Sports as Leadership Theater and Recognizing Near Enemies

21:30I

21:37I'm not sure.

21:40Brené Brown:I just, so I started scheduling like my hair appointments for six weeks out. I started scheduling all of my games, you know, my pickleball games. I started scheduling my downtime. And what it's meant is I play six days a week. I don't have to call my hair salon crying. I'm like, oh my God, please get me in. I've got to do something and, you know, and it's been good, but I'm still wrestling with there's got to be an easier way. Oh, okay. So the paradox in here that's jumping out for me is in order to gain freedom, you have to give up some control. In order to gain freedom.

22:25Yes. I'm not built that way. I want freedom and control and no discipline.

22:35Brené Brown:I think, you know what? I think we're pushing up against too. I think I've spent my whole life subscribing to the belief that the definition of freedom is no discipline.

22:53You know, and so now I want the freedom

22:57Brené Brown:to enjoy the last 20 or 30 years of my life in a very different way than what happened to my mom and my grandmother with dementia and frailty. And so I'm disciplined. I'm at the gym. I'm lifting weights. I'm working out. But I'm paying for my freedom with discipline. And I think there's a part of me that just... Rebels against that. Yes, that's the right word. It feels like an act of rebellion. Yes. Yes. But it's like, how many of us do things to be rebellious and we're the only one hurt by them?

23:45Do you know what I mean? It reminds me of that definition of resentment, that resentment is drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Oh, wow. Oh, I haven't heard that before. That's good. Yeah. So I do think the power of paradox is just like our conversation about rigidity and discipline.

24:08Brené Brown:I think the power of paradox is it introduces a relationship between two concepts that we didn't understand existed.

24:22Does that make sense to you? It does. I think the part that I struggle with, and this is one of the ways that Strong Ground really pushed me, is I just don't want to believe that the trade-offs are inherent. Like, okay, what's the integrative solution? How do we get the best of both worlds? So let's take a practical version of this in your life. so my solution to the paradox of you know i want basically i want to i want to control my time but i also want to have flexibility and freedom is uh paul graham's idea of maker days versus manager days so two days a week i basically fail my calendar with all the things that need to be done and then the other three days are pretty empty is the goal.

25:15It doesn't always work out that way. But that's the template that I try to work from. And so what I feel like I'm doing is I'm trading two days of freedom for the rest of the week of freedom. But that seems to me to be discipline and freedom

25:29Brené Brown:because Paul Graham's idea is a discipline practice. It is. You're right. I mean, I'm not sure there's a productivity, and I've looked at all of them, because rather than doing shit, I actually just watch YouTube videos on productivity schemes. I mean, come on. We can't even be friends if you haven't wasted 30 minutes doing that. Like, come on. I've never watched a productivity video in my life. Oh, God. And you're so freaking productive. I know. It makes me crazy how productive you are sometimes. But I do think Paul's idea of maker... versus manage, maker versus manage, right? Yeah. Maker versus manager.

26:14Yeah. Is it disciplined? Is it discipline? You're right. It is. It's a practice. It is a practice. And I guess what it does is it makes the paradox more tolerable, but it doesn't make it go away. No.

26:31Brené Brown:Because you're trading. When you say you're trading a couple days for more freedom, I still clearly see you in this heart of discipline versus freedom paradox. Discipline and freedom. Yeah, that's right. So you're just going to have to accept it then. I cannot. I mean, I am, you know, yeah, because it's like, I'm going to have to get underneath. I'm grateful that you used the word rebellion because I'm going to,

27:05I'm going to do some investigating in my coaching work to understand what that's about.

27:09Brené Brown:I think I need to do that. And I think that'll be helpful for me. So thank you. I think the thing about strong ground that the whole concept for me is a paradox in itself that I never thought about after I finished the book, which is strong ground offers tethering, connection, and stability, but it's also the platform for explosive movement and change. You know, on the back of the book, I think we wrote something like, when people tell me, when people ask me how far, fast, or high do you think we can go as a team or as an organization, the first question I find myself asking now is tell me about your relationship with the ground, then we can talk about that.

28:00Brené Brown:And I mean, I think that's why there's a chapter on the tush bush. I think that's why I think about Simone Biles and the physics of what she can do is all about her relationship with the ground. I think about, you know, springboard diving. Like, how great could a diver be if they had no relationship with a board? It's the single hardest part of the sport. Oh my God, is it really? The flipping and twisting and the rip entries, like all of that is far easier than timing and rhythm and balance on the board. So a diver's strong ground is the board? Absolutely. Or the platform. Yeah. If you're on tower.

28:48But that was one of the things that jumped out at me when I was reading the book is like, yeah, even these activities where like what we think is the defining strength is being up in the air. It's all about ground.

29:06Brené Brown:It's all about ground. And I think that's true in organizations as well. I think, you know, I talk a lot about the physics of the tush push and, you know, and all of Newton's rules, you know, and how they applied to the tush push and how it, you know, if you've got someone that can execute against it well, if you've got a team. So for those of y 'all listening that don't know what the tush push is, it's in American football, you've got an offensive team and a defensive team. And in a situation where the offensive team is what we'd call a short yardage situation, they only need to move the ball about a yard.

29:44Brené Brown:One of the ways they can do it, and it's kind of belongs in the tush push belongs in a family of moves that are like a quarterback sneak collection of moves. But what they'll literally do is ground down into the turf and literally just use their massive muscles and ground force to push the ball forward a yard. And the physics of it is really about the fact that the offense has a split second advantage. They go first. So you're up against the law of physics there. And, you know, their body weight And what's really interesting is the minute any player becomes detached from the ground, they're no longer contributing to the tush push because they've lost their ground force.

30:30Brené Brown:Right. And so I just thought, what would it mean for an organizational team to all be grounded not only in their values, but a clear understanding of the mission of their team or what they're trying to do and moving quickly? And, you know, that's Newtonian teamwork, you know.

30:53So we have to talk about sports metaphors a little bit more. Okay. Because I think you and I have both gotten a lot out of them, but also gotten pushback for using them. And I know sometimes when I use them, people say, well, wait, you're leaving out half the population. And it's led me to wonder, is it easier for a woman to bring sports metaphors to the table?

31:19Brené Brown:When people say that you are leaving out half the population, are they talking about women? They're assuming. It's feedback that often comes from women saying, you know, by default, women were less likely to grow up playing all the men's sports. They didn't grow up playing American football, for example. They're less likely to be super fans. and so, you know, they're not out golfing all the time, you know, so sometimes the metaphors don't translate for them. Yeah, yeah, I think, first of all, I think that's definitely becoming a very faulty assumption. Hashtag everyone watches women's sports. I love that.

31:59Brené Brown:And I think that if you're going to use, look, I use sports metaphors for a simple reason. I'm a big sports person. And I think that sports is leadership theater. I think in a single play, certainly over the course of a quarter of a game or a half a game or a whole game, you can actually watch. It's like looking under the hood at strategy, discipline, operations. You can look at the whole line from idea to execution. You can watch it play out. It's literally leadership theater. So I think when you use sports metaphors, and not only do I use a lot of them, I have an entire chapter explaining why I use them and why I think they're valuable.

32:53Brené Brown:I think you just have to pause to explain the sport. And I think, you know, when I use them, I usually will show videos or I'll walk people through and say they're two opposing teams. This team's trying to move the ball a yard. So they're using the physics of just, you know, five, 300 pound guys just to literally push. So I think it's not using, it's not just using them that's problematic or can be problematic. It's how they use them. And what can feel, I think, not great for people, myself included,

33:28Brené Brown:is making an assumption as a speaker that people know what you're talking about. But I don't think it's any different than when I've been in the audience and said, you know, hey, look, we've all read this book, right? We all are really familiar with, you know, so-and-so's work on, Linda Hall's work on digital transformation. Like, excuse me, row four, seat J. No, don't know what you're talking about. That's just, that's just sloppy. So a speaker could just take five seconds and say, listen, let me introduce you to Linda Hall. For those of you not familiar with her work, this is what she studies at Harvard.

34:02Brené Brown:This is what she's known for. And this is something that she taught that's really changed my thinking. And then you've done a service. And so I'm going to use sports metaphors. I'm going to try to be more mindful about how I use them. But I think they are super helpful because you'd have to observe a team for a year and put together tiny snippets that you could never do it. I love the way that you characterize it. Sports are leadership theater. You're absolutely right. They're teamwork theater. We get more vivid observation and more visible examples than we do in any other world. And I think also we get the discipline of people trying to learn the skills.

34:56Yes. And practice them at an elite level as opposed to, I mean, talk about paradox. People spend easily 95 % of their time as elite athletes practicing for a performance that's a tiny fraction of their career. Right. Which is the exact opposite of what most leaders and team members do at work.

35:23Brené Brown:Right. And I would say that they train for that 5 % and include in their training, they build in obstacles. Like, I remember when I think it was the Colorado's college football team in the U.S., Colorado, was training to play against Oregon, which has a notoriously loud stadium. So at practice, the coaches were all holding five-foot high speakers, blaring the Oregon song, you know, just to create. Leaders should be doing that. we should be training and skilling up and practicing. That might look like role plays, that might look like premortems, that might look like red teams. We should be creating some environments to make sure our ideas and our strategies hold in environments and cultures and contexts that we can't control.

36:35So important and so rarely done.

36:37Brené Brown:So rarely done. I mean, how long does a premortem take? I mean, you're the one that introduced me to the idea. Gary Klein is the one who put it on my radar. Okay. So Gary Klein's got it and we do them all the time. It's six months from now. This has gone to total shit. Why did it go to shit? What did we miss. And it has drastically changed how we think.

37:03It's amazing to me that these kinds of activities aren't more popular because I was with a leadership team recently and they had made what they all agreed was a disastrous strategic decision. And I was listening to them debrief it And I said, well, like, how many major decisions did you simulate before you went into the real thing? And they said none. Why did you expect to be good at this? The first time you had to make a big choice together as a group.

37:35Brené Brown:I mean, it's, yeah, it's, and you're going to, you know, I think one of the things you're going to come to every chapter you could talk about this in my book, and think again, in all your books, in all my books, the biggest unspoken resistance to intentionality is time. Always. We don't have time. We don't have time. You know, you think it's going to take time now. You think a 20-minute postmortem is going to be time? Cost, you know, cost you a lot. You wait, you know, a year from now when this has cost you, you know, $27 million in six months. The way that people discount future time is beyond problematic.

38:23Yes, invest the two hours this week to save yourself 200 hours over the next year.

38:30Brené Brown:Please, do it. That's so interesting. The devaluation of future time. Do you think that's predicated on the overwhelming stress of current time? It's, I mean, it's hard to imagine that that's not a major contributing factor. There's an economist you might know, David Leibson, who's studied this. He calls it hyperbolic discounting. and it's the just a dramatic decrease in the amount of weight that people put on you know the time they have even a week from now or a month from now as opposed to now and i've caught i think that that intensifies under pressure and stress

39:16okay to be continued i love this conversation we'll be back for a lot more to talk about we

39:23Brené Brown:That's more to talk about. All right. Thanks, Adam. I really appreciate it. And I'm really, let's just, maybe it will be fun to do this. What's something you're taking away from this conversation? Oh, I mean, I have multiple takeaways already. One is, I mean, just I'll pick one from where we just were, which is instead of fighting against time, I want to reframe time invested now as time savings later. I'm always I'm always kind of I feel like chipping away and saying no no you can squeeze more you know you could add one meeting to the calendar or you could prioritize one hour a week to you know to devote to rethinking and unlearning things and what this conversation is leading me to think is no let's take people into the future like you were saying let's talk to them about how much time they're going to waste cleaning up the giant mess they're going to make if they don't carve out time now.

40:22That's like, that's an investment, not a cost.

40:26Brené Brown:It is a total investment. And it's actually going back to the top of our conversation, possibly an investment in your own freedom, which I can get behind. And I am going to think about this hyperbolic devaluation. I do not think about future time because in future, I'm even in better shape than I am now. And I don't need as much time. and my house is already clean. I've got some serious ass magical thinking on future time. Confession. Stay tuned. We're going to dive into that in our next episode. Thanks, Adam. Thank you. We hope you're enjoying these conversations while we're on our summer hiatus.

41:08Again, just a reminder, we'll be back with brand new episodes of The Curiosity Shop on July 30th. Thank you for listening.

41:15Brené Brown:The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brene Brown Education and Research Group and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to The Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.