Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.

The Journey

Wholehearted living is not a onetime choice. It is a process. In fact, I believe it’s the journey of a lifetime. My goal is to bring awareness and clarity to the constellation of choices that lead to Wholeheartedness and to share what I’ve learned from many, many people who have dedicated themselves to living and loving with their whole hearts.

Before embarking on any journey, including this one, it’s important to talk about what we need to bring along. What does it take to live and love from a place of worthiness? How do we embrace imperfection? How do we cultivate what we need and let go of the things that are holding us back? The answers to all of these questions are courage, compassion, and connection—the tools we need to work our way through our journey.

If you’re thinking, Great. I just need to be a superhero to fight perfectionism, I understand. Courage, compassion, and connection seem like big, lofty ideals. But in reality, they are daily practices that, when exercised enough, become these incredible gifts in our lives. And the good news is that our vulnerabilities are what force us to call upon these amazing tools. Because we’re human and so beautifully imperfect, we get to practice using our tools on a daily basis. In this way, courage, compassion, and connection become gifts—the gifts of imperfection.

Here’s what you’ll find in the pages that follow. In the first chapter, I explain what I’ve learned about courage, compassion, and connection and how they are truly the tools for developing worthiness.

Once we get some clarity about the tools that we’re going to use on this journey, in the next chapter we move to the heart of the matter: love, belonging, and worthiness. I answer some of the most difficult questions of my career: What is love? Can we love someone and betray them? Why does our constant need to fit in sabotage real belonging? Can we love the people in our lives, like our partners and children, more than we love ourselves? How do we define worthiness, and why do we so often end up hustling for it rather than believing in it?

We encounter obstacles on every journey we make; the Wholehearted journey is no exception. In the next chapter, we’ll explore what I’ve found to be the greatest barriers to living and loving with our whole hearts and how we can develop effective strategies to move through the barriers and to cultivate resilience.

From there, we’ll explore the ten guideposts for the Wholehearted journey, daily practices that provide direction for our journey. There’s one chapter for each guidepost, and each chapter is illustrated with stories, definitions, quotes, and ideas for making deliberate and inspired choices about the way we live and love.

Defining Moments

This book is full of big-concept words such as love, belonging, and authenticity. I think it’s critically important to define the gauzy words that are tossed around every day but rarely explained. And I think good definitions should be accessible and actionable. I’ve tried to define these words in a way that will help us unpack the term and explore the pieces. When we dig down past the feel-good words and excavate the daily activities and experiences that put the heart in Wholehearted living, we can see how people define the concepts that drive their actions, beliefs, and emotions.

For example, when the research participants talked about a concept such as love, I was careful to define it as they experienced it. Sometimes that required developing new definitions (like I actually did with love and many other words). Other times, when I started looking around in the existing literature, I found definitions that captured the spirit of the participants’ experiences. A good example of this is play. Play is an essential component to Wholehearted living, and when I researched the topic, I discovered the amazing work of Dr. Stuart Brown.1 So, rather than creating a new definition, I reference his work because it accurately reflects what I learned in the research.

I realize that definitions spark controversy and disagreement, but I’m okay with that. I’d rather we debate the meaning of words that are important to us than not discuss them at all. We need common language to help us create awareness and understanding, which is essential to Wholehearted living.

Digging Deep

In early 2008, when my blog was still pretty new, I wrote a post about breaking my “dig-deep” button. You know the dig-deep button, right? It’s the button that you rely on when you’re too bone-tired to get up one more time in the middle of the night or to do one more load of throw-up-diarrhea laundry or to catch one more plane or to return one more call or to please/perform/perfect the way you normally do even when you just want to flip someone off and hide under the covers.

The dig-deep button is a secret level of pushing through when we’re exhausted and overwhelmed, and when there’s too much to do and too little time for self-care.

In my blog post, I explained how I had decided not to fix my dig-deep button. I made a promise to myself that when I felt emotionally, physically, and spiritually done, I’d try slowing down rather than relying on my old standbys: pushing through, soldiering on, and sucking it up.

It worked for a while, but I missed my button. I missed having something to turn to when I was depleted and down. I needed a tool to help me dig my way out. So, I turned back to my research to see if I could find a way to dig that was more consistent with Wholehearted living. Maybe there was something better than just sucking it up.

Here’s what I found: Men and women who live Wholeheartedly do indeed DIG Deep. They just do it in a different way. When they’re exhausted and overwhelmed, they get

Deliberate in their thoughts and behaviors through prayer, meditation, or simply setting their intentions;Inspired to make new and different choices;Going. They take action.

Since I made that discovery, I’ve been DIGging Deep the new way, and it’s been pretty amazing. One example happened just recently when I was lost in an Internet fog. Rather than working, I was just lulling myself into a haze by mindlessly playing on Facebook and piddling on the computer. It was neither relaxing nor productive—it was just a giant time and energy suck.

I tried the new DIG Deep—get deliberate, inspired, and going. I told myself, “If you need to refuel and losing yourself online is fun and relaxing, then do it. If not, do something deliberately relaxing. Find something inspiring to do rather than something soul-sucking. Then, last but not least, get up and do it!” I closed my laptop, said a little prayer to remind myself to be self-compassionate, and watched a movie that had been sitting in a Netflix envelope on my desk for over a month. It was exactly what I needed.

It wasn’t the old Dig Deep—the pushing through. I didn’t force myself to start working or to do something productive. Rather, I prayerfully, intentionally, and thoughtfully did something restorative.

Each guidepost has a DIG Deep section to help us start thinking about how we get deliberate and inspired about our choices, and how we take action. I share my personal DIG Deep strategies with you and I encourage you to come up with your own. These new strategies have been so much more effective than the old “pushing through.”

What I Hope to Contribute

This book is full of powerful topics such as self-compassion, acceptance, and gratitude. I’m not the first to talk about these subjects, and I’m certainly not the smartest researcher or the most talented writer. I am, however, the first to explain how these topics work individually and together to cultivate Wholehearted living. And, maybe more important, I’m certainly the first person to come at these topics from the perspective of someone who has spent years studying shame and fear.

I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to give up my research on shame. It’s extremely difficult to dedicate your career to studying topics that make people squeamish. On several occasions I’ve literally thrown my hands up and said, “I quit. It’s too hard. There are so many cool things to study. I want out of this!” I didn’t choose to study shame and fear; the research chose me.

Now I know why. It was what I needed—professionally and personally—to prepare for this work on Wholeheartedness. We can talk about courage and love and compassion until we sound like a greeting card store, but unless we’re willing to have an honest conversation about what gets in the way of putting these into practice in our daily lives, we will never change. Never, ever.

Courage sounds great, but we need to talk about how it requires us to let go of what other people think, and for most of us, that’s scary. Compassion is something we all want, but are we willing to look at why boundary-setting and saying no is a critical component of compassion? Are we willing to say no, even if we’re disappointing someone? Belonging is an essential component of Wholehearted living, but first we have to cultivate self-acceptance—why is this such a struggle?

Before I start writing, I always ask myself, “Why is this book worth writing? What’s the contribution that I’m hoping to make?” Ironically, I think the most valuable contribution that I can make to the ongoing discussions about love, belonging, and worthiness stems from my experiences as a shame researcher.

Coming at this work with a full understanding of how the shame tapes and gremlins keep us feeling afraid and small allows me to do more than present great ideas; this perspective helps me share real strategies for changing our lives. If we want to know why we’re all so afraid to let our true selves be seen and known, we have to understand the power of shame and fear. If we can’t stand up to the never good enough and who do you think you are? we can’t move forward.

I only wish that during those desperate and defeated moments of my past, when I was knee-deep in shame research, I could have known what I know now. If I could go back and whisper in my ear, I’d tell myself the same thing that I’ll tell you as we begin this journey:

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.