Brene Brown

I recently finished Brene Brown's book Daring Greatly and while it's a little 'touchy-feely' than what I normally read, it's an excellent book that relates to so many different areas in life:

• On social media: I see how kids that grow up on a steady diet of reality television, celebrity culture, and unsupervised social media can absorb this messaging and develop a completely skewed sense of the world.  I am only as good as the number of likes I get on Facebook or Instagram.
• On comparing your life with others: What makes this constant assessing and comparing so self-deflating is that we are often comparing our lives, our marriages, and our communities to unattainable, media-driven visions of perfection, or we’re holding up our reality against our own fictional account of how great someone else has it.  Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison.
• On anyone who works with children and/or students: With children actions speak louder than words.  When we stop requesting invitations into their lives by asking about their day, asking them to tell us about their favorite songs, wondering how their friends are doing, then children feel pain and fear (and not relief, despite how our teenagers may act).  Because they can’t articulate how they feel about disengagement when we stop making an effort with them, they show us by acting out, thinking, this will get their attention.
• On religion: When religious leaders leverage our fear and need for more certainty by extracting vulnerability from spirituality and turning faith into “compliance and consequences” rather than teaching and modeling how to wrestle with the unknown and how to embrace mystery, the entire concept of faith is bankrupt on its own terms. 
• On leadership: How would engagement change if leaders sat down next to folks and said “thank you for your contributions.  Here’s how you’re making a difference.  This issue is getting in the way of your growth, and I think we can tackle it together.  What ideas do you have about moving forward?  What role do you think I’m playing in the problem?  What can I do differently to support you?”
• On parenting, part 1: Certainty often breeds absolutes, intolerance, and judgment.  That’s why parents are critical of one another- we latch on to a method or approach and very quickly our way becomes the way.  When we obsess over our parenting choices to the extent that most of us do, and then we see someone else making different choices, we often perceive the difference as direct criticism of how we are parenting.
• On parenting, part 2: In terms of teaching our children to dare greatly in the “never enough” culture, the question isn’t so much “are you parenting the right way?” as it is” are you the adult that you want your child to grow up to be?”.