The Heart of Daring Leadership

[Music] Hi everyone, I'm Brunei Brown and welcome to the very first episode of the Dara to Lead podcast. I am so grateful to have you with me. This is Dream Come True territory for me and could it get any better if you're thinking, "Hey, what's that snappy little ditty that I'm listening to? I like this music. Wait till you hear at the end of the podcast. This is Music Buy, The Houston Band, The Suffers, and the song is called Take Me To The Good Times. And I need you to go buy it, download it, and dance in your kitchen with your socks on. And I just, to the suffers, my Houston neighbors. Thank you so much for letting us use this in the Dara to Lead podcast because this is the vibe for this podcast. Like this is it. So grateful for that. And I'm just excited that you're here. For this first episode, I thought I would share with you what I've learned about courageous leadership. We're in our 10th year of a study on leadership. I thought I'd share kind of what's working as I try to put these learnings into practice where I'm struggling and what we need to learn more about. Support for this show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odo for free at odu.com. That's odo.com. Support for the show comes from KPMG. In any organization, disruption is inevitable, but struggling through it doesn't have to be. The KPMG Adaptability Index is your blueprint for building capabilities to handle what comes next. It uses real data to look at how your culture, strategy, and partnerships all work together to help your business thrive. Stop reacting and start adapting. Visit KPMG.com/us/adaptability to explore the Adaptability Index and pull surveys today. So I'm going to start with kind of my why around leadership. A little nod to my friend Simon Sinek, who will be on this podcast and we'll talk to him about his work. So for me, my why for studying leadership is pretty straightforward. I wanted to be and I still want to be a better leader. Over the past decade, I have made this. I will tell you super weird transition from being a research professor to being a research professor and a founder and CEO of an organization. And I can tell you right now the first very difficult, very hard humbling lesson that I have learned is studying leadership is way easier than leading. So I have become a leader. I find it to be one of the greatest challenges of my life. And during those same 10 years, these past 10 years where I've been coming into this new role, I was also spending 90% of my time in organizations working with leaders. And you all know me like when I'm in an organization talking to people, I cannot turn off my inner pattern hunter that qualitative researcher in me that just sees patterns and repeats of things over and over, regardless of how different organizations are. And I started to see so many patterns and themes around leadership leaders, you know, leaders who were effective leadership that was ineffective leaders that had huge impact and had cultures of deep caring and connection leaders who were abusive. I mean, I just saw it all and I saw patterns. I just could not walk away. It's funny that I just interviewed Guy Ross about his book and his podcast, how I built this. And I interviewed them for this podcast series. And he talks about how good ideas are really hard to find and even harder to walk away from once you find them. So I'd like to believe that the leadership research and book, the Daily Book, were good ideas that I found it impossible to walk away from. And I think that's true because when I think about my personal experiences as a leader over the past few years, I can honestly say to you that the only endeavors that have required the same level of self-awareness, of emotional literacy, difficult rumbles, hard conversations, really the only things in my life that are on par with that are being married for close to 30 years and parenting. And I never expected that because, you know, being married for 30 days is tough. 30 years, boy, I mean, that's the long haul, right? And there are great seasons and there are shitty seasons. Parenting is just, it's just vulnerability from the moment you even consider the idea, I guess, until the day you die. And so I have been so taken aback how leadership has joined the ranks of that difficult work and equally rewarding, maybe not equally rewarding to be honest with you, because, you know, when it comes down to it, Steve Allen and Charlie are my heart. But I have to say my heart's big enough to hold all the people that I lead and that I work with as well. So it's been a really serious challenge. And I guess I underestimated the pull on my emotional bandwidth. The sheer determination it takes to stay calm. What I'm losing my mind, kind of the weight and heaviness of problem solving and decision making and strategy sleepless nights. I don't think I understood the load of great leaders. And I don't think I really understood the payoff of really courageous empathetic leadership. Both have kind of blown me away. So I think you can probably file my leadership quest under both kind of rabid researcher can't turn away. And the adage research and write what you need to read. And I will say also another goal for this work for me is I want to live in a world with braver, bolder leaders. And I want to be able to pass that kind of world onto my children. And right now, as I'm recording this, we are in the middle of COVID, we're in a pandemic. We are in a long time, long overdue fight for racial and social justice. The economy is just wrecked, I guess is the right word. And it's interesting because you know what I'm seeing in the midst of this. I'm seeing the best of leaders. And I'm seeing that worst, absolutely, just awful, awful, fear based divisive leadership, which is what you see in crisis, right? You see the best of people and you see the worst of people. And leadership's no different. So let's start with this. Let's start with my definition of what a leader is because here's the thing. I have spent many, many, many, maybe hundreds of hours in the fancy sea suites and you know, with the CEOs and the CFOs and the CMOs and the CHOs. And I've been there. And I have struggled to find a single leader in that environment. And I have been on warehouse and factory floors. And I have been surrounded by direct line people. And every single one of them was a leader. So for me, a title leader or the description leader has nothing to do with corner offices and shoulder pads and pen stripes and money. And it has nothing to do with that. I define the leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes and who has the courage to develop that potential. Before we dig into the content, I will say that maybe it won't surprise you, but it surprises me that I sincerely believe that one day, when I look back on my career. I think the dare to lead research might be the work that I consider the most important of my career. Maybe and we'll get to this in a minute, maybe one of the big reasons for that is really discovering that courage is not just a gauzy, aspirational, I wish I could be thing, but courage is a collection of four skill sets that are teachable, observable, and measurable. So I think I may not personally ever get over that just because courage is one of my two values and understanding the skill building and the muscle building that I needed to do to not just have that as an aspirational value, but a lived value has changed everything in my life. I think the other reason is this was the first time in my 20 year research career where I asked a primary research question and every single one of the participants gave me the same answer. I mean it blew my mind because the people we talked to represented every continent, every industry. They were diverse in age, race, gender, experience from creatives that picks our to leaders in the US special forces to NGOs in Asian Africa to educational leaders around the world. We went far and wide to find the sample of transformational leaders. So the formal question was, and this is the formal question when you're alone in your office and you're coming up with this like very sophisticated 45 comma clauses questions. So it started like this, what if anything about the way people are leading today needs to change an order for leaders to be successful in a complex rapidly changing environment where we're faced with seemingly intractable challenges and an insatiable demand for innovation. So as I conducted these interviews, that question in all of it's like long ass grammar heavy way, that question was played back to me by the leaders we interviewed in a lot of interesting ways including so you asking what's the future of leadership or are you asking me who's going to be leading for impact in five years who's still going to be standing and who's not going to be standing. So it was interesting to see that really simplified kind of the cut to the chase version. So what's the answer like who's going to be standing in five years who's not going to be standing in five years who's going to be leading for impact who won't be and with these seemingly intractable challenges and this insatiable demand for innovation, what's it going to take. Again, first time in my career across every single interview, the answer was courage and I expected to be sorting data that ranged from AI and machine learning to increasing market cap and scalable, you know, like stuff I'd have to Google, but it wasn't, it was courage. The future of leadership is braver leaders and more courageous cultures. So when I followed up to understand the specific kind of call for braver leadership and what did leadership mean, this is where things got really dicey. So when I asked people like, what is the why? What's your why behind the call for braver leadership? There wasn't just one answer. There were 50 answers and many of them were not intuitively connected to courage. Leaders did talk about everything from critical thinking and the ability to synthesize and analyze information, building trust, rethinking big systems, educational systems, banking systems, inspiring innovation, finding common political ground amid the growing polarization, decision making, especially tap decision making, the importance of empathy, relationship building, the importance of empathy, especially in machine learning and artificial intelligence environments, which I knew AI and machine learning would make it in there somewhere, right? But as we kept peeling back, the answers and we would say, okay, we kind of understand why people need to be braver. Can you talk to me specifically about the skills they're going to need? What are the observable, measurable skills that you're talking about? And man, did these research participants, brilliant, again, transformative leaders, really struggling to answer this question. Right under half of the leaders that we interviewed really talked about courage as a personality trait. They were like, you're braver, you're not. And I've studied human behavior and thinking and emotion long enough to know that you either got it or you don't is not true. 99.9% of the time. When you're talking about anything outside of like biological description, like maybe you've either got brown eyes or you don't, I don't know. But I'm like, I got enough flags for a parade when people say that. So when we would push in and stay curious and we'd push for observable behaviors and we'd ask questions like, well, what does it look like if you have it? And 80 to 90% of the leaders we interviewed, including those who believe the courage was behavioral, but they still couldn't describe the specific skills. However, when you ask them the opposite question, which is like a big hack is that we are very limited in words for what is and we've got a ton of words for what is it. And that goes all the way back 20 something years to when I was talking to people about love or vulnerability or wholeheartedness. What does it mean to feel worthy? Well, I don't know. What does it mean to not feel worthy? Oh, I can tell you for sure. What does love mean? I don't know, but I can tell you about betrayal. Like we just have a lot more words for what isn't, which actually, interestingly, if this was a book that you're reading instead of a podcast you're listening to, I do a little gray call out box in the margin here. That interestingly really correlates to the fact that we have so much more information on hard emotions than on the positive emotions. We just have a tendency to dig into what bothers us. So I asked, what does it look like when you don't have brave leadership? What is the ramification of a culture that is fearful, not courageous? Well, but then Katie bar the door. You could not get them to stop talking while they couldn't tell you what skills they needed or what brave leadership look like and what skills were associated with it. They could definitely tell you what happened in the absence of it. So let's start with the first one because it's the biggest one. I mean, there's a second, but not a close second. Number one, in the absence of brave leadership, we avoid tough conversations. We avoid giving honest, productive feedback. We just absolutely tap out. And culturally, the result of the tough conversation tap out is nice culture. And here's the thing, I've been in hundreds of organizations and every one of them, when I get into the organization, a leader will lean in toward me and say, we've got a nice problem. Like they're the only ones. Like, I mean, there are some obviously some cultures that have do not have a nice problem, but so many do. And what they don't understand is a nice problem is actually a fear problem. And fear doesn't cause people to be nice. Fear causes people to talk about people instead of talking to them, which is not nice. So number one consequence of a lack of brave leadership and courageous culture is we tap out of the hard conversations that we need. Number two, rather than spending a reasonable amount of time, kind of acknowledging and addressing fears and feelings that show up during change and upheaval and pandemics, rather than spending a reasonable amount of time addressing those, we don't address them and therefore spend an unreasonable amount of time managing problematic behaviors. Diminishing trust caused by a lack of connection and empathy was a big issue. Not enough people taking smart risks or creating or sharing bold ideas to meet the challenges. You know, when people are afraid of being put down or ridiculed for trying something and failing, are even putting forward a radical new idea. The best you can hope for is kind of status quo. In our organization, we actually onboard people for failure because what we like to say is you can't work here and only do what you're already good at doing because we can't afford to keep you. If all you're doing is what you already know how to do and you're not pushing and failing and iterating and learning, this is not a good investment for us. This is a big one. Without brave leadership and courageous cultures, we get stuck and defined by setback disappointment and failure. Instead of spending our time cleaning up the failures and setbacks and disappointments, to make sure our consumers, our stakeholders, our satisfied, made whole. We're spending way too much time and energy helping people get back up off the ground. Our motto is, everybody's got to be responsible for their own bounce. We will provide a culture that is bounce positive. We'll give you the skill set for bouncing, but you got to be responsible for doing it on your own because we cannot both spend our time and energy picking you up and destiny you off and telling you it's going to be okay and fix the problem that put us on the ground to begin with. Other issues too much shame and blame, people are opting out of very difficult conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion because they're afraid of being wrong, looking wrong, saying something wrong, which that's going to happen every time you engage in one of those conversations. If you're lucky, you'll have your ass handed to you with some learning, but that's going to happen every time you have one of those conversations. Every I've taught race and gender for over 20 years. I've never had a conversation about race and gender where I didn't learn something new about myself, including my blind spots. But to say, look, I'm not going to do it because I can't look perfect and I can't be right and I can't be comfortable. That would be the textbook definition of privilege. Also, other issues, organizational values are too gauzy. They're not operationalized into behaviors, perfectionism and fear keep people from learning and growing. I think when you listen to this list of what we face in the absence of daring leadership, we see ourselves. I see me. Look, I'm an emotions researcher who happens to also be a leader. And I do not like spending a lot of time attending to fears and feelings. And we see ourselves in here. We see our culture. We see our organizations in here. And we've got to change that. If we want to still be standing and leading, moving in to what's coming next. And if you recognize yourself or your organization or your team in this, just know you're not alone. I mean, I still recognize myself in it. This is a leadership podcast. And these may be work behaviors and organizational cultural concerns. But what underlies everything I'm talking about here. These are just deeply human issues. And so for us as researchers, after finding these roadblocks and hearing this, our job was to identify the specific courage building skill sets that people needed to address all these problems. You know, we conducted more interviews. We developed instruments. We tested the instruments with huge shout out to the EMBA students enrolled and the faculty who helped us at the Jones Graduate School Business at Rice at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, the Wharton School at UPEN. We just started digging in. We started building instruments to kind of test courage building. And we worked until we found the answer. We tested it. We improved it. We tested it again. And so here's the heart of daring leadership. And if you've got Dare to Lead the book, just know that this is different because something else has changed since I wrote this book. We have taken since that book came out, the Dare to Lead book. We have taken over 30,000 people on every continent in the world through our Dare to Lead work, our Dare to Lead training work. And we have collected data on every single one of those experiences going through the work. And we have followed up and we have collected more data. And so I'm going to say the heart of daring leadership are these things. One, here's what we learned. You cannot get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability. We have to embrace the suck. If vulnerability wasn't the only path to courage, and I wasn't sitting on top of 400,000 pieces of data that confirmed that, I would opt out of vulnerability every day. Hate it. Hate it. Fifth generation Texan hate it. cringy, awkward, uncomfortable, punch first, ask questions later. Like that is not my M.O. But we can't get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability. And that is at the heart of daring leadership. This deeply human truth that's rarely acknowledged, especially at work. Courage and fear are not mutually exclusive. Most of us feel brave and afraid all day long at the exact same time. And during those really tough moments, when we're pulled between our fear and our called courage, we need shared language, we need tools, we need skills, we need daily practices that can support us through these difficult rumbles. And look, the word rumble, if you're my age, and you hear the word rumble, the first thing you think of is like West Side Story. But we use the word rumble because it was the best word I could think of. To capture a conversation, a discussion, a meeting that's defined by a commitment to lean into vulnerability, to stay curious and generous, to stick with the messy middle of problem identification and solving, to take a break if we have to, to circle back when's necessary, to be fearless, to own our parts. And as my friend Harriet Learner says, "To listen with the same passion with which we want to be heard, I could not think of a better word than rumble." And for us, when we say, "Hey, can we rumble at three o'clock about this new strategy?" It's a serious intention setter and it's a behavioral cue, it's a reminder. Like, we're not meeting at four o'clock to pat each other on the back, we need to dig into some hard stuff, bring a point of view, be prepared, and let's dig in together. Hi everybody, it's Megan Rapinoe. I've been thinking a lot about this one question I've been asked over and over. A question about the choices I've made, the colors of my hair, the things in the world I've spoken about and the things that I haven't. I've heard this question asked so many different ways, but it always came down to, "Why are you like this?" And as you know, there's no simple answer, because people are not simple. We're messy and complicated and contradictory and layered. So on my new show, I'm sitting down with the ultimate disruptors, the athletes, the artists, the activists, and the architects of our culture who looked at the way things were and asked, "Why do we do it like this?" And, "Can we do it differently?" My hope is to give us a little more space to that question and to the person on the other side of the mic. Not to tell us their answer, read from their script, but to take us on their journey. Check out my new show "Why Are You Like This?" on YouTube, or listen in your favorite podcast app, new episodes drop every Thursday. This week, two of the most important people in Google's AI division left their jobs. Depending on who you are, that's either really terrible news for Google's whole AI project, or a sign that AI may be closer to something truly world-changing than we even thought. This week on the Vergecast, we're dissecting what's going on at Google DeepMind and whether we truly are in the foothills of the singularity. All that plus the state of the no-screen wearable what's going on with open-weight models and much more. All that on the Vergecast wherever you get podcasts. Going back to that idea that this very hopeful finding that courage is this collection of four skill sets that can be taught, observed and measured, those four skill sets. Number one, rumbling with vulnerability. If you've read Dare to Lead, you know that the first half, the worst 150 pages of that book is the first skill set. The other three skill sets combined take up 150 pages, 50 pages each. Number two, living into our values. Three, braving trust and four, learning how to rise. But the foundational skill of courage building is the willingness and ability to rumble with vulnerability. Without this core skill, the other skill sets are just impossible to put into practice. So I think it's important and fair to understand, as hopefully a new committed listener to this Dare to Lead podcast, is that our ability to be daring leaders will never be greater than our capacity for vulnerability. Once we start to build vulnerability skills, we can start to develop the other skill sets. And so the goal of this podcast is to have really honest, tactical, practical conversations with daring leaders and researchers and trouble makers and culture shifters to have really honest conversations so that we can give each other language, specifics on the tools, practices so we can start to build the muscle memory for living into these concepts. So what is the Dare to Lead podcast going to be about? It's going to really focus on the four skill sets of courage building and how different people are doing it in new ways. How is the psychologist? working with some of the Premier League soccer teams. How is she working with them in a way to address fear and anxiety and panic around penalty kicks? And what is Simon Sinek have to teach us about the importance of why? About trust. What has Guy Ross learned through time? Iko Bethia has written this amazing article about diversity, equity and inclusion. What's the next best step to stop talking about it and start doing it in our teams and organizations? So that's this podcast. And I really hope you join us. I think it's going to be fun. And I think it's a little leadership, like, you know, the bleeding edge of leadership, because we don't have a lot of great examples of what it means to lead with courage. We don't see that very often in the public sphere. And we need more of us. So let's finish this up. Second, kind of heart of daring leadership, self-awareness and self-love matter. Who we are is how we lead. We often think of just like these leaders that we interviewed, we think of courage as this inherent trait. You got it? Are you don't? But courage is actually, and this was like, this was a hypothesis fail for me, y'all. Courage is less about who people are and about how they behave and show up in difficult situations. So my hypothesis, when I learned about the importance of courage and brave leadership, my hypothesis was the biggest barrier to brave leadership is fear. And when I went back and talked to these leaders about what I was learning, they were like, hey, if I'm not allowed to be afraid, don't put me on your list of daring leaders, because I'm afraid all day every day. Well, it turns out that it's not fear that gets in the way of daring leadership. It's armor. It's how we self-protect when we're afraid. And we're going to dig so deep into this waste high, you will need waiters. We're going to just going to jump right into this. So fear is the emotion, maybe at the center of the problematic behaviors and the culture issues. It's what you'd expect to find. But the real underlying obstacle to brave leadership is how we respond to our fear. It's our armor, the thoughts, the emotions, the behaviors that we use to self-protect when we're not willing and able to rumble with vulnerability. And vulnerability, look, simple definition, right? Uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure to be humanist to be vulnerable, to be a leader is to be vulnerable every day, every moment. That's leadership. And so we have to look at not only fear, but we have to talk about armor. And that's where self-awareness comes in. I think right now when we think about self-awareness, I always have people when I'm taking them through the dear to lead training. I always have them make a circle in front of them with their arms and I say, look inside this circle. Right now, maybe if you're really practiced 30 or 40% of how you show up, what you think, you're aware of it. Self-awareness, about 30, 40% of that. The other 70, 60% of that is outside of your field of self-awareness vision. We need to change that to be impactful, transformative leaders. We're 70% of what we do, we're aware of why we're doing it. Like, maybe not in real time because that would be hacky neurobiology in a way that I don't know that we can do all the time. But even walking out of a meeting and me going like, God, why was I such an asshole in there? What is going on? And for the leader that lacks real self-awareness, or does he even ask, just blames other people for it and keeps walking? Versus the leader who walks out and says, God, I don't like the way I showed up in there. What's going on? Takes a deep breath, walks outside, paces the parking lot, goes into her office and says, what's going on? Oh, man. So we'll just use mean, for example, if I am that intense kind of. Not great person in a meeting, 90% of the time, it's because I was in fear. Because when I'm in fear, I get intense. I talk more than I listen and I get blaming. So self-awareness, knowing yourself, self-compassion, self-love, they matter. Because I don't care how much I read, I don't care how much I observe. I know that who we are as people is how we lead. So it's not about consuming leadership strategies as much as it is looking inward and understanding who we are so that we can apply those strategies in an effective way. Number three, courage is contagious. Look, if we want to scale during leadership and build courage in teams and organizations, we have to create a culture in which brave work, tough conversations and whole hearts are the expectation. I used to have a sign that I would hang up when I taught. I had it in my office and when I went into the classroom, whatever classroom I was assigned to, I just put it right in front of my desk that said, if you are comfortable, we are not learning. Set the expectation of discomfort. We also have to set up cultures where armor is not necessary or rewarded. And that's tough. But if we want people to fully show up to bring their whole selves, including their unarmored whole hearts, to work so that we can innovate and solve problems and serve people, we have to be vigilant about creating this culture and we have to be the leaders that we want people to be. I'm going to add this one to the heart of daring leadership because it is something that we don't talk about very often. It's controversial. But the data are just very straightforward. Daring leaders must care for and be connected to the people they lead. Care and connection are irreducible requirements for whole-hearted productive relationships between leaders and team members. This means if you don't have a sense of caring towards someone you lead or we don't feel connected to that person, we have two options. Both the care and the connection are find a leader who is a better fit. There's no shame in that. We've all experienced a kind of disconnection that doesn't get better despite our strongest efforts to try to forge a relationship, a professional relationship with someone. And understanding that a commitment to care and connection is the minimum threshold, we need real courage to recognize when we can't fully serve the people we lead. I have to say that just a quick story, that when this was emerging from the research, I happen to be kind of really involved in a lot of work with the military. And I thought, "Oh, crap. I'm already the researcher who studies vulnerability, talking to these troops about courage and vulnerability. That's hard enough." And now I'm going to say, "Hey, you've got to care for and be connected to the people you lead. And I am doing this work with the Air Force, talking with a general. And I share that finding that's emerging from the data. And he just looked at me like I said today's Tuesday. He was like, "Yes, ma'am. We know that." And I said, "What?" And he goes, "That's a primary part of our belief system." And I said, "Say more." And he said, "We actually say, going all the way up, that affection for the people we lead is non-negotiable." And it was so interesting because this came up for me so many times that emotional awareness, self-awareness. I get pushed back from people and organizations whose work is important, but certainly not life or death. But when you take this work into organizations where their work is life or death, they're like, "Yes, ma'am. We got to really care for. We have to have affection for people. We get that. Yes, ma'am, self-awareness. That is actually a life or death situation for us. If you don't know your emotions, if you don't have self-awareness, not only your danger to yourself, you're danger to anyone standing next to you. So we've got some stuff to learn because what daring leadership asks from us is a lot. It means that leaders, that you and me, we've got to create in whole spaces that rise to a higher standard of behavior than what we experience certainly in the news or on TV. And for many people, the culture at work may need to even be better than what they experience in their own home. And these strategies, I will say, have made me a better partner. They've made me a better parent. They've made me a better friend, a better daughter. People are people are people. And if the culture in our school, our organization, our place of worship, even our family requires armor because issues, abusive language, racism, violence, and violence. Classism, sexism, fear-based leadership, we just can't expect whole-hearted engagement, not from anyone. Because look, mouth closed, head down, doesn't lead to impactful work. People are just self-protecting. And when organizations reward armoring behaviors like blaming, shaming, cynicism, perfectionism, emotional stoicism, you can't expect innovative work. We can't fully grow and contribute behind armor. That shit is heavy. It is so heavy. And you know, and here's the big midlife developmental milestone. And midlife is when the universe grabs you by the shoulders. Pulls you in close and whispers, "I'm not screwing around here." That armor protected you when you were young, maybe when you were a child. But now it's heavy, your dragon-ass, and it's preventing you from growing into the gifts that you have and not utilizing your gifts. That's not a benign proposition. That metastasizes into grief and rage and anger and depression and all kinds of hard stuff. So we're going to talk about that. It just takes too much energy just to even carry it around. So if we've created cultures where people have to do that, just expect half of the input or output and twice the burnout. And look, I think the most powerful part of this process of daring leadership is scene elusive behaviors emerge that are not hardwired. Everything is teachable, observable, measurable, whether you're 14, 40, or 84. And it's not genetic destiny. It's what we choose to focus on. And I have to say we're not talking about soft skills here. This is not soft skills. This is some of the hardest, if not the hardest work we'll ever do in our lives. Is the work of becoming more courageous people. So we can lead. And look, the skill sets that make up courage are not new. They've been aspirational leadership skills for as long as there's been leaders in leadership books. We just haven't made great progress in these skills and leaders because we don't dig into the humanity of the work. It's too messy. It's much easier to talk about what we want, then to talk about fears and feelings and scarcity and the things that get in the way of achieving this. We just don't have the courage for real talk about courage, but it's time. And that's the dear to lead podcast. Like there are no word, Joel, for how grateful I am. For you walking alongside me. As I try to continue to learn and unlearn and relearn who I am, how I want to show up, how I want to step up and lead, even when it's scary as hell. And we can do this together because you just were not meant to do it by ourselves. It's just not how we're wired. So this is the dear to lead podcast. And I can't wait to be with you every week and talk to some really interesting people that I'll string up some twinkle lights so we can see our way down this bumpy ass walk. All right, thanks, y'all. Dear to lead is produced by Brunei Brown, Education and Research Group. Music is by the Suffers. Get new episodes as soon as they're published by following Dear to lead on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. [Music]