Gifts of Imperfection

Brene Brown has listed ten guideposts throughout her book. To me, each guidepost is how to improve your life and be content and a lot more happy with who you are and also being more genuine with yourself.

The purpose of this book is to live wholeheartedly so I believe the guide post that is most prominent in living a stress-free life is “Cultivating self-compassion: Letting go of perfectionism” and “Cultivating calm and still: Letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle.”

The first guided post I chose was self-compassion, I truly believe that if you want to continue your life living wholeheartedly you must be compassionate with yourself and have to learn to let go.

In this chapter, there was one quote that stood out to me, “A moment of self-compassion can change your entire day. A string of such moments can change the course of your life.” This quote means that changing the way you treat things can have a tremendous impact on your day to day life and your life overall. This guidepost is very crucial to living a stress-free life because I feel as though a majority of stress stems from being very critical of oneself and not being able to move past it and let go.

But with this guidepost, if we are able to be more compassionate to ourselves and let things go a less stressful life will surely ensue. I believe without self-compassion there's no chance of having a stress free life.

The second guidepost I chose was calm and stillness, this guide revolves around anxiety and how you should not fight to be anxiety free but be anxiety aware. Instead of fighting your anxiety or trying to bury it you should come to terms with it. Figure out what triggers you but also what keeps you at ease or relaxes you in general.

This post relates to stress management because if you can practice stillness and calmness this could decrease your stress tremendously. Also with being aware of your anxiety instead of trying to fix it, you can help relieve a lot of stress that your anxiety causes.

Brene Brown states the importance of finding meaningful work. My meaningful work, as cliche as it may sound, is helping people. I find volunteering and helping people a necessity in my life.

This whole book focuses on being happy with your best you, I wouldn't be the best me if I wasn’t helping or working on my goals that'll help people in the end. As an adult, I want whatever career I’m in to benefit people.

Next, she speaks about how difficult it is to describe yourself, so here’s how I describe myself: independendent/driven/passionate/ancestral/ anxious/content/worried/relaxed/respectful/companion/awkward/genuine.