The One With Brené Brown

People always ask me what the best parenting advice is that I came across in the 20 years of research, and everyone gets pissed off when I say it. The best parenting advice I can tell you is hard as shit: We need to be the adults we want our children to grow up to be.

Vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability. It can be over-sharing, it can be shock and awe, it can be attention-seeking, but it's not true vulnerability because what you're looking for... is validation of pain, not connection.

I would say the greatest infinite game that we're engaged in... and the one that dictates the quality and the depth of the connections we have is probably self-awareness and self-love.

We are not deeply enough connected with the infinite love and energy that we all are to be able to connect with other people.

We are wired for survival above all else. There's not even a close second in terms of what the brain is wired to do. And so the brain's interest in positive affect is not as great as the brain's acute feelers out for negative affect—everything from fear and physical threat to emotional threat to stress, overwhelm, anxiety, despair, anguish. It's how we're wired.

There's a real yearning to understand who we are, to understand ourselves, to understand where we belong, to understand our worth, to understand our lovability and our capacity to love.

The number one shame trigger for masculinity is 'don't be perceived as weak.'

Spirituality is really, at its core, a belief that we are inextricably connected to each other by something greater than us.

I don't think you can engage people in meaningful change without giving them some tools and skill-building, which requires new cognitive ways of thinking about things.

I'm a good storyteller because I understand the craft of story, but who gives a shit if I'm not saying something that's important?