Finding Courage In Unexpected Places & Creating Your Best Story

Intro by Ami Mariscal
Do you feel like the world keeps handing you lemons and you keep trying to make lemonade, but it’s getting harder and harder? Read Rising Strong. Are you trying to accomplish something monumental and you need inspiration and wisdom for your journey? Read Rising Strong.
Brené Brown is one of my greatest heroes when it comes to #CreatingHappiness because she goes deep on exploring the stuff that gets in the way of preventing happiness and how to rise up with wisdom, courage and love.
Below are quotes with some of my notes from the book Rising Strong by Brené Brown.
Generosity is not a free pass for people to take advantage of us, treat us unfairly, or be purposefully disrespectful and mean…
A generous assumption without boundaries is another recipe for resentment, misunderstanding, and judgement. We could all stand to be more generous, but we also need to maintain our integrity and our boundaries. I call the solution to this issue living big; boundaries, integrity and generosity. Here is the question:
What boundaries do I need to put in place so I can work from a place from integrity and extend the most generous interpretations of the intentions, words and actions of others?
Ch. 43

Living Big: Boundaries, Integrity, Generosity
Jean Petano Lading?
Leadership & Organizational Development
What is the hypothesis of generosity? What are the most generous assumption you can make about this person’s intentions or what this person said?
Ch. 43

Stop loving people for who they could be and starting loving them for who they are
This doesn’t mean that we stop helping people set goals. Or that we stop expecitng people to grow and change
It means that we stop respecting and evaluating people based on what they should accomplish. And start respecting them for who and holding them accountable for what they are actually doing. It means we stop loving people for who they could be and starting loving them for who they are.
Ch. 42

Rising strong deepens our whole-heartedness, but it often feels like a good hearty tired.
Hallelujah by Leonard Coehn
Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and its a broken hallelujah.
Ch. 41

Rumbling with Boundaries & Generosity
My S.F.D. was pretty straight forward and approximated a temper tantrum. I was
Two types of human behavior

1) Those of us who try our best, follow rules and are respectful
2) sewer rats who don’t try best and take advantage of people
Ch. 41

Life is better when assumes people are doing the best they can.
The most compassionate people have the most well defined and well respected boundaries. They assume that other people are doing the best they, but they also ask for what they need and they don’t put up with a lot of crap.
I lived the opposite way
I assumed the opposite.
So I judged them and constantly faught being dissapointed, which is easier than setting boundaries. Boundaries are hard, especially when you are people pleaser
Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to and when they say yes they mean it.
I said yes when I should have said no. I put no value on my needs and the event organizaers put no value on my needs.
Ch. 40

Are people doing their best?
When I got home that night Steve was
I hadn’t asked him the research question,
He tHought about it for a solid 10 minutes. As a pediatrician, Steve sees the best and worst in people.
I could tell he was really struggling with the question. But when he looked back at me
Do you think people are doing the best they can.
15 interviews = saturation. THere were clear themes that would acuratly predict what I would find in the remaining interviews.
People who said people are doing their
I know it sounds naive,
I know it sounds weird, they were slower to answer and almost seemed apologetic as if they tried to persuade themselves otherwise but couldn’t give up on humanity.
They were also careful to mean that people can t grow or change.
But at any given time, people are doing the best they can with the tools that they have.
Those who didn’t believe people were doing thebest they could, were emphatic.
Unlike their yes counterparts, about 80% of these respondents used themselves as examples, “I know I’m not doing my best, so why should I assume others are. They judged their efforts in the same manor that they judged the efforts of others. It was clearly important for the people judging no.
Ch. 39

I turned to walk away he said, “the thing is you never know about people, that lady could have a kid on drugs stealing money from her account,… You just never know people aren’t themselves when their scared, it may be all they can do.” – Dan’s? idea.
Ch. 38

That we had a terrible fight b/c Steve thought I looked like crap in my new speedo.
It would have been a confabulation – lie honestly told. And regardless how honestly I was conveying this untruth, it could have hurt Steve our relationship and me. And perhaps even my relationship with my sisters. I can just see one or both of them saying, that doesn’t sound like Steve…
Ch. 30

Uncontrolled eruptions of emotion sabotage the safety that most of us are trying to create, whether in our families, or our organizations.
Chandeliering leads to egg shell environments, fear-based settings where everyone else is on edge.
Ch. 24

How We Develop Curiosity
The participants in my study who taught me the most about getting curious learned to investigate their emotions in one of three ways;

1) Their parents, or another important adult in their lives explicitly taught them how to the importance of exploring feelings
2) Their parents or another important adult in their lives modeled curiosity about emotion.
3) Maybe they worked with a helping professional, someone who taught them the power of inquiry.

In other words, their pumps were primed with enough knowledge about emotion to serve as a foundation for getting curious.
Their are numerous complex reasons why there is so little open discussion and engagement around emotion.
The research made it clear how much, or how little value emotions comes from what we saw or we’re taught when we were growing up.
Combination of

7 ideas

1) Maybe we were raised believing that being emotional is a sign of vulnerability and that is weakenss
2) Maybe we grew up around “Don’t ask, don’t tell”. You can feel emotion all you want, but don’t share it with other.
3) Some of us don’t have access to a full emotional vocabularly, so we make fun of it.
4) Maybe grew up believing that discussing emotion is frivolous
5) We’re so numb to feeling we don’t think it exists
6) Uncertainty is too uncomfortable so we don’t discuss emotion
7) We grew up believing that engaging and asking questions invites trouble.
Ch. 22

Our instinct is to run from pain.
In fact, most of us were never taught how to hold dicomftrot. sit with iwth it or communicate it.
Only how to discharge or dump it. Or to pretend it’s not happening.
If you combine that with the instinctual avoidance of pain, it’s easy to understand why offloading becomes a habit.
Ch. 20

Being curious.
When we deny our stories and disengage from tough emotions, they don’t go away. Instead they own us, they define us. Our job is not to deny the story, but to defy the ending. To rise strong and recognize our story and rumble with the truth until we get to “yes, this is what happened”.
Ch. 20

Storytelling and creativity
Integration through creativity.
Creativity is connecting things.
Creating is connecting the dots between the experiences we;ve had to synthesize new things.
Ch. 18

Steps to Rising Strong
The goal: to rise from falls and face hurt in a way that brings whole heartedness

1) The reckoning. Realize emotions off kilter and get curious about what’s causing it. Start examining story.
2) The rumble – they get honest about the stories they’ve made up. Willing to revist, challenge and reality check narratives they’ve created.
Gives birth to key learning about who we are and how we deal with others.
3) The revolution – fundamentally change our beliefs. life integration
Ch. 18

That’s were my richest data comes from, people’s lived experiences.
Ch. 15

The 3 Act Structure of Story Telling

by Darla Anderson, the Pixar Producer behind Toy Story 3, Monsters Inc, A Bug’s Life and Cars.

Act 1 The protagonist is called to adventure and accepts the adventure. The rules of the world are established.
At the end of act one is the inciting incident
Act 2 – The protagonist tries every uncomfortable way to solve the problem. By the climax he learns what it’s really going to take to solve the problem. This act includes the lowest of the low.
Act 3 – The protagonist needs to prove she learned the lesson. Usually showing a willingness to prove this at all cost. This is all about redemption, an enlightened character knowing what to do to solve a conflict.

Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey.
The Hero with 1000 Faces
Yep, we reference Joseph’s hero’s journey at the beginning of every film. – Darla Anderson
Ch. 15

Awesome phrase to use when the conversation is heated:
I feel like ______ and the story that I’m making up is that ______…
Example:
I feel like you’re blowing me off and the story I’m making up is that you looked over at me while I was swimming and thought, man she’s getting old.
Ch. 11

Love is my scariest arena. In a hot argument: Put your heart where your mouth is.
Ch. 10

The opposite of scarcity is not abundance, it’s ENOUGH. Empathy is not finite. When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, there is not less of these qualities to go around, there’s more. Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world.
Ch. 8

These are the rules of engagement for rising strong
If we are brave enough often enough we will fall. Daring is saying,”I know I will eventually fail and I am still in.”
Once we fall in the service of being brave, we can never go back.
This journey belongs to no one but you, however, no one successfully goes it alone. We must learn to depend on other travelers for support.
We’re wired for story. We want to own, integrate and share our stories of struggle. We feel the most alive when we’re connecting with others and sharing our stories. neuro economist Paul Zach – > when we hear story either beginning, middle and end causes our brains to release cortisal and oxtytocin. These chemicals trigger abilities that help us connect & make meaning.
Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We are born makers and creativity is the ultimate act of integration. Creativity is the mechanism that allows learning to seep into our brain and become practice. Knowledge is only a rumor until we live it.
Rising strong is the same process whether you are navigating personal or professional struggles. Humans are feeling machines that think. You cannot remove emotion from process just b/c you are at work.
Ch. 6

Music makes me feel less alone in the mess.
Ch. 6

Quotes listed are by Dr. Brené Brown in the book Rising Strong. Brené Brown, Ph.D. is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work. Her TEDx talk on vulnerability catapulted her fame quickly as it darn well should have
This post was last updated by Ami Mariscal March 15, 2017.