Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

Rising Strong

6 min read

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Highlights

Rising strong after a fall is how we cultivate wholeheartedness in our lives; it’s the process that teaches us the most about who we are. (Location 114)

We’re sick of being afraid and we’re tired of hustling for our self-worth. (Location 128)

We much prefer stories about falling and rising to be inspirational and sanitized. (Location 189)

To strip failure of its real emotional consequences is to scrub the concepts of grit and resilience of the very qualities that make them both so important—toughness, doggedness, and perseverance. (Location 195)

To pretend that we can get to helping, generous, and brave without navigating through tough emotions like desperation, shame, and panic is a profoundly dangerous and misguided assumption. (Location 219)

when we stop caring what people think and stop feeling hurt by cruelty, we lose our ability to connect. But when we’re defined by what people think, we lose the courage to be vulnerable. Therefore, we need to be selective about the feedback we let into our lives. For me, if you’re not in the arena getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback. I (Location 262)

“I know I will eventually fail and I’m still all in.” Fortune may favor the bold, but so does failure. (Location 270)

We want to go back to that moment before we walked into the arena, but there’s nowhere to go back to. (Location 274)

For those of us who fear being alone, coping with the solitude inherent in this process is a daunting challenge. (Location 283)

Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that hearing a story—a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end—causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. (Location 289)

The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea has a beautiful saying: “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.” (Location 297)

And, third, they have the ability and willingness to lean in to discomfort and vulnerability. (Location 311)

fear and scarcity immediately trigger comparison, and even pain and hurt are not immune to being assessed and ranked. (Location 314)

Empathy is not finite, and compassion is not a pizza with eight slices. When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, (Location 318)

Experience and success don’t give you easy passage through the middle space of struggle. (Location 540)

He argued that this is only possible if we have more experiences or devote more time to thinking about our experiences. (Location 695)

YOU MAY NOT have signed up for a hero’s journey, (Location 713)

It doesn’t matter whether we are ready for an emotional adventure—hurt happens. (Location 714)

Rather than saying I failed and it feels so crappy, we move to I am a failure. (Location 739)

This is what happened. This is my truth. And I will choose how this story ends. (Location 772)

We seek out emotional intensity vicariously, because when we are emotionally numb, we need a great deal of stimulation to feel something, anything. So emotional pornography provides the stimulation, but it’s only ersatz emotion—it doesn’t teach us anything about ourselves or the world. (Location 788)

the brain’s chemistry changes when we become curious, helping us better learn and retain information.7 (Location 820)

we have to have some level of knowledge or awareness before we can get curious. (Location 833)

We aren’t curious about something we are unaware of or know nothing about. (Location 834)

it may be necessary to ‘prime the pump’” (Location 836)

Anger, blame, and avoidance are the ego’s bouncers. (Location 927)

living so hard and fast that the truths of our lives can’t catch up with us. (Location 940)

Too much twee emotional expression—too many claims like, “Everything is awesome,” or “I just never really feel angry or upset,” or “If you’re just positive, you can turn that frown upside down”—often masks real pain and hurt. These behaviors are as much red flags as brooding and anger are. (Location 997)

I basically was afraid mindfulness would disrupt my flow—what the scholar Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as that sacred intersection of deep enjoyment and disciplined concentration.19 (Location 1056)

That’s when I realized that mindfulness and flow are never in competition with each other. They aren’t the same thing, but they share the same foundation: making the choice to pay attention. (Location 1065)

The most difficult part of our stories is often what we bring to them—what we make up about who we are and how we are perceived by others. (Location 1094)

what makes that story so painful is what we tell ourselves about our own self-worth and value. Owning (Location 1095)

“Because we are compelled to make stories, we are often compelled to take incomplete stories and run with them.” He goes on to say that even with a half story in our minds, “we earn a dopamine ‘reward’ every time it helps us understand something in our world—even if that explanation is incomplete or wrong.” (Location 1132)

“To the conspiratorial mind, shit never just happens,” and the complexities of human life are reduced to produce theories that are “always consoling in their simplicity.” (Location 1184)

our brains like predictable storytelling. (Location 1195)

Stay in the story until you touch every part of it. You’ll know you’re being honest if you’re worried that someone might see your SFD and think you’re a total jerk or a nut job. Concerns like this are a good sign that you’re on the right track. Don’t hold back. There is no rising strong without a true accounting of the stories we make up. RUMBLING (Location 1285)

you make a hundred judgment calls every day. Do you think you’re going to make the right call every time? Does making a bad call make you a failure?” (Location 2430)

Did something happen in this story that left me feeling like my cover was blown, revealing that I’m really not what I want people to think I am? (Location 2473)

Talk to ourselves in the same way we’d talk to someone we love. (Location 2484)

Reach out to someone we trust—a person who has earned the right to hear our story and who has the capacity to respond with empathy. (Location 2486)

shame can’t survive being spoken. (Location 2488)

In fact, for most of us who rely on blaming and finding fault, the need for control is so strong that we’d rather have something be our fault than succumb to the bumper-sticker wisdom of “shit happens.” (Location 2500)

If stuff just happens, how do I control that? Fault-finding fools us into believing that someone is always to blame, hence, controlling (Location 2502)

own judgment led us astray. (Location 2520)

Trust and mistakes can coexist, and often do, as long as we make amends, stay aligned with our values, and confront shame and blame head-on. (Location 2553)

Were we all in and were we true to ourselves? When you’re rumbling with failure and it’s clear that the choices you made along the way were not in alignment with your values, you have to grapple not only with the fallout of failing but also with the feeling that you betrayed yourself. (Location 2656)

believe that what we regret most are our failures of courage, whether it’s the courage to be kinder, to show up, to say how we feel, to set boundaries, to be good to ourselves. (Location 2701)

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