Kai Crawford’s Reviews > Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead > Status Update

As Joseph Chilton Pearce writes, “What we are teaches the child more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.”

Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.

I’m not going to practically knock myself unconscious with a shaming eye roll about your nonorganic milk if I feel good about what I’m feeding my children. But if doubt lurks beneath my choices, that self-righteous critic will spring to life in moments that happen because my underlying fear of not being the perfect parent is driving my need to confirm that, at the very least, I’m better than you.

Ironically, parenting is a shame and judgment minefield precisely because most of us are wading through uncertainty and self-doubt when it comes to raising our children. After all, we rarely engage in self-righteous judgment when we feel confident about our decisions:

It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo. It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle. When you identify the discomfort, you’ve found the place where a leader is needed. If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.”

when I feel self-righteous, it means I’m afraid. It’s a way to puff up and protect myself when I’m afraid of being wrong, making someone angry, or getting blamed.

Here’s the best way to think about the relationship between shame and blame: If blame is driving, shame is riding shotgun. In organizations, schools, and families, blaming and finger-pointing are often symptoms of shame.

...Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done. This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life,

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of.…