Up to Section 5 of Dare to Lead, Brene Brown’s exciting new book: Get It Here.
The section is titled Curiosity and Grounded Confidence and begins: “Grounded confidence is the messy process of learning and unlearning, practising 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 armour that keeps us small for grounded confidence that lifts us up and supports 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 armour up early in our lives because, as children, we needed to.
Brene then goes on about the paradoxes that elicit vulnerability in leaders and provides this excellent list:
- 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 marathons of sprints in business-building
In a conversation with Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of a Silicon Valley IT company, Dheeraj says the following, “Leaders must learn the skills to hold these tensions and get adept at balancing on the ‘tightrope’ of life. Ultimately, leadership is the ability in the ambiguity of paradoxes and opposites.”
So, what does the world say about paradoxes and opposites, here are a few of my favourite things:
1. How well do I embrace and opposites, better some days than others, a lifetime practice, methinks?
2. Reads like lines from a really great song: Radiate.
3. The gravity man, Sir Isaac Newton, watch out for the apples.
4. The Light and the Dark, both are needed to transform: I Gotta Feeling.
5. Anything goes, it is all required in our journey of life.
6. That’s very Woo Woo, Albert: God Save The Queen.
7. Fact check, did our favourite POTUS really say this?
8. What do you say to your soul, I’m practising with I love You for five minutes in the mirror every day: A Whole New World.
9. Something Judgement 101 does not allow.
10. The classic reason why opposites attract, they are incomplete without their opposite, how many modalities teach us we need all the types of archetypes, personalities, etc. etc. etc: New Speedway Boogie.
11. I post Ram Dass daily in Booker Looker land, he is one of my top ten faves on the net.
12. More light and dark stuff, you can’t deny either for your life to work: Duality.
13. They are sent to you to learn from them, what you resist persists, an old Landmark statement from the 1990’s that still rings true to this day.
14. Best known for his book, The Myth of Equality, Wystma, a minister of the gospel helps us come to a deeper understanding of both the origins of these issues and the reconciling role people are called to play as a follower of the gospel. Inequality and privilege are real. The Myth of Equality opens our eyes to realities we may have never realized were present in our society and world. And we will be changed for the better as a result: Glory.
15. The paradox of being attracted by an opposite, what are yours, mine is booze versus sobriety.
Brene sums it up as follows ” Learning how to rumble with vulnerability is work. And vulnerability never becomes comfortable, but practising means that when a vulnerability is washing over us, we can hear grounded confidence whisper in our ear, ” This is hard and awkward, and uncomfortable. You may not know how it’s turning out, but you are strong and you have practised what it takes to create and hold the space for it.”
If you haven’t work it out from these two blogs, buy the book. It’s worth it for the free workbook and the glossary alone, not to mention the values list and the posters you get thrown in.
If you loved punk, there is a song for you on today’s playlist. We begin with a newbie for me, Hannah Kerr, then the iconic Black Eyed Peas, then the legend that is Johny Rotten leading the Sex Pistols. Another Disney classic from Alladin. An Aussie legend Courtney Barnett, then rocking out with Slipknot, then a beautifully smooth finish from John Legend: Self Awareness and Self Love Matter.
Spread Love and Respect to All, Everybody Included until next, we meet my dear friends:
I am an Interculturalist 