but there are other ways, and many of us have used those as well. And there are ways in which we can draw the spirit out, listen for it with all the strength we’ve got.

But listening for spirit is something of a complicated process when we do not believe in a God, or do not feel a connection to what may be called a Higher Power. Many of us have been trained to think of “spirituality” as the sole provenance of religion; and if we have come to feel that the religious are not the only ones with access to a spiritual life, we may still be casting about for what, precisely, a spiritual life would be without a God, a religion, or a solid set of spiritual beliefs.

Throughout this book, I use the words spirit and spiritual often, and that may seem strange when I state my own lack of belief in a Higher Power or God. And some days it seems strange to me as well, that I am so certain of an ineffable force within me and within all of us when I doubt the presence of a metaphysical power without. But really, it isn’t contradictory. I am not speaking of metaphysics. I am speaking of the thing in ourselves that stirs.

The origin of the word spirit is Greek. It means “breath.” That which stirs within, slows or quickens, goes deep or dies out. When I speak of spirit, I am not speaking of something related to or given by a force outside ourselves. I am speaking of the force that is ourselves. The experience of living in this world, bound by a body, space, and time, woven into the fabric of human history, human connection, and human life. This is the force that feels and thinks and gives us consciousness at all; it is our awareness of presence in the world. It is the deepest, most elemental, most integral part of who we are; it is who we are.

So when I speak of spirit, I’m speaking of something that frustratingly defies articulation, because we have few words for spiritual beyond those that refer back to a God. But not believing in a God is not opposed to a belief in an aspect of the self that can be called spiritual. The latter is experienced, and defined, very personally, and is different for each individual.

I am not speaking of some universal or transcendent “Spirit” that exists outside of us; I am speaking of the human spirit that exists in each of us. I’m speaking of something that is urgently important in ourselves, the very thing that’s sent us searching, the thing that feels the longing, the thing that comes knocking on the door of our emotionally and intellectually closed lives and asks to be let in.

When we let it in, and only when we do, we begin to be integrated people. We begin to find integrity in who we are. We are not just a body, not just a mind, not just a mass of emotions, not just people dragging around the dusty bag of our pasts. We have depth and wholeness, not shattered bits of self that never seem to hold together properly. And we begin to walk a spiritual path.

This path is not toward a known entity of any kind. Rather, it is the path that leads through. And there are many points along the way where we stop, or we fumble, or we get tangled up or turned around.

And those are the places where we wait. We’re not waiting for the voice of God, or for the lightning-bolt spiritual experience. We’re not waiting to be saved or carried. We’re waiting for our own inner voice—for lack of a better word, I’m going to keep calling it spirit—to tell us where to go next.

It will.

Excerpted from Waiting by Marya Hornbacher. She is the author of two best-selling nonfiction titles, Madness: A Bipolar Life and Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. She has also authored a recovery handbook, Sane: Mental Illness, Addiction, and the 12 Steps and a critically acclaimed novel, The Center of Winter.


Waiting
A Nonbeliever’s Higher Power

Softcover, 168 pages

For those who don't believe in God, feel disconnected from the ideas of God presented in organized religion, or are simply struggling to determine their own spiritual path, Marya Hornbacher, author of the New York Times best sellers Madness and Wasted, offers a down-to-earth exploration of the concept of faith.

In Waiting, Hornbacher uses the story of her own journey beginning with her recovery from alcoholism to offer a fresh approach to cultivating a spiritual life. Relinquishing the concept of a universal "Spirit" that exists outside of us, Hornbacher gives us the framework to explore the human spirit in each of us--the very thing that sends us searching, that connects us with one another, the thing that "comes knocking at the door of our emotionally and intellectually closed lives and asks to be let in."
When we let it in and only when we do, she says, we begin to be integrated people. And we begin to walk a spiritual path. And there are many points along the way where we stop, or we fumble, or we get tangled up or turned around. Those are the places where we wait.

Waiting, you'll discover, can become a kind of spiritual practice in itself, requiring patience, acceptance, and stillness. Sometimes we do it because we know we need to, though we may not know why. In short, we do it on faith.

List Price: $14.95
Online Price: $13.45

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