You are the single most requested guest. And let me tell you, this has not been easy because we went to some hard places. But I don't think we'll ever talk about anything more important than this. Cuz it's not fear that gets in the way of us being brave with our lives and our work. It's the armor that we reach for to self-protect when we're afraid.

And how that armor moves us away from love, connection, and our values. And the hardest work is being aware of what is my armor when I'm afraid.

Is that automatic? Oh, no. It's a training.

Brené Brown is an icon whose world-leading research in shame, vulnerability, and connection has inspired companies like Pixar, Google, and the US special forces to build stronger leaders and help the everyday person unlock their full potential.

Is vulnerability important? It is if we want to be brave with our lives. But we were raised to believe that vulnerability is weakness. Like in my family, we were allowed anger, but sad was not an option. You needed to be tough. And so when I get scared, when I feel anxious, disappointed, I'm just angry. And so when you're raised without vulnerability, it'll put you in jeopardy. Like, you want to know what vulnerability is? Joy. Joy is so vulnerable that people choose to live disappointed rather than to get excited about something and risk getting sucker punched by disappointment. Like, there is no courage without vulnerability because courage is the willingness to show up and be all-in when you cannot predict the outcome.

Wow. I've never thought about that before. But you can develop skills.

We've taken 165,000 people through this work. That included how to build trust.

And I've heard about your marble jar theory. I know. So this is how we teach trust to the most senior leaders in Fortune 100 companies. It's awesome.

In order to understand all the work that you have done and the perspective that you have on the world and also who you are as a anomaly in many respects, I think it's probably important that I understand your earliest context, where you've come from, what shaped you.

I'm stuck on am I an anomaly?

Of course you're an anomaly. Of course you're an anomaly. That that should be of no surprise to you. I mean, if you look at your outcomes, your outcomes are anomalous. So, one would assume that there's some form of something that made you an anomaly.

I would say that I'm a fifth generation Texan. I came from a fair amount of dysfunction. Parents doing the best they could with what they knew. both coming from really really really tough upbringings that included you know poverty addiction and so probably a lot of the stereotypes you would think about fifth generation Texan tough don't cry we were allowed a very small continuum of emotions were approval you know or approved which were pissed off or okay like anger was okay but no you couldn't be sad really or vulnerability was not a thing. Vulnerability was weakness and scary and puts you in jeopardy.

I felt like a real outsider at home and in school, but I was really good at reading people, reading situations. I think my I think a therapist somewhere along the way said, "Yes, that's hypervigilance. You're hypervigilant. You know, I can see everything around me. I know everything's going on. I can connect things very quickly that other people don't see." And there was laughter and there was love. But there was a ton of unpredictability.

I was going to say, isn't that typically what creates hypervigilance is some kind of need to be that aware when you're young?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think yes, being fun-loving was very valued in my family and being tough. These were the values. These are these are on the parental scorecard. This is what got you an A. if you're fun, easy, you can, you know, shoot straight, spit far, fish well, like really drive fast. And so those things were very valued. Athleticism was very valued. Um, but those fun things could turn really hard very quickly.

Yeah. I could just picture it like it's fun until It's fun until you've had a parent ejected from a game for being so hard.

And that was your father. Yeah.

Oh, he was really hard then if he was ejected from a game. Oh yeah.

There's a photo I saw of you and your siblings where you're clutching your siblings and I think you referred to it as you could see there was a certain fear in your eyes. Do you know the photo I'm referring to?

Am I on a couch? You're on a couch. Like a yellow velour couch like from the 70s. Yes. Yeah. I think about that picture. I like that picture. But there was definitely I definitely had a protector role as the oldest. I mean code named sister superior. It was jokingly but it wasn't joking. Like if things got hard between my parents and they would get in volatile fights, I would go get all my siblings, put them in my room. I'd go downstairs and handle it, you know? Like I was definitely the protector.

physically volatile fights um on occasion but more emotionally volatile. Screaming and shouting. Yeah.

Same with my parents. Yeah. Just loud. There's a background in my whole house for my whole childhood was just screaming.

There was a Yeah, we had a lot of screaming and there's a certain like if you grew up with screaming, hearing screaming through a wall, you know that sound.

Of course. Yeah. Oh my god. It was my whole childhood. Yeah.

Yeah. And so, yeah, I'm sorry because I don't like to hear that about your childhood and I don't like to know that about my childhood, but there was a lot of screaming. And so, I think hypervigilant, protective, responsible with a dose of be very careful because I will protect my siblings.

And and how did that change your model of love as a young person? It must have been because I mean I obviously feel the same way about about my situation. And um I think the lesson I learned was that love was like a prison cuz it was my mom doing the shouting and my dad was the prisoner and he wouldn't respond. So this you've got a woman shouting at him for six seven hours a day and him sat there like he's a like an inanimate object looking at the screen. And I remember thinking, "Oh, okay. So, if I get in a relationship when I'm older, then I'm going to be a a prisoner to a woman. Okay? Doesn't sound doesn't sound appealing. And if you move to a different room, you'd follow him. So, I avoided relationships like the plague.

Yeah. Steve got over the wall. Damn it.

That's your partner, not me. Just for context.

No, not Yeah. Not you. Although you're doing a hell of a job right now. Um, you're like you've crossed a piranha filled moat that I like. Um, but the drawbridge is like I'm see I'm just see I'm going to see my Steve my Steve definitely definitely got over the wall. Um, but it was like game game recognizes game. He had a wall.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. Uh, and so we had long conversations about our walls and and slowly through those conversations. We just those walls crumbled with each other and we've been together now for 38 years. Wow. Yeah. Um, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life bar none, dude. Nothing has been harder.

when we got married, six months after we got married, this is, you know, you you said for you love was going to be being a prisoner. And having to just shut down to survive. For me, 6 months after we were married, I went to go see a therapist and I said, "I cannot do this. I've got to get out of this marriage." And we had dated off and on for 7 years before we got married. And I said, "I got to get out." And she said, "I could th this is hard. I I could see how this is not working." And I was like, I had a twinge of defensiveness about Steve. And I said, 'What do you mean? And she said, he likes you so much more than you like you. It must be terrible.

It's like, you, man. You're fired. I was like, I am so I thought, what? That's what I do. So if you I'm going to give you one of my tells. If I do a really high-pitched what that means I'm that means I'm looking for my purse and I'm get I know where the door is. Um I I I just kept thinking what what do you mean? He said it's got it's got to be very com uncomfortable to be with someone who sees you and really knows you and loves you so much when you have not found a way to see you and love you so much. It's got to be disconcerting.

What an man. like, wow. And it was true. I had to get to this point where I was like, I maybe I should like me as much as he likes me and then make a better decision about whether this is going to work or not.

When you grow up and pissed off or shut down are your two emotional opportunities. Like there, you know, in Atlas of the Heart, I write about 87 emotions that I think are important to understand because the limits of our language are the limits of our world. When you have two buckets, then everything must go in those. And in fact, in our research over the last 15 years, we found the average person can accurately identify and name three emotions. Happy, sad, pissed off.

And so in my family, sad was not an option. That was weakness. So you could be pissed or okay. So when I get scared, when I feel grief, when I'm anxious, when I feel disappointment, when I feel anguish, I'm just angry.

There's two sort of outstanding question marks in my head and they might be the same answer, but it's you said earlier on that you didn't fit in at school or at home, and I didn't understand why you didn't fit in at school or at home. And then the other thing that's still a question mark in my head is the therapist said to you that you well asserted that you didn't like yourself as much as he liked you. And I wasn't clear on what made you not like yourself.

I wanted out of where I was raised. I wanted to leave everything I knew. And so I always felt like an outsider. I didn't didn't want to do I mean I wasn't popular. I wasn't dating a quarterback. That was a dream that my my parents and their parents and their parents, you know, you were you were a bearcadet and you dated a quarterback and you got a farm. So at I felt not cute, not popular, not understood. And then at home, I wasn't easygoing. I was an I was anxious. and and always ready.

And the point about self-esteem, which the therapist sort of highlighted about not liking oneself as much as Steve liked you, where did that come from or is that related in some way?

Oh, cuz my parents parented with a very big heaping dose of shame.

Oh, okay. So, if you accomplish something or you don't accomplish something, you're made to feel bad about it.

Yeah. And a ton of it was about appearance, being fun. Appearance. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, big blonde hair with hot rollers. The higher the hair, the closer to God. You needed to be tough and strong and throw on a baseball cap and get somewhere really quick, low-maintenance, and you needed to be a beauty pageant queen.

how has your perspective on how has the world changed in those last two decades in your view?

Unions would say before any great progression there is a regression and I think that when you look at various admin I know you have a very global audience when you look at administrations political administrations across the world and you look at how power is being used right now it will tell you a lot about what they're afraid of.

The leading political narrative at the moment that seems to be getting people elected is if you say those people with that skin color are the reason for the pain and anguish in your life. It's actually the people below you that are coming over the border or crossing the the English Channel on dingies that are ruining your life. And it seems to be like a really effective narrative to earn power both in the US and the UK.

I don't think we'll ever talk about anything more important than this to be honest with you. when when you use power especially power over because there's multiple kinds of power. There's power with into and power within. So people that use power within to and power within work from a belief system that's completely different. We believe that power is infinite and can grow when shared. People who use power over work from a a belief system that power is finite like pizza and if I give you any I have a a deficit. So it's got to be hoarded and protected and not shared.

Power over is really important to understand because when people are using power over, they're definitely letting you know what they're afraid of because that's what they're focused on and they're tapping into. And I think this is absolutely true. If you give people someone to dislike and blame for their pain and they look different than the people who are voting, you will win a 100 times out of 100.

If you say, "I see your pain." I can tell you exactly the source of it and I can fix this for you. And the source of it is going to be easy to see. You're not going to see yourself in them.

so that narrative that you are talking about it is a full circle. People in power use power to address issues that they're afraid of. They gain power by leveraging fear and giving people an enemy. That's how this works. It works like this. I mean I spend 95% of my time in organizations working with seauite leaders and senior leaders. This this is how it works in organizations. how it works in political, you know, how it works in faith communities. This is how power works in general.

So power over is a very specific kind of power. And it's especially dangerous because in order to maintain it, you have to engage in periodic bouts of cruelty towards vulnerable populations. You have to remind people what you're capable of.

I'm a big systems theory. I'm a systems theory person. I think in systems theory I was trained in systems theory. I think if you don't understand system systems theory, at least if you're leading an organization right now, you're going to fall behind because the complexity inside and outside of organizations is such that we need a framework to understand how all of these individual systems are bumping up against each other.

in order for systems to thrive and grow, they have to keep permeable boundaries. Meaning they have to allow feedback to flow in and out from other systems to be aware.

What happens when the world gets complex is we start not wanting the feedback. The complexity is too big. So we start shutting down those permeable boundaries. Well, what happens to a system where the boundaries are no longer permeable. It atrophies. And in the in the process of atrophying, the system becomes self-referencing. Are we good? We're great. Are we right? We're right. Are we on target? We're on target. because the boundaries of the system is are no longer craving outside feedback even when it's tough.

And in businesses today, the geopolitical realities, the market changes, AI, I mean, it's crazy. And so our predisposition to shut down uncertainty and complexity is the biggest threat to the systems in which we work and live. the self-protect, close the wall, put up the drawbridge, fill the moat with piranhas. We just don't have that luxury. We've got to keep the the boundaries permeable. We've got to keep learning, guessing, unlearning, relearning.

One of the added complexities is the rise in algorithms. And and actually when I think about algorithms that are powered by AI, they're going to be even better at knowing what you want to see so that you spend time, so that you consume more adverts, which means probably the best thing to show me is either something really fearful or to to confirm what I already believe.

100%.

An algorithm that was doing the opposite probably wouldn't be an enjoyable experience for the average human brain. It would cause too much dissonance, too much discomfort,

but great for democracy.

Great. Yeah. Fantastic. But terrible for for running a business and selling ads. So any company that takes that approach will go bankrupt. This is why Tik Tok I think have been so successful is the algorithm is I don't use Tik Tok. So I have a Tik Tok account. I don't have the app on my phone. But um from what I hear is it's so unbelievably addictive.

Yeah. I mean, you just laid it out. You just laid it out. We're emotionally disregulated. We're distrustful of each other. We don't trust ourselves very much. And we're disconnected. I can't give up on people, though. I'm not built that way. Like, I just believe that we are more good than greedy.

You know, I I was in conversation with Trevor Noah at an event and I mentioned this term that I I was really excited about and he challenged me on it and I said, I think what we need is cognitive sovereignty. We need to wrestle control away from the algorithms and decide what we consume, what we read, how we think, think critically. We need to think about our attention and our focus as commodities that people are after because they're after them, right?

He had an interesting point though. He always has interesting points, don't you think? He's always got an interesting point. Damn it. Um and he's funny, but he said, "No, we need less cognitive sovereignty, Brené." And I'm like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "Everything's about the for you page. Everything's for you. We need communal sovereignty. He's like, you know, the whole problem is that your for you page is completely sovereign.

I hear them talking and I hear things that are so misaligned that it panics me. So I hear someone say, "Hey, you know, tech billionaire, what what should my kids study? I'm worried for my kids." well they should study coding physics you know and then five minutes later as if that answer didn't happen someone will say to what do you attribute your success I mean deeply when you think about it and the same person will say my deep reading of philosophy in the stoics

and so then I'm thinking to myself well which is it dude and then I then I start to extrapolate from there and wonder if there is a thinking class that's emerging where they're like, "We're going to to read philosophy and we're going to read the liberal arts and we're going to study history and the rest of you just keep scrolling. Don't worry about the big words. We'll we'll handle all the big words for you." Like, it's like when they asked Steve Jobs, "Boy, your kids must love the iPad." Steve Jobs said, "My kids don't have an iPad." And then his biographer who spent time with his family said he wasn't kidding. There's no technology at dinner. They're talking about art and history.

This word connection, what does that mean? Does it mean on an individual basis? Does it mean me having friends and relationships? Is that connection? Is that the type of connection I should be looking for? Or does it need do I need to like do you think people need to ladder up further to their city, their town, their world, to the community, to something bigger, God? What what does connection mean in this context?

Yes. I think the answer to that question is yes. We're neuro neurobiologically hardwired to be in connection with other people and in the absence of connection there's always suffering always suffering in the absence of connection. To me, connection is the ability to be in a relationship where we can both give and receive, where we feel seen, heard, believed, valued.

That is that human connection is really important on a micro level, one-on-one with other human beings. I think a sense of belonging and a sense of place. And I don't know that that necessarily needs to be a location, but A sense of being a part of something bigger than you I think is also important. So love and belonging, connection, irreducible needs.

I I think spirituality I define spirituality is being inextricably connected to other people by something bigger than us. Maybe that's love, maybe that's God, maybe that's fishing. Like I I you know it's different for other people. For me, I'm faith is one of my values and I'm a a pretty serious God person. Um I'm a pretty deep person of faith.

And when you talk about belonging, it's interesting in your book Braving the Wilderness, which I think the question is kind of summed up by the subtitle here. The quest for true belonging and the courage to stand alone. This appears to be a dichotomy or a contradiction. To belong, but also to stand alone. Why are both of these important?

Because I don't think you can truly belong to anything or any or or any group if you don't belong to yourself first. True belonging requires us to be who we are, not to change who we are. That's fitting in. Fitting in is the greatest threat to belonging.

Which takes us both back to our childhoods, right?

Yeah. Fit in. Fit in. Fit in. fit in. The problem is that that chameleon kind of skill set means that in order to fit in, the first person you betray is yourself. We've got to be able to stand alone. And that's what's happening right now in the world. I mean, if I if I look back at Braving the Wilderness, that was maybe the only prophetic book that I think I've ever written. like that like like that. I don't think I'm prophetlike, but man, did I call what was happening in terms of the big sort into ideological bunkers where we're going to get to a place where I don't even know you, but I'm going to call you friend because we hate the same people.

And those are so dangerous cuz here you and I like let's say let's say that we have the same belief around immigration. Um, so we're going to flip this table over and we're going to get behind it in our ideological bunker and we're going to be like, "Yeah, we're right." and these guys are crazy and y'all, you know. And then one day I'm going to turn to you and say, you know, one thing I'm wondering about is how are we going to solve the problem with the folks coming over in the dingies from France? Cuz I don't think we're going to be able to go without solving it because we do have an employment issue and a housing crisis. And then you go, you're out. My my care for you, my connection with you completely dependent on you not questioning anything we agreed to to back here. Well, that's counterfeit connection.

is vulnerability important? Cuz there's a lot of performative vulnerability taking place in Is it an important thing for my health, happiness, my future to be a vulnerable person?

Well, let's define it. Um vulnerability is the emotion we experience when we have when we are up against uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. So vulnerability is what I feel. It's the cringe, the awkward, the thing that I the emotion I feel in times of uncertainty, risk or emotional exposure.

it took a trip to Fort Bragg working with special forces to ask soldiers a question. Give me a single example of courage in your life. One example that you've witnessed or you you yourself have done. One example of courage that did not require uncertainty, risk or emotional exposure. No one could answer it. Finally a young soldier stood up and said three tours. There is no courage without vulnerability.

So is vulnerability important? It is if we want to be brave with our lives. If we if we want to be able to manage ourselves in a way that's values aligned and courageous, we have to be able to reconcile how we feel when we're uncertain, at risk, or exposed.

Like, if you're doing things in your life, in your work, and there's no risk, no uncertainty, and no exposure, then they're not brave. If you know how it's going to end, that is not courage. Courage is a willingness to show up and be all-in when you cannot predict the outcome. Courage is saying, "I love you first."

The most the most vulnerable human emotion, joy. Joy is so vulnerable that when some of us get close to it, we dress rehearse tragedy to prepare for disappointment. Like it's so vulnerable that we don't even let ourselves feel joy because we're so afraid someone's going to rip it away and we're going to get sucker punched by disappointment.

people choose to live disappointed rather than to feel disappoint. risk feeling disappointed and get excited about something.

people always ask me what comes first, trust or vulnerability. Do I trust you first, then I'm vulnerable, or am I vulnerable first and then I trust you? And I think it's a very slow stacking. We get to know each other. I share a little bit. I don't I don't share, hey, nice to meet you, Stephen. Here's my darkest, horrible, most painful trauma. You know, cuz that that is actually that kind of litmus testing is actually a form of armor.

Vulnerability, trust, vulnerability, trust, vulnerability, trust.

And I've heard about your marble jar theory. So, I got a jar of marbles.

I saw that. Um, so this comes you know where where is where where do I get my information? Ellen's in fourth grade, my oldest. She comes home from school. The front door closes. She slides down the door into a heap, sobbing. She says that something hard happened. She shared it like very confidentially with one or two of her friends during recess. When she got back to the classroom, they had told everybody in her class, all 30 kids, everybody was laughing and pointing and making fun of her. And she said, "I will never trust anyone again."

And my response immediately to my in my mind was, "Damn straight, not a person. You trust your mama." And that's it. Like that was my response. But again, that's not the right thing to do, right? You want a kid who can develop trust with others. So I said, "Trust is really hard." She said, "I don't understand it." And her teacher at the time, Mrs. Bockam, had a mar a marble jar. And when the team when the when the class would collectively make good decisions, she would put marbles in this empty jar, and when it got full, they'd have an extra recess and party.

And so immediately what came to me, because I'm describing trust, which is a hard concept to a fourth grader. I said, "Trust is the marble jar." She's like, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Every time you share somebody something with someone that's confidential and they don't share it, they get a marble. Every time you build trust, when you want to share something really private and personal, you look for a friend whose jar is full of marbles. Do you have any marble jar friends?"

And what was shocking to me is that Ellen was conveying that these marbles were being earned on these very small. She knew my grandparents' name. She gave me a seat to sit at. She checked on me when I was missing school. And so it made me start thinking about the literature on trust. So I immediately go to the Gottman's. Have you had the Gottmans on here? Yeah. I mean, just like Yeah. So I go to the Gottman's research on trust. And I read right off the bat where Gottman say trust is earned in small moments every day.

He tells a story. It's my favorite story that he tells. He's on the second to last page of his mystery. He's like, "Oh my god, oh my god." Like, who did it? And he jumps up to go brush his teeth and he gets walks to the bathroom and he sees his wife crying and brushing her hair. He's like, "Shit, don't look. Everything's good. Just go to the bathroom and get back in your get back to your book." And he's like, "That's a sliding door moment.

I can I have a choice in that moment. to build trust and stop and say what's going on or to build betrayal and pretend like I don't see her hurting. So I stop I take the brush out of her hand. I start brushing her hair and say, "What's going on?"

That's a sliding door moment that we have all the time, right? And so to me, trust is built slowly over time, a marble at a time. And that's how that's how we teach trust to the most senior leaders in Fortune 100 companies. That trust is a marble jar. It's earned.

maybe one of the biggest findings of my research over the last 25 years is it's not fear that gets in the way of us being brave with our lives and our work. It's armor.

Everybody's afraid. It's okay to be afraid. What's dangerous is the armor that we reach for to self-protect when we're afraid. And how that armor moves us away from love, connection, and our values. And so I think the hardest work is for me constantly being aware of what is my armor? What am I what am I grabbing for when I'm afraid? What am I grabbing for when I want to protect my sense of self-worth, my ego? Like, and and how heavy that is.

You know, at some point I had to wear it because that was survival for me growing up. But this is the big this is the big developmental milestone of middle age which you are squarely entering which is kind of when the universe grabs you by the shoulders and pulls you really close and says I'm not around anymore. They gave you gifts. Choosing not to grow into them is not benign.

There's a consequence for that and your armor is getting in the way. You're a grown ass person now. You have different choices. Let go of what doesn't serve. And that is the big milestone I think that we have to wrestle with in midlife. What no longer serves that's preventing us from growing into who we want to be.

is fear the opposite of courage or is it

No, I think the opposite of courage is armor. Armor. Okay. I think the opposite of courage is self-p protection.

It appears you've overcome various traits of old Brené Brown.

No, I'm overcoming.

Overcoming?

No, I'm not over I have not overcome.

Have you overcome anything?

Yes. The belief that I will overcome anything. I have overcome the belief that I have overcome the belief that I will ever arrive.

I am grateful for the skills that I have that are new skills that keep me more aligned with the person, the mom, the partner, the leader that I want to be. But I I am mindful all the I try to stay very mindful that I am scary when I'm scared that I catastrophize very very easily and that's painful for everybody around me and I don't need to be liked. I just need to be myself.

Some people might find that somewhat demoralizing to know that they they too might never cure parts of themselves that they're desperate to change.

I don't think that's in the consideration set for a very beautiful reason that if we could fix it and never have to wrestle with it again, we would be so short on grace for other people that we would be tyrants.

So, you think it it creates a form of empathy for others?

Yeah. I mean, like I'm not going to I have like really serious boundaries. I'm a very boundary person. But when I see someone behaving a certain way, I was like, "My sees your inner right here. I I get it. I get what you're doing. I'm not going to tolerate it. I'm going to set a boundary around it, but I'm not really judging you for it. It's just that behavior is not okay right here.

But you like yourself now.

Yeah. Yeah, I do. I I Yeah, I do. I do. I can I can I think I can say that pretty I like what I'm becoming.