As You Were – looking for connections between the work of Brené Brown and Daniel Quinn as I revisit them in book clubs. See the introductory post for what this is all about. In this post, I look at:
- Daniel Quinn Book Club — no reading this week
- Brené Brown Book Club — Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts., session 9 reading: Part Four: Learning to Rise
(Commissions earned on Amazon links.)
Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.
Part Four: Learning to Rise
“The body’s message is always clear: Shut down the stockpiling or I’ll shut you down. The body wins every time.” Quinn’s work shows that the same is true on a broader level — the ecosystem wins every time and will shut down whatever doesn’t work for it.
“When light and dark are not integrated, overly sweet and accommodating can feel foreboding, as though under all that niceness is a ticking bomb.” Same goes for civilization’s “civilized’ view of itself and what that view hides in its reality underneath.
“The rumble starts with this universal truth: In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. It’s how we are wired. Meaning making is in our biology…” Quinn suggests that our capacity for storytelling was a core part of what it meant to evolve into human beings in the first place.
“The three most dangerous stories we make up are the narratives that diminish our lovability, divinity, and creativity.” Perhaps Taker culture on some level is precisely about these three stories — it believes humans are flawed (diminished lovability), that God/gods are fundamentally separate from and above humans (diminished divinity), and it systematically strives to make itself and the world static and unchanging (diminished creativity).