Dare to Lead: Cultivating Courage for a Braver World

Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead is an essential guide for anyone seeking to lead with courage, vulnerability, and a whole heart. Building on two decades of research into shame, vulnerability, and empathy, Brown offers a practical, no-BS playbook for transforming how we show up in our work and lives. This book is a powerful call to action for brave leaders, challenging the conventional wisdom that separates emotion from effectiveness. By exploring the core skill sets of rumbling with vulnerability, living into our values, braving trust, and learning to rise, Brown provides concrete strategies and actionable insights that promise to fundamentally change how we connect, innovate, and thrive. This summary will comprehensively break down every important idea, example, and insight, ensuring you grasp the full wisdom of Brown’s transformative approach.

Quick Orientation

Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston and a #1 New York Times bestselling author, has dedicated her career to understanding the profound impact of courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy on human connection. Her work has resonated globally, making her TED Talk one of the most-viewed in the world. In Dare to Lead, Brown distills her extensive findings into an actionable framework for leaders, defining leadership broadly as anyone who takes responsibility for finding and developing potential in people and processes. She argues that the complex, rapidly changing world demands a new kind of leader—one who leads from the heart, not from fear. This book promises to be a practical guide for cultivating brave work, tough conversations, and whole hearts, offering language, tools, and practices to foster courageous cultures. Join us as we unpack every crucial concept, story, and strategy Brown presents, equipping you to embrace daring leadership in your own life and organization.

Part One: Rumbling with Vulnerability

This foundational part of Dare to Lead dives deep into vulnerability, exploring its true nature, dispelling common myths, and introducing it as the indispensable core skill for courageous leadership. Brown challenges readers to embrace discomfort and redefine what it means to be strong.

Section One: The Moment and the Myths

This section sets the stage by highlighting why vulnerability is essential for courage and addresses the pervasive misunderstandings surrounding it. Brown emphasizes that daring leadership requires leaning into, rather than avoiding, the very emotions that make us feel exposed.

The Physics of Vulnerability and Feedback
Brown introduces the “physics of vulnerability”: if we are brave enough often enough, we will fall. Daring isn’t about avoiding failure, but accepting its inevitability and still being “all in.” She defines vulnerability as the emotion experienced during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Examples include first dates, difficult conversations, or starting a new business. Critically, Brown asserts that there is no empirical evidence that vulnerability is weakness. Instead, showing up wholeheartedly in vulnerable situations absolutely requires courage.

A core lesson derived from Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” quote is to ignore cheap-seat feedback—criticism from those unwilling to put themselves on the line. Brown urges readers to avoid pulling hurtful comments close, ruminating, or seeking comebacks. Instead, let unproductive and hurtful comments drop at the feet of your unarmored self. Engaging with all feedback hurts too much and leads to armoring up, which can result in emotional disconnection, even from love. C.S. Lewis’s quote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable,” underscores this point: self-protection, while seemingly safe, leads to an “unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable” heart.

Rumble Tool: The Square Squad
To navigate whose opinions matter, Brown introduces the Square Squad. This involves writing down the names of people whose opinions truly matter on a small piece of paper (to force editing). These are individuals who love you not despite your vulnerability, but because of it. They are not “yes” people but respect you enough to offer honest, direct feedback, even when it’s difficult, and support you through it. Reaching out to these individuals with gratitude for their honesty is a vital practice.

The Four (Now Six) Myths of Vulnerability
Brown debunks six common myths about vulnerability, arguing that they prevent daring leadership:

1. Vulnerability is weakness: This is the most common and persistent myth. Brown challenges audiences (including military special forces) to provide a single example of courage that doesn’t involve vulnerability. None can. This myth crumbles under the weight of lived experience; courage requires managing massive vulnerability.
2. I don’t do vulnerability: Our daily lives are filled with uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure, meaning there’s no “opting out.” You either consciously engage with vulnerability (do vulnerability) or let fear drive your behavior without awareness (it does you), leading to acting out or shutting down. Wisdom and experience, far from replacing vulnerability, validate its importance; “to grow up is to accept vulnerability.”
3. I can go it alone: Humans are hardwired for connection. Neuroscience shows our “neural, hormonal, and genetic makeup support interdependence over independence.” Authentic connection, which doesn’t require hustling for acceptance, is crucial. Without it, we suffer.
4. You can engineer the uncertainty and discomfort out of vulnerability: Many try to remove the messy, emotional aspects of vulnerability from systems or processes. Brown clarifies the difference between systemic vulnerability (which engineers work to eliminate, like loopholes or system failures) and relational vulnerability (the human emotional experience). Fields focused on eliminating systemic vulnerability often struggle most with relational vulnerability. Leaders are rewarded for eliminating vulnerability from systems, making it counterintuitive to embrace it in relationships. This myth implies that vulnerability can be made “easy,” but it cannot.
5. Trust comes before vulnerability: This is a classic chicken-and-egg debate. Research shows that we need to trust to be vulnerable, and we need to be vulnerable in order to build trust. Trust is a slow-building, iterative, and layered process earned in small moments. The marble jar metaphor illustrates this: each small act of support, kindness, or honoring a confidence puts marbles in the jar; negative acts take them out. Trust is built through gestures of genuine care and connection, not just grand gestures. John Gottman’s “sliding door moments” in relationships highlight that turning toward connection, even in small ways, builds trust over time.
6. Vulnerability is disclosure: This myth suggests that Brown advocates for indiscriminate oversharing. This is false. Brown is not a proponent of oversharing or vulnerability for vulnerability’s sake. Daring leadership absolutely requires vulnerability, but it also requires boundaries and clarity of intention. Leaders should name unsaid emotions, create safe containers for discussion (e.g., asking what the team needs to feel open and safe), and reality-check stories. False vulnerability, often used for sympathy-seeking or manipulation, breeds distrust. Vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability; it’s confession, manipulation, or desperation. Leaders must consider why they are sharing and with whom, recognizing their role and professional boundaries.

To Feel Is to Be Vulnerable
Vulnerability is not just the center of hard emotions like fear, shame, and grief, but the core of all emotions. To feel is to be vulnerable. Believing vulnerability is weakness means believing feeling is weakness. Humans are “feeling machines that think,” and emotional literacy is crucial. Vulnerability is the cradle of love, belonging, joy, creativity, and innovation. Cultures that frame vulnerability as weakness struggle with fresh ideas and new perspectives because there’s no innovation without failure. All skills underpinning daring leadership—adaptability, hard conversations, feedback, problem-solving, ethical decision-making, resilience—are born of vulnerability. Shutting down emotional life out of fear forecloses on the very things that give life meaning.

Section Two: The Call to Courage

This section illustrates how unattended fear and feelings can lead to significant problems in leadership, using a personal anecdote to introduce practical “rumble tools” and language. Brown emphasizes the transformative power of clarity and curiosity in difficult conversations.

The Ham Fold-over Debacle (Part 1)
Brown shares a personal story about setting unrealistic timelines for her team at her company, which led to chaos and burnout. When her CFO, Charles, confronted her directly about her “sucky time estimation skills,” Brown’s initial internal reaction was defensive. This led her to reflect on a past incident with her husband, Steve, about an impending dinner party where she again tried to force unrealistic expectations on him. Steve’s empathetic and clear feedback, including predicting her defensive “must be nice” comment, helped her see her behavior.

Clear is Kind. Unclear is Unkind.
This powerful mantra, which Brown learned in a 12-step meeting, is a central tenet. Avoiding clarity by feeding half-truths or bullshit, or holding people accountable without clear expectations, is unkind and unfair. Talking about people rather than to them is also unkind. Brown’s response to her team was initially defensive (“Okay, I get it and I’ll work on it”), a common shutdown technique. Leaning into curiosity (“Tell me more about how this plays out for y’all”) allowed her to understand the deeper impact of her behavior: it was frustrating, demoralizing, and unproductive for her team to constantly receive unrealistic ideas and be seen as “dream crushers” for being honest. This painful discomfort is why leaders often avoid deeper conversations.

The Cave You Fear to Enter Holds the Treasure You Seek
Brown highlights that pushing through hard conversations isn’t always beneficial; taking breaks or circling back (a few hours or the next day) often leads to better outcomes. In her personal reflection, Brown realized her unrealistic timelines stemmed from two sources: fear, scarcity, and anxiety (e.g., fear of not doing enough, others thinking of an idea first, or being in over her head as a leader) and a failure to communicate longer-term strategic priorities to her team. The shame gremlins whispered, “You don’t belong in this job. You study leadership, but you can’t lead.” Brown describes the predictable pattern of assembling armor when in fear: “I’m not enough” leads to self-protection, defensiveness, and eventually “I’m actually better than them.” To break this cycle, she embraces Joseph Campbell’s quote: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” The “treasure” for her was less fear and loneliness; the “cave” was admitting her struggles and perceived inadequacies as a leader.

Rumble Tools and Practices
During their “circle back” meeting, Brown’s team used permission slips (writing down what they allowed themselves to do or feel for the meeting, e.g., “be honest,” “listen with passion”). Brown gave herself permission to be honest about her fears and the shame-based self-talk. The team identified four key learnings:

• Shared understanding of moving pieces: Implementing new communication processes, including cross-departmental meetings and a new meeting minutes process (Date, Intention, Attendees, Key Decisions, Tasks & Ownership), where everyone is responsible for capturing decisions and reviewing them before leaving. This addressed subjective minutes and kept dispersed teams informed.
• Collaborative timeline estimation: Using a Turn & Learn practice where everyone writes their time estimates or priority rankings privately, then reveals them simultaneously. This prevents the “halo effect” (following the most influential person) and “bandwagon effect,” fostering understanding of different data and assumptions.
• Gritty faith and gritty facts: Inspired by Jim Collins’s Stockdale Paradox (Admiral Stockdale’s resilience as a POW), this means maintaining faith that you will prevail (“gritty faith”) while confronting the brutal facts of current reality (“gritty facts”). This counters binary thinking (e.g., operations vs. marketing) and encourages everyone to be both optimistic and realistic.
• Apologizing and backing it with behavior change: Brown apologized for offloading her emotions, committing to talk about her fears and stay aware of fear-driven behaviors. The organization normalizes apologizing as brave leadership, recognizing that everyone has “a part” in difficult situations.

The Power and Wisdom to Serve Others
Colonel DeDe Halfhill shares a powerful story of leadership courage. When airmen reported exhaustion, Halfhill, inspired by Brown’s work, dared to ask, “Who’s lonely?” Fifteen hands went up. This incredibly vulnerable question, driven by a Harvard Business Review article linking exhaustion to loneliness, revealed a deeper issue. Halfhill admitted her own discomfort and lack of immediate solutions, but chose to “hold space” for the raw emotion rather than sending them away. She recognized that addressing loneliness could combat suicide and isolation in the military, arguing that using sterile words like “disconnected” is less impactful than “lonely,” which conveys “true depth of shared human experience.” Her willingness to be vulnerable and use direct, empathetic language fostered connection and led to critical conversations about building community within the unit. She emphasizes that leaders must be willing to sit in discomfort and that words matter. Her research into the 1948 Air Force leadership manual, which included words like “humanness,” “belonging,” “mercy,” and “love,” highlighted how modern leadership language has become sanitized, losing the capacity to address the “real emotions of people.”

Taking Action and Addressing Resistance
Brown suggests that if leaders find Halfhill’s or her own stories “too kumbaya” or think “I’m not sure I could ever do this,” they should examine whether they are underestimating the courage involved or diminishing the effort to avoid trying. For teams hesitant to engage, she recommends having them read this section and discuss its applicability, using it as a container-building opportunity. To those who question “Who has the time?”, Brown argues that 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. This means digging deeper than surface-level issues and creating “white space” for honest conversation. She also stresses that leaders can’t take responsibility for others’ emotions; boundaries are key: “Being angry is okay. Yelling is not okay.” Using time-outs when rumbles become unproductive is also encouraged. Daring leadership, ultimately, is about serving others, not ourselves.

Section Three: The Armory

This section explores the various “armor” we deploy to self-protect against vulnerability, and how these defensive behaviors hinder courageous leadership. Brown presents sixteen specific examples of armored leadership, contrasted with their “daring leadership” responses, emphasizing the critical role of the “heart” in effective leadership.

The Heart as the Treasure
Brown frames the heart as the most precious treasure of human experience, symbolizing our capacity to love and be loved, and the gateway to our emotional lives. Wholeheartedness, defined as “engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness,” involves integrating our thinking, feeling, and behavior, and putting down armor to embrace our messy, whole selves. While many organizations pay lip service to “bringing your whole self to work,” they often unconsciously create cultures that reward armor (perfectionism, emotional stoicism, compartmentalizing, valuing “all-knowing” over “always learning”). This is because they mistakenly believe severing heart from work leads to productivity and easier management. However, when we imprison the heart, we kill courage, impacting trust, innovation, creativity, and accountability. Emotions, when disembodied, drive decisions while thinking is suppressed. An open heart, connected to emotions, leads to better decision-making, critical thinking, empathy, self-compassion, and resilience.

The Ego’s Role in Armoring
The ego, described as the “inner hustler,” drives pretending, performing, pleasing, and perfecting, craving acceptance and approval. It actively works to avoid or minimize the discomfort of vulnerability, fearing judgment or learning something unpleasant about ourselves. Despite its power, the ego is a “thin wafer of consciousness” compared to the “giant” heart, which offers free, wholehearted wisdom. Protecting the ego (fearing being wrong, not smart enough, or misunderstood) leads to armoring. All these situations ultimately lead to shame, the feeling of being so flawed that we question our worthiness. Brown notes the irony that as we worry about AI and machines taking jobs, we’re suppressing the unique human gifts of vulnerability, empathy, and emotional literacy—gifts machines can’t replicate. Embracing these human assets is part of “the rise of daring leaders.”

The Vulnerability Armory
Brown details sixteen types of armored leadership and their daring leadership counterparts.

1. Armored Leadership: Driving Perfectionism and Fostering Fear of Failure
   • Perfectionism is a “self-destructive and addictive belief system” fueled by the thought: “If I look perfect and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of blame, judgment, and shame.” It is not striving for excellence (which is healthy and self-focused: “How can I improve?”). Perfectionism is other-focused (“What will people think?”), a hustle for approval. It hampers achievement and is correlated with depression, anxiety, and addiction. It’s a function of shame, not a way to avoid it.
   • Daring Leadership: Modeling and Encouraging Healthy Striving, Empathy, and Self-Compassion
     • Engage in open conversations about where the team is susceptible to perfectionism and how to distinguish it from healthy striving. Develop ways to check in with each other.
2. Armored Leadership: Working from Scarcity and Squandering Opportunities for Joy and Recognition
   • Foreboding joy is the “dress-rehearsing tragedy in moments of deep joy” (e.g., “Don’t get too happy, that’s just inviting disaster”). Joy is the most vulnerable emotion. When we can’t tolerate this vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding, leading to self-protection and planning for pain. This squanders the emotional reserve needed for resilience. At work, it means hesitating to celebrate victories (fear of inviting disaster or employees getting complacent) and withholding recognition.
   • Daring Leadership: Practicing Gratitude and Celebrating Milestones and Victories
     • The antidote to foreboding joy is gratitude. It’s an “actual practice” (journals, sharing). This allows for “basking in” accomplishments and love, and recognizing the “shiver of vulnerability” with gratitude. Starting meetings with a gratitude check builds trust and connection. Recognition increases employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention.
3. Armored Leadership: Numbing
   • Numbing involves using agents like food, work, social media, shopping, or alcohol to “take the edge off” discomfort. While not addiction, it has severe consequences because we cannot selectively numb emotion—numbing the dark also numbs the light (joy, love, belonging). The anticipation of pain triggers numbing.
   • Daring Leadership: Setting Boundaries and Finding Real Comfort
     • Numbing is driven by vulnerability, resentment, and anxiety. Resentment often stems from a lack of boundaries. The cure is to develop tools to lean into discomfort and find real comfort/renewal (vs. “shadow comforts” like excessive work or binge-watching). Ask: “What are these feelings and where did they come from?” and “What brings me real comfort and renewal?” Brown’s personal example is using a picture of walking shoes in the pantry to prompt a healthier choice than comfort eating.
4. Armored Leadership: Propagating the False Dichotomy of Victim or Viking, Crush or Be Crushed
   • This is a win-lose, zero-sum power dynamic: you’re either a sucker/loser or a Viking who controls, dominates, and shuts down emotion to avoid vulnerability. This thinking is pervasive in some professions and leads to a belief that if you don’t crush, you won’t survive. It defines success as mere survival, which isn’t true living.
   • Daring Leadership: Practicing Integration—Strong Back, Soft Front, Wild Heart
     • The opposite is integration: embracing all parts of ourselves (tough/tender, scared/brave). Roshi Joan Halifax’s concept of strong back, soft front means having grounded confidence and boundaries (strong back) while staying vulnerable and curious (soft front). A wild heart lives these paradoxes, being both fierce and kind.
5. Armored Leadership: Being a Knower and Being Right
   • This is heavy armor, characterized by defensiveness, posturing, and a drive for “bullshit.” It causes distrust and unproductive conflict. It can be shame-driven (fear of not knowing enough) or a cultural problem where only “tenured leaders” are valued as knowers.
   • Daring Leadership: Being a Learner and Getting It Right
     • Strategies include: 1) Naming the issue directly but kindly. 2) Making curiosity skills a priority. 3) Acknowledging and rewarding great questions and “I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.” The shift is from “being right” to “getting it right.”
6. Armored Leadership: Hiding Behind Cynicism
   • Cynicism and sarcasm are easy and cheap ways to avoid contributing. They leave a trail of hurt, anger, and resentment, especially when modeled by leaders. They often mask deeper emotions like anger, fear, inadequacy, or despair.
   • Daring Leadership: Modeling Clarity, Kindness, and Hope
     • The antidote is threefold: 1) Staying clear and kind. 2) Practicing the courage to say what you mean and mean what you say. 3) Cultivating hope (defined by C.R. Snyder as a cognitive-emotional process with Goal, Pathway, and Agency: knowing where you want to go, how to get there, and believing you can do it). Leaders must not reward or allow cynicism.
7. Armored Leadership: Using Criticism as Self-Protection
   • Criticism from “cheap seats” (those unwilling to risk in the arena) hinders innovation. Two subtle forms: nostalgia (“That’s not how we do it”) and the invisible army (“We don’t want to change”). Criticism often arises from fear or unworthiness, shifting the spotlight off oneself.
   • Daring Leadership: Making Contributions and Taking Risks
     • Brown’s mantra: “I want to say I contributed more than I criticized.” Leaders must stop rewarding criticism. In her company, criticism requires offering a point of view (a plan for rebuilding). This forces everyone into the arena to participate and risk.
8. Armored Leadership: Using Power Over
   • This occurs when leaders use their position to benefit the minority and oppress the majority, or when they perpetuate harmful behaviors experienced when they were powerless (e.g., hazing). “Power over” dynamics evoke resistance and rebellion.
   • Daring Leadership: Using Power With, Power To, and Power Within
     • Drawing on Just Associates, Brown defines three types of power: Power with (finding common ground, collaboration, mutual support); Power to (giving everyone agency, acknowledging unique potential); and Power within (self-worth and self-knowledge, challenging assumptions for the highest common good).
9. Armored Leadership: Hustling for Your Worth
   • When people don’t understand their value or where they deliver value, they hustle—jumping in everywhere, even where not strong or needed, to prove they deserve a seat. This leads to exaggeration, attention-seeking, and franticness.
   • Daring Leadership: Knowing Your Value
     • Daring leaders help team members understand their unique contributions and strengths, especially those they take for granted. This shifts focus from proving worthiness to leaning into gifts. “Catch people doing things right” (Blanchard).
10. Armored Leadership: Leading for Compliance and Control
    • This armor is driven by fear and power, reducing work to tasks and micromanaging to ensure exact execution, using fear of “getting caught.” This stifles creativity, idea sharing, and vulnerability. It also involves holding onto power while pushing only responsibility down, setting people up for failure.
    • Daring Leadership: Cultivating Commitment and Shared Purpose
      • Daring leaders explain the “why” behind strategies, adding texture and meaning to work. They shift from a “directly responsible individual” (DRI) model to a TASC approach (Accountability and Success Checklist): Task (who owns it?), Authority (do they have authority?), Success (are they set up for success?), Checklist (clear steps?). They also use “What does ‘done’ look like?” or “Paint done” to ensure clarity on deliverables, unearthing stealth expectations and intentions. This cultivates commitment and contribution, not just compliance.
11. Armored Leadership: Weaponizing Fear and Uncertainty
    • In uncertain times, leaders leverage fear and weaponize it by providing easy answers and an “enemy” to blame. This is an authoritarian playbook that is impossible to fulfill for complex problems.
    • Daring Leadership: Acknowledging, Naming, and Normalizing Collective Fear and Uncertainty
      • Leaders have an ethical responsibility to hold people in discomfort without fanning fear. They share information transparently, fact-check stories, and open up spaces for rumbling. This provides “incredible relief and power” by acknowledging and normalizing the shared experience of fear.
12. Armored Leadership: Rewarding Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Attaching Productivity to Self-Worth
    • When self-worth is tied to productivity, there’s a constant pressure to work, leading to a loss of downtime and viewing rest as a “waste of precious time.” “Why sleep when you can work?”
    • Daring Leadership: Modeling and Supporting Rest, Play, and Recovery
      • Dr. Stuart Brown’s research shows that a lack of play negatively impacts output. Play fosters empathy, social navigation, creativity, and innovation. Leaders must model appropriate boundaries (e.g., shutting off email) and not celebrate unsustainable work behaviors. “The opposite of play is not work—the opposite of play is depression.”
13. Armored Leadership: Tolerating Discrimination, Echo Chambers, and a “Fitting-in” Culture
    • Fitting in is changing who we are to be accepted, the “greatest barrier to true belonging” (which is believing in and belonging to yourself). Cultures that promote fitting in stifle individuality and inhibit true belonging, leading to people sacrificing authenticity.
    • Daring Leadership: Cultivating a Culture of Belonging, Inclusivity, and Diverse Perspectives
      • Daring leaders fight for the inclusion of all people, opinions, and perspectives, acknowledging their own privilege and biases. They watch for favoritism and work to ensure people can be themselves and feel a sense of belonging. Silence is not brave leadership.
14. Armored Leadership: Collecting Gold Stars
    • While fine for individual contributors, continuing to “collect gold stars” (seeking recognition for oneself) becomes counterproductive in leadership roles.
    • Daring Leadership: Giving Gold Stars
      • True daring leadership involves lifting up teams and helping them shine. This requires moving beyond personal achievement and making leadership of others an explicit priority, not an afterthought. Bill Gentry’s “flip the script” concept applies here.
15. Armored Leadership: Zigzagging and Avoiding
    • Zigzagging is the energy spent trying to dodge vulnerability (conflict, discomfort, potential for shame/hurt), leading to hiding, pretending, procrastinating, blaming, or lying. It’s a huge energy suck.
    • Daring Leadership: Talking Straight and Taking Action
      • It saves time and mental capacity to face discomfort head-on. It’s less scary to appraise a situation directly. Leaders need to stop, breathe, gain clarity on what they’re avoiding, and step into vulnerability. Craig Jelinek (Costco CEO) is praised for his “straight talk” and for Costco’s culture where “we clap for the truth.”
16. Armored Leadership: Leading from Hurt
    • People lead from a place of hurt and smallness, using power to fill a self-worth gap. This means working “our shit out on other people” (e.g., taking credit for ideas, comparing, always knowing instead of learning). The most common source is first families, leading to an insatiable appetite for recognition or zero tolerance for risk.
    • Daring Leadership: Leading from Heart
      • Leaders must invest time in attending to their own fears, feelings, and history. The difference is not what you’ve experienced, but what you do with that pain and hurt. Tarana Burke’s response to Harvey Weinstein’s arrest (focusing on healing survivors, not celebrating “how the mighty have fallen”) exemplifies leading from heart. Owning our hard stories allows us to write new endings and be more compassionate.

Putting Down the Armor and the Universal Nature of Vulnerability
Roosevelt’s arena metaphor implies an unarmored struggle. The “greatest arena” is vulnerability. Brown emphasizes that the fear of vulnerability is universal, regardless of culture, age, or gender. This shared experience creates common ground. However, cultural messages and expectations can differ, necessitating conversations about how they impact trust and psychological safety in global teams. If shame and blame are management styles, or pervasive cultural norms, people cannot be vulnerable or brave. Shame drives armoring and disengagement. Brown reiterates that “people, people, people everywhere are just people, people, people.”

Section Four: Shame and Empathy

This section delves into shame, its destructive power, and its crucial antidote: empathy. Brown explains the nuances of shame versus related emotions and provides actionable skills for developing shame resilience and practicing empathy.

Digging into Shame
Shame is the ultimate threat to vulnerability, causing our egos to keep our hearts armored. Brown calls shame “the master emotion”—the “never good enough” emotion that makes us question our worthiness of connection, belonging, and love. The only people who don’t experience shame lack the capacity for empathy and human connection. We are all afraid to talk about shame, but the less we talk about it, the more control it has.

The Concussion Story: A Personal Shame Experience
Brown shares a deeply personal story of a severe concussion, which brought up her “unwanted identity” of being sick, unreliable, and undependable (a “weakness” from her German American Texan upbringing). Her struggle to heal and the fear of losing her intellectual capacity triggered intense shame (“You don’t belong in this job. You study leadership, but you can’t lead. You’re a joke!”). Her team’s empathetic response and her friend Trey’s direct, tender feedback about accepting the healing process were crucial. Her inability to work out and subsequent weight gain intensified her shame, further showing how the “shame gremlins” work. She learned that even though she helps others, she struggles with these messages herself.

Shame 101
Brown summarizes key shame concepts:

• We all have it: Shame is universal, a primitive human emotion. Those who don’t experience it lack empathy.
• We’re all afraid to talk about shame: Even the word is uncomfortable.
• The less we talk about shame, the more control it has over our lives.
  Shame is fundamentally the fear of disconnection—the fear that something about us makes us unworthy of connection. Its definition: “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.” Shame activates two “tapes”: “Never good enough” and “Who do you think you are?” This creates a “vise” that pushes us toward smallness and self-protection, leading to brokenness and suffocation. Examples of shame experiences are deeply personal and varied, but all share the common thread of unbearable pain. Neuroscience shows shame inflicts pain as real as physical pain; healing requires talking about it, as its power thrives on being unspoken.

Shame, Guilt, Humiliation, and Embarrassment
Brown clarifies these often-confused terms:

• Guilt = I did something bad. (e.g., “Man, I’ve been unfair to my team.”) It’s a psychologically uncomfortable but socially adaptive emotion that drives meaningful change when we fail to align with our values. It is negatively correlated with addiction, violence, etc.
• Shame = I am bad. (e.g., “It’s not that I’ve made bad choices. I am a bad leader.”) Shame is not a compass for moral behavior; it’s often the cause of destructive, unethical behavior (e.g., narcissism, defined as “the shame-based fear of being ordinary”). Where shame exists, empathy is almost always absent.
• Humiliation: People believe they don’t deserve their humiliation (e.g., “Man, my boss is so out of control, I don’t deserve this”). It’s less destructive than shame because we don’t internalize the “badness.”
• Embarrassment: Fleeting and often funny; we don’t feel alone in our mistakes.

How Shame Shows Up at Work
Shame is often hidden but destructive to innovation, trust, and connection. Behavioral cues include perfectionism, favoritism, gossiping, back-channeling, comparison, self-worth tied to productivity, harassment, discrimination, power over, bullying, blaming, teasing, and cover-ups. An overt sign is shame as a management tool (public reprimands, intentional embarrassment). Brown highlights that 85% of people recall a school incident so shaming it changed their self-perception as learners, often involving comparison as a creativity killer. Conversely, over 90% could name a teacher who fostered their self-worth. Leaders have immense power to build or diminish.

Dignified Exits and Cover-ups
Susan Mann, an expert in leadership, emphasizes giving people a “way out with dignity” when firing them. This means remembering the human, being kind, clear, respectful, and generous, allowing graceful exits to preserve dignity. Barriers to this include leaders armoring up, time/money constraints, finding a “fall guy” for systemic issues, and a lack of vulnerability/courage (fear of emotion). The most devastating sign of shame is a cover-up: when a culture prioritizes reputation over human dignity, shame is systemic, complicity is normalized, money/power trump ethics, accountability dies, and fear rules. Honest conversations about shame are liberating, normalize the experience, create connection, and build trust.

Shame Resilience
While shame resistance is impossible, shame resilience is possible, teachable, and within reach. It’s the ability to practice authenticity when experiencing shame, moving through it without sacrificing values, and emerging with more courage, compassion, and connection. Ultimately, it’s about moving from shame to empathy—its antidote. If we share our story with someone who responds with empathy, shame can’t survive. Self-compassion is also crucial, enabling us to reach out for empathy.

Empathy
Empathy is a linchpin of connection and trust, and essential for risk-taking teams. It’s often confused with sympathy or advice-giving. Brown shares a personal story of missing her daughter’s senior night due to flight delays, leading to a public breakdown. Her colleague, Suzanne, demonstrated perfect empathy by acknowledging the pain directly (“This sucks. This is such bullshit. My heart is breaking too.”) without trying to fix it, minimize it, or engage in comparative suffering. Empathy is feeling with people, not for them. It’s about being present in someone’s darkness, not rushing to turn on the light. Connection is what heals. If you’ve felt grief, disappointment, shame, fear, loneliness, or anger, you’re “qualified” to practice empathy.

The Five Elements of Empathy
Drawing from Theresa Wiseman and Kristin Neff, Brown identifies five attributes of empathy:

1. To see the world as others see it, or perspective taking: Honoring others’ perspectives as truth, even if different from our own. This requires becoming the learner, not the knower, and recognizing our own lenses (age, race, gender, knowledge). Inclusivity, innovation, and performance are positively correlated. Brown highlights Beyoncé’s call for diverse hiring to foster greater understanding.
2. To be nonjudgmental: We judge in areas where we’re most susceptible to shame, especially those doing worse than us. Staying out of judgment means understanding our own shame triggers. Building grounded confidence helps reduce judgment.
3. To understand another person’s feelings: Requires being in touch with our own emotions and being emotionally literate (able to recognize and name 30-40 emotions). This is crucial for processing emotion and prerequisite for shame resilience.
4. To communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings: This is the riskiest part, but course-correction is possible if we’re wholehearted and curious. Asking “What I hear you saying is…” or “That sucks and must be so frustrating. Want to talk about it?” invites deeper conversation.
5. Mindfulness (or paying attention): Taking a balanced approach to negative emotions, neither suppressing nor exaggerating them. It’s about staying present to what’s happening in conversations, including body language, and not being “swept away by negative reactivity.”

Empathy in Practice: Empathy Misses
Empathy is a skill, and we all “miss” sometimes. Six common empathy misses:

1. Sympathy vs. Empathy: Sympathy (“You poor thing,” “Bless your heart”) fuels disconnection and shame, magnifying feelings of being alone. Empathy (“Me too,” “I get it, I feel with you, and I’ve been there”) fuels connection.
2. The Gasp and Awe: Reacting with horror or shock, making the person who shared feel they need to comfort you.
3. The Mighty Fall: Being disappointed by someone’s imperfection, making them feel they need to defend themselves.
4. The Block and Tackle: Scolding or blaming others (or the situation) rather than sitting in discomfort with the person.
5. The Boots and Shovel: Rushing to make things better, minimizing the person’s pain (“It’s not that bad. You’re amazing.”).
6. If You Think That’s Bad…: One-upping the story, shifting focus away from the person sharing.

Self-Compassion
The trickiest barrier to empathy is often a lack of self-compassion. Kristin Neff identifies three elements:

• Self-kindness: Being warm and understanding toward ourselves during suffering or failure, rather than self-criticism. “Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to someone you love.”
• Common humanity: Recognizing that suffering and inadequacy are part of the shared human experience, reducing feelings of isolation (“It’s not just me!”). This is foundational for empathy and movements like #MeToo.
• Mindfulness: Not taking on thoughts/emotions that don’t belong to us (e.g., “She was irritated” vs. “She was irritated with me“). It’s about paying attention without rumination.

When shame is doused with empathy (and self-compassion), it loses its power. Language and story bring light to shame.

Shame Resilience Elements:

1. Recognizing Shame and Understanding Its Triggers: Knowing physical symptoms and what triggered the shame, avoiding “shame shields” like moving away (withdrawing), moving toward (appeasing), or moving against (aggression).
2. Practicing Critical Awareness: “Zooming out” from focus on one’s own flaw to see that many people share the same struggle, normalizes shame and reality-checks triggers.
3. Reaching Out: Sharing stories helps us learn that experiences that feel isolating are often universal, fostering connection and ending silence.
4. Speaking Shame: Naming and articulating shame cuts off its power, as “shame hates having words wrapped around it.” It also helps identify “gaslighting language” used to shame or defend shaming.

Empathy is at the heart of connection, a circuit board for shared experience and reminding others they are not alone. It’s a learnable skill, essential for courageous leadership.

Section Five: Curiosity and Grounded Confidence

This final section of Part One focuses on grounded confidence as the outcome of rumbling with vulnerability, highlighting curiosity as its core ingredient. Brown emphasizes that this confidence isn’t arrogance but a result of learning, unlearning, practice, and surviving setbacks.

Grounded Confidence: Beyond Armor
Grounded confidence is the “messy process of learning and unlearning, practicing and failing, and surviving a few misses.” It’s real, solid, built on self-awareness and practice, not bluster or posturing. Most people armor up early in life for protection, especially in unsafe environments or due to parental overprotection.
Brown reiterates that rumbling with vulnerability is the fundamental skill of courage-building. Just as athletes develop muscle memory through disciplined practice of fundamentals (like a tennis player’s sashay or a pool player’s cue delivery), leaders build strength and emotional stamina by regularly engaging with vulnerability. This allows them to focus on higher-order objectives and challenges under pressure. Daring leaders need the grounded confidence to stay true to values, respond emotionally rather than reacting, and operate from self-awareness.

Thriving in Paradoxes and the Effort of Learning
Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix, emphasizes that leaders must learn to hold the tension of paradoxes inherent in entrepreneurship (e.g., optimism and paranoia, big heart and tough decisions). “Leadership is the ability to thrive in the ambiguity of paradoxes and opposites.”
Brown stresses that easy learning doesn’t build strong skills. Effective learning needs to be effortful, involving “desirable difficulty” that makes the brain feel discomfort, like a muscle burning during strengthening. This counters the trend in organizations to optimize training for ease and popularity rather than recall or behavior change. Practicing rumbling with vulnerability is work; it never becomes comfortable, but builds the grounded confidence to know “you are strong and you have practiced what it takes to create and hold the space for this.”

Grounded Confidence = Rumble Skills + Curiosity + Practice
Curiosity is the DNA of rumble skills and grounded confidence. It is an act of vulnerability and courage and is correlated with creativity, intelligence, improved learning, and problem-solving. The brain’s chemistry changes when we’re curious, aiding learning. However, curiosity is uncomfortable because it involves uncertainty and vulnerability. Ian Leslie calls curiosity “unruly” and “deviant,” disdaining rules and approved pathways, which is why it leads to grounded confidence in rumble skills.

Einstein is presented as a curiosity mentor: “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.” And “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” The “knower” ego races for answers or avoids discomfort. Curiosity says: “No worries. I love a wild ride. I’m up for wherever this goes. And I’m in for however long it takes to get to the heart of the problem. I don’t have to know the answers or say the right thing, I just have to keep listening and keep questioning.”

Specific Rumble Starters and Questions:

• The story I make up… (powerful tool for reality-checking assumptions)
• I’m curious about…
• Tell me more.
• That’s not my experience (instead of “You’re wrong”).
• I’m wondering…
• Help me understand…
• Walk me through…
• We’re both dug in. 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? (often overlooked, leading to solutions for undefined problems)

Brown emphasizes that sometimes the best rumbles start with a short fact-finding conversation and agreement to circle back. She also introduces horizon conflict, where different roles necessitate different time lenses (e.g., CEO focuses on 10-year horizon, operations on 6-month). Leaders must respect and leverage these different views while maintaining a shared reality of the current state.

Driving Greatness from Curiosity and Learning
The most common barrier to curiosity is having “a dry well” (George Loewenstein’s information gap perspective): we aren’t curious about what we know nothing about. To induce curiosity, we must “prime the pump” with intriguing information. The more we know, the more we want to know.

Case Example: Stefan Larsson at Old Navy
Stefan Larsson transformed Old Navy’s culture from fearful and siloed to entrepreneurial and trusting. Key drivers:

• Weekly “learnings sessions” for top leaders: Focusing on outcomes as learning opportunities (“What did we set out to do, what happened, what did we learn, and how fast can we improve?”). This eliminated shaming and blaming.
• Quarterly town halls to share outcomes and learnings.
• Physical co-location of the management team in a glass-walled, unlocked room to visually mirror openness and encourage ideas from all levels.
  This built vulnerability and trust, removing the fear of failure. They “outlearned and outperformed,” achieving twelve consecutive quarters of growth and adding $1 billion in sales. Larsson is most proud of empowering his team to turn vulnerability into a strength and foster continuous learning.

Case Example: Dr. Sanée Bell at Morton Ranch Junior High
Principal Sanée Bell integrated daring leadership by:

• Practicing vulnerability: Sharing her personal story of overcoming poverty and a broken home made her more approachable and helped staff understand her commitment, giving them permission to share their own journeys.
• Becoming self-aware: Journaling and seeking feedback to refine leadership, integrating personal reflection into her weekly practice.
• Engaging in tough conversations: Building trust to address academic disparities and challenge the “we’ve always done it this way” attitude. She invested in high-performing, connected teams and structured protocols for hard conversations.
  Bell emphasizes that by growing “power with people” and empowering others to lead, she was able to change the school’s narrative and lead in a deeper, more meaningful way.

More Rumble Tools
Brown reminds readers that resources are available on her website. She also stresses the value of role-playing, practicing, and writing notes to bring into meetings. Her anecdote about her boss appreciating her notes for a difficult conversation underscores that preparation and intentionality in vulnerability are strengths, not weaknesses. “People, people, people are just people, people, people.”

Part Two: Living into Our Values

This part focuses on how to crystallize and live into our core values, especially during challenging “arena moments.” Brown argues that values serve as a crucial North Star, guiding behavior and reminding us of our purpose when faced with critics and discomfort.

Step One: We Can’t Live into Values That We Can’t Name

The first step is divining what’s most important to us—our North Star. Brown emphasizes that we have only one set of values; they don’t change based on context (professional vs. personal). The challenge lies in living aligned with these values regardless of setting, especially when they conflict with others. Brown provides a list of values and instructs readers to narrow their selection down to one or two core values. The research shows that leaders who demonstrate the most courage tether their behavior to one or two values, not ten or fifteen. If everything is important, nothing truly drives you. These core values are where “second tier” values are tested. For example, Brown’s core values are faith and courage, which fuel her commitment to her family. When she says no to work opportunities to be with her family, it’s her courage and faith that enable her to prioritize what’s right over the fear of being seen as ungrateful. Our values should be so clear they feel like a definition of who we are, making choices based on “what’s right, right now, over what is easy”—this is integrity.

Step Two: Taking Values from BS to Behavior

Simply professing values is “total BS” if they aren’t operationalized into teachable and observable behaviors. Only about 10% of organizations do this effectively. To move from “BS to behavior,” identify three or four behaviors that support your values and three or four “slippery behaviors” that counter them. Use past “arena moments” where you either lived or didn’t live into your values as examples. Brown shares personal examples: her value of courage means not choosing silence over what is right (e.g., speaking out against racism, sexism, homophobia, even when uncomfortable or facing backlash). Her value of faith means finding “the face of God in everyone,” avoiding dehumanizing language, and holding people accountable without hating them. She acknowledges the constant struggle and imperfection in living these values, but emphasizes that choosing courage over comfort, even for “eight seconds” of intense discomfort, is crucial to avoid feeling shame and out of integrity later.

Step Three: Empathy and Self-Compassion: The Two Most Important Seats in the Arena

When in the arena, distractions, critics, and the “shame gremlins” (Not good enough, Who do you think you are?) are loud. The most important seats in the arena are reserved for empathy and self-compassion.
Brown stresses the crucial, uncomfortable conversation every leader must have about privilege. She, as a white, straight, educated woman, acknowledges her privileged experience in the arena compared to others. To opt out of conversations about privilege and oppression because they make you uncomfortable is the epitome of privilege. Silence is not brave leadership. A brave leader says, “I see you. I hear you. I don’t have all the answers, but I’m going to keep listening and asking questions.”
The empathy seat is for one or two people who know your values and support your efforts to live them. The self-compassion seat is for yourself—you must cheer yourself on and prioritize your values. Brown describes her husband, Steve, as her empathy seat, offering love, encouragement, and straight talk. Her self-compassion involves sleep, healthy food, exercise, and connection. Her “early warning indicator” for living outside her values is resentment, which signals when she’s chosen comfort over truth or failed to set boundaries.
Living into values often means choosing a “tough and really tough” path, not an easy one. It’s about feeling “strong and solid” and, often, “tired.”

Living into Our Values and Feedback
Values are critical when giving and receiving feedback. Brown provides a “readiness checklist” for giving feedback:

1. Ready to sit next to you (not across).
2. Willing to put the problem in front of us (not between us or sliding it toward you).
3. Ready to listen, ask questions, and accept not fully understanding. Focus on fact-finding, not lecturing. Use “I need some time to think” and “Can we circle back?”
4. Ready to acknowledge what you do well (not just mistakes). Ken Blanchard’s “catch people doing things right.”
5. Ready to recognize strengths and how they can address challenges. Use a strengths-based approach.
6. Ready to hold accountable without shaming or blaming. Acknowledge your own potential for shaming.
7. Open to owning your part. Most situations requiring feedback involve the giver’s part too.
8. Can genuinely thank someone for their efforts.
9. Can talk about how challenges lead to growth and opportunity. Tie feedback to their personal growth areas.
10. Can model vulnerability and openness. Show up curious, vulnerable, and full of questions.

When delivering feedback, align with your values (e.g., courage for honesty over politeness) and allow others to have feelings without taking responsibility for them (don’t caretake or rescue).

Getting Good at Receiving Feedback
Mastery requires feedback, regardless of how it’s delivered. Tactics for receiving feedback:

• Identify a value-supporting behavior or self-talk (e.g., “I’m brave enough to listen,” “There’s something valuable here, take what works and leave the rest,” “This is the path to mastery”).
• Stay present and avoid defensiveness. Recognize physical signs (folded arms, dry mouth), thought patterns (listening for disagreement), and emotional signs (anxiety, frustration).
• If overwhelmed, ask for a break (“I can only hear so much right now”).
• Be able to say, “The way you’re acting is keeping me from hearing what you’re saying…we’re going to have to find a different way.”
  The ultimate goal is a skillful blend of listening, integrating feedback, and reflecting it back with accountability. This requires holding discomfort.

Natalie Dumond of Miovision transformed performance management by putting employees in the driver’s seat, with leaders as coaches. They stripped away forms and 360 reviews, fostering a culture where employees sought feedback one-on-one, nothing was anonymous, and hard conversations were the norm. Training focused on courageous feedback, leading to a culture of trust, curiosity, positive intent, and self-awareness.

Know My Values = Know Me. No Values = No Me.
Sharing values is a massive trust and connection builder. Brown realized she didn’t fully know her team until they shared their core values, which led to deeper understanding and improved relationships (e.g., understanding her colleague’s value of “connection” or her CFO Chaz’s value of “financial stability”). This process helps teams develop a shared language and defined culture, improving hiring and non-performance issues.

The Values Operationalizinator
Brown humorously introduces her “values operationalizinator”—a process for translating lofty values into teachable, observable, and evaluable behaviors. For her own organization (Brené Brown Education and Research Group), values like “Be brave,” “Serve the work,” and “Take good care” are broken down into specific behaviors (e.g., for “Be brave”: setting clear boundaries, leaning into difficult conversations, talking to people not about them). This process provides shared language, a well-defined culture, and drives thoughtful and decisive decision-making. Melinda Gates highlights how operationalized values (like the Gates Foundation’s principle of equity) help resolve conflicts by tying tactics to core values, fostering deeper understanding even when disagreeing.

The value of “assumption of positive intent” is a complex example. It requires setting and maintaining boundaries and the core belief that people are doing the best they can. Brown notes that most people struggle with boundaries and only about 50% truly believe others are doing their best. The “Living BIG” framework (boundaries, integrity, generosity) helps operationalize this. If someone is believed to be “doing the best they can,” then a leader’s job shifts from pushing/grinding to teaching, reassessing skills, reassigning, or letting them go (“move the rock”). This cultivates commitment and contribution, not just compliance.

Part Three: Braving Trust

This part explores the critical role of trust in teams and organizations. Brown introduces the BRAVING Inventory, a concrete framework for understanding and building trust through specific behaviors, emphasizing that trust is earned in small moments and requires ongoing, intentional work.

The Transformer Effect and the Cost of Distrust
The word trust can trigger a “Transformer” reaction, leading to vulnerability lockdown (shields, armor, closed heart). Most people believe they are trustworthy but struggle to trust others, a “math” that doesn’t work. Charles Feltman defines trust as “choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions” and distrust as deciding “what is important to me is not safe with this person.”
Avoiding trust conversations is dangerous because it leads to talking about people rather than to them (zigzagging) and allows issues to fester. Trust is the glue that holds teams together; ignoring it impacts performance and success. Companies with high trust levels significantly outperform others, making trust a “must-have,” not a “soft” or “secondary” competency.

Trust Talk We Can Actually Hear: The BRAVING Inventory
To make trust actionable, Brown developed the BRAVING Inventory, an acronym for seven specific behaviors that define trust. This inventory is a rumble tool—a conversation guide for colleagues to discuss where their trust experiences align or differ.

The BRAVING Inventory Elements:

• B – Boundaries: You respect my boundaries, and when unclear, you ask. You’re willing to say no.
• R – Reliability: You do what you say you’ll do. This includes being aware of competencies and limitations to avoid overpromising.
• A – Accountability: You own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends.
• V – Vault: You don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share (including sharing others’ confidences with you).
  • Unpacking Vault: The key here is not just not betraying confidence, but also not sharing information that doesn’t belong to you. People often lose trust in those who constantly gossip about others, even if their own secrets are safe.
• I – Integrity: You choose courage over comfort. You choose what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy. And you choose to practice your values rather than simply professing them.
  • Unpacking Integrity: In a culture of “fun, fast, and easy,” integrity is a major stumbling block. It’s about not taking shortcuts. An integrity partner at work can help ensure you act in your integrity by role-playing difficult conversations or checking in.
• N – Nonjudgment: I can ask for what I need, and you can ask for what you need. We can talk about how we feel without judgment. We can ask each other for help without judgment.
  • Unpacking Nonjudgment: We tend to judge others in areas where we’re most susceptible to shame, especially if they are “doing worse.” Ironically, asking for help is a power move and a sign of strength that builds trust. Leaders are more likely to delegate important work to those who habitually ask for help, as it signals trustworthiness in delegation.
• G – Generosity: You extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others.
  • Unpacking Generosity: As discussed in Part Two, this is “Living BIG” (boundaries, integrity, generosity). It requires asking: “What boundaries need to be in place for me to be in my integrity and generous with my assumptions?” It also relies on the belief that people are doing the best they can.

Putting the BRAVING Inventory into Practice
Leaders use the BRAVING Inventory one-on-one with direct reports, discussing strengths and areas for growth. This helps identify specific issues (e.g., unreliability in meeting times) and create actionable plans. Teams can also develop observable behaviors for each BRAVING element, specific to their work style and culture, fostering mutual accountability.
Trust is earned in small moments over time; it cannot be “summoned with a command” in a crisis. Melinda Gates’s “marble jar” framework helps her recognize that every small gesture of support adds marbles, while betraying trust removes a “huge handful.” She uses BRAVING to identify what those small, trust-building (or breaking) actions are, focusing on integrity (actions matching words) and accountability (being her own boss). Trust is a “living process” requiring ongoing attention.

The Basics of Self-Trust
Self-trust is the foundation of trust with others. When we fail or experience setbacks, self-trust is often the first casualty (“I don’t trust myself anymore”). Applying the BRAVING Inventory to ourselves can help identify areas of breakdown:

• Boundaries: Did I respect my own boundaries?
• Reliability: Could I count on myself to follow through?
• Accountability: Did I hold myself accountable or blame others?
• Vault: Did I honor the vault (e.g., not sharing personal info inappropriately)?
• Integrity: Did I choose courage over comfort, and practice my values?
• Nonjudgment: Did I ask for help? Was I judgmental about needing help?
• Generosity: Was I generous toward myself? Did I practice self-compassion?

We are in control of our relationship with self-trust. To rebuild it, make small, doable promises to yourself and fulfill them, creating a “flywheel of reliability.” Brent Ladd’s story illustrates this: as a professional staff member, he initially struggled with independently doing everything due to a “Puritan work ethic” and a fear of asking for help, leading to a lack of trust with colleagues. He intentionally began engaging personally with colleagues, fostering connection and seeing them as “people who were doing the best they could.” Simultaneously, he confronted his long-held shame around not completing his PhD, daring to submit his research and present it at a conference, which rebuilt his self-trust and belonging. He also learned to delegate, allowing a colleague to co-chair a workshop, which built trust and a sense of team. We can’t give people what we don’t have. Maya Angelou’s quote, “I don’t trust people who don’t love themselves and tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt,” underscores the importance of self-trust as a prerequisite for trusting others.

Part Four: Learning to Rise

This final part of the book addresses resilience and how leaders can equip themselves and their teams to get up after falls. Brown argues that teaching “rising skills” upfront is crucial for fostering courage and preventing shame from derailing progress.

Preparing for Hard Landings: Teaching People How to Land Before They Jump
Brown states that we must teach people how to land before they jump. Just as skydivers learn to land before their first jump, leaders cannot expect bravery and risk-taking without preparing for hard landings. Research shows that leaders trained in rising skills as part of a courage-building program are more likely to engage in courageous behaviors because they know how to recover from setbacks. Teaching these skills after a failure is much harder. Brown’s organization teaches “falling as part of courage-building” during onboarding, signaling: “We expect you to be brave. That means that you should expect to fall. We’ve got a plan.”
While “fail fast” and “fall forward” slogans are popular, they are often “half-assed attempts” without actual reset skills or honest rumbles about shame, which almost always accompanies failure. This leaves people feeling shame about feeling shame. The increased presence of millennials and Gen Zers in the workforce highlights this need, as many enter without grounded confidence or rumbling skills, either due to overprotection (“lawnmower parents”) or underprotection (trauma). Brown’s experience shows these generations are “starving” for the ability to practice courage. If we don’t have the skills to get back up, we may not risk falling. The most resilient individuals, “risers,” use a process called Learning to Rise, which has three parts: the reckoning, the rumble, and the revolution.

The Ham Fold-over Debacle (Part 2)
Brown revisits her personal story, illustrating the Learning to Rise process. Overwhelmed by work, she misinterpreted her husband Steve’s “damn lunch meat” comment as a jab at her leadership (“I am a half-ass leader, a half-ass mom, a half-ass wife…disappointing every single person”). This was her “story I’m telling myself.” Steve’s empathetic response (“I know you’re making that up because that is your go-to story when you’re in a hard place…I’m diving down. I’m going to find you, and I’m going to pull you to the surface”) helped her reality-check. His simple explanation for his “ham fold-over” comment (“I’m just hungry”) revealed her ham fold-over debacle—making herself the center of something unrelated due to her own fear/scarcity. This illustrates how our brains, in their effort to keep us safe, invent “conspiracy theories” or “confabulations” to fill data gaps.

The Reckoning, the Rumble, and the Revolution
The Learning to Rise process helps us get up from falls, overcome mistakes, and face hurt, leading to more wisdom and wholeheartedness. When we own our story, we get to write the ending. When we deny stories of failure, “they own us.”

The Reckoning:
This is the moment risers recognize they are emotionally hooked (“Hey, something’s got me”) and get curious. Emotion drives in hard times; thinking is “hog-tied in the back.” The challenge is that most of us weren’t raised to be emotionally curious. Instead, we offload emotions onto others.

Six Offloading Strategies for Hurt:

1. Chandeliering: Packing down hurt until an innocuous comment triggers a rage or crying fit, or a small mistake causes a huge shame attack. Common in “power-over” situations, shattering trust.
2. Bouncing Hurt: Ego intervenes, replacing hurt with anger, blame, or avoidance (e.g., “I don’t give a damn” instead of “I’m hurt”). Ego uses stories as armor and alibi, often shaming others for “emotional control.”
3. Numbing Hurt: Using substances or behaviors to “take the edge off” pain, as discussed in “The Armory.”
4. Stockpiling Hurt: Continuously amassing pain until the body forces a shutdown (anxiety, depression, burnout, physical pain), often seen midlife/midcareer.
5. The Umbridge: Overly cheerful, saccharine claims (“Everything is awesome”) that mask pain and hurt, leading to distrust because lack of relatable struggle suggests a “ticking bomb.”
6. Hurt and the Fear of High-Centering: Denying feelings for fear of getting “stuck” (emotionally high-centered), unable to move forward or backward. Fear of losing control.

Strategies for Reckoning with Emotion:

• Breathing: Box breathing (or tactical breathing: inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4) helps to rewire and calm.
• Practicing Calm: Creating perspective and mindfulness while managing emotional reactivity. Calm is contagious. Proficient practitioners use breathing and curiosity (“Do I have enough information to freak out? If so, will freaking out help?”).
• Permission Slips: Giving ourselves permission to feel emotions.

The Rumble: Conspiracies, Confabulations, and Shitty First Drafts
The rumble starts with the truth: In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. This is biological “meaning making.” The brain rewards us with dopamine for completing patterns (stories), even if inaccurate. This “Aha!” sensation can cause us to shut down vulnerability needed for truth.

• Shitty First Drafts (SFDs): The first stories we make up, which are “fears and insecurities romping all over the place, making up worst-case scenarios” (Anne Lamott). Capturing these (writing them down) gives us power, not the SFD. Unfiltered SFDs are powerful.
• Conspiracy Theories: Stories based on limited real data and plentiful imagined data, coherent but emotionally satisfying, often with clear good guys/bad guys. Common in cultures of change/confusion. Daring leaders provide facts and acknowledge what they can/cannot share.
• Confabulations: “A lie told honestly.” Replacing missing information with something false believed to be true (e.g., “We are all getting laid off in September”). It’s dangerous because it spreads fear based on opinion, not fact.

Risers capture their SFDs, often by writing them down (like James Pennebaker’s research on translating messy experiences into language). This helps them ask: “Does this even make sense?”

Rumble Questions for Risers:

1. What more do I need to learn and understand about the situation? (Objective facts, assumptions?)
2. What more do I need to learn and understand about the other people in the story? (More information, questions, clarifications?)
3. What more do I need to learn and understand about myself? (What’s underneath my response, what am I feeling, what part did I play?)

Checking SFDs with colleagues (“The story I’m making up is you’re pissed…”) builds trust and connection, leading to empathy and productive dialogue. Brown notes that “conspiracy is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant, or the crazy. It is a reflex of the storytelling mind’s compulsive need for meaningful experience.”

Case Example: Shell’s SURF Team
Gwo-Tarng Ju (GT) led Shell’s deep-sea engineering team through daring leadership work. They learned to distinguish systemic from relational vulnerability and engaged in constructive performance feedback sessions by “reality-checking the stories we all make up during conflicts or setbacks.” This led to less defensiveness and more learning in a high-risk environment. They schedule two meetings for evaluations: one for initial conversation, one for story checking.

Case Example: Melinda Gates’s Imposter Syndrome
Melinda Gates shares her own experience of “the story I was making up” about experts ignoring her or being condescending because she wasn’t Bill. She realized it stemmed from her own insecurity about leading world-renowned experts without a science degree (imposter syndrome). By facing this insecurity, she could “chip away at it” and confidently ask “seemingly stupid questions,” which often turned out to be the most important ones. This is about owning hard stories to write new endings.

The Delta:
The “delta” is the difference between what we make up about our experiences and the truth we discover through rumbling. This is where meaning, wisdom, and key learnings live. The more you practice, the better and faster you get at it. In Brown’s office, checking SFDs is a daily practice, leading to more honest, vulnerable, and disarming conversations.

The Story Rumble (for organizations/groups):
This process helps address conflict or failure at a team level:

1. Set intention and clarify why you’re rumbling.
2. Container-building: What does everyone need to engage with an open heart/mind? What will get in the way?
3. Shared permission slips.
4. Name emotions people are experiencing.
5. Get curious.
6. Share SFDs (using Turn & Learn if needed).
7. Analyze SFDs: What do they reveal about relationships, communication, leadership, culture?
8. Rumble deeper: What lines of inquiry needed to reality-check theories?
9. Identify the delta (new info vs. SFDs).
10. Determine key learnings.
11. Act on learnings: How to integrate into culture? What is each person responsible for?
12. Schedule circle-back for accountability.

Own the story and you get to write the ending. Deny the story and it owns you.

The Revolution
Brown embraces the word revolution, defining it as “choosing authenticity and worthiness,” an “absolute act of resistance” in a world of critics and fearmongers. Choosing to live wholeheartedly is an “act of defiance.” Courage is rebellion.
Her three key learnings from this research:

1. Collective courage in an organization is the best predictor of its success (culture, leader development, mission).
2. The greatest challenge is helping leaders acknowledge their personal call to courage. Courage can be learned by putting down armor and picking up shared language, tools, and skills.
3. We fail the minute we let someone else define success for us. Brown shares how she used to be driven by external definitions of success (“accomplish-acquire-collapse-repeat”), leading to exhaustion and resentment. She learned to define success by her “joy and meaning” list (sleep, health, family time, meaningful work). This becomes a filter for opportunities.

The book ends with Joseph Campbell’s “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” Own the fear, find the cave, and write a new ending. Choose courage over comfort, whole hearts over armor, and the great adventure of being brave and afraid simultaneously.

Key Takeaways

Dare to Lead redefines leadership as an act of profound courage, grounded in the willingness to embrace vulnerability, cultivate empathy, and live authentically. It challenges the conventional view that emotions have no place in professional settings, arguing instead that they are the very source of connection, innovation, and resilience. Brené Brown’s research provides a powerful roadmap for individuals and organizations to shed protective armor and step into the arena of daring leadership.

The core lessons readers should remember are:

• Vulnerability is not weakness; it is the foundation of courage. All acts of bravery require uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.
• Armoring up against vulnerability kills courage and connection. Behaviors like perfectionism, numbing, knowing, and judging are self-protective mechanisms that hinder growth and trust.
• Clear is kind; unclear is unkind. Direct, honest communication, even when difficult, is more empathetic and effective than avoidance or half-truths.
• Trust is built in small moments of reciprocal vulnerability. The BRAVING framework provides a clear vocabulary and actionable behaviors for cultivating trust in relationships and teams.
• Shame thrives in silence and judgment, but withers in empathy. Understanding the difference between shame and guilt, and practicing self-compassion, are crucial for resilience.
• Curiosity is a leadership superpower and essential for grounded confidence. Asking questions and embracing uncertainty (rather than needing to be “the knower”) leads to deeper understanding and better solutions.
• We must own our stories of struggle to write new endings. The “Learning to Rise” process (reckoning, rumble, revolution) helps individuals and teams move through setbacks with wisdom and wholeheartedness.
• True belonging requires authenticity, not fitting in. Leaders must foster cultures where diverse perspectives are valued and people feel safe to be their whole selves.
• Our values serve as our North Star. Operationalizing values into specific, observable behaviors ensures alignment between what we profess and how we show up.

Next actions readers should take immediately:

• Identify your two core values: Use Brown’s list and the “values operationalizinator” questions to clarify what truly guides you.
• Start with “The story I’m making up…”: Practice this rumble tool in your daily interactions to reality-check assumptions and foster clear communication.
• Practice tactical breathing: Use the 4-4-4-4 count to cultivate calm and stay present in emotionally charged situations.
• Conduct an Empathy Miss assessment: Reflect on which of the six empathy misses you typically engage in and commit to changing one behavior.
• Initiate a BRAVING conversation: With a trusted colleague, discuss the elements of BRAVING to build explicit trust and identify areas for growth in your working relationship.

Reflection prompt:

• What piece of “armor” are you most ready to lay down, and what specific action will you take this week to begin the “rumble” of living more vulnerably in your leadership?