When we choose growth over perfection, we immediately increase our shame resilience. Improvement is a far more realistic goal than perfection. Merely letting go of unattainable goals makes us less susceptible to shame. When we believe “we must be this” we ignore who or what we actually are, our capacity and our limitations. We start from the image of perfection, and of course, from perfection there is nowhere to go but down.
— Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (but it Isn’t). Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough” (Penguin Publishing Group, Feb 2007)
Notes: Portrait: NPR, 2019
