Top highlights from Dare to Lead
Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid.
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Science is not the truth. Science is finding the truth. When science changes its opinion, it didnt lie to you. It learned more.
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The near enemy of love is attachment. Attachment masquerades as love. It says, I will love this person (because I need something from them). Or, Ill love you if youll love me back. Ill love you, but only if you will be the way I want. This isnt the fullness of love. Instead there is attachmentthere is clinging and fear. True love allows, honors, and appreciates; attachment grasps, demands, needs, and aims to possess.
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Choosing to be curious is choosing to be vulnerable because it requires us to surender to uncertainty. We have to ask questions, admit to not knowing, risk being told that we shouldn't be asking, and, sometimes, make discoveries that lead to discomfort.
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good friends arent afraid of your light. They never blow out your flame and you dont blow out theirseven when its really bright and it makes you worry about your own flame.
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I am responsible for holding you accountable in a respectful and productive way. Im not responsible for your emotional reaction to that accountability
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People will do almost anything to not feel pain, including causing pain and abusing power;
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Ive learned that power is not bad, but the abuse of power or using power over others is the opposite of courage; its a desperate attempt to maintain a very fragile ego.
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In fact, research shows that the process of labeling emotional experience is related to greater emotion regulation and psychosocial well-being.
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when Im prioritizing being liked over being free, I was much sweeter but less authentic. Now Im kinder and less judgmental. But also firmer and more solid. Occasionally salty.
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The more difficult it is for us to articulate our experiences of loss, longing, and feeling lost to the people around us, the more disconnected and alone we feel.
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Comparison is the crush of conformity from one side and competition from the otherits trying to simultaneously fit in and stand out. Comparison says, Be like everyone else, but better.
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But those who are able to distinguish between a range of various emotions do much, much better at managing the ups and downs of ordinary existence than those who see everything in black and white.
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The idea that regret is a fair but tough teacher can really piss people off. No regrets has become synonymous with daring and adventure, but I disagree. The idea of no regrets doesnt mean living with courage, it means living without reflection. To live without regret is to believe we have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with our lives.
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When someone shares their hopes and dreams with us, we are witnessing deep courage and vulnerability. Celebrating their successes is easy, but when disappointment happens, its an incredible opportunity for meaningful connection.
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This is one reason we need to dispel the myth that empathy is walking in someone elses shoes. Rather than walking in your shoes, I need to learn how to listen to the story you tell about what its like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesnt match my experiences.
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When we reject the truth of someones storythe ultimate failure of story stewardshipits often because weve stealthily centered ourselves in their story, and the narrative takeover is about protecting our ego, behavior, or privilege. The less diverse our lived experiences, the more likely we are to find ourselves struggling with narrative takeover or narrative tap-out.
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Communicating our expectations is brave and vulnerable. And it builds meaningful connection and often leads to having a partner or friend who we can reality-check with.
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In a world where perfectionism, pleasing, and proving are used as armor to protect our egos and our feelings, it takes a lot of courage to show up and be all in when we can't control the outcome. It also takes discipline and self-awareness to understand what to share and with whom. Vulnerability is not oversharing, it's sharing with people who have earned the right to hear our stories and our experiences. Vulnerability is not weakness; it's our greatest measure of courage.
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There are too many people in the world today who decide to live disappointed rather than risk feeling disappointment. This can take the shape of numbing, foreboding joy, being cynical or critical, or just never really fully engaging.
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Worrying and anxiety go together, but worry is not an emotion; its the thinking part of anxiety. Worry is described as a chain of negative thoughts about bad things that might happen in the future.
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Empathy is not relating to an experience, its connecting to what someone is feeling about an experience.
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For anxiety and dread, the threat is in the future. For fear, the threat is nowin the present.
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Resentment is the feeling of frustration, judgment, anger, better than, and/ or hidden envy related to perceived unfairness or injustice. Its an emotion that we often experience when we fail to set boundaries or ask for what we need, or when expectations let us down because they were based on things we cant control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how theyre going to react.
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Additionally, we have compelling research that shows that language does more than just communicate emotion, it can actually shape what were feeling. Our understanding of our own and others emotions is shaped by how we perceive, categorize, and describe emotional experiencesand these interpretations rely heavily on language. Language
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I once heard theologian Rob Bell define despair as the belief that tomorrow will be just like today. When we are in struggle and/or experiencing pain, despairthat belief that there is no end to what were experiencingis a desperate and claustrophobic feeling. We cant figure a way out of or through the struggle and the suffering.
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Taking pleasure in someone elses failings, even if that person is someone we really dislike, can violate our values and lead to feelings of guilt and shame. But, make no mistake, its seductive, especially when were sucked into groupthink.
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cultural example of narrative takeover is the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a life-affirming accountability movement to call attention to the violence being perpetrated against Black people. But rather than listening, learning, and believing the stories of injustice, systemic racism, and pain, groups of white people centered themselves with all lives matter and blue lives matter. There was never a narrative of white lives and police lives dont matter in this movement. This was an attempt to, once again, decenter Black lives and take over the narrative.
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The self-righteous scream judgments against others to hide the noise of skeletons dancing in their own closets. JOHN MARK GREEN
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I firmly believe that regret is one of our most powerful emotional reminders that reflection, change, and growth are necessary. In our research, regret emerged as a function of empathy. And, when used constructively, its a call to courage and a path toward wisdom.
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I could never step lightly enough or run fast enough to get away from the cracking, so I made everything around me so loud that it drowned out the sound.
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Its dangerous to put your self-worth in other peoples hands. Again, no matter what you do, you cant control other peoples responses. These are recipes for disappointment and hurt.
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Each persons grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesnt mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining. Professor Neimeyers
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Across our research, nostalgia emerged as a double-edged sword, a tool for both connection and disconnection. It can be an imaginary refuge from a world we don't understand and a dog whistle used to resist important growth in families, organizations, and the broader culture and to protect power, including white supremacy.
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Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture
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Cognitive empathy, sometimes called perspective taking or mentalizing, is the ability to recognize and understand another persons emotions. Affective empathy, often called experience sharing, is ones own emotional attunement with another persons experience.
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We need happy moments and happiness in our lives; however, Im growing more convinced that the pursuit of happiness may get in the way of deeper, more meaningful experiences like joy and gratitude. I know, from the research and my experiences, that when it comes to parenting, what makes children happy in the moment is not always what leads them to developing deeper joy, grounded confidence, and meaningful connection.
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Were the comfort and safety of that past existence real? If so, were they at someone elses expense?
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Current neuroscience research shows that the pain and feelings of disconnection are often as real as physical pain. And just as healing physical pain requires describing it, talking about it, and sometimes getting professional help, we need to do the same thing with emotional pain.
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True belonging doesnt require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.
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Very few people can handle being held accountable without rationalizing, blaming, or shutting down;
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As I mentioned in the introduction, we asked around seventy-five hundred people to identify all of the emotions that they could recognize and name when theyre experiencing them. The average was three: glad, sad, and mador, as they were more often written, happy, sad, and pissed off. Couple this extremely limited vocabulary with the importance of emotional literacy, and you basically have a crisis. Its this crisis that Im trying to help address in this book.
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Our ability to accurately recognize and label emotions is often referred to as emotional granularity. In the words of Harvard psychologist Susan David, Learning to label emotions with a more nuanced vocabulary can be absolutely transformative.
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When were faced with information that challenges what we believe, our first instinct is to make the discomfort, irritation, and vulnerability go away by resolving the dissonance. We might do this by rejecting the new information, decreasing its importance, or avoiding it altogether. The greater the magnitude of the dissonance, the greater is the pressure to reduce dissonance. In these challenging moments of dissonance, we need to stay curious and resist choosing comfort over courage. Its brave to invite new information to the table, to sit with it and hear it out. Its also rare these days.
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Painting done means fully walking through my expectations of what the completed task will look like, including when it will be done, what Ill do with the information, how it will be used, the context, the consequences of not doing it, the costseverything we can think of to paint a shared picture of the expectations.
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Disappointments may be like paper cuts, but if those cuts are deep enough or if we accumulate them over a lifetime, they can leave us seriously wounded.
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we can fight our tendency to accept binaries by asking what additional perspectives are missing between the extremes.
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When we compare, we want to be the best or have the best of our group. The comparison mandate becomes this crushing paradox of Fit in and stand out! Its not be yourself and respect others for being authentic, its Fit in, but win. I want to swim the same workout as you, and beat you atit.
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At the heart of loneliness is the absence of meaningful social interactionan intimate relationship, friendships, family gatherings, or even community or work group connections.
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The bittersweet side of appreciating lifes most precious moments is the unbearable awareness that those moments are passing. MARC PARENT, Believing It All
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Resentment is the feeling of frustration, judgment, anger, better than, and/or hidden envy related to perceived unfairness or injustice. Its an emotion that we often experience when we fail to set boundaries or ask for what we need, or when expectations let us down because they were based on things we cant control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how theyre going to react.
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Vulnerability is not oversharing, it's sharing with people who have earned the right to hear our stories and our experiences.
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As researcher and writer Sherry Turkle says, Boredom is your imagination calling to you.
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The best story stewardship in these moments is just to say, Im grateful that youre sharing this with me. What does support look like? I can listen and be with you, I can help problem-solve, or whatever else you need. You tell me.
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There is overwhelming evidence that gratitude is good for us physically, emotionally, and mentally. Theres research that shows that gratitude is correlated with better sleep, increased creativity, decreased entitlement, decreased hostility and aggression, increased decision-making skills, decreased blood pressurethe list goes on.
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Maps are the most important documents in human history. They give us tools to store and exchange knowledge about space and place.
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Interestingly, admiration often leads to us wanting to improve ourselves. It doesnt, however, make us want to be like the person or thing we admirewe just want to be better versions of ourselves
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People will do almost anything to not feel pain, including causing pain and abusing power; Very few people can handle being held accountable without rationalizing, blaming, or shutting down; and Without understanding how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors work together, its almost impossible to find our way back to ourselves and each other. When we dont understand how our emotions shape our thoughts and decisions, we become disembodied from our own experiences and disconnected from each other.
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we find that what we regret most are our failures of courage, whether its the courage to be kinder, to show up, to say how we feel, to set boundaries, to be good to ourselves, to say yes to something scary.
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The edges taught me that the more I used alcohol, food, work, caretaking, and whatever else I could get my hands on to numb my anxiety and vulnerability, the less I would understand my feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.
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“I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.”
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“At the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of my life, I want to say I contributed more than I criticized.”
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“The courage to be vulnerable is not about winning or losing, it’s about the courage to show up when you can’t predict or control the outcome.”
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“Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”
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“If you are not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion, I’m not interested in or open to your feedback. There are a million cheap seats in the world today filled with people who will never be brave with their lives but who will spend every ounce of energy they have hurling advice and judgment at those who dare greatly. Their only contributions are criticism, cynicism, and fearmongering. If you’re criticizing from a place where you’re not also putting yourself on the line, I’m not interested in what you have to say.”
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“People are opting out of vital conversations about diversity and inclusivity because they fear looking wrong, saying something wrong, or being wrong. Choosing our own comfort over hard conversations is the epitome of privilege, and it corrodes trust and moves us away from meaningful and lasting change.”
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“Show up for people in pain and don’t look away.”
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“We fail the minute we let someone else define success for us.”
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“If we want people to fully show up, to bring their whole selves including their unarmored, whole hearts—so that we can innovate, solve problems, and serve people—we have to be vigilant about creating a culture in which people feel safe, seen, heard, and respected.”
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“Don't grab hurtful comments and pull them close to you by rereading them and ruminating on them. Don't play with them by rehearsing your badass comeback. And whatever you do, don't pull hatefulness close to your heart.
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“I always bring my core values to feedback conversations. I specifically bring courage, which means that I don’t choose comfort over being respectful and honest—choosing politeness over respect is not respectful.”
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“In a 1968 speech given to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., defined power as the ability to achieve purpose and effect change. This is the most accurate and important definition of power that I’ve ever seen. The definition does not make the nature of power inherently good or bad, which aligns with what I’ve learned in my work. What makes power dangerous is how it’s used.”
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“If you put shame in a petri dish and cover it with judgment, silence, and secrecy, you’ve created the perfect environment for shame to grow until it makes its way into every corner and crevice of your life. If, on the other hand, you put shame in a petri dish and douse it with empathy, shame loses its power and begins to wither. Empathy creates a hostile environment for shame—an environment it can’t survive in, because shame needs you to believe you’re alone and it’s just you.”
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“I’m also not a fan of anything that’s brutal, including honesty. Honesty is the best policy, but honesty that’s motivated by shame, anger, fear, or hurt is not “honesty.” It’s shame, anger, fear, or hurt disguised as honesty. Just because something is accurate or factual doesn’t mean it can’t be used in a destructive manner: “Sorry. I’m just telling you the truth. These are just the facts.”
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“Mastery requires feedback.”
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“Empathy is a choice. And it’s a vulnerable choice, because if I were to choose to connect with you through empathy, I would have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling. In the face of a difficult conversation, when we see that someone’s hurt or in pain, it’s our instinct as human beings to try to make things better. We want to fix, we want to give advice. But empathy isn’t about fixing, it’s the brave choice to be with someone in their darkness—not to race to turn on the light so we feel better.”
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“There is an incredibly important, uncomfortable, and brave discussion that every single leader and every organization in the world should be having about privilege.”
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“In the end, the cure for numbing is developing tools and practices that allow you to lean into discomfort and renew your spirit.”
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“Self-compassion is an easy list to write, and a hard list to live. For me, it’s all about sleep, healthy food, exercise, and connection. It’s what I mentioned in the concussion story—the best predictor of living into my values is being in physical, spiritual, and emotional shape.”
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“know I’m living outside my values when I am…drum roll…this is a huge issue for me…resentful. Resentment is my barometer and my early warning system. It’s the canary in the coal mine. It shows up when I stay quiet in order not to piss off someone. It shows up when I put work before my well-being, and it blows the doors off the hinges when I’m not setting good boundaries.”
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“We have to be able to take feedback—regardless of how it’s delivered—and apply it productively. We have to do this for a simple reason: Mastery requires feedback. I don’t care what we’re trying to master—and whether we’re trying to develop greatness or proficiency—it always requires feedback.”
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“No trust, no connection.”
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“Diminishing trust caused by a lack of connection and empathy.”
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“what we are ethically called to do, is create a space in our schools and classrooms where all students can walk in and, for that day or hour, take off the crushing weight of their armor, hang it on a rack, and open their heart to truly being seen. We must be guardians of a space that allows students to breathe and be curious and explore the world and be who they are without suffocation.”
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“At work, foreboding joy often shows up in more subtle and pernicious ways. It shows up by making us hesitant to celebrate victories, for two primary reasons. The first is that we’re afraid if we celebrate with our team, or have a moment where we just breathe, we’re inviting disaster and something will go wrong. You can likely identify with that feeling of getting a project up and out the door and then refusing to celebrate it with high-fives because you think, We can’t celebrate right now because we don’t know if it’s going to be perfect, we don’t know if it’s going to work, we don’t know if the site will stay up… The second way foreboding joy shows up at work is withholding recognition. We don’t want our employees to get too excited because there’s still so much work to be done. We don’t want them to take their foot off the gas, to get complacent. So we don’t celebrate achievements. We think we’ll do it someday, but these same factors persist in the wake of joy. This is how foreboding joy shows up at the office, and it is a costly mistake.”
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“If I share something with you that’s difficult for me, I’d rather you say, “I don’t even know what to say right now, I’m just so glad you told me.” Because in truth, a response can rarely make something better. Connection is what heals.”
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“A brave leader is someone who says I see you. I hear you. I don’t have all the answers, but I’m going to keep listening and asking questions.”
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“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
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“It’s simple but transformative: Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”
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“Leaders must either invest a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or squander an unreasonable amount of time trying to manage ineffective and unproductive behavior.”
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“Other people’s emotions are not our jobs. We can’t both serve people and try to control their feelings.”
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“when our organization rewards armoring behaviors like blaming, shaming, cynicism, perfectionism, and emotional stoicism, we can’t expect innovative work. You can’t fully grow and contribute behind armor.”
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“In either case, if you come across an explanation of vulnerability that doesn’t include setting boundaries or being clear on intentions, proceed with caution. Vulnerability for vulnerability’s sake is not effective, useful, or smart.”
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“Perfectionism is addictive, because when we invariably do experience shame, judgment, and blame, we often believe it’s because we weren’t perfect enough. Rather than questioning the faulty logic of perfectionism, we become even more entrenched in our quest to look and do everything just right. Perfectionism actually sets”
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“We asked a thousand leaders to list marble-earning behaviors—what do your team members do that earns your trust? The most common answer: asking for help. When it comes to people who do not habitually ask for help, the leaders we polled explained that they would not delegate important work to them because the leaders did not trust that they would raise their hands and ask for help. Mind. Blown.”
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“this making up stories and conspiracy theories is something we all do. Gottschall writes, “Conspiracy is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant, or the crazy. It is a reflex of the storytelling mind’s compulsive need for meaningful experience.” The problem is that rather than rumbling with vulnerability and staying in uncertainty, we start to fill in the blanks with our fears and worst-case-scenario planning. I love this line from Gottschall: “To the conspiratorial mind, shit never just happens.”
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“Don’t grab hurtful comments and pull them close to you by rereading them and ruminating on them. Don’t play with them by rehearsing your badass comeback. And whatever you do, don’t pull hatefulness close to your heart. Let what’s unproductive and hurtful drop at the feet of your unarmored self. And no matter how much your self-doubt wants to scoop up the criticism and snuggle with the negativity so it can confirm its worst fears, or how eager the shame gremlins are to use the hurt to fortify your armor, take a deep breath and find the strength to leave what’s mean-spirited on the ground. You don’t even need to stomp it or kick it away. Cruelty is cheap, easy, and chickenshit. It doesn’t deserve your energy or engagement. Just step over the comments and keep daring, always remembering that armor is too heavy a price to pay to engage with cheap-seat feedback.”
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“Silence is not brave leadership, and silence is not a component of brave cultures.”
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“I define wholeheartedness as “engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but”
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“A brave leader is not someone who is armed with all the answers.”
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