Brené Brown is the closest example I have to a spiritual master. Her research on shame, vulnerability, belonging, and leadership moves my life. I watch her Ted Talk, “The Power of Vulnerability”, a few times a year just to sit in that space again. It brings me to tears.
There is no courage without vulnerability, Brené explains. No act of bravery and honor that didn’t come with the risk of emotional exposure and fear. She talks about the power of identifying your values and living in them. My own value of courage was crystalized and influenced my personal vision statement: I am brave. I show up. I move forward.
I first read Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly in 2016 with an informal book club at work, though her books had been recommended to me and my ex during marital counseling (rumbling with vulnerability was not our strong suit). Since then I’ve explored more of her work and last night I finished listening to the audiobook of Braving the Wilderness. There were a hundred gems, but this particular quote resonated with me as I was thinking about self-care:
“Tonight we will exhale and teach. Now it’s time to inhale. There is the in-breath and there is the out-breath, and it’s easy to believe that we must exhale all the time, without ever inhaling. But the inhale is absolutely essential if you want to continue to exhale.”
Brené Brown
I hadn’t heard that metaphor before, though it circles the familiar ones: make deposits so you can withdrawals, add to your soup pot, charge your battery. Breathe In. Take care of yourself first, everything else will follow.
In the workplace, we call the missed Inhale employee burnout. As HR, it’s something I try to stay in tune to. It’s why good companies promote balance, add yoga classes or social events to relax and blow off steam, and generally give a damn about their people. When people get burned out the tower is crumbling. It ripples into morale, employment brand, and eventually turnover of your best people.
Millennials are being called the “Burnout Generation”. One writer put it like this:
“We’re deeply in debt, working more hours and more jobs for less pay and less security, struggling to achieve the same standards of living as our parents, operating in psychological and physical precariousness, all while being told that if we just work harder, meritocracy will prevail, and we’ll begin thriving. The carrot dangling in front of us is the dream that the to-do list will end, or at least become far more manageable.”
Anne Helen Peterson
Here’s the thing: burnout or depression or anxiety cannot be solved by a dose of self-care. Meditating for a few minutes each morning doesn’t turn around your life. You can’t get a massage once a month and no longer be exhausted or sad. It doesn’t work like that. But I do think there’s power in the Inhale. In drawing energy to yourself and figuring out what self-care really means.
Brianna Wiest west wrote in her ThoughtCatalog article:
“True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.”
Brianna Wiest
Brené’s messages are in the same vein. A life worth living is not one where you numb yourself from anything that is painful or scary, but one where you rumble with the tough shit, the real conversations, and who you are and who you want to be.
With Love,
Natalie