Brene Brown said to Dare Greatly so I promptly burst into tears

I just finished listening to Brene Brown's book, Daring Greatly, and promptly burst into tears.

I nearly made it too. But the last four minutes did me in.

You know when, back in the day, you went to a movie theatre and it was a tear jerker but you kept it together, so as not to blubber cry surrounded by strangers, until - the last few minutes?

Yeah - like that, except on my back porch, all by myself.

The book, in a nutshell, is about being vulnerable, open, available to our humanity, to how we relate to others, and the applications of shame, blame and vulnerability to the way we live our lives. 

Not surprisingly, the most relevant piece for me was the parenting section. I nodded along with all of it. But that last section about how we use these strategies with awareness of these skills as parents resonated with me deeply because of the work I do.

So, what exactly brought me to tears? 

Brene completed the book with an intimate story of feeling vulnerable and connected to her daughter, yet choosing to allow her to struggle and potentially fail. She described her mental process of applying perspective to the experience, then requiring her daughter to do the hard thing - all by herself, because of the long term growth opportunity.

I thought, Oh my gosh! Another mother who thinks the way I do. She GETS me! 

And I was a gonner. Bring on the tears. 

Not the slow-roll tear down the cheek, tear.

Not the sniffle sniffle. Wow. That's deep. tear. 

But, crying, bawling, I feel this truth in my soul, tears.

My tears are based in respect. Respect that there's at least one other parent out there who feels as strongly as I do, and practices wholehearted parenting, with the intention of raising a wholehearted human. 

Once I pulled myself together another emotion washed over me. 

The sense of connection and hope turned to conviction that where there's one, there's many. And when there's many, there's millions. 

Millions of other parents who nod their heads and let their tears flow like I do when they listen to the openness of Brene's words, stories, research findings and realities. Or, at the very least, that there are millions of parents who want that experience, who desire, deeply, to be in relationship with the children they chose to bring into this world.

They are simply looking for the roadmap of how to do it.

Here’s the rub. Desire and action are two sides of the same coin and to get results you’ve got to employ both. 

But in parenting, there is no checklist. 

There's no staples “easy” button. 

There's no, one-size-fits-all, just do what I do, and you'll have the same experience. 

When I think about the totality and the overwhelmingness of raising another human being in this world it brings me back to my teaching days and how it never ceased to amaze me that I would put the exact same materials in front of every single child in my classroom. And I would give the exact same directions to every single child in my classroom.

And they would all, without fail, produce something completely unique, specific to:

 WHO they are and

• how they interpreted the materials

• how they interpreted my directions. 

And they would give me a little piece of themselves back. How beautiful it was; how honest and vulnerable and true these Kindergarten and first graders could be.

And in my response to their soul-baring work, I had a choice. The words, tone and affect I used when they held that little piece of themselves up and said, “Look at this. Do you like it?” had to be well chosen because my teaching degree came with huge responsibility.

My response would do more than support their understanding of our curriculum. It shaped their identity, respected their vulnerability, valued their willingness to share that tiny piece of themselves with me through their work.

Or not. 

I was given the power to declare: right and wrong.

In hindsight, this is terrifying because early learners interpret these declarations as, You are right and You are wrong.

This is an inordinate amount of power to wield, especially when we, as teachers, we not trained in the psycho-social aspects of classroom management. 

I’m so grateful that, even then, I got this. That somehow deep in my soul I knew there was a Brene induced meltdown in my future to verify how I thought and felt, allowing me to confidently run by classrooms with proactive, intentional strategies. 

• To connect with each child, assess their strengths and weaknesses, then use one to leverage the other. 
• To choose my words and set my tone wisely. 
• To understand that the moment we were currently living was not the final moment that I hoped to inspire. 

When we look at our little people, at any age, and tell them that what they produce, do, or say is wrong we crush a little bit of their spirit, steal a smidge of that vulnerability and truth telling. We begin, brick by hard-to-demo brick, to build a wall around their soul and their truth until they will shut down. 

Until they arrive at the conclusion that it’s safer not to try instead of daring to fail.

Instead of doing their best, and knowing it's good enough to work towards their next best. 

Similarly, when we tell our little people that everything they do is perfect, amazing and how smart they are we set them up for another type of failure - the perfectionist trap.

We build a different type of wall around our kids, but this one is very fragile. It’s like the petals of a flower gently protecting the valuable core. When the petals are closed, that core is safe, everything is fine - perfect, status quo. But when our littles produce something that doesn’t meet the mark, the petals fall, their core is exposed and then fall apart. 

What’s worse, our kids learn to trigger this reaction within themselves. Work tirelessly to avoid failure. Live within the fear of not achieving perfection. Their inner monologue goes something like this.

If I'm right, today I should be right tomorrow and if I'm right, tomorrow I better be right next week, and the day that it's not right, the day that my teacher, my mom, my dad, my boss... looks at me and tells me I’m wrong...well, that's the day that I've been waiting to fall on my face, and I will avoid face falling at all costs.

Think back to your kindergarten and first grade days. Did you realize how much was happening inside your classroom? As you got to know the people around you? And with your daily interactions with your teacher? Because at five or six years old that's not your job.

It's your teacher's.

And the saddest and scariest part about teaching, for me, was understanding that the majority of my counterparts, my fellow teachers who had a deep love for their students, a deep love for teaching, who were the kindest, gentlest people also didn't understand that this was a vital part of their job description.

In teacher training we're taught what to teach the kids. Depending on what state we're teaching in, we're taught the curriculum to follow, the goals and agendas, and which tests these kids are going to take. The standards they need to show on these exams.

In Core4 terms -- the WHAT. 

We are not taught how vulnerable our students will be. .

We are not taught that every word we say shapes our students as learners. 

That we have the power to inspire a deep, lifelong love of learning or steal it away before it even sparks. 

And this is why I cried. 

This is why I bawled like a baby at the end of this book called Daring Greatly.

Because as parents, long before we send our precious children to their Kindergarten teacher,

We must be strong enough.

We must be brave enough.

The culmination of our natural gifts, our flaws, our upbringing, and our dreams.

We must be able to recognize it. 

Accept it. 

Own it.

To deeply understand that simply who we are, shapes our baby. That we need to do work on who we are and who we desire to be in relationship to others in this world. 

Because we are growing another human being that we hope emulates us, models us, and respects us.

Because they see us, hear us, feel us and learn from us, every single second of every single day of their lives regardless of what we sound like, look like and feel like,

Are you ready to look in the mirror and see all of you? The parts you love and you're proud of and you know fit into this world so wonderfully. And the parts you're hiding, the ones that cause you to pull on your vulnerability cloak and decide just not to deal. Are you ready to let all of it, the good and the bad, come into the light, so that you can be, as Brene says, a wholehearted parent raising a wholehearted child?

I am. And yes, it’s not easy. But I can tell you as a mom releasing her first wholehearted adult into this world, I’m already seeing the most gorgeous ripple effects I never knew were possible.

Thank you for sharing this space with me.