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

In this solo episode of The Curiosity Shop, Brené Brown turns to questions and comments from her LinkedIn community to explore what it means to protect our humanity and attention in a world moving faster than ever. She digs into where AI can support our work without replacing human discernment, why "work slop" costs leaders real cognitive bandwidth, and how leaders can tell the difference between polished output and actual understanding. Brené also unpacks Aiko Bethea's idea that transformation requires grief, reflects on what her conversation with Rebecca Lowe revealed about preparation and presence, and explores how pausing and active listening are essential parts of meaningful conversation. Along the way, she explains why she wears two watches and shares the story of getting fired from a house-cleaning job… and the unexpected lesson it taught her about why shiny can never replace mastery. Brené Brown — Brené Brown, LinkedIn (Profile) Adam Grant — Adam Grant, LinkedIn (Profile) AI, Commencement Speeches, and Why Human Thinking Still Matters — Brené Brown & Adam Grant, June 11, 2026, The Curiosity Shop (Podcast) The Rise, Fall, and Surprising Survival of WordPerfect — Jonathan Scott, January 15, 2023, Retro Tech Reads (Post) Why Do Podcasters Wear Headphones While Sitting Next To Each Other? — Ray Malik, January 25, 2025, How-To Geek (Article) AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity — Kate Niederhoffer et al., September 22, 2025, Harvard Business Review On Death and Dying — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 1969, Macmillan (Book) Stages of Grief Portrayed on the Internet: A Systematic Analysis and Critical Appraisal — Kate Anne Avis et al., 2021, Frontiers in Psychology Strong Ground: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human Spirit — Brené Brown, 2025, Random House (Book) Multitasking: Switching Costs — American Psychological Association, 2006, APA Center for Humane Technology — Center for Humane Technology, humanetech.com Brené with Father Richard Rohr on Breathing Under Water, Falling Upward, and Unlearning Certainty, Part 1 of 2 — Brené Brown, 2022, Unlocking Us (Podcast) Brené with Father Richard Rohr on Breathing Under Water, Falling Upward, and Unlearning Certainty, Part 2 of 2 — Brené Brown, 2022, Unlocking Us (Podcast) The Two Halves of Life With Brené Brown — Center for Action and Contemplation, 2024, Everything Belongs (Podcast) Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life — Richard Rohr, 2024, John Wiley & Sons (Book) Kairos: The Right Moment or Occasion — Barbara Baert, Institute for Advanced Study The History of the Elgin National Watch Company — Times Ticking, timesticking.com Aiko Bethea — Aiko Bethea, aikobethea.com RARE Coaching & Consulting — Aiko Bethea, rarecoaching.net Brené with Aiko Bethea on Inclusivity at Work: The Heart of Hard Conversations — Brené Brown, 2020, Dare to Lead (Podcast) Stop Outsourcing Your Judgement: Brené Brown in Conversation with Leadership Coach Aiko Bethea — Brené Brown, April 21, 2026, Fast Company Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams — Amy C. Edmondson, 1999, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2) The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth — Amy C. Edmondson, 2018, Wiley (Book) Systems Thinking Resources (The Iceberg Model) — The Donella Meadows Project, Academy for Systems Change Rebecca Lowe Bio & Career Accomplishments — FOX Sports, FOX Sports Brené with President Barack Obama on Leadership, Family, and Service — Brené Brown, 2020, Dare to Lead (Podcast) Brené with Brandi Carlile on Music, Mysticism, and Broken Horses — Brené Brown, 2021, Unlocking Us (Podcast) Brené with Bono on Songs of Surrender and Carrying the Weight of Our Contradictions, Part 1 of 2 — Brené Brown, 2023, Unlocking Us (Podcast) Dare to Lead Hub — Brené Brown, brenebrown.com Brené with Barrett Guillen on The Hardest Feedback I've Ever Received, Part 1 of 2 — Brené Brown, 2021, Dare to Lead (Podcast) The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant — YouTube (Channel) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:30Brené Brown?

  Welcome to The Curiosity Shop.

• 1:31Speaker 04

  A show from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 1:40Brené Brown?

  Hi, everybody. 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.

• 2:22Brené Brown?

  So always getting tons of comments, questions, really productive, helpful feedback on The Curiosity Shop. 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.

• 3:06Brené Brown?

  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?" And I'm going to start here. I am not the czar of AI ethics, the overlordess 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

• 3:50Brené Brown?

  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? 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.

• 4:34Brené Brown?

  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. Most of us have been using some kind of word processing, you know, whether it was Microsoft Word or... I miss WordPerfect, but I'm old. I mean, as an academic, like it was literally one day

• 5:17Brené Brown?

  you came into the office and all of the WordPerfect 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? And one thing I would also be aware of is when I have put a very beautifully, I thought, crafted paragraph into AI just to see what would happen,

• 6:02Brené Brown?

  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 on the inside and fluffy, but it's nothing. That's how it reads. So just a thought. Okay, this is from Christie, also on LinkedIn. Oh, I thought I'd share this. "Dearest Brene, your work means so much to me." Thank you. Giving you a heart. "Seeing your ears filled with technology

• 6:45Brené Brown?

  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. 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

• 7:30Brené Brown?

  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. 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.

• 8:13Brené Brown?

  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.

• 8:56Brené 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...

• 9:19Brené Brown?

  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. I don't know how to use that word, giving feedback to someone without sending them straight into a shame spiral.

• 10:02Brené Brown?

  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.

• 10:46Brené Brown?

  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. It's a lot of bandwidth. 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 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

• 11:31Brené Brown?

  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, 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, 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

• 12:14Brené Brown?

  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. That cost me 40 bucks. Because this thing I'm still working on, now I gotta go here. Now I'm in my feelings and they're hard and, you know, and I have to make calls and can I hand it off to my sister and it's going to cost them 40 bucks. I think if you think about cognitive spend during the day and protecting our thinking,

• 12:56Brené Brown?

  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 1050 to wonder if I'm a sucky leader because I haven't trained them how to use it well. 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.

• 13:40Speaker 00

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• 14:13Speaker 01

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• 15:27Speaker 02

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• 15:43Brené Brown?

  Okay, Julie, what's up with the two watches? Are you doing double time? 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 rep publication 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

• 16:23Brené Brown?

  person, I think about my life in both chronos and kairos. And so chronos 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 and then I can record my workout times and I have most notifications turned off, but I really do love the chronos of it. I like that it's quantitative, it measures stuff for me, it's sequential.

• 17:03Brené Brown?

  And then this is my grandmother's Elgin watch from the 50s and this is kairos. This is another word for time. Like chronos 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 double time, I'm keeping chronos and kairos.

• 17:46Brené Brown?

  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 paraclocks because it's a paradox.

• 18:03Brené Brown?

  Okay.

• 18:07Brené Brown?

  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. And if you've never listened to a coaching session IRL, like in real life or in real time, this is a coaching session.

• 18:49Brené Brown?

  It was so hard. I was in tears. I was so worn out after it. You could have heard a pen drop in the room, but it was such a beautiful example of what a skilled coach like Iko looks like. So this is a question from that episode. Iko 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. 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.

• 19:34Brené Brown?

  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.

• 19:50Brené Brown?

  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. Iko Bathia said that transformation requires grief. Lauren is asking, is there really space in organizations for grief? And if there's not a space for grief, are transformations even possible? I think this is a question of our time. I think

• 20:26Brené Brown?

  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, you know, 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. So you're not going to get a different answer from me,

• 21:11Brené Brown?

  and you're not going to, you know, she's, she's taught me so much about this. And I thought I'd give an example, maybe, oof, this is hard.

• 21:21Brené Brown?

  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. And it's in that deconstruction, that breaking of old systems, and then rebuilding new systems and fighting the human

• 22:05Brené Brown?

  urge to rebuild what we've just broken, that's where the grief comes. And, 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. 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.

• 22:48Brené Brown?

  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 addressed the problem, but nothing underwater, you're, good luck, two weeks maybe. 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.

• 23:34Brené Brown?

  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?

• 24:11Brené 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

• 24:55Brené Brown?

  and the person that holds the most power and authority,

• 25:00Brené Brown?

  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.

• 25:17Brené Brown?

  And there's grief attached to that for me. And

• 25:24Brené Brown?

  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. Mine concretize faster because of my position. But

• 25:49Brené Brown?

  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, you know? 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. 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.

• 26:34Brené Brown?

  It's a beautiful question, Lauren. Okay. Moving to the podcast with Rebecca Lo, who led the largest soccer 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. I mean, just for all of you, I'm a LinkedIn.

• 27:18Brené Brown?

  I know people say, but 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 wanted to say I really appreciate, in, in real time, in both Cronos and Kairos, I do both clocks, really appreciate the thoughtfulness and the productive challenge and the pushes and the I disagree.

• 27:48Brené Brown?

  And every now and then, someone's shitty to me or shitty to another person. And, you know, that's life, 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 in that while Rebecca has presence, you cannot underestimate her preparation. I mean, I'm going to tell you, if you, if you did a deep dive on her prep, it's insane.

• 28:33Brené Brown?

  And she, she does it, and she's done it for years. The Olympics, Premier League football, the World Cup. She uses 10% of it, but she doesn't care because she feels grounded and it gives her permission to have fun and let loose. 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 in 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.

• 29:17Brené Brown?

  That's where presence becomes more than confidence. It becomes capacity." Wow, oh, preparation builds capacity, not just presence. Let's go. Carlos asks, "Do you think the best preparation ultimately creates the freedom to be less attached to the preparation itself?" Yes. Listen to this question. This is just, I hurt people, not always, but here. "Do you think the best preparation ultimately creates the freedom to be less attached to the preparation itself?" Yes. Because when I am only moderately prepared,

• 30:01Brené Brown?

  I am white knuckling the notes. I am praying while people are talking. I'm literally like, dear God, don't let them go into this area that was on page seven of seven of my prep notes, and I only got to page five, you know? Yes, it allows for active listening. It allows to go off script. It's fun. I'm grounded. From this place of strong ground, I can go anywhere. I feel stable enough to be explosive. I feel tethered enough to reach. This is it. I'm going to read Carlos's line again. "The best preparation ultimately creates the freedom to be less attached to the preparation itself." Paradox. Carlos, winner. Love it.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Real value shows up in reliability you don't have to second guess, like a set of Firestone All-Season tires. They're designed to deliver confidence inspiring wet weather traction and a quieter ride, no matter the road. Season after season. Firestone All-Season tires. For durability you can count on, just like people count on you. Firestone. Always dependable. Since 1900.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Purchase new carpet from The Home Depot and get it installed for free right now. Shop the stylish choices and simple pricing of carpet from Home Decorator's Collection, Traffic Master, or Life Proof with Pet Proof Technology, and see for yourself why nobody beats our prices. Enjoy new carpet with free installation right now at The Home Depot. Offer valid October 15 through November 1, 2026. Exclusions apply. For licenses, see homedepot.com/license numbers.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal from your local Toyota dealer. Make a smart buy on an all-wheel drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or get a Corolla sedan packed with the latest features, advanced tech, and head-turning style. Or take a test drive in two of Toyota's most popular SUVs, the spacious, family-friendly Grand Highlander and adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid and plug-in hybrid models available across the lineup, plus efficient all-electrics like the BZ, BZ Woodland, and all-wheel drive CHR, you can drive your way and skip the pump. And long after you leave the lot, your Toyota keeps delivering with legendary resale value, built on a reputation for quality and reliability.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  So when it's time for your next Toyota, you could trade in for more. From a great deal today to a great value tomorrow, a Toyota is right for you. Shop toyota.com for deals and details, or stop by your local Toyota dealer today. Toyota, let's go places.

• 32:49Brené Brown?

  We have two left. One cracks me up. Okay. This is from Arti, referencing the Rebecca Lowe podcast. Preparation can create a kind of freedom in the moment because you're no longer using your attention to figure out what comes next. You can listen, respond, and stay present. How much of what we call presence is actually the result of preparation? Okay, so I want to, three Ps here. I want to talk about presence. I want to talk about preparation. And I want to talk about pausing. I do think a lot of what we call presence is really the result of preparation.

• 33:34Brené Brown?

  I also think if I look back 40 years on my career, I have seen and felt in my bones presence in equal measure in both preparation. As someone who's been interviewed a lot and done a lot of interviews, there is a connection that only happens as a result of the freedom that preparation gives you. There is also of equal importance to preparation because you can't prepare for everything. And if you work from the mindset that you can, you can,

• 34:18Brené Brown?

  you need to be prepared for everything, you lose, you actually lose chiros. Remember that the definition of chiros is a vulnerable, volatile opening. It's deep time and God time. You can't prepare for it, and it's just something that unfolds at a different level, a different spiritual level, and that it's about seizing that. And so 50% of the presence I have felt and experienced was prep, but 50% was pause. I'll add a fourth one to that, a fourth P, which is maybe playback. So I've been in interviews and I've been interviewing people

• 35:03Brené Brown?

  where something just comes up and we find ourselves down a rabbit hole that we didn't plan for. There was no way to prep for it. It's a beautiful moment. I can think off the bat, conversations with President Obama, with Brandi Carlile, with Richard Rohr, with Bono. I can think about how Iko coaches in that moment in that podcast with me. The pause as someone who is doing the interviewing, and I got a, I get a lot of shit for it. I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I'm not going to kid you. A lot of people called on Lockiness and Dare to Lead,

• 35:45Brené Brown?

  the pause casts, because people would say in the beginning, oh, man, I thought my ears went out, or I, I thought that, I thought I hit stop on my phone, but it was just you being, doing nothing. I'm thinking, folks, the pause is, I need to think about this. And, and what it really says to me is, I don't want to be thinking about my response while you're talking. I want to stay in deep, active listening while you're talking. Then I'm going to need a beat to think about what I want to say back. And the pause is another form of presence, in my opinion.

• 36:27Brené Brown?

  And some people just edit the shit out of those on podcasts. And I'm not for it. Because I am not interested in conversations that don't look and feel like human conversations. I think the playback is also a tool. It's a tool that we teach when we do Dare to Lead transformation. So.

• 36:56Brené Brown?

  Barrett might say, hey, look, I'm really curious about the all hands that you want to have today at 4:30. And, you know, one of my really big concerns is we need to have some very strategic communications with individuals before this all hands. And do you think we're going to have time? Because here's what I'm worried about. And I'm thinking about it. And then I say, can I play back what I think you're asking? And she'll say, yeah, I say, we've got this meeting scheduled at 4:30. We're going to make some announcements. The ethos for how we work is no one ever learns something new that affects them directly

• 37:38Brené Brown?

  in a group setting. So we want to reach out to some individuals and have one on one conversations with them, answer questions that we can answer before we have a group meeting where we share information. And she'll say, yeah, that's exactly what I'm thinking. I'm like, okay, that's helpful. And then we'll think about it. Maybe this brings us full circle to Ico AI and discernment, my paraclocks. Maybe it just comes back to what's best about us and what's best about the human spirit is our own discernment, our own pause, our own deep thinking and our own deep time. Those are the things I

• 38:23Brené Brown?

  think we need to protect above all else. Yeah. Okay, our last question is from Penny and Penny asks, have you ever been fired? If so, what did you learn? Yes, I have been fired. So I worked my way through school and I had a lot of weird jobs. Bartended waited tables for a decade. I worked at drugstores, retail stores. I didn't have a car. So however I could get the in San Antonio, it's called the bus is called the Via Via, wherever I could get the Via Via. So I had a lot of jobs. I picked up a last minute job cleaning

• 39:07Brené Brown?

  houses because tuition was due and I was either going to make some money and pay tuition or I was going to get kicked out of school. And I thought I would do a really above and beyond job. So this person had hardwood floors and I pledged them all. I went through an entire can of pledge and pledged all the hardwood floors. She came home and bruised her tailbone. She fell and it wasn't just a fall. She said she slid for 10 to 12 feet, which I think is exaggerating because I don't know that she had 10 or 12 feet of

• 39:47Brené Brown?

  runway, that she slid for 10 to 12 feet and then did a gainer, which again, I questioned and landed on her ass. And then I was fired from cleaning houses. And so, yes, I have been fired. And what did I learn? Actually, I did learn something from this, which is shiny can never replace mastery. You can make something really shiny. But sometimes shiny is really dangerous and shiny often hides a lack of actually knowing what you're doing. And I actually had no idea what I was doing because I grew up in a house that had like

• 40:27Brené Brown?

  linoleum floors and carpet. And so I had never really been in anywhere that had hardwood floors. And so instead of like calling my mom and asking, or I don't know what I would have done back then. There's no Google or anything. I don't think there was, I don't even know if there was an internet. So yeah, had a lot of weird jobs. And I do remember going home that day on the Via Via bus, thinking to myself, crushed it. I literally crushed it. I could see her tailbone. Shut up, Aaron. I could see myself in that floor when I left. Like, I'm going to get so many jobs cleaning houses that I maybe quit my other

• 41:08Brené Brown?

  jobs. But the answer was, that's not what I crushed. All right. Well, on that note, thanks for joining the solo episode of the Curiosity Shop. I'm going into my teaching intensive. Adam's finishing his up. I think he may do a solo episode. We'll see. Appreciate it. And all of these old episodes will be linked on YouTube. You can go back and watch any of them. Again, thank you for the great challenge, pushback, debate, discourse. Love everything you're putting on LinkedIn and appreciate it. Makes me better. Makes us better. The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to The Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

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