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The Gifts of Imperfection: 10th Anniversary Edition: Features a new foreword and brand-new tools Hardcover – September 8, 2020
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Don’t miss the five-part HBO Max docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart!
For over a decade, Brené Brown has found a special place in our hearts as a gifted mapmaker and a fellow traveler. She is both a social scientist and a kitchen-table friend whom you can always count on to tell the truth, make you laugh, and, on occasion, cry with you. And what’s now become a movement all started with The Gifts of Imperfection, which has sold more than two million copies in thirty-five different languages across the globe.
What transforms this book from words on a page to effective daily practices are the ten guideposts to wholehearted living. The guideposts not only help us understand the practices that will allow us to change our lives and families, they also walk us through the unattainable and sabotaging expectations that get in the way.
Brené writes, “This book is an invitation to join a wholehearted revolution. A small, quiet, grassroots movement that starts with each of us saying, ‘My story matters because I matter.’ Revolution might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance.”
- Print length208 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateSeptember 8, 2020
- Dimensions5.72 x 0.98 x 8.58 inches
- ISBN-100593133587
- ISBN-13978-0593133583
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From the Publisher
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| Atlas of the Heart | Dare to Lead | Rising Strong | Braving the Wilderness | |
| Brené Brown writes, “If we want to find the way back to ourselves and one another, we need language and the grounded confidence to both tell our stories and be stewards of the stories that we hear. This is the framework for meaningful connection.” | Brené Brown taught us what it means to dare greatly, rise strong, & brave the wilderness. Based on new research conducted with leaders, change makers, & culture shifters, she’s showing us how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up & lead. | Living a brave life is not always easy: We are, inevitably, going to stumble and fall. It is the rise from falling that Brown takes as her subject in Rising Strong. | A timely and important book that challenges everything we think we know about cultivating true belonging in our communities, organizations, and culture. |
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Product details
- Publisher : Random House; Anniversary edition (September 8, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 208 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0593133587
- ISBN-13 : 978-0593133583
- Item Weight : 13.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.72 x 0.98 x 8.58 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,211 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston, where she holds the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair at the Graduate College of Social Work. She also holds the position of visiting professor in management at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business.
Brené has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. She is the author of six #1 New York Times best sellers and is the host of two award-winning Spotify podcasts, Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead.
Brené’s books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and her titles include Atlas of the Heart, Dare to Lead, Braving the Wilderness, Rising Strong, Daring Greatly, and The Gifts of Imperfection. With Tarana Burke, she co-edited the best-selling anthology You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience.
Brené’s TED talk on the Power of Vulnerability is one of the top five most-viewed TED talks in the world, with over 50 million views. Brené is the first researcher to have a filmed lecture on Netflix, and in March 2022, she launched a new show on HBO Max that focuses on her latest book, Atlas of the Heart.
Brené spends most of her time working in organizations around the world, helping develop braver leaders and more-courageous cultures. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Steve. They have two children, Ellen and Charlie, and a weird Bichon named Lucy.
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I found this was a little shallow and abstract, whereas Daring Greatly so eloquently and articulately put words to ideas we understand intuitively, and it really enhanced my emotional vocabulary. This book offered little in that respect. Some of it (shame vs guilt, for example) was redundant of Daring Greatly (and other texts for that matter) and her discussion of ideas like intuition, spirituality, and numbing were vague and unhelpful to me. She was mostly quoting other people's definitions and discussion of these topics, and while some the quotes were thought-provoking, I didn't feel that it really enlightened me.
Her examples were also not as compelling in this text. It was mostly about her, and while some of the examples were useful and memorable, I came away feeling like she was painting a picture of her family rather than focusing on her research and data. Daring Greatly, on the other hand, was written in such an empathetic and compassionate way that I kept saying, "YES! That's me! She understands!" or "Wow! That's totally my brother-in-law!" It was like one light bulb after another going off. Reading Daring Greatly was so inspiring and healing. This book didn't have that same level of empathy and was missing that universal quality, focusing instead on examples that were auto-biographical. Some other reviewers said this read like a blog, and I have to agree. By the end of this book I didn't feel UNDERSTOOD like I did after reading Daring Greatly. I honestly felt that as I read Daring Greatly, Brene Brown was like looking inside me and having a conversation with me, even though she doesn't even know me. After reading The Gifts of Imperfection, however, I felt that I understood more about her and less about myself.
There was also something a little kitschy about this. She had a section after each chapter called DIG deep where she listed ways that she tries to employ these strategies, and she often said "Amen" at the end of some quotes. While cute, it lacked the maturity and empathy of Daring Greatly.
She was also a little judgmental in this book (towards others and towards herself) and I could ironically see her striving for perfectionism (like in order to be perfect she needs to become "wholehearted," so she is actively working to employ these strategies rather than actually embodying them). It is almost like by the time she got to Daring Greatly she was fully reborn and had reached that full enlightenment, and she was still working on getting there in this text.
Additionally, unlike Daring Greatly, this reads a little bit like a checklist (see comment above) of things you should do: 1. don't be a perfectionist 2. Get creative 3. Rest and play 4. But don't numb 5. Dance like no one is watching you 6. practice self-compassion 7. Have faith. By the end I felt like I was being told what to do to be happy, as if it was a formula. While some of the advice was certainly helpful, it wasn't inspiring in the same way Daring Greatly was. Daring Greatly got at the heart of one's emotions. It talked about courage, authenticity, compassion (true ideals) and it showed how there is extraordinary in the ordinary. The Gifts of Imperfection seemed to get sidetracked by specifics (dancing, jewelry making, her childhood house in New Orleans) and it never reached that universality that was so healing in Daring Greatly.
Lastly, this book was highly referential. As I said earlier, she quotes a lot of other people to get at defining abstract terms. She also references the work of many other psychologists, researchers, etc. For example, Kristin Neff and Marci Alboher. It isn't that I didn't appreciated her references, but this felt blog-like again: "Hey I read this and I LOVED this idea, check it out!" Or "this quote inspires me! Let me share." In contrast, it felt like Brene Brown had found her own voice in Daring Greatly, and no longer needed to continually reference others' work and could just share her research and the conclusions she reached from it.
All in all, while The Gifts of Imperfection was a nice book that offered a little refresher of Brown's understanding of "wholehearted living" with some ideas about intuition and faith, creativity, and song and dance, it was not as sophisticated or inspiring as her latest book Daring Greatly, which really felt like a true culmination of her research and experiences. I'd skip this one; or at least just borrow it from the library...
1. In order to feel joy, you have to lean into uncomfortable feelings and not numb pain (through food, TV, substances, sex/love, obsessions, etc), because you can't selectively numb emotions, so if you numb pain, you numb joy as well
2. That joy will often be accompanied by fear because we fear we will lose the things that make us joyful, so you can expect anxiety to come up when you are about to feel joy or in the midst of feeling joy. You have to be able to tolerate the discomfort, because If you can't tolerate discomfort, then you will lose your capacity to experience joy. But there is no way to feel joy without feeling vulnerability because this life has no guarantees. She suggests, very helpfully, that one focuses on gratitude in order to overcome it. I've practiced this and it helps a lot- she suggests saying "I feel vulnerable right now, and that's okay, I feel so grateful for..." Gratitude is the key to joy.
4. That we think we can avoid pain by avoiding feeling the joys in life, but actually you need to feel the joy fully in order to be able to handle the difficult things that will come up. If you never feel joy (because you are numbing yourself), then when difficult things happen you don't have the inner resources to handle them and you end up having to numb yourself more, then because you are numbing yourself, you don't feel joy, so it's a cycle.
5. That everyone is so busy trying present themselves in certain ways and live up to expectations in order to be accepted, but you can never feel true love and belonging if you don't present your real self (be authentic).
6. In order to be authentic you must have a lot of courage in order to risk being vulnerable, because you could present your true self and be rejected, but if you don't try you will never experience true belonging.
7. The root of feeling love and belonging is feeling worthy, now, just as you are, of love and belonging, because you have to believe that your true self is worthy in order to have the courage to be authentic.
8. Feeling worthy now is also the answer to handling shame. Shame is the fear of being unlovable, so believing that you are worthy is the opposite of shame and the antidote to shame. You have to face shame and practice using shame resilience (which she teaches in the book, which feeling worthy is at the root of) in order to overcome perfectionism.
I don't really love her writing style. You can really tell that she loves to put things in boxes, her background is as a researcher, and she loves definitions (and the majority of the definitions are really good and some of them are fantastic). But it means that her writing style doesn't seem to work the best for this subject matter. It feels like if she had a more of a clear, simple, inspirational tone, it could have had a little more flow and felt a little stronger, writing-wise. It's just a little hard to read sometimes, it feels a little clunky. But there are so many amazing parts that blow your mind and change your life, so it's totally worth reading.
She made some really amazing points about so many subjects, but there were several subjects she really just brushes through and says basically that she discovered that "these were important characteristics of whole-hearted people as well, and here are some other books to look at on the subject" but I didn't really think she herself made that many great points on these subjects. And maybe for other people she did say things that hit home, but the subjects I felt she could have worked more on were:
1. Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith (This is a really huge thing for me, and now, from the book, I know that it is important to have faith to be whole-hearted, but I didn't get any closer to figuring out HOW to have faith from what she said)
2. Cultivating Calm and Stillness (There is so much fantastic information out there on this subject, I would highly recommend the book "Mindsight" on this subject.)
3. Cultivating Creativity, Play and Rest, Laughter, Song and Dance (these are fairly straight-forward topics, probably most people can figure out how to incorporate more of these things into their lives, but these chapters didn't feel like they offered a lot of useful points on the subjects, aside from just pointing you in the right directions towards doing these things- which in and of itself is very important!
4. I wish she had said more about HOW to cultivate authenticity. The chapter on authenticity was chock-full of great points, but I would have loved more on how
5. She discusses using boundaries and holding people accountable to be compassionate, instead of the usual shaming and blaming we do. I could have used A LOT more instruction and advice on HOW to use boundaries and hold people accountable in a compassionate way.
This book is life-changing, it is necessary reading for everyone in my opinion. The first chapter was actually the hardest to get through for me- writing-style wise. I actually thought it wasn't a good book and I put it down and considered it a bad investment after reading the first chapter- I felt it was full of fluff, and obvious stuff, and that it didn't have any useful information. But then thankfully, a month or two later, I picked it up again, and once you get to chapter two, everything starts getting a lot better. Then it kind of goes downhill again at Guidepost 5 and beyond. But between chapter two and guidepost 5, it is pure gold.
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It's a good book to go back to, because everytime you read it something new sinks in! Like an 'ahaa' moment.
I would definitly reccomend this purchase.
I found her writing style to be too much of a mix between personal spoken colloquial description of experience and attempt at justifying the professionalism and the science. Without fully explaining the science.
I do get that it’s about conveying the main ideas to the mass audience and those with deeper interest will go and research. I just find it sometimes a hard sell about the grounded theory approach and a seeming lack of awareness that there is researcher bias and ‘here’s how mine plays out’. It feels too preachy and takes away from the message which is the research.
I’ll continue to read the research but not the books.
















