While the title of Brene Brown’s helpful book The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Most of us are trying to live an authentic life. Deep down, we want to take off our game face and be real and imperfect.”
I found a lot to think about in Brown’s discussion of how to break out of people pleasing and perfectionism in their various guises. She draws on her research as a sociologist for the book, but also adds her own experiences freely, which makes the book quite accessible and well-rounded. Brown includes thoughts on how children cope with these problems and tendencies, which I found especially helpful as a parent.
An aspect of the book that really helped me was Brown’s discussion of how people deal with painful circumstances. Most people, to some degree or another, resort to what Brown calls “numbing,” whether that be with harmful substances or escaping through TV, the internet, or constant busy-ness. In her research, Brown found that especially resilient and joyful people (versus people who are only happy when they are in good circumstances) tend to acknowledge when they are numbing, and limit that behavior, and that instead of running away from painful emotions they actually lean in and “feel their way through it.” Interestingly, Brown found that while people imagine that if you prepare yourself for the worst, it won’t hurt as badly. But what Brown found in her research is that preparing for trouble doesn’t minimize the pain of it, but it does minimize the joy you get if a good thing happens instead. I found that interesting.
Brown also contends that we need to let go of exhaustion and busy-ness as a status symbol. Instead, she advocates cultivating calm (this keeps coming up in books I read!) and defines calm as “creating perspective and mindfulness while managing emotional reactivity.” She says that in order to commit to practicing calm, we should identify things that make us overreact, and “practice non-reactive responses.” This is something I really need to work on!
The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are is an interesting and compelling book, and I’d recommend it for people who struggle with perfectionism, people pleasing,or busy-ness, or who have children who deal with those issues.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.
is the first book of Morton’s that I found.
. It’s always interesting to read books from earlier in an author’s career, to see how they have developed and improved.
. The book features well-conceived sibling relationships, as well as the mother-child relationship based on a mystery. As in 
.
, you’ll learn about how information is changing, how that impacts how we understand ourselves and go about our day-to-day lives, and the implications for our privacy and ethics now and in the near future.
also has some great ideas, and tackles the topic of healthy eating for families a bit differently.
, I feel perfectly confident in questioning the judgement of everyone else instead.
. I was afraid I’d find one of those legalistic books about how to be a perfect wife and mother.
thinking it would go into even more detail.
. I loved the concept of this book, and there were some good points in it, but honestly nothing that I hadn’t read in Connecting Church & Home or other Christian parenting books. The idea is that parents should actively and verbally bless their children, in the sense of encouraging them, giving them positive labels, and being affectionate. These are good ideas, but weren’t written in a particularly distinctive way. I was hoping for something more insightful or profound.
is a lovely story set in Japan about a brilliant mathematician suffering from brain damage, his housekeeper, and her son. Along the way, it’s also about how friendships develop, how beautiful and elegant math is, the nature of memory, and baseball.
by Madeleine L’Engle is my new favorite book about life, balancing motherhood with other vocations, literature, and writing.
Hi, I'm Catherine Gillespie and A Spirited Mind is where I post about reading, writing, and parenting and the lessons I'm learning as a result. Thanks for stopping by!
