Building Integrity in the Age of Normalized Cheating

22:46Brené Brown:I mean, God almighty, if I have to grade blue books again, I'm retiring. Yeah, we got rid of cursive for a reason. Or at least I can't write in cursive anymore. You probably love it, don't you? Yes, and the science proves it. How could you be against the science selectively about cursive? I don't think I know the science on cursive. Tell me. Oh my God, I'm going to look it up before this is over. I know handwriting is better than typing. And cursive is better than cursing and cursive. That is the most powerful. You're here for both. Yeah, I am. That's a Freudian slip, Renee style. Yeah, I believe in cursing and cursive.

23:29Brené Brown:You bet, in equal measure. I will find that research for you and put it in the show notes. But yeah, I can't grade blue books anymore like that. That ship has sailed. But OK, so if we're not proctoring everything, which I do think I hear a lot of my colleagues going toward, I'm going to watch you. I'm going to watch you produce, which, oh, my God, y 'all. Y 'all know that's not going to translate to work environments, right? So, OK, so what do you think? It's not feasible. And also, do we really want to just accept we're raising a generation of students who are not trustworthy and we're just going to throw our hands up and say we give up?

24:09No. We either monitor them or no, we're not going to do that. So I've spent a bunch of time thinking about this. I did a deep dive into the research on what do we know about what else prevents cheating? And the answer that came out again and again in the data is identity. It's the point that you made earlier, Brene, that it's got to come from within. If we can't create a permanent system of monitoring or reward and punishment externally, then we're looking at internal motivation. And in the research on cheating, I think there's a whole set of studies that I think captures it really well, which is the basic finding is across a set of experiments, when you raise the stakes of getting a good grade or acing a quiz, cheating goes up.

24:58Because people want the reward and they're willing to cut corners to get it. Except there are some people who aren't more likely to cheat when the stakes go up. And those are people with strong moral identities who have internalized a sense of honor and integrity. And I think as you were suggesting earlier, they both feel good when they do the right thing. And they also feel awful if they even consider doing the wrong thing. And that both fear of being a bad person and desire to be a good person is enough to get them to resist whatever temptation they feel, not only to cheat, but also to lie or steal or do anything else unethical.

25:39And I think I came away from this believing that we have essentially abandoned the idea of instilling a moral identity in our students and maybe in our children too. And that's a mistake.

25:53Brené Brown:And what does the research say about the best way to instill moral identity? I know it's not shame. And I know it's not attaching someone's moral identity to their sense of self-worth. that if you engage in these behaviors that are dishonest, you're a terrible person. I don't think that works. So what does the research tell us is the right way to increase moral identity? Well, this is exactly what I wanted to ask you. How confident are you that a little bit of shame isn't helpful here? because I think at least anticipated shame is one of the common experiences of people with strong moral identity.

26:45I think, and maybe shame is the wrong flavor of it. But when I heard you say a moment ago, I would feel, I feel physically ill at the thought of doing this. Isn't there shame attached to the idea of saying, if I were to cheat, I would have a view of myself that is, you know, I would come to think of myself as a bad person. And so I can't even contemplate that. No.

27:11Brené Brown:So for me, that would not be shame. That would be. And again, I think if you look at the correlation between shame and behaviors like aggression, violence, outcomes like addiction, depression, I think shame is far too blunt of an instrument. What I would feel, what I could anticipatorily feel if I cheated is guilt and the cognitive dissonance of engaging in a behavior that's different than who I want to be and how I see myself. So the sickening feeling for me is cognitive dissonance. There's a lack of alignment between who I believe I am and who I say I am and a behavior I just engaged in, which is kind of classic adaptive guilt.

27:56Brené Brown:Now, in these studies, I wouldn't be surprised if they use terms like anticipatory shame, because I don't think a lot of researchers spend a lot of time teasing out shame, guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment. Yeah. But the reason why I think guilt is more helpful here is it doesn't seem like, based on your survey of your students, that shame is a mediating variable making them feel bad. So I think if you are really talking about moral identity, What moral identity, I believe, does is creates cognitive dissonance when we act outside of who we think we are and who we say we are. And I think that's adaptive guilt.

28:39I think that's exactly right. See, you didn't need to ask me that question. You knew the answer.

28:44Brené Brown:No, but I do think, I think there's a lot of questions embedded in that because, you know, So we could take this into an arena that's really, for us, if, do you say you watched a film when you watch the trailer and a few snippets on social? Do you do an interview on a podcast with an author if you haven't read every word of the book or whatever? You know, like, do we think students are reading every word of assigned reading? And if they don't read, let me tell you something. As a PhD student, we had 1 ,500, 2 ,000 pages sometimes a week that we had to read. I read for utility. Like, I read for utility.

29:27Brené Brown:And if a professor looked at me and said, did you do the readings? I'm going to say, I don't know what I would have said, but I probably would have said yes, because I read them for utility. And I'm prepared to answer any question you have for me. Quiz me. Quiz me. But quiz me, mother trucker, is different than it's still, I probably said, yes, I read. And so where's my line? And so what I'm wondering about is, are we talking about cheaters versus cheating and not cheating, dishonesty and honesty? Are we talking about moral ambiguity? and what role do we have in saying, let me tell you what's not ambiguous in this course and what's ambiguous.

30:19Brené Brown:If you want to read the book, you read the book any way you want, but I'm going to take full authority to quiz you on any part of it that I want to. I love that framing of it. Yeah. You know, and if I say, here's what I need, I always tell my students, because I think this is true, I have signed a contract, a legal contract with this university saying that I'm going to cover this information and that upon successful completion of this course, I can almost promise the university that you understand the following things. Yeah. And I take that obligation super seriously. So if at the end of the class, I feel like they have mastered that material, am I overly invested in how?

31:15Brené Brown:I'm just asking. I don't know. I don't know the answer. No, I don't think you should be. I'm grappling. But when you can no longer gauge whether they've mastered the material or not, because they may just be copying their answers from an AI tool, then you have a problem. I got to be honest with you. This is a hard conversation. And I feel like this at work too sometimes. Do you ever get to the point where you're just like, screw it? I have a piece of the course that's self-graded. And I can always predict the students who are going to be harsher on themselves and more probably appropriately evaluative and those that are just going to give themselves the straight highest grade.

31:53Brené Brown:And I don't fight them because if that's the way you choose to live your life, I'm going to spend zero interest and energy on that. If you come to me, however, for a recommendation on anything, zero chance, and I'll tell you exactly why I'm not going to give it to you. Yeah, same. Yeah. You scored yourself a 10 out of 10 on a rubric where there was no way you got a 10 because it would have been observable by me in the classroom because it was this kind of sharing or that kind of sharing. So if you're good with that, I'm not babysitting your morality here. Great. But don't come to me for anything.

32:34Yeah, I think that's a reasonable stance. I think I've had to have conversations with students before where I've said, I don't think I'm in the best position to write you the letter full of detailed, glowing praise that I'm sure you're seeking. And so I would recommend asking someone else. If I can't write you, if it doesn't say, I fully recommend Adam Grant for this position

32:59Brené Brown:without any reservations, please call me on my cell phone if you have any questions. If I can't write that, I don't write your letter of recommendation. I just tell you, I think you'll be able to find a stronger one somewhere else. That's generally my position too. And I, you know, interestingly, I think that's an expression of moral identity for both of us. That for sure is because I, yeah. I'm not going to voice someone on somebody else who did not, who I can't vouch for. Yeah, I think that's true. I wonder if it'd be helpful for people listening or watching. It'd be helpful for me if we bucket what we're talking about because we're sliding into related areas that are different.

33:41Brené Brown:And so I want to be really clear about cheating. Well, maybe this is the discussion we're having. I don't know it. But cheating to me is an active behavior of breaking agreed upon rules for your benefit. Yeah. I find no moral ambiguity in that whatsoever. Nope. Very clear. Yeah, very clear to me. Using whatever your methodologies are that are within the confines of the rules to varying degrees, read it off by word, read summaries, get a spark note, whatever, and being willing to be held accountable for mastery of the material, I'm actually okay with. Same.

34:35Brené Brown:AI does not always equate to cheating for me. So it's really about, and this was in actually the AMA we did for the Curiosity Shop, why I'm seeing trust implode on teams right now. Because they haven't gone through an exercise as a team of saying, here's what's okay for AI use in our team, and here's what's not okay. Just two columns. You know, you can use it for background information. You cannot use it for discernment. You have to let us know when you use it, you can't use it and not disclose when it's being used. You know, like those kind of just basic rules. Yeah. So it sounds like we're pretty much aligned.

35:19Yeah, I think we are.

35:21Brené Brown:The only place where I'm unsure is tell me about the research in the op-ed where what was effective teaching of ethical awareness and what wasn't? Some pretty big studies. Yeah. What did you learn? Yeah. I mean, the data are powerful here. And I actually, I think this goes to the question of, let's go to the next level of how do you actually develop a moral identity or activate a moral identity? Because I think you captured it beautifully when you said, I don't want shame. I might want some adaptive guilt, but how do we cultivate that? So let's just do a quick walkthrough of what we know. There have been a whole series of experiments where you try to use an honor code or an honesty pledge, and the results are inconsistent.

36:17Sometimes you see a reduction in cheating. Sometimes you see no effect. Sometimes you actually see an increase in cheating. And the experiment that really stopped me in my tracks on this showed that if you ask students to sign an honesty pledge before an exam, the rate of cheating doubled.

36:36Brené Brown:Is the messaging, wow, everybody's doing this. This is why we have to sign it. So it's normalizing it. Exactly. Yeah. It seems to be that if you're not careful when you ask everybody to sign an oath saying I'm going to do the right thing, you're implicitly messaging. You know what? everybody's cheating. And then students assume, well, I guess it's normal. Table stakes. Yeah. So that does not work well. Wait, can I stop you here? Can I stop here and ask a question? Yeah, please. What do we know about these? Or do we know, I think of some universities pop into my mind right off the bat that have very strong kind of, that's part of their marketing material.

37:18Brené Brown:Do we know anything from those universities? Am I right in saying like UVA has a really big one? What do we know from those? Anything from university-wide honor codes? Don't know. It's a really good question. I think they're hard to study in a controlled way because they're so embedded in the institution that you don't really have a control group. And so let's say UVA has a great honor code and they also seem to have lower rates of cheating than other schools. Is it because you attracted students who cared about integrity and they wanted to be UVA students? Is it that you've actually changed their behavior in some way through the code?

37:57For me, the jury's out. Do you have any sense of it?

38:00Brené Brown:I don't have a sense of it, but this is where I think shit goes bad very quickly, is the enforcement of honor codes randomly and enforcing those honor codes and letting some folks of privilege slide. Yeah. So unequal enforcement based on identity and power, I think, is the fastest stake through the heart of any kind of trust, honor code, ethic, is when the accountability is unevenly applied and when privilege and power are mediating variables around accountability. That is so problematic to me. And again, I'm not – I mean, I'm just – I've seen that over and over. And so when we're like, hey, we have these rules and we're going to enforce them only against groups that have no access to power and are in systems not built for them.

39:00Brené Brown:So I just I've never seen persuasive data on what we're talking about. So I think it's interesting that you haven't either. So let's just keep going. What else? What have you seen? I am with you there. And you're reminding me of John Amici's definition of culture. He says culture is the worst behavior tolerated. I mean, that's it. If you let students, because daddy or mommy is rich or because they are an athlete, if you let them get away with things that others wouldn't, guess what? You don't have a culture of integrity. No. You're choosing to tolerate that behavior. Yeah. And in those systems, it's fight club, baby.

39:46Brené Brown:Like it's, it's everybody for themselves because that's what you've built. And it's a culture of silence too. What's the first rule of Fight Club? Yeah. No Fight Club. We don't talk about Fight Club. Right.

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41:32Brené Brown:Okay, so what was effective? Are there effective ways to increase or change moral identity or build it? So I think in terms of activating it, assuming that everybody has some degree of it, some people hold it more strongly than others. There was an experiment with over 20 ,000 people, which basically reduced cheating by reminding students of the moral implications of their actions. And there were a few different ways to do this that I thought were interesting. One that I never would have thought of was to disrupt the tendency to compartmentalize. Oh, yeah. We've all seen people say, well, you know, I did this, but that little instance of cheating, no, that doesn't make me a cheater.

42:16Or, you know what? Everybody's doing this, and therefore, it's not really cheating. The way to interrupt that tendency was to give students a pledge that said, I understand that honesty is an all or nothing concept. In other words, you're either honest or you're not, and you confront that, and you say, huh, I can't cheat a little and say, but I'm not a cheater. because I'm either honest or I'm cheating and I've got to choose. I thought that was clever. What did you think of that one?

42:47Brené Brown:I mean, it's very Yoda. Do or do not, there is no try. Right, I mean, do or do not, right? Do or do not. Yeah, that was, God dang, that was good. Was it? I don't know. I need to work on my Yoda impression. No, it's really good. Yeah, I think there's a potential backlash, but let's keep going. Okay, so a second way to activate moral identity or appeal to it was to remind students of just a deep-seated sense of justice and fairness that maybe they subscribed to in the abstract, but they hadn't linked it to, well, what am I going to do on this exam? And the way of doing that was to ask them to sign a statement that said, I understand that dishonesty is a fraudulent way of getting something I don't deserve.

43:37That one spoke to me because I think that got, for me, it got right to the heart of, but you are then, you're claiming a reward that you did not earn.

43:48Brené Brown:I don't know. I just see when you say those statements, just to be honest with you, I just see how people could dismantle them in a microsecond. Tell me. So say the statement again. Okay, so the statement is, I understand that dishonesty is a fraudulent way of getting something I don't deserve. Yeah, and there's nobody in here getting anything that they deserve. This place is so screwed up. The system is so screwed up. No one is getting what they deserve except for a couple of people. And I'm gonna get exactly what I deserve by any means necessary in a system that's completely flawed. And how much cryptocurrency does the president deserve?

44:32Brené Brown:During a presidency. And on both sides of the aisle, how much early insider trading does anyone who's an elected representative deserve? Like, we're not in a system. I mean, I can just see. And the worst thing is, again, I don't want to be the proponent for cheating in this conversation because I'm not built for it. But when systems are corrupt and bankrupt, it makes it so hard. Yeah. Like, for me, the sentence that would work. So we've got, I understand that honesty is an all or nothing concept. I understand that dishonesty is a fraudulent way of getting something I don't deserve. The last one got to me.

45:11Brené Brown:Do you want to read the last one? Yeah, this is the one that I found least compelling. It's so interesting that it's the one that spoke to you. Yeah. Wait, before we go to it, I just want to say one thing on the fraudulent one. I think you're right that a lot of people can rationalize it by saying, hey, but everybody around me is getting something they don't deserve. Why not me too? I wonder if that's why it's not more effective. It is one of the most effective statements that's been tested, but there's still a lot of noise in that effect. And I wonder if it would be better if there's an addition to it that goes something along the lines of this.

45:48I understand that dishonesty is a fraudulent way of getting something I don't deserve. I recognize that there are people who have gotten where they are through that, and I don't want to contribute to that system. I don't want to be part of that system, because I believe in creating something fair and just and better.

46:04Brené Brown:So now we're in my - Does that work better for you? It does, because now we're in my third one. Because that goes to the third one, right? Yes. My third one is, I recognize my honesty fosters a culture of trust, mutual respect, and social responsibility, inspiring others to act with integrity. So I am going to be much more, I am going to be the person, you know, if I see the just say no, or this is your brain on drugs, I'm like, yeah. Shut up. Those worked on me. That's so funny. Oh, did they? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if I saw something from like more of the social positive marketing, hey, 70 % of the students on this campus do not do drugs, I'd be like, oh, wait, I want to belong.

46:49Brené Brown:I wonder if it's easy to dismantle, again, work, home, cheating on partners, whatever the dishonesty is. I wonder if there are some of us that are motivated by who we don't want to be. Yeah. And some of us motivated, I'm going to tie this to shame research. It's really interesting. Some of us motivated by who we don't want to be. And some of us motivated more by who we absolutely want to be. Does that make sense? It does. It reminds me of the Tori Higgins research on self-discrepancy theory and how there are ideal and ought selves. Or we could go to Hazel Marcus and say, hope for versus feared possible selves.

47:39Which one is stronger? And my hunch is, although I haven't seen good data on this, my hunch is that in general, the prevention avoidance messaging is more effective in the realm of cheating than the promotion approach. Because you can still feel like a good person in other ways. Whereas if you do this and that makes you think you might have done something wrong, there's no way around that.

48:08Brené Brown:It's interesting. I don't know. I think when I go to Tamara Ferguson's research on unwanted identity and how the quintessential elicitor of shame is unwanted identity, I do not want to be perceived as. And then when we ask people to list those, they can list those very quickly. I don't want to be perceived as, you know, they can list a million things, not good enough, ugly. You know, you could do a thousand. Unintelligent. Yeah. Unkind. Yep. But to really understand shame in our lives and how it operates, we also have to understand it is critically important to me that I am perceived as. And so a lot of times we'll unearth things there that don't come up.

48:55Brené Brown:They're not always the opposite of what comes up. Like, you know, I don't want to be perceived as not smart. It's important to me that I'm perceived as smart. We don't see that as much as we see just these kind of random things. And for me, I don't know if it's because I feel more control over how I'm perceived rather than how I don't want to be perceived because I can't control that. But I can act in ways. I don't know. I think this is very, very much points to, okay, can I just take us on a non sequitur for work? Yes, please.

49:39Brené Brown:So one of the things that we learned in the Dare to Lead research was how difficult it is to bring folks in on one-on-ones to talk about trust. and what do we mean when we mean trust and how do we define trust and what is trust? And so we came up with the acronym BRAVING for trust. Boundaries, reliability, accountability, vault or confidentiality, integrity, which is where this would fall, non-judgment and generosity or assumption of positive intent. So these are the seven elements of trust that we train and teach and we measure. boundaries, reliability, accountability, vault, integrity, non-judgment, and generosity.

50:27Brené Brown:There is some debate, especially in the practice community around trust. So let's say I work for you, you bring me in, and we're doing our once a quarter kind of trust check-in on braving, which is what we encourage people to do so that trust conversations are not weird. Here's where I think we're strong. Here's where we could work together. Some people think that the trust score is an average of all of those. So I give you five points out of one, you know, but some people believe it's the product. And if any of them are a zero, then you don't trust somebody at all. Why did you say, why'd you say nope so fast?

51:04Well, I said no in part because they don't all have equal weights, but also there are some dimensions that drive it to zero. If you fail on them. Say more. That depends on the task though, and what you have to trust the person to do, right?

51:16Brené Brown:Yeah. So yeah, I'm coming to the conclusion that I do believe that trust can be dimensional, that I can count on you around reliability and accountability. You're delivering on time, you're delivering good deliverables, but I don't really trust you on vault. I don't share confidential things with you because I know that you're a spreader of, you like social capital, so you're always running around, yeah, telling people shit that you shouldn't, you know. And so I kind of believe that you can have high levels of dimension. I don't know if you can have any zeros. I haven't decided yet. But yeah, I mean, it's so interesting.

51:54I love your seven dimensions and they capture fault is a missing dimension of trust in my world of management and organizational psychology where trust breaks down to integrity, benevolence, ability, and sometimes reliability. Wait a minute. I guess that's just lumped under integrity is another facet of it, but it's a different phenomenon because we all know high integrity people that would not cheat, for example, but are very comfortable sharing information that's confidential with others. And when we study this, what I've seen in our data is when people form a positive impression of you on one dimension of trust, they tend to assume that you're trustworthy on all the others until something happens that bites them.

52:38And all of a sudden they realize, oh no. And then sometimes they overreact and just decide you're not trustworthy, period. But I think the more nuanced reaction is exactly what you said, which is, oh, I now know I can trust you to do this, but not that.

52:52Brené Brown:What's interesting too about Vault that really freaks people out. I mean, every time we teach this, which is all the time, I just taught it in the MBA program. So this, I'll give you, we'll do a little role play. You call me into the office and we're doing our trust kind of audit once a couple of times a year, which I love because that means we can have really explicit conversations about trust. They're not, you know, we're naming it. We're talking about the importance of building trust. We're talking about the dimensions of trust. And you say, where I think we're really struggling right now, Brene, is vault.

53:25Brené Brown:And I said, you know what, Adam, I don't get it. You share highly confidential proprietary things with me all the time. And I have not once shared any of those things with anybody. And then you say, I know, but you often come in here and share things with me that are not yours to share. And that's when a whole group of people, when I explain that, go, wait, what? And then I said, raise your hand if you want to be on the receiving end of really good gossip or chisme. Everybody's like, yes. And I said, and raise your hand when that person leaves your office if you trust them less. Everybody raises their hand.

54:07Brené Brown:And they're like, oh, my God, the other side of the vault. It's not just that you'll keep what I share with you confidential. It's that you don't share things with me that are not yours to share. Yes. So important. Yeah, but so misunderstood. Do you know what I mean? It's like we just don't talk about both of those sides. And it's interesting because in teams where someone has shared, you know, I've received that feedback before that I share too much, especially with my boss. I'll get under like, tell me what's driving it when you do it. And it feel in, how does it feel? It feels great. It feels like I'm being helpful.

54:53Brené Brown:And then we talk about social capital and we talk about, you know, the awkward situation that can put people in and how they just trust you less. So I think it's, I didn't think we'd end up here, but I do think it's really, I do think the, The last couple of lines of your op-ed is everything we're talking about. The heart of integrity is recognizing that the ends don't justify the means. What we achieve may define our success, but how we achieve it determines our character. I think that's so important. I do too. I think the means are a measure of our character. And we live in a world, unfortunately, that only measures the ends, not the means.

55:34The means are hard to measure. They're often unobservable. And that's why people take shortcuts or cut corners or cheat. and I think that you know it's so interesting you're I know you're trying to wrap this up here but I have to I have to comment on two things that I think are so interesting one is in braving when you talk about the the v so the other side of vault I think what you're doing there is you're helping people realize that's actually an integrity violation and they're not aware of it So it may be somebody with a strong moral identity who has not connected the practice of disclosing somebody else's secret or confidential information with somebody that they trust as a violation.

56:22Brené Brown:Yes. Yes. I think that's right. And I think that's where people are like, oh shit. Yeah. It's huge. And it's interesting. You would love our definition of integrity that we use for our work, because this will really make you crazy with your cheating issue. Yeah. Integrity is actively practicing your values, not just professing them and doing what's right. Not what's fun, fast or easy. Yes. Nailed it. Nailed it. This is one of my favorite versions of Brene Brown is the, you go out into the world and study something that everybody thinks they already understand. And you come up with a more nuanced, more complex, more comprehensive understanding of it.

57:08You synthesize it in a way that makes it digestible so that people can actually pulse check in their relationships, in their interactions, so they can look in the mirror and see how they're doing on these dimensions. And you help us see something both more clearly and also more complexly than we would have otherwise. I love that. I love that so much. And -

57:29Brené Brown:Wow, thank you. It's really powerful. You know, it also, I think it underscores the other thing that I'm really thinking about as a result of this conversation, which is I think a lot of people make the mistake of conflating moral identity with moral image. I want to be perceived as a good person. I don't want to be seen as a bad person. At the end of the day, that just makes you vulnerable to what everyone else is doing. That opens up the possibility that if everybody else is cheating or a lot of people are cheating, then you know what? They're not going to judge me negatively. So this is okay here, or this is okay now.

58:10I think moral identity has got to be about your self-concept. It has to be about, I don't want to see myself as a person who would do that. I want to see myself as a person who does the right thing. And I think that's what we've got to be doing in homes and schools and workplaces is laying out really clearly what it means to see yourself as a good person, as a person of, in this case, honor and integrity. And then what are the behaviors that if you engaged in would violate that? What are the behaviors that if you do them consistently would uphold that? And I think that's how we nurture moral identity is we engage kids starting when they're young in the process of reflecting on what kind of person do I want to see myself as?

58:53and what do I need to do in order to earn that identity? And what do I need to make sure also I don't do in order to avoid developing that sense of me?

59:03Brené Brown:I think this is the heart of everything we've been talking about, moral image, which is so vulnerable and susceptible to, it's movable. It's movable. Yeah. Yeah. Moral identity, not movable. And what's really interesting to me is I think honesty is a discipline and a practice. And I think you're faced with those things 50 times a day. Like I remember when I remember getting to the car, you know, Charlie's a baby. I think I wrote about this in a book as an example. Charlie's a baby. Ellen's, you know, We're picking up a poster board is why I think we're at H-E-B, our grocery store. And I'd run in.

59:56Brené Brown:Charlie's crying. And I'd get back. And I'd paid cash. And they gave me a 20 instead of a 10. And in that split second, I was like, Charlie's too young to learn the lesson anyway. But then I'm like, oh, Ellen's. I was like, all right. I've got them in their car seats. of like, we got to go back in. And they're like, H-E-B has a lot of money, but this is not mine. You know, and it's a thousand times a day where we have to make those decisions. Yeah. And I don't know that I always make them. I don't know that I will debate you. If it's a violent movie that I can't watch, I will watch enough of it to debate you about the meaning of that movie, having seen, you know, five-eighths of it.

1:00:51Brené Brown:And then when the person goes, did you watch the movie? I'm like, did you watch the movie? You know? And yeah, I think I'm imperfect around this. I think - That's your white lie. Yeah. What do you think of my new haircut? Awesome. Yeah, I'm not, I could always get better, but I do think it's a discipline that I care about. And I don't think it's ever going to be externally

1:01:18motivated. Yeah. Yeah.

1:01:21Brené Brown:Which is why I think it's more guilt than shame. I think that resonates. Yeah. I was, I was thinking about what my version of this is and it's, it's very similar. Although I would just say, I think I watched enough of the movie to, to have the debate with you, but to be honest, I didn't want those images in my head. So I turned it off. But I think my version of this is similar, which is I don't want to hurt somebody's feelings. And so I will sometimes withhold what could be a constructive criticism because I don't think they can handle it. And I'll just say, yeah, I thought that was great when I really thought it was OK or pretty good.

1:01:59And I've got some notes. Yeah.

1:02:01Brené Brown:I mean, I think now we're into like a different area that I think it's been a great conversation, I think, because we started with intentionally breaking rules to get a better grade, regardless of the rules, just cheating. and it gets, I don't know. I think my takeaway is Yoda. Do or don't, you know? I mean, you just have to make a decision. And I think what's also interesting is if you're interested in the rumble, the internal rumble, I think it's worth figuring out the messaging that speaks to you the most. And it doesn't have to be the same for all of us. It's about who I want to be, not about who I'm afraid that I could be.

1:02:47My reminders that work for me is, you know, I don't say to myself, hey, you know, let's skip working.

1:02:54Brené Brown:You know, I got to go work out today because I don't want to be whatever the word is. What works for me is I'm going to go work out today because I think of myself as an athlete. That's my identity, you know. And you have to earn that identity every day. On the senior tour, but nonetheless. It's a good conversation. I appreciate it. Right back at you.

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