Strong Ground

 Strong Ground

Brene Brown

 

Brene Brown comes at the reader in this book was thought you have been close friends your whole life.  She owns a firm that consults with corporate world.  She has her own podcast which I am sure promotes her consulting business.  She knits this with metaphor and real life stories that exposes her all this into a message: “be human”.  She opens with this:  "I recognize that choosing courage, discipline, and kindness can feel impossible and increasingly vulnerable in a time when even empathy has been vilified. I understand that fostering care, connection, and belonging in our organizations seems downright subversive. But I have hope. In my work I get to see people who have not given up on their values and what it means to lead while honoring what it means to be human."

 

The first thing that pops up is Senior Leadership is task oriented with performance reviews that are metric driven.  HR may go through motions towards human development, yet when an employee’s pay check does not recognize human development, the end result is disenchanted employees who move in in search of humanness. She starts her approach with a metaphor in physical training that begins with your core.  If you ignore your core other areas are strained to compensate leaving you vulnerable. Tying individual to organizational that Leaders should pake a priority Brenee writes.   "Developing core stability and functional strength in organizations means investing in people, because for an organization, people, and our connection to each other, are the strong ground."

While Brene spends 300 pages plus drawing techniques from experts in numerous areas and then sharing how they played out with leaders of many large organizations, she closes out with two chapters on how those lessons showed up in her life as she is now in her fifties with grown children.  Doing this made the whole book human and the lessons memorable.  I’ll leave with one here and ask you to read the book for the rest.

Compliance is unhuman and you come up short to your true potential.  Commitment is human desire where you exceed tasks on your performance review.

Excerpts:

 

"He defines mindfulness as the “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally…in the service of self-understanding and wisdom.”"

 

Today, when I’m working with leaders who desperately want to transform their organizations and even disrupt entire industries, it’s normal to bump into some resistance up front. They’re often hopeful that the big change effort can be predictable, not too messy, and dependent on tools rather than the tough and courageous work of changing mindsets and building new skills."

 

"What you’re trying to achieve will require a deep, broad, and disciplined commitment to individual change, team change, culture change, and systems change."

 

"Despite my best efforts to minimize the level of change I needed to make to get the results I was seeking in my own life, it was clear that I didn’t need a new app. I needed a personal version of the deep, broad, and disciplined commitment to change across my life. For me, this looked like getting back into therapy, working more with my leadership coach, becoming more spiritually fit, committing to my work with Tony and Morgan, and doing what’s always"

 

"If you’d like to try a computerized IAT, you can go to www.implicit.harvard.edu. There you’ll find several tests, including the most famous of all the IATs, the Race IAT. I’ve taken"