Brené Brown on Protecting our Attention, Time, and Humanity in a World that Won’t Slow Down

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0:47Hi, everybody.

0:49Brené Brown:Welcome to the Curiosity Shop. I am solo today. As many of you might know, Adam and I both teach in MBA programs, and he is teaching his MBA intensive at Wharton right now, and I'm starting mine actually tomorrow. I'm recording this on the Monday before the podcast drops, and so I'll go into my intensive on Tuesday, so you may see him also doing a solo episode, so we're covering for each other while we teach. I thought I would use the podcast today to kind of do an AMA, take questions from LinkedIn on the podcast. I have a great LinkedIn community, as does Adam. So always getting tons of comments, questions, really productive, helpful feedback on the CuriosityShop.

1:38Brené Brown:So I thought I'd answer some questions today. we'll jump in. The first question is from Scott. And I just thought this was really interesting. And he is referring to back to the episode that we did on AI commencement speeches and why human thinking still matters. And so Scott wrote on LinkedIn, I'd argue that writing isn't an exercise in thinking, but drafting is. I have found that when using AI to write a first draft, it's hard to get away from sounding as if it were written by AI. The cognitive load of the first draft has been lifted and you can't get that processing time back. That being said, is it appropriate to turn to AI for proofreading and critique once a first, second, or third draft has been completed.

2:30Brené Brown:And I'm going to start here. I am not the czar of AI ethics, the over-lordess of what's right or wrong with AI. I think we're all navigating and finding our own way. What I thought was interesting about this question and this idea that Scott poses is I do think there's a difference between drafting and writing. And I do think drafting is more of an exercise in thinking than sometimes polishing or making the draft pretty. I think you have to do what works for you. And I think it's about developing self-awareness for each one of us about at what point have I turned over my discernment to technology.

3:19Brené Brown:And wherever that line is for you, that's a line I don't think we should be crossing because human discernment is so far superior to AI discernment. So to me, it's the discernment question. And the reason why I think about that is sometimes I'll do one, two, or three drafts. And if I turn over too early, the problem for me would be word selection. Sometimes I'm sitting on a draft because I'm like, God, this is not the right word to describe what I heard from that research participant in terms of how they were feeling. And so that word choice to me still belongs in discernment. Dangling modifiers, not so much.

4:12Brené Brown:Most of us have been using some kind of word processing, you know, whether it was Microsoft Word or I miss Word Perfect, but I'm old. I mean, as an academic, like it was literally one day you came into the office and all of the Word Perfect was gone. It was a dark day. But for me, word selection is really important. I think in terms of grammar, I think it's okay. But you have to decide for yourself. I think the line is, where does responsibility and discernment end and where does passing it off start? So thank you for that comment. I really love the distinction between drafting and writing and at what point is it going from thinking to polishing.

4:58Brené Brown:And one thing I would also be aware of is when I have put in a very beautifully, I thought, crafted paragraph into AI just to see what would happen, it changed it. And I went back to what I wrote because I didn't like the level of frictionlessness. Is that a word? Frictionlessness? I think it is. Frictionlessness read as bullshit to me. It read as nothingness. It read as, you know, when you get a chocolate bar and you're excited because it's supposed to be creamy in the inside and fluffy, but it's nothing. That's how it reads. So just a thought. Okay. This is from Christy also on LinkedIn. Oh, I thought I'd share this.

5:45Brené Brown:Dearest Brene, your work means so much to me. Thank you. Giving you a heart. Seeing your ears filled with technology has me wondering how present you are really when you're chatting with your guests on the podcast. I don't know if what you mean by that with my ears being filled with technology means I have my AirPods in, but that's how I hear my guests. So it's not, we're not in a Cyrano situation where someone's saying, pause, take a deep breath, look left, and then repeat after me. There was a man from Nantucket. Like that's how I hear the guests. That's the only way I can hear them. So we can record the podcast.

6:24Brené Brown:Okay. Another LinkedIn from Peter. And this is going back to the AI commencement. As you can Imagine lots of comments. Peter says, the hidden cost of work slop is that it makes the receiver become the quality department for someone else's thinking. AI can clean the sentence, but it can't prove the sender understood the problem. That's where discernment shows up. In the gaps, the assumptions, the weak logic, the missing context. For leaders, this becomes a real operating issue. Polished work now needs a stronger test. Did this move the task forward or just move the effort downstream? Oh, I love this.

7:10Brené Brown:I should have been like, Peter, meet Scott. Scott, meet Peter. Share answers. Peter's going to answer Scott's question. Polished work now needs a stronger test. Did this move the task forward or just move the effort downstream? Yeah, I have to say that I'll give you a very specific example. I asked for a two-page brief on whether we should make a move or not. And when the brief came back, it said, we should hesitate to make this move because this new platform doesn't do X, Y, and Z. It's limited to doing A, B, and C. And the thing that was so distressing to me is the platform doesn't do X, Y, and Z, but neither do we.

8:04Brené Brown:The platform did not do something that we have never done, never been interested in doing. And so there was no discernment about whether we should make the platform move by the people who wrote the piece clearly, because they also know that we don't do X, Y, Z. And I think for me, you know how Kubler-Ross has kind of these stages of grief? What I want to say is the linear nature of those stages as first presented has been very much called into question. It'd be so nice if we could sequentially go through grief, but we cannot. There is a kind of Kubler-Ross effect that I have on the receiving end of an AI work product that's missing discernment, which aka also known as work slop, that's a hard word for me because I don't know how to use that term.

9:02Brené Brown:I don't know how to use that word, giving feedback to someone without sending them straight into a shame spiral. Because if someone called anything that I did, if anyone used the word slop, it would be very hard for me to stay in my prefrontal cortex and not go into fight, flight, freeze, or punch ya. So when my stages around it are, I read it and I go, oh shit, I'm so mad. This is so crappy. Then I go to, do they even care about what we're trying to work on here? Then I say, oh, they're not using AI well. That's my fault. I haven't trained my team on doing it well, which is true. And then I go to, maybe I can't trust this person because I actually turned to them for discernment, and now there's no discernment.

10:06It's a lot of bandwidth.

10:10Brené Brown:And so one of the things I talk to leaders about all the time, especially around deliberate recovery, there's a chapter in Strong Ground called Locking In, Locking Through. And the whole purpose of that chapter is, hey, we all know how to lock in, but do we know how to lock through? And And locking through when we get home at night is really hard because we're not just context shifting, we're dimension shifting. And so one of the things I say to senior leaders is you leave for work with a hundred bucks in your pocket, a hundred cognitive dollars. And every time there is cognitive switching, you're locked in, you're working on something and someone comes up and asks you something that's completely unrelated and you have to look up and say, hold on just a sec.

10:57Brené Brown:No, no, no. Okay. Tell me. Okay. Yes. That's a good question. I'm wondering if we need to look at this data first. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Have a great one. No, no, no, no. That costs you five bucks. We can sometimes control our spending by turning off messaging on Slack or Teams. That helps. Most of us have our phones there because I'm looking for kid calls or Steve or when I was caregiving for my mom, caregiving calls. But when a caregiving call came in that said, you know, I'm locked in. Hey, your mom's refusing to go to physical therapy today. Oh, that's like a griefy, shitty, sad dimension shifting.

11:43Brené Brown:That cost me 40 bucks because this thing I'm still working on, now I got to go here. Now I'm in my feelings and they're hard and, you know, I have to make calls and kind of hand it off to my sister and it's going to cost them 40 bucks. I think if you think about cognitive spin during the day and protecting our thinking, our deep thinking, protecting our attention, which all the shitty algorithms are trying to steal, when I get something that is kind of work sloppy, it's expensive for me because I'm paying$5 to notice the lack of discernment. Then I'm paying$5 to wonder if someone cares and I'm paying $10.50 to wonder if I'm a sucky leader because I haven't trained them how to use it well.

12:35Brené Brown:You know, so I think this question about, are you giving me something that's moving the task forward, or have you just moved the effort downstream or back to me? This is the question. Support from the show comes from Bolan Branch. Small discomforts when left unaddressed can compound into greater ones. That's true anywhere, but especially when it comes to getting a good night's sleep. Maybe your bed sheets slip off, the corner's too much, or your pillow is far past its prime. Whatever the case, you can finally upgrade your bedding with Bowling Branch. They make everything your bed needs. Their signature organic cotton sheets are incredibly popular.

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15:21includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot capable device required availability, speech and coverage varies see MintMobile.com Megan Rapinoe here this week on Why Are You Like This I got to sit down with legendary Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve in Chicago during All-Star Weekend we get into her personal style of activism, how she supports her players as people and why she proudly considers herself a dyke Then we learn if she's more of a mommy, daddy, or baby. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.

16:00Brené Brown:Okay, Julie, what's up with the two watches? Are you doing double time?

16:11Brené Brown:Okay, I often wear two watches. I'm not keeping double time, but that's funny. I like it. I did a podcast with Richard Rohr, and then I wrote the foreword to the republication of his book, Falling Upward, about the second half of life, about midlife. And one of the things that is very true to me, not only am I a word person and a spiritual person, I think about my life in both Kronos and Kairos. And so Kronos is clock time, sequential, quantitative, measured. This is my, and I do, I have to say, I don't take any ad dollars from Apple, but I do love my Apple Watch. I like getting points, but mostly I love because I can find my phone with it.

17:06Brené Brown:And then I can record my workout times and I have most notifications turned off, but I really do love the Kronos of it. I like that it's quantitative. It measures stuff for me. It's sequential. And then this is my grandmother's Elgin watch from the 50s. And this is kairos. This is another word for time. Kronos means clock time. Kairos means deep time, God time. It's actually Homeric in origin, I think. Vulnerable, vital openness is what kairos means. an openness and a vulnerability to stay in receiving for something that can only happen on spiritual time. And so I wear both. I also love watches and I just don't, I don't know, not keeping devil time.

18:00Brené Brown:I'm keeping Kronos and Kairos, deep time, God time, how many calories did I burn and where the hell is my phone? That's it. And you know what I call this, I call this my pair of clocks because it's a paradox. All right. That is not a dad joke. That is a mom joke. Okay. Here's a question from Lauren. This is on the episode where we shared a recording of Iko Bathia, friend, leadership, senior leader, coach, thinker. She wrote a new book called Anchored Aligned Accountable, and it's about self-leadership. The two of us did a talk together on a stage at a Better Up event, and we recorded it and shared the talk as a podcast.

18:57Brené Brown:And And if you've never listened to a coaching session IRL, like in real life or in real time, this is a coaching session. It was so hard. I was in tears. I was so worn out after it. You could have heard a pin drop in the room, but it was such a beautiful example of what a skilled coach like Ico looks like. So this is a question from that episode. Ico said something I keep pondering, that transformative change requires grief. a loss of innocence, of community, of how you once saw yourself. We talk a great deal about psychological safety as a condition for inclusion, but almost never about grief as a requirement for it.

19:38Brené Brown:What strikes me is that children can move through exactly this kind of loss naturally through play, conflict, repair, before the armor goes on and the calculus of self-protection takes over. My question is whether you think organizations are capable of making space for that grief or whether the demand for productivity makes genuine transformation structurally impossible in most workplaces. Damn, Lauren, this is such a beautiful question. So I'm going to kind of play it back in different words so everyone's tracking. Eikopathea said that transformation requires grief. If Lauren is asking, is there really space in organizations for grief?

20:33Brené Brown:And if there's not a space for grief, are transformations even possible? I think this is a question of our time. I think as someone who has led many deep transformations in organizations over the last 20 years, and I mean really hard transformations, where we've taken entire organizations, 30 ,000 people, through a process to change, to build new skills, to change mindsets, to examine mental models. to change system sets, to bring in coaching. What I can say is if there's not space for grief and loss, there is not space for change. Iko is 100 % right. And Iko and I do these transformations together.

21:25Brené Brown:So you're not going to get a different answer from me and you're not going to, you know, she's taught me so much about this. And I thought I'd give an example maybe. oof this is hard one of the things that differentiates in transformations whether something's going to have to be is it a full transformation and a lot of times i think we have transformation fatigue in organizations because we call everything a transformation look a strategic change an adaptive change an incremental change are not transformative changes you're in a transformative change when shit has to be broken and then you have to rebuild new things and watch every minute of the rebuilding so you don't rebuild exactly what you tore down.

22:10Brené Brown:And it's in that deconstruction, that breaking of old systems and then rebuilding new systems and fighting the human urge to rebuild what we've just broken, that's where the grief comes. And the less you're willing to grieve that loss, the more likely it is you'll just create new systems that replicate what you broke. So very recently we were doing, I think, one of the hardest things that would qualify. If I go into an organization and we have to change mental models, bam, that is transformative work. Let me see if I can draw this and I'll describe it to the people listening. I'm going to draw this for us.

22:53Brené Brown:You may have seen this, but I'll walk you through kind of how I think about it. so you have this iceberg and you see a problem and the problem is above the wave so we see problems and they're above the water if you're audio listening hey so the problem is that we is visual we can see it underneath the water is the rest of the iceberg and that first strata is behaviors then systems and structures and then at the very bottom mental models If the lower you make the change, the more leverage and the longer the change lasts. So if you see a problem and you just address the problem but nothing underwater, good luck, two weeks maybe.

23:38Brené Brown:If you see a problem, address behaviors, you may get three months. If you see a problem, address behaviors and structures and systems, maybe six months, nine months, a year if you're super lucky. If you see a problem, think about the behaviors that underpin the problem, the systems and structures that are built that feed the problem, reward the problem, punish challenges to the problem, and then you talk about the mental models that underlie everything, then that's transformative change. That's really breaking. It's excavating and breaking. So recently, we were excavating mental models in my own organization about just what are some of the mental models that we're working off of that are no longer serving.

24:27Brené Brown:And the excavation of those was so painful. Oh my God, that's why people hate it. And people hate it because transformation requires a change in mental model. A mental model is the way I see the world and the way that I make sense of the world. And it's the way I make sense of the value that I contribute to our relationship or an organization or my team. So they're very protected. We do not want to change them. And there was a moment where I was looking at some post-it notes of mental models that were no longer serving us. And in that moment, what I saw was as the founder and the person that holds the most power and authority, there had been moments when I was in pain or fear and I was under the line and I said something and that became a mental model off which people worked for two years.

25:35Brené Brown:And there's grief attached to that for me. And as we start to excavate across my organization, there's grief attached to it. I'm not the only one that has set mental models that are not helpful from a place of pain or fear or anxiety or scarcity. mind concretize faster because of my position. But there's this great quote that says, sometimes we have to let go of what we planned in order to really embrace what is. And that's transformation. We had a plan. The world changed. We changed. What we thought we needed to be able to do changed. And so if you don't make room for grief and other emotions, hope, sometimes despair surfaces in the midst of transformations, anxiety, fear, scarcity.

26:40Brené Brown:If you don't make room for everything that we know that comes with change, then call it something else, but don't call it a transformation. it's a beautiful question lauren okay moving to the podcast with rebecca lowe um who led the largest soccer um announcing effort in american history she was at the table with the big some of the biggest most well-known players and egos in soccer and we interviewed her about what it took and what it takes to be, you know, the face of announcing for Premier League soccer and for the World Cup that just ended. And we talked a lot about preparation. And this is a comment from Carlos and a question.

27:30Brené Brown:I mean, just for all of you, I'm a LinkedIn. I know people say that some people like it, some people don't love it. I love any place where there's accountability because your name's attached to your comments. And I just, comments are open there for me. And I comment there all the time and engage with folks. And I just want to say I really appreciate in real time, in both Kronos and Kairos, I do, both clocks, really appreciate the thoughtfulness and the productive challenge and the pushes and the I disagree. And every now and then, someone shitty to me or shitty to another person. And, you know, that's life.

28:15Brené Brown:And that's what blocking is for. But I do really appreciate the real debate and discourse. And you can see they're thoughtful. These are from LinkedIn. Like they're just, I could put these together and it'd be a leadership manual. So Carlos writes, oh, one thing we said in the, just to give you the context, We said that more important than executive presence is preparation, and they're often not always combined, and that while Rebecca has presence, you cannot underestimate her preparation. I mean, I'm going to tell you, if you did a deep dive on her prep, it's insane. And she does it, and she's done it for years, the Olympics, Premier League football, the World Cup.

28:56She uses 10 % of it, but she doesn't care because she feels grounded and it gives her permission to have fun and let loose.

29:03Brené Brown:And so that's the context for this. So Carlos writes, the distinction between presence and preparation is important. I have noticed that what looks effortless and strong leaders is often the visible result of a great deal of invisible work. Smart. It's beautiful. Preparation does more than improve performance. It reduces the mental noise that appears when the pressure rises. When we know the material, the context, and ourselves well enough, and we have more attention available for the room, the people, and what's unfolding in real time, that's where presence becomes more than confidence. It becomes capacity.