Book Review: Dare To Lead by Brene Brown
It has been a while since I’ve reviewed a Brene Brown book. For those of you fairly new to my book reviews – I Love Brene Brown. I haven’t read a book of hers that I wouldn’t recommend to someone. I read them, then I listen to them as audiobooks. I’m super excited that she has restarted her podcasts so that I can listen to them on my walks and I’m pretty sure that if we ever met, we would instantly become best friends. With all that it should be no surprise that I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.
If you have read any of Brown’s other books especially, The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly or Rising Strong, this book takes the key points from those books and shows how they are useful in a work setting. Because I found Brown’s work after I retired, I had been hesitant to read this book because I wasn’t sure how I would relate to it. I didn’t need to worry about that because this book is about working with other people in general and while it is geared toward a corporate or work environment, relating to other people is a skill that you can use in all areas of your life. I will say that because I have read most of Brown’s other books there were some ideas in this book that I had heard before, but I found it good to revisit them.
The book is broken into 4 parts: Rumbling with Vulnerability, Living Into our Values, Braving Trust and Learning to Rise.
The first section of the book, Rumbling with Vulnerability, is where she talks about the importance of vulnerability and how it shows up in our lives and at work. This is the also the longest part of the book. She breaks this part into five sections: The moment and the myths, The call to courage, The Armory, Shame and Empathy, and Curiosity and Grounded Confidence.
My favorite section here was the one on Shame and Empathy. She starts by defining the difference between shame and guilt and then goes on to show the difference between shame and empathy. She really delves into the nuances of empathy. She starts by saying that “empathy is not connecting to an experience; it’s connecting to the emotions that underpin the experience”.
She then explains five empathy skills:
Skill 1: To see the world as others see it, or perspective taking
Skill 2: To be nonjudgemental
Skill 3: To understand another person’s feelings.
Skill 4: To communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings
Skill 5: Mindfulness
Brown is a wonderful storyteller; I think that is why I enjoy her books and podcasts so much. She uses examples from her life to illustrate her points and it really brings her ideas to life. It makes the content in her books very relatable.
Before I start dissecting every section of the book, I want to mention Part Three of the book, Braving Trust. There is so much good stuff in this part of the book on being trustworthy, and gaining others trust and then not breaking it. She talks about “The Vault” in another one of her books, Braving the Wilderness, and she talks about it again in this book. My big takeaway from this part is that we must remember that other people’s stories are not ours to share. To be trustworthy we need to know what stories should remain “in the vault”. I don’t feel that I’m doing a very good job of explaining this so you might just need to read this section of the book.
My other takeaway from this book is to remember “that everyone is doing the best that they can”. When you are working with people and you have this mindset, that everyone is doing the best that they can at that time with the tools that they have, it changes your perspective on that person and on how you can better help and interact with them.
If you are doing anything in your life where you are working with other people and especially if you have any kind of leadership role in your life, and I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t fit into one or both of these categories, I highly recommend this book. It is easy to read, relatable and there are so many small things that you can take away from this book that will help your interactions with others. If you like audiobooks this one is an excellent audiobook narrated by Brown.
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You’ve now convinced me to read this book and stop having it just sit there in my office bookshelf!