Self-Awareness and Self-Love Matter PDF

SELF-AWARENESS AND SELF-LOVE MATTER. Who we are is how we lead. section CURIOSITY AND GROUNDED CONFIDENCE ***gK* rounded confidence is the messy process of learn-** **ing and unlearning, practicing and failing, and** **surviving a few misses. This brand of confidence** **is not blustery...

SELF-AWARENESS AND SELF-LOVE MATTER. Who we are is how we lead. section CURIOSITY AND GROUNDED CONFIDENCE ***gK* rounded confidence is the messy process of learn-** **ing and unlearning, practicing and failing, and** **surviving a few misses. This brand of confidence** **is not blustery arrogance or posturing or built on bullshit;** **it's real, solid, and built on self-awareness and practice.** **Once we witness how courage can transform the way we** **lead, we can trade the heavy, suffocating armor that keeps** **us small for grounded confidence that lifts us up and sup­** **ports our efforts to be brave.** It's unreasonable to believe that we can just rip off our self­ protection mechanisms and streak through the office. Most of us armor up early in our lives because, as children, we needed to. In some instances, the armor protected us from being hurt or disap­ pointed, from feeling invisible or unlovable. In some situations we had to self-protect to stay physically or emotionally safe. Vulner­ability is the greatest casualty of trauma. When we're raised in unsafe environments, confronted with racism, violence, poverty, sexism, homophobia, and pervasive shaming, vulnerability can be life-threatening and armor is safety. And when we think about how millennials and Gen Zers were raised, many of their parents swaddled them in armor out of their own lack of confidence as parents and people. The more grounded confidence parents have, the more likely they are to *prepare their* *child for the path* byteaching courage, praising effort, and model­ ing grit, versus trying to *prepare a perfect path for their child* by fixing, praising only results, and intervening. We've spent a disproportionately large amount of time on rumbling with vulnerability for a simple reason: It's *the* funda­ mental skill of courage-building. Building the grounded confi­ dence to rumble with vulnerability and discomfort rather than armoring up, running away, shutting down, or tapping out, com­ pletely prepares you for living into your values, building trust, and learning to rise. Understanding rumbling with vulnerability as the funda­ mental skill of daring leadership is absolutely essential. Skill­ building in sports provides a great analogy. All sports rely on key fundamentals, those skills that are drilled into players from the first day you sign up for a class or join a team. When I reflect on my experiences playing tennis and swimming, I remember always thinking "Let's race! I'm tired of doing fifty flip turns in a row" or "I don't want to sashay across this dang tennis court holding my racket in volley position one more time, let's play!" But developing fundamental skills through disciplined practice is what gives players the grounded confidence to dare greatly. The same is true for leaders---developing a disciplined prac­tice of rumbling with vulnerability gives leaders the strength and emotional stamina to dare greatly. In sports, when you're in the heat of play and under pressure, you have to be able to rely on the skills you've built to be able to execute, deliver, and perform. If you've flip-turned and sashayed enough times, the mechanics of those moves enter muscle mem­ ory. Having the grounded confidence to rely on the skills we've developed over time allows us to focus on higher-order objectives, challenges, and goals. My pool playing efforts are a good example. I always thought playing pool looked pretty easy and attrib­ uted my poor performance in college to trying to juggle a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other while lining up a shot. But Chaz, whom you met earlier, plays competitively and has dis­ abused me of the notion that it was the partying that got in the way of my running a table. It turns out that I suck at pool because I've done it only a handful of times, and the players who make it look easy are deeply skilled in the fundamentals of billiards. When pool players design their shots, they always consider three elements: angles, speed, and spin. The success of executing their designed shot is dependent on the fundamental skill of being able to reliably and constantly deliver the cue stick to the spot on the cue ball that will set the shot in motion. That means good pool players spend hundreds of hours building that foundational skill of consistent cue delivery. Not to mention the equally tedious work of building a steady bridge, mastering a pendulum arm stroke, and developing a stable stance. One fundamental exercise that's commonly practiced is the empty bottle drill. Players set an empty glass soda bottle on its side and practice stroking their cue stick into the neck of the bottle without moving the bottle. There's little margin for error. Of course, you never see a glass bottle on a pool table during a tournament, but you can bet that the best players have spent hours practicing their strokes, their breaks, and their shots. When the pressure is on, they've built the necessary strength and stam­ ina to make it through ten hours of play, and they are confident enough in their fundamentals to focus on strategy and shot selec­ tion. Lauren, our director of facilitator community engagement and research, is an ex-professional soccer player from Scotland and a former graduate student of mine. She explained that the fundamental skill in soccer is ball control. She told me that from the time she was little, coaches would run drills that had players touching the ball a million times with different parts of the foot. Even as a professional athlete, she spent countless hours passing the ball with a partner using different parts of her foot. She told me, "We had a four-foot brick wall that went around the perimeter of our garden at our house in Scotland. I would stand in front of one section of the wall and I would pick a brick and try and hit it with the ball. I would do this for hours, picking another brick, then another. The entire time I was just working on my ball control." As in Chaz's story about solid fundamentals allowing you to focus on higher-order challenges, Lauren said, "You have to mas­ ter the fundamentals of ball control so you can pick your head up in a game and see what is going on around you. You have to read the field and strategize your next move before you even have pos­ session of the ball. You have to have complete confidence about your mastery of that skill so you can focus on other things." In tough conversations, hard meetings, and emotionally charged decision making, leaders need the grounded confidence to stay tethered to their values, respond rather than react emo­ tionally, and operate from self-awareness, not self-protection. Having the rumbling skills to hold the tension and discomfort al­lows us to give care and attention to others, stay open and curi­ ous, and meet the challenges. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to work with Nutanix, an enterprise cloud software company in Silicon Valley. In my conversations with their founder, chairman, and CEO, Dheeraj Pandey, I was struck not only by his belief in the importance of vulnerability in leadership, but the *why* behind that belief. Dheeraj explained to me that when leaders don't have the skills to lean into vulnerability, they're not able to successfully hold the tension of the paradoxes that are inherent in entrepreneurship. His examples of the paradoxes that elicit vulnerability in leaders align with what we heard from the research participants: Optimism and paranoia Letting chaos reign (the act of building) and reining in chaos (the act of scaling) Big heart and tough decision making Humility and fierce resolve Velocity and quality when building new things Left brain and right brain Simplicity and choice Thinking global, acting local Ambition and attention to detail Thinking big but starting small Short-term and long-term Marathons and sprints, or marathon of sprints in business-building Dheeraj told me, "Leaders must learn the skills to hold these tensions and get adept at balancing on the 'tightrope' of life. Ulti­ mately, leadership is the ability to thrive in the ambiguity of para­ doxes and opposites." Building rumbling skills is not easy, but easy is overrated. An increasing number of studies are confirming what most of us have always known but hated: Easy learning doesn't build strong skills. In an article in *Fast Company* magazine, Mary Slaughter and David Rock with the NeuroLeadership Institute write: Unfortunately, the trend in many organizations is to design learning to be as easy as possible. Aiming to respect their employees' busy lives, companies build training programs that can be done at any time, with no prerequisites, and often on a mobile device. The result is fun and easy train­ ing programs that employees rave about (making them easier for developers to sell) but don't actually instill last­ ing learning. Worse still, programs like these may lead employers to optimize for misleading metrics, like maximizing for "likes" or "shares" or high "net promoter scores," which are easy to earn when programs are fun and fluent but not when they're demanding. Instead of designing for recall or be­ havior change, we risk designing for popularity. The reality is that to be effective, learning needs to be *effortful.* That's not to say that anything that makes learn­ ing easier is counterproductive---or that all unpleasant learning is effective. The key here is desirable difficulty. The same way you feel a muscle "burn" when it's being strengthened, the brain needs to feel some discomfort when it's learning. Your mind might hurt for a while---but that's a good thing. Learning how to rumble with vulnerability is work. And vul­ nerability never becomes comfortable, but practicing means that when vulnerability is washing over us, we can hear grounded con­ fidence whisper in our ear, "This is hard and awkward, and un­ comfortable. You may not know how it's going to turn out, but you are strong and you have practiced what it takes to create and hold the space for this." Grounded Confidence = Rumble Skills + Curiosity + Practice We've covered a lot of new language, skills, and tools, and as you can probably tell, they all share the same DNA: curiosity. Curiosity is an act of vulnerability and courage. Researchers are finding evidence that curiosity is correlated with creativity, intelli­ gence, improved learning and memory, and problem solving. A study published in the October 22, 2014, issue of the journal *Neuron* sug­ gests that the brain's chemistry changes when we become curious, helping us better learn and retain information. But curiosity is un­ comfortable because it involves uncertainty and vulnerability. In his book *Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Fu­* *ture Depends on It,* Ian Leslie writes, "Curiosity is unruly. It doesn't like rules, or, at least, it assumes that all rules are provi­ sional, subject to the laceration of a smart question nobody has yet thought to ask. It disdains the approved pathways, preferring diversions, unplanned excursions, impulsive left turns. In short, curiosity is deviant." This is exactly why curiosity leads to grounded confidence in rumble skills. We're scared to have hard conversations because we can't control the path or outcome, and we start coming out of our skin when we don't get to resolution fast enough. It's as if we'd rather have a bad solution that leads to action than stay in the uncertainty of problem identification. Einstein is one of our best curiosity and confidence mentors. I love two of his sayings: "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend fifty-five min­ utes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions." He also reportedly said, "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." The knower in us (our ego) either races to beat everyone in the room with an answer that may or may not address the real issues, or thinks: *I don't want to talk about this because I'm not sure how* *it's going to go or how people are going to react. I might not say* *the right thing or have the right answers.* 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 ques­* *tioning.* Here are some specific rumble starters and questions that we use: 1. The story I make up \... (This is by far one of the most powerful rumble tools in the free world. It's changed every facet of my life. We'll walk through it in the part "Learning to Rise.") 2. I'm curious about\... 3. Tell me more. 4. That's not my experience (instead of "You're wrong about her, him, them, it, this \..."). 5. I'm wondering \... 6. Help me understand \... 7. Walk me through \... 8. We're both dug in. Tell me about your passion around this. 9. Tell me why this doesn't fit/work for you. 10. I'm working from these assumptions---what about you? 11. What problem are we trying to solve? Sometimes we'll be an hour into a difficult rumble when someone will bravely say, "Wait. I'm confused. What problem are we trying to solve?" Ninety percent of the time we'll realize that we're not on the same page because we skipped the problem identification process and set a meeting intention of find­ ing a solution to a problem that we had yet to define. Sometimes the best rumbles start with a thirty-minute fact- finding conversation and an agreement to circle back in a few hours or the next day (but don't wait too long). I recently had a conversation with two colleagues about a training we're planning. As soon as we sat down and they presented the plan, I knew it was going to get hard. We were on totally different pages. I simply said, "We're in very different places. Why don't we spend twenty minutes rumbling on how we got here, then circle back tomorrow and land on an approach? "Walk me through all of the assumptions you are working off. "How did y'all come up with the schedule? "What are y'all seeing as the goal of the training? "Help me understand what you see as the benefit of this ap­ proach." It took only ten minutes before we realized that we were work­ ing toward different goals, we had different priorities, and we were working off different data. My colleague said, "Wow. This is really helpful. Let's come back with some of the information we're both missing and get on the same page about the goals and priorities tomorrow." *Great!* Another helpful curiosity tool is staying on the lookout for ho­ rizon conflict. Our role dictates where we should set our lens in terms of the organizational horizon. As a founder and CEO, I'm expected to plot a long-term course for the company. I try to bounce back and forth from a ten-year horizon to the current state of affairs. Other leaders on my team have responsibility for different horizons. An operations leader may be focused on a six- month horizon because of a huge launch schedule. To lead effectively, we're responsible for respecting and lever­ aging the different views and staying curious about how they can often conflict. When rumbles start to get tough, we know to check in on horizon issues. And while we may have different perspec­ tives and may not share the same level of knowledge about every detail of the organization, we must have a shared reality of the current state of the organization. Horizon conflict doesn't give us permission to lose focus on the organization as a whole. I can't be so concerned with the five-year goal that I don't know about a cul­ ture issue that we need to address. DRIVING GREATNESS FROM CURIOSITY AND LEARNING When I was researching and writing *Rising Strong,* I learned that the most common barrier to getting curious is having "a dry well." In his 1994 article "The Psychology of Curiosity," George Loewenstein introduced his information gap perspective on curiosity. Loewen­ stein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, proposed that curiosity is the feeling of deprivation we experience when we identify and focus on a gap in our knowledge. What's important about this perspective is that it means we have to have some level of knowledge or awareness before we can get curious. We aren't curious about something we are unaware of or know nothing about. Loewenstein explains that simply encour­aging people to ask questions doesn't go very far toward stimulat­ ing curiosity. He writes, "To induce curiosity about a particular topic, it may be necessary to 'prime the pump' to use intriguing information to get folks interested so they become more curious. And here's the good news: If you've read up to this point in the book, you're primed and ready to go. We may not know enough or have enough practice nailing every rumble, but we know enough to get curious. And there's even more good news: A growing num­ ber of researchers believe that curiosity and knowledge-building grow together---the more we know, the more we want to know. I want to share two case examples with you that demonstrate how the combination of rumbling skills and the grounded confi­ dence to take off the armor and get curious can transform an or­ ganization. The first is from Stefan Larsson and the second is from Dr. Sanee Bell. Stefan Larsson is a seasoned retail leader who was most re­ cently chief executive officer of the Ralph Lauren Corporation. He is credited with turning around the iconic American apparel brand Old Navy, where he and his team delivered twelve straight quarters of growth and added \$1 billion in sales in three years. He also spent fourteen years as a key part of the leadership team that built the Swedish-based fashion giant H&M into one of the three most valued fashion brands in the world, with global operations in forty-four countries and sales that grew from \$3 billion to \$17 billion. As you read through this case study, you will see the role vul­ nerability plays as the foundation for the next three skill sets: liv­ ing into our values, braving trust, and learning to rise. Stefan writes: When I took the helm of Old Navy, the brand had faltered for a number of years, and we had to find our way back to the original vision. After a few days in the archives, we uncov­ ered the original vision statement, which was about making aspirational American style accessible to every family. Now we just had to deliver on it! The most crucial component to unlock and the biggest driver of success turned out to be transforming the organizational culture. What was once an entrepreneurial, fast-moving, and empowering culture had over the course of several years of struggling performance become hierarchal, siloed, political, and filled with fear. Most team members understood our collective chal­ lenges; they saw clearly what we needed to do and what stood in the way. However, very few dared to share their insights or voice their concerns in larger settings or take ac­ tion on them, because of the fear of looking bad or making someone else look bad. To turn the brand around, our main job was to build a culture of trust. To do this we set out with a few goals that turned out to be key drivers of our success: We started with weekly learnings sessions for our top sixty leaders: two hours every week together as one team, with the premise that we would no longer judge outcomes as good or bad, we would just read the outcomes as outcomes, learn from them, and quickly improve. The goal was to out- learn our competitors. We would stop the shaming and blaming and the judging of outcomes as good or bad, and instead continuously ask ourselves, "What did we set out to do, what happened, what did we learn, and how fast can we improve on it?" We launched quarterly town halls and companywide calls where we, in connection to our vision and the plan we had set out, shared the outcomes, learnings, and improvements on a regular basis. As a management team we physically moved in together into one big room with glass walls (where we intentionally unlocked the doors) in the middle of our headquarters to further enable openness, trust, and teamwork by using the space to visually mirror our approach and attitude. We also encouraged all team members, regardless of their position in the organization, to come by and reach out with ideas and thoughts around anything that could improve what we were doing (or not doing). It didn't take long until everyone started to come up with more and more ideas of how to improve the business. At first, people were hesitant to believe that we were really serious about the no shaming and blaming, but over time they started to speak up in meetings, whether it was asking a question without knowing the answer or sharing the out­ comes from an initiative that had underdelivered (formerly talked about as "failures," now reframed as 'learnings"). We all started to show more vulnerability in front of each other. We started to trust each other more since we were all in it together. As a management team, we focused on asking questions, experimenting and driving continu­ ous improvement until we started to get traction. Instead of thinking about outcomes as good and bad, we set up a "failure proof' way of working. This allowed us to over­ come setbacks and put the focus on learning instead of blaming. Once we removed the fear of failure and the fear of being judged, we started to oudeam and outperform our best competitors. As a result, we delivered twelve consecutive quarters of growth in a very challenging market and added \$1 bil­ lion in sales in three years. But what I'm most proud of as a leader was being able to empower my team to take vulnera­ bility and make it into a strength, to foster a culture of trust, openness, and collaboration, and to shift our mentality to one of continuous learning. Today, over two years after I moved on to lead another company, I still get emails from team members who want to share what they've learned and how they continue to drive greatness from their learnings. Those emails make all the difference. I love the idea of driving greatness from our learnings. I've seen it work in organizations across the globe where people are willing to be vulnerable. Another great example is this next case study, from Dr. Sanee Bell. She is the principal of Morton Ranch Junior High in Katy, Texas. She has served as an administrator since 2005 at both the elementary and secondary levels. She taught middle school and high school English and also coached girls'basketball. Sanee was named the 2015 Katy ISD Elementary Principal of the Year. Sanee writes: Leading others is hard. Being the leader of adults, chil­ dren, and a school community is even harder. The role of a principal is complex, challenging, rewarding, and lonely all at the same time. When I began my daring leadership journey, I was a successful school leader. During my second principalship, I did a deep dive into this daring leadership work and realized that I had only scratched the surface of what it means to dare to lead. This personal and professional journey has changed my practice as a leader in three specific ways: teaching me how to practice vulnerability, increasing my self-awareness, and giving me the tools to have tough conversations. Today, these three areas of focus are foundational components of my leadership approach. PRACTICING VULNERABILITY There's an old saying that I lead by now: "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." I've learned one way to help people understand how much you care is to share your story. Practicing vulnerability has given me the courage to share my personal story, of grow­ ing up in situational poverty and a broken home, with my staff. When they hear about my journey to overcome huge obstacles, they better understand my commitment to build­ ing a supportive school environment. As a leader, I no longer check my personal life at the door. In fact, sharing stories and leading through the lens of multiple perspectives and experiences has made me more approachable and relatable to my students, staff, and community. By sharing my story and my *why* for leading, I helped my staff understand my purpose, passion, and com­ mitment to courage. It also gave others permission to prac­ tice vulnerability and to be brave in sharing and owning their life journey. BECOMING SELF-AWARE When I lack self-awareness as a leader and when I'm not connected with the intentions driving my thoughts, feel­ ings, and actions, I limit the perspective and insights that I can share with the people I lead. Today, through journal­ ing and seeking feedback from others, I have been able to grow and refine my leadership skills in a way that is more responsive to the needs of my staff, students, and commu­ nity. Spending time in quiet reflection has become part of my weekly practice. ENGAGING IN TOUGH CONVERSATIONS Doing this work made me realize that there is no way to address the academic disparities between the different stu­ dent groups without leaning into tough conversations on an ongoing basis. past the "This is the way we have always done it" attitude held by many people on our campus. To make this happen, I would have to lead these potentially emotionally charged discussions and I would need support. *If not me, then who?* *If not now, then when?* enough trust and connection to talk about equity issues, and to commit to helping those who are normally silenced acquire the skills and grounded confidence to participate in these tough conversations. I invested in building high- performing, connected teams by using strengths-based and work-personality assessments, and I developed struc­ tured protocols for hard conversations, including progress checks. mission, vision, and values, and I challenge others to call out the culture killers in our organization. We celebrate what works, and we change things that don't add value to the organization. *with* people through distributive and collaborative leader- ship, and by empowering others to lead. Ultimately, being true to who I am as a person, respecting my journey, and owning my story have given me the opportunity to lead in a deeper, more meaningful way. More Rumble Tools Just a reminder that you can find more resources for rumbling with vulnerability on the *Dare to Lead* hub on brenebrown.com. You'll find a downloadable workbook, a glossary, and images, as well as role-play videos that you can watch as part of building your own rumble skills. And, whether or not you choose to download the workbook or watch the videos, never underestimate the value of role-playing, practicing, and writing down notes and bringing them with you into important meetings or conversations. I do all three every day. I once worked for a boss who said "Are you referring to notes?" when he saw me looking at my journal during a very tough resig­ nation conversation. I said, "Yes. I've given this conversation a lot of thought. It's important to me, and I want to make sure to share all of what I've prepared with you." He shifted in his chair as I prepared to defend my notes. He said, "That's a really cool idea. Do you just use bullet points, or do you write paragraphs?" People, people, people are just people, people, people.