http://www.oprah.com/own-super-soul-sunday/Full-Episode-Oprah-and-Brene-Brown-on-Daring-Greatly-Video
Brene Brown: “… perfectionism is not about striving for excellence, or healthy striving, which I’m for. It’s a cognitive behavioral process, a way of thinking and feeling that says this: ‘If I look perfect, do it perfect, work perfect, and live perfect, I can avoid or minimize shame, blame, and judgment.”
Oprah Winfrey: “Perfectionism is the ultimate fear… that the people who are walking around as perfectionists, who have to have everything so perfect, that they are ultimately afraid that the world is going to see them for who they really are and they won’t measure up. It’s fear. It’s very different from trying to be excellent and working hard and doing your best.”
Brene: “I call perfectionism the 20-ton shield. We carry it around thinking it’s gonna protect us from being hurt. But it protects us from being seen.”
Oprah: “I love cultivating a resilient spirit: letting go of numbing and powerlessness. A lot of people are numb to life… the key element that you discovered from people who are successful or not, who live a whole-hearted life or not, is that they feel a sense of worthiness.”
Brene: “That is the absolute bottom line… they engage the world from a place of worthiness.”
Oprah: “… the cultivation of joy and gratitude is the way home. There is no joy without gratitude.”
Brene: “If you ask me what is the most terrifying, difficult emotion that we experience as humans, I would say ‘Joy’… When we lost our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes forboding. I’m not gonna feel you. I’m not gonna soften into this moment of joy. Because I’m scared. I’m scared it’s gonna be taken away. The other shoe’s gonna drop. And so what we do in moments of joyfulness is, we try beat vulnerability to the punch. I interviewed a man who told me, ‘My whole life, I never got too excited, too joyful about anything. I just kind of stayed right in the middle. That way, if things didn’t work out, I wasn’t devastated. And if they did work out, it was a pleasant surprise.’ He said in his 60s, he was in a car accident. His wife of 40 years was killed. And he said, ‘The second I realized that she was gone, the first thing I thought was I should have leaned harder into these moments of joy. Because that did not protect me from what I feel right now.’ In a culture of scarcity, we’re all chasing the extraordinary. When I interviewed people who went through horrific things.. the loss of children, genocide, violence, trauma.. And I talked to them about what’s the hardest loss. They never talked about the extraordinary things. They said, ‘I miss the ordinary moments. I miss hearing the screen door slam and knowing my husband’s home from work. I miss hearing my kids fighting in the backyard. I miss the way my wife set me table.’ And those are the moments that are in front of all of us every day that we could stop and say, ‘God, I’m grateful for this.””
