Tl;dr Book Review — Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Tl;dr – ★★★★★

We’re sure you’ve heard of Brené Brown at this point — and if you haven’t, where have you been? It feels like her TED Talks and books are everywhere. She’s referenced in many of the other books we’ve read about equity, team culture, and change. That’s because she is the SME on vulnerability.

First, Brown makes us question the Six Myths of Vulnerability, one of the most prominent being Vulnerability is weakness. For some of you, vulnerability will initially conjure images of Bachelor contestants claiming to have “let walls down” — and doesn’t instantly make you think of radical leadership. Traditionally, it’s framed as a weakness.

But Brown spins this misconception — vulnerability is actually a display of courage & strength. “Vulnerability is the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Can you give me a single example of courage that you’ve witnessed or experienced in your own life that did not require experiencing vulnerability?”

Vulnerability isn’t possible without psychological safety. Like Brown’s work, you hear this term everywhere these days — it’s a hot topic, but ultimately difficult to implement where it isn’t already present.

Brené describes psychological safety as the atmosphere that “makes it possible to give tough feedback and have difficult conversations without the need to tiptoe around the truth”. The presence of this type of safety makes sure your team understands they have the space to trust & be vulnerable, which leads to another major theme in Dare to Lead — rumbling.

Rumbling with vulnerability is the act of “leaning into rather than walking away from the situation that makes us feel uncertain, at risk, or emotionally exposed”. Speaking from experience, psychological safety makes collaboration, feedback, innovation, and pivoting so much easier. And speaking up for introverts, it also makes sure that everyone on your team truly has a seat at the table.

One of the most valuable concepts in Dare to Lead for us was living into our values. There’s a quick exercise developed by Brown that helps you determine your top two values — and let me tell you, doing that exercise made a lot of our decision-making habits much clearer to us both on personal and professional levels.

Value work is important because it allows us to walk our talk; naming and understanding them allows us to be “clear about what we believe and hold important” both internally and externally with those we lead, and helps us to “take care that our intentions, words, thoughts, and behaviors align” with our beliefs.

We’re sure you all have examples of leaders who preach values in one place and then take action in ways that are totally contradictory. After understanding and naming our values, it’s our job to commit to living in them.

The last concept we’ll touch on is one we use almost every day — Sh*tty First Drafts (SFDs). These are the stories we make up when we lack details or information, and they should not be trusted.

SFDs are stories based on limited real data and plentiful imagined data, blended into a coherent (and emotionally satisfying) version of reality. They’re conspiracy theories. And here we go, circling back to psychological safety. As leaders, we have to create space where everyone feels empowered to reality check their SFDs.

Dare to Lead is an integral part of professional development, especially for those looking to be more just, empathic leaders. Read our full Tl;dr recap below!

Part 1 – Rumbling with vulnerability

Section 1 – The moment and the myths

• Centered around Roosevelt’s “in the arena” quote – “if you’re criticizing from a place where you’re not also putting yourself on the line, I’m not interested in what you have to say.”
• Learnings through research – “Don’t grab hurtful comments and pull them close to you by rereading them and ruminating on them. Don’t play with them by rehearsing your badass comeback. And whatever you do, don’t pull hatefulness close to your heart.”
• Main points of this chapter – The Square Squad and 6 Myths of Vulnerability

The Square Squad

• Get a one-inch by one-inch piece of paper and write down the names of the people whose opinion of you matter
• The size forces you to edit and also makes the list portable

6 Myths of Vulnerability

• MYTH #1 Vulnerability is weakness: Speaking to soldiers about vulnerability, Brown dug in with “vulnerability is the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Can you give me a single example of courage that you’ve witnessed in another soldier or experienced in your own life that did not require experiencing vulnerability?” Spoiler alert – the answer is always no.

• MYTH #2 “I don’t do vulnerability”: Well, you can do vulnerability, or it can do you
  
• MYTH #3 I can go it alone: Neuroscience researcher John Cacioppo dedicating his life to understanding loneliness and connection. He argues that we “don’t derive our strength from our rugged individualism, but rather from our collective ability to plan, communicate, and work together. Our neural, hormonal, and genetic makeup support interdependence over independence.”
  
• MYTH #4 You can engineer the uncertainty and discomfort out of vulnerability: Nope, you can’t
  
• MYTH #5 Trust comes before vulnerability: Trust is earned in small moments. “Trust is the stacking and layering of small moments and reciprocal vulnerability over time. Trust and vulnerability grow together, and to betray one is to destroy both.”
  
• MYTH #6 Vulnerability is disclosure: “Some of the most daring leaders I know have incredible vulnerability rumbling skills and yet disclose very little.” Statements during change like “I will share everything I can about the changes with you, as soon as I can” shows vulnerability without needing to communicate every detail of an org plan.

Psychological safety

• “Simply put, psychological safety makes it possible to give tough feedback and have difficult conversations without the need to tiptoe around the truth.”
• Most people feel a need to manage interpersonal risk – this need is “both instrumental (promotions and rewards may depend on impressions held by bosses and others) and socio-emotional (we simply prefer approval over disapproval).”
• “Psychological safety does not imply a cozy situation in which people are necessarily close friends. Nor does it suggest an absence of pressure or problems.”

Rumble with vulnerability

• Commit to no fake vulnerability – “fake vulnerability can look like a leader telling us that we can ask questions but not taking the time to create the psychological safety to do it, or not offering a pause in the conversation for anyone else to speak.”
• “Vulnerability is not a personal marketing tool. It’s not an oversharing strategy. Rumbling with vulnerability is about leaning into rather than walking away from the situation that makes us feel uncertain, at risk, or emotionally exposed.”
• “We should always be clear about our intention, understand the limits of vulnerability in the context of roles and relationships, and set boundaries” – making clear what’s okay and what’s not okay, and why. “Vulnerability minus boundaries in not vulnerability. It’s confession, manipulation, desperations, or shock and awe”.
• Say more as a great “rumble tool”.
• Stealth intentions and stealth expectation
  • Stealth intentions are self-protection needs that lurk beneath the surface and often drive behavior outside of our values.
  • Stealth expectations are desires or expectations that exist outside our awareness and typically include dangerous combos of fear and magical thinking.

Section 2 – The call to courage

• Clear is kind — unclear is unkind.
  • Unkind behaviors
    • Half-truths & bullshit
      • Not getting clear with a colleague about expectations, then holding them accountable for not delivering
      • Talking about people instead of to them is unkind
    • Clarity isn’t always the quickest path, but is the most beneficial in the long run
    • When we let fear or an emotion drive self-protection, we are assembling and putting on armor. Armor acts as a barrier between us and the people we work with.
      
• 1st concept: Permission slips — write down one thing that we give ourselves permissions to do or feel during a meeting
  • E.g. Ask for breaks when we need them or ask for time to think about something before sharing my POV
    
• 2nd concept: Turn & Learn
  • Get some post-it notes and write down how long we think a project is going to take & put them in priority order
  • Once everyone has written their answers down, count to three and show your answers
  • This practice controls the halo effect (when everyone sees what the person with the most influence in the room wants and follows suit) & controls for the bandwagon effect (when everyone follows suit even when you disagree)
    
• 3rd concept: Gritty faith & gritty facts — take responsibility for both dreaming and reality-checking those dreams with facts

Leaders must either invest a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or squander an unreasonable amount of time trying to manage ineffective and unproductive behavior.

Section 3 — The armory

• Wholeheartedness is about integration (Latin root integrare or “to make whole”).
  
• When heart, emotion, and vulnerability are seen as liabilities, cultures reward armor like perfectionism, emotional stoicism, and the false compartmentalizing of our lives and our work — and they value all-knowing over always learning and staying curious.
  
• Shame makes us feel so flawed that we question whether we’re worthy of love, belonging, and connection. The only antidote is empathy.

Section 4 — Shame & empathy

Shame 101

1. We all have it
2. We’re all afraid to talk about it
3. The less we talk about it, the more control it has

Where shame exists, empathy is almost always absent — so shame is not a compass for moral behavior.

Shame resilience is the ability to practice authenticity when we experience shame, to move through the experience without sacrificing our values, and to come out on the other side of the shame experience with more courage, compassion, and connection than we had going into it.

Empathy Skills

1. To see the world as other see it, or perspective taking — honor people’s perspectives as truth even when they’re different from ours (instead of the default my truth is the truth)
2. To be nonjudgemental
3. To understand another person’s feelings
4. To communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings

Section 5 — Curiosity and grounded confidence

Grounded confidence is the messy process of learning and unlearning, practicing and failing, and surviving a few misses.

• Easy learning doesn’t build strong skills
• Grounded confidence = rumble skills + curiosity + practice
• “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” – Einstein

Rumble starters & questions

• The story I make up… (One of the most powerful rumble tools)
• I’m curious about…
• Tell me more.
• That’s not my experience (instead of “You’re wrong about her, him, them, it, this…”)
• Walk me through…
• Tell me about your passion around this.
• Tell me why this doesn’t fit/work for you.
• I’m working from these assumptions — what about you?
• What problem are we trying to solve?

Part 2 — Living into our values

Daring leaders who lives into their values are never silent about hard things.

In the arena:

• We need our values to remind us why we went in [to the arena], especially when we are facedown, covered in dust, sweat, and blood
• A value is a way of being or believing that we hold most important
  • Living in our values means that we do more than profess our values, we practice them
  • We walk our talk — we are clear about what we believe and hold important, and we take care that our intentions, words, thoughts, and behaviors align with those beliefs

Step 1 — We can’t live into Values that we can’t name

• Defining what’s important to us
• We have only one set of values
• Not a choice — they’re simply a definition of who we are in our lives
• Choose 2 values: does this define me? Is this who I am at my best? Is this a filter that I use to make hard decisions?

Step 2 — Taking values from BS to behavior

• Everyone talks a big game, but few actually practice their values
• What are three behaviors that support your value?
  What are three slippery behaviors that are outside your value?
  What are three slippery behaviors that are outside your value?

Step 3 — Empathy and self-compassion: the two most important seat in the arena

• A brave leader is not — (1) someone who has all the answers or (2) someone who can facilitate flawless discussions on hard topics; a brave leader is someone who says “I see you, I hear you. I don’t have all the answers, but I’m going to keep listening and asking questions.”

Part 3 — Braving trust

• No trust, no connection
• Trust between managers and employees is the primary defining characteristic of the very best workplaces

The BRAVING inventory:

• Boundaries
• Reliability
• Accountability
• Vault
• Integrity
• Non-judgement
• Generosity

Part 4 — Learning to rise

When we have the courage to walk into our story and own it, we get to write the ending.

• We can’t expect people to be brave and risk failure if they’re no prepped for hard landings
  • “We expect you to be brave. That means that you should expect to fall. We’ve got a plan.”
• High levels of resilience
  • The story I’m telling myself…
  • The story I make up…
  • I make up that…
• Strategies for reckoning with emotion
  • Box breathing/tactical breathing
    • Inhale deeply through you nose, expanding you stomach, for a count of four
    • Hold in that breath for a count of four
    • Slowly exhale all the air through your mouth, contracting your stomach, for a count of four
    • Hold the empty breath for a count of four
  • Breathing is also the key to another strategy for reckoning with emotion, and one of the most underrated leadership superpowers: practicing calm
    • Calm — creating perspective and mindfulness while managing emotional reactivity
    • Calm is contagious — slowing down the pace of a frantic conversation by modeling slow speech, breathing, and fact finding
• In the absence of data, we will always make up stories
  • The first story we make up is what we call the “shitty first draft” (SFD)
    • Stories based on limited real data and plentiful imagined data, blended into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality — conspiracy theories
    • In work cultures where there’s a lot of change and confusion afoot, teams go crazy with SFDs
    • Clear is kind, and clarity absolutely reduces story making and conspiracy theories
    • Create the time, space, and safety for people to reality-check their stories
  • “The stories were confabulations — lies, honestly told”
    • Confabulation shows up at work when we share what we believe is factual information, but it’s really just our opinion
• Rumble tools to combat stories
  • What more do I need to learn and understand about the situation?
  • What more do I need to learn and understand about the other people in the story?
  • What more do I need to learn and understand about myself?