Time Scarcity and Pocket Presence

0:00Hey, it's Adam Grant. While The Curiosity Shop is on our summer hiatus, we're sharing a few conversations that we really love. Today's episode comes from a conversation we originally recorded during Brené's Dare to Lead series on Strong Ground. In it, we explore time scarcity and what it really means to be present as a leader. Spoiler alert, thumbs down on executive presence and thumbs up on pocket presence. We'll be back with brand new episodes of The Curiosity Shop on July 30th. Thank you for listening. Right now, get up to 15 % off select storage solutions. Put heavy-duty HDX totes to good use, protecting what's important to you.

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2:09Hi, everyone. I'm Brene Brown, and this is Dare to Lead. And joining us for more conversations around pretty much any topic you can think of, Adam Grant. Hi, Adam. Hey, Brene. I'm excited to be back.

2:24Brené Brown:I'm excited to have you back. It's going to take me a very long time to get my head around my devaluation of future time. Our last conversation, I fancy myself a realistic person, but I do not think of my future time with the same amount of discipline as I think about my time today. And it's really changing me. Wow, that's fascinating. Okay, I want to hear more. Why? I think right now, especially in my life, I'm feeling a lot of time scarcity. And one way, one of the things I need to do right now is get more disciplined in my time now. So it's not driving me to think tomorrow will be different.

3:29Brené Brown:So I think it's just a confounding variable for me, like is that the more scarcity I'm in with my time now, the more I project that the future is going to be easy. Is that a coping mechanism? For sure. So you're telling yourself this is only temporary. Yes, for sure. But this is year 10. So having done nothing to change it. Yeah, I'm getting... Hope is not a strategy. Is that the line? That is the line. I have very mixed feelings about that quote. So we should talk about it sometime because I'm not sure that it's right. But I'm pro-hope. I am radically anti-magical thinking. Yeah, maybe the correction to it should be hope alone is not a strategy.

4:23Hope alone. Hope can be motivation for finding a strategy. I think it's C.R. Schneider's work and hope as a... Agency and pathways. Get goal, agency, and pathway. So in some ways, hope is the ultimate strategy. if you're a Schneider follower, because that high levels of hopefulness are correlated with the ability to set a goal,

4:44Brené Brown:to determine a pathway, to be relentless about the pathway, even if the first one doesn't work out, and then to believe in your ability to do it. So in some ways, hope is actually a strategy if you define it with his definition, right? But I guess I think, I wonder, our last conversation makes me wonder, this is my exercise I'm going to do with my coach. When I am thinking, when I'm devaluating future time, what specifically does my world and my life look like in the future that's so radically different than today? And why aren't you creating it today? Damn. And why am I not creating it today?

5:34Brené Brown:So if you're joining us and you missed the last podcast, I think it's really worth going back to because we had a really interesting conversation about paradox and about the paradox of discipline and freedom, of productivity.

5:50Brené Brown:And I was explaining to Adam that I thought I always think it's going to be better moving forward. And tell us about the research you introduced from The Economist. Oh, this is Leibson on hyperbolic discounting. and the idea is that people value the same thing in the future much less than in the present. And sometimes with disastrous consequences, you give people the choice between, I'll give you$5 today or$50 in a year and most people prefer the$5 today. Yeah, because this is the magical thinking because I'm going to invest that$5 today and it's going to be$100, not$50 and really I'm just going to buy a Diet Coke and, you know, a power bar.

6:34Yeah. And also, I think there's often an identity disconnect of that future person is not me. Like the now is me. And I need to take care of the now. No, that's it. Oh my God. That's it. That's it. Future Brene is a different person. That's part of the challenge here, right? Yeah, future Brene doesn't need to be thoughtful about time. she's got all this shit figured out. I'm realizing as we talk this through, this is another difference between us. You live in the present and I live in the future. Say more. I think I've, when you were talking last episode about seeing me as a disciplined person, I don't feel particularly disciplined.

7:24I just, I spend probably half my time I'm thinking about tomorrow and next week and how am I going to work toward the goal I'm trying to accomplish and how am I going to solve a problem that someone I care about is facing. And it's great for momentum and motivation, but sometimes it means I'm not engaged in the moment because I'm too busy thinking ahead. And you do the opposite, I think, from what I'm hearing. I do. I do. I got some really interesting feedback about this difference between us. I'm now realizing a couple of years ago when I was doing a virtual event with a colleague and afterward I asked what I could do better.

8:03And she said, you should answer questions more like Brene. Jesus. And I said, oh, tell me more. What do you mean? And she said, Brene pauses and thinks about a question. and you get to experience her thinking out loud in real time. And she said, you just rattle off the answer. And it doesn't have the same curiosity or engagement or mindfulness to it. And I had a hard time parsing it in the moment. And now I'm realizing some of the time it's because I already thought through the questions that I expected people to ask and tried to prepare a helpful answer. And now, okay, that's my job to deliver that as opposed to the off-the-cuff random thought that I had.

8:56But it means I wasn't connecting to the audience, right? I was like, here, I'm just going to deliver to you my preplanned thought as opposed to I'm going to work through this with you. And I think that present focus is one of your superpowers. This is really weird and really interesting because I think all of our superpowers and our kryptonite are on the same continuum. Do you believe that? I think my favorite definition of a weakness is a strength overused or misused. Okay, so yes, I agree. So I think it's really interesting because my team gets feedback every now and then, the people that help me get to events and plan them and execute against them and do all

9:59Brené Brown:the really hard, tedious work of making sure they're successful, that the event organizer is not pleased with the fact that they've been told by my team, don't bother sending the questions. She's not going to read them.

10:18And I think it's because I don't want to think about them in advance. I want to be able to, if I'm in a fireside chat with a CEO and the CEO asks me a question,

10:37Brené Brown:I want to be able to follow up with the 30 questions to that person that I'm going to need to understand better to answer. And I think there's some value in modeling that. Like I even put one of those in the book, you know, in Strong Ground, I'm like, I don't know the answer to that. And they're like, well, here's this variable. I'm like, I still don't know. And I think sometimes there's really great learning in that. And I think that I've given my team different direction now, which is, if this is something that's deep in my content area, great. If you think you've never seen this question come by, I may want to see it in advance.

11:18Yeah. So I probably have some really important learning to do there, too. But you know what's so interesting about this is I think in your case, it's really easy to do the same thing with a different framing, right? To say, hey, what I'm hearing is you want a sense of predictability and control. Yes. And we're happy to give that to you, but we also want to preserve Brene's ability to be in the moment. Yeah. I just don't read questions in advance. And it can make people really nervous.

11:54Brené Brown:And they have to be okay with sometimes they'll ask me something and I'll say, I actually don't know. And then I'm not sure that's always what they think they paid for. This is the tension between they're excited to learn with you, but they also want to learn from you. And if you take off your expert hat too much, they're dissatisfied. Yeah. And you know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of my husband, Steve, who he has taught so many medical students and residents and pediatrics over the years. And he said one of the most difficult things is to teach them is when you're working with parents, you know, the patient is the child.

12:39Brené Brown:There are so many occasions when a parent will look at you, you know, all welled up and said, you know, I love that you shared how you're thinking about this as a parent. I love that you talked about the decisions that you would make. And this is why I come here. And this is, you know, you're amazing. and there are other times when I came here because you damn well better be God and you better tell me right now what to do. I don't give a shit what, you know, like, you know, it's like sometimes they just want the all-knowing God when they're scared and sometimes they want the empathetic kind of, and it's something that pediatric residents really have a hard time in when they make, they'll know when they make it wrong, right?

13:23Brené Brown:Yeah. But it's, you know, sometimes they want us to know everything and then the other time they're so grateful that there were human beings and we don't know the answers, but we've got great questions. And what we study is how to be curious and ask the right questions. But if people are in scarcity, they want the expert with the answer. And I have to say, like, just if you're listening, I think I have a lot to offer in terms of how to get underneath what you're really worried about and what's keeping you up at night and how to ask the right questions. You and I can both like source research, but I don't think the definition of a great leader is someone who has all the answers.

14:09Brené Brown:You know, it's just questions.

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15:35This connects so well to one of my favorite topics in Strong Ground. Uh-oh, I'm curious. Which is presence. Oh. So one of the things, we have a lot to talk about here, But one of the things that you excel at, and clearly Steve does too, is a form of presence that I think with it brings a high degree of situational awareness. And it's different from the ways that we normally talk about presence in leadership. So I think the kickoff question for this conversation has to be, tell me what you have against executive presence. Oh, my God. No, I'm going to rat you out. I'm going to rat you out right off the bat.

16:28So, oh, man, where do I start? So sports metaphors. We talked about this last episode. We both use them.

16:37Brené Brown:We both love them. We both believe that sports can be an amazing kind of leadership theater where you can really point to where in the chain things go wrong from ideation, strategy, execution, evaluation. You know, it's helpful. I think we're both committed to doing better jobs with a setup so that everyone can follow the metaphor because that's probably key to being able to use them. but I'll tell people who are listening right now actually what happened is I was raised by a father who was a football player played in college, played in high school he was on the O-line he was someone who would protect the quarterback when the offense had the ball and I grew up with a really interesting understanding of this term pocket presence and in American football, the quarterback, who's the kind of the leader of the offense, who immediately gets the ball, runs with it, throws it, needs to move the ball down the field to score a goal, to score a touchdown.

17:48Brené Brown:Pocket presence is how you evaluate a quarterback's ability in this pocket. So when the play starts, all the big guys protect the quarterback. They form a little pocket around him so that he can figure out what he's going to do with the ball. And a quarterback that has good pocket presence is someone who has a very strong internal clock, anticipatory awareness, situational awareness, major, major trust building with the line of folks that are protecting him. And so through a series of events, I talked to Steve Sarkeesian, they coach at University of Texas football, hook them horns, that's my team, about what is pocket presence?

18:39Because I was very curious if, I was really curious about the skill set that made up pocket presence. And it started with a conversation. I was on

18:50Brené Brown:the sideline of a game and I was standing with Emmanuel Acho, who played for the Longhorns and ended up playing professional ball. And now as a writer and a speaker doing really interesting work, and I looked at him during the game and I said, hey, how would you define pocket presence? I'm curious. And he said, the ability to read the entire field without seeing it and the trust in your team to get something done, move the ball down the field. And I thought, man, I think what leaders need today is pocket presence. and I was talking about with my team and they said, is that like executive presence?

19:34Brené Brown:And I was like, Jesus, I hate executive presence. But I was scared because there are a lot of people who study executive presence, you know? So I texted Adam, I'm going to tell on you, if you think, if I'm going down, if I'm going down on this sinking executive presence ship, I'm taking your ass with me, dude. Happy to come along for the ride. Yeah. We can both swim, luckily. So I texted you. What did I say in the text? I can't remember. Let me see. I'm going to try to find it. It's in here somewhere. I read it. Hold on. It was funny. Wait, I'm going to look. I have it marked. Oh, there it is.

20:13Brené Brown:When I texted, yes. When I texted my friend Adam Grant, I'll read from the book, saying, I'm going to talk about the problem with executive presence in this book. And I asked his thoughts. The first thing I got was the dreaded three-dot iPhone response. Like, I'm like, oh, my God, he's writing something. It's taking a long time. Maybe he's going to be mad that I'm taking down. And then after waiting, because my thought was like, maybe this is like sacred territory in the leadership world. Finally, your text came up and it said, yes, please. Executive Presence is cover for discriminating against women and introverts.

20:50Brené Brown:And then half a second later, he followed up with, and while you're at it, Could you do a smackdown of charisma too?

21:00I was like, that's why we're friends. I don't like executive presence because I don't, I think the world right now, especially on the political stage, is full of people who would check, tick all of the executive presence boxes,

21:16Brené Brown:you know, like blustery and, you know, your tie and your, you know, commanding. and they're saying nothing. And what they are saying is terrible. And so I don't know that executive presence, to me, I don't know what that means. To me, it is a prescriptive way of how you think a leader looks and sounds. Where you and I both agree that the quiet nerd in the meeting, he or she normally has the best answers of the group, right? Yeah, this captures so effectively what's bothered me about executive presence for a long time is it's all style, no substance. Executive presence is all about style. And it says nothing about whether there's any substance behind it.

22:12Yeah, so do you look the part? Do you act the part? Do you talk the part? But what are you actually saying? What's your contribution to the meeting? not clear. And I think, I guess, we haven't talked about this yet other than that little text exchange, but I've seen it. I have seen it used as an excuse to say, well, we can't promote her yet because she's not ready. She doesn't have the executive presence we're looking for. So what does that mean? Talk to me about what she's missing. And the most consistent answer I get when that happens with women is, well, there's just an air of confidence that we're looking for.

22:52Bravado. Like, I'm sorry, how is that relevant to being an effective leader? Is she competent? Is she caring? Has she demonstrated an ability to live by your organization's values and make other people around her better? Yes, yes, and yes. Promoter. Yeah, I agree 100%.

23:13Brené Brown:And I think you have to go back to a very dangerous leadership origin story to understand how the quote unquote style was first formulated. And I do think it's really hard for women. And I do think it's hard for black and brown folks. I do think it's hard for introverts. I do think it's hard for LGBTQ people. The definition, I think, of presence has been built on a leader from a 1950s movie. You know, and I, and yeah, I, and yeah, I just, pocket presence to me is more interesting because, you know, I was really like when I was thinking about it, the ability, you know, anticipatory awareness, strategic thinking, critical awareness, internal clock, which we never talk about temporal awareness and leadership.

24:20Brené Brown:And it's so huge. It's so complex. and it was interesting because you've read the book now, so you know, but when I had to guess how much time a quarterback has in the pocket before the defense is on top of them, do you know what I guessed? 40 seconds.

24:42Wow. What would you have guessed? What would you have guessed? I mean, I spent way too much time on fantasy football as a kid. Okay, got it. I would have counted three seconds probably or four seconds max. It's usually 2.8 to 3.5 seconds before they're clobbered by, you know, 1 ,200 pounds of fury and rage. And so I was trying to think, well, does the metaphor work, you know, or does it work to think about leaders and pocket presence? But I do because I don't think you have 1 ,200 pounds of fury coming at you as a leader and have three seconds.