The one thing you can count on in our flock is good deep dive conversation over wine. Add a beautiful sunset at the Greens Country Club and the latest bestseller from Brene Brown, Dare to Lead, and you’ve got a perfect trifecta for our first book club happy hour.
Dare to Lead takes Brene’s concepts shared in her former books like Daring Greatly and Rising Strong and applies them to leadership roles. Our boss Chicks (now 30 strong and growing) range from solopreneurs who mostly have to manage our own mindset and client relations to lead well, to small businesses, to network marketing team leaders with 10k, 15k and even 44,000 members in their care.
In today’s environment, leadership isn’t the boss in the corner office/open door policy of yesteryear. With social media, transparency, and a 24/7 news cycle, how we lead is how we live and vice versa. As Brene says so well in her book, you don’t have personal values and work values. Your values are you.
For our discussion, we zeroed in on Brene’s BRAVING inventory, something she first introduced in Rising Strong. Shonda Spencer, realtor, Jeanna Lichtenberger, Young Living Diamond/co-founder of Essential Famiies, Lori Pedford, president, Praxis Benefits, and Malena Putnam, author/speaker/brand strategist, share their thoughts on aspects of the inventory that most hit home with them both personally and professionally. Read through and then share the one(s) that most resonate with you in comments.
BOUNDARIES.
“That’s a tough one. I make myself available to my team but then I get so many texts and messages that I can’t keep up so then it makes me unreliable and I feel bad.”
“The hardest part for me is wanting to do it all and then that makes me fall short because I run out of time.”
“I’m bad at setting boundaries for my own work/life balance so I think that bleeds into my relationship with my family. I love to work and it’s hard to turn that off when you work for yourself.”
ACCOUNTABILITY.
“I think if I had better boundaries that would take care of a lot of the accountability problem I have.”
“This reminds me of Brene’s marble jar story she told with her daughter. To determine who your marble jar friends are, you put a marble in when they show up, keep your secrets, and invites you to occasions. Marble jars go out when the friend doesn’t follow through, reach out or show they care. That’s accountability.”
“I feel like I do my best when I have an accountability partner. Otherwise I get bored and want to move on to the next thing.”
VAULT.
“Being good at keeping thing in the vault means knowing your audience. Who can you trust? Who will give you the feedback to make you feel better and not worse? And not gossiping or saying names when sharing a story. Keeping the high road.”
“I think people who are more private have less of a problem with this. They don’t like sharing their personal stories on social media or live videos or whatever and so they tend to underscore versus overshare. For big extroverts, I could see it being easier to overshare or to the wrong people.”
INTEGRITY.
“People who walk the walk and not just talk the talk. People who don’t pull the “because I said so” or power trip. Leaders who aren’t afraid to have the tough conversations instead of avoiding them. That’s courage and you can’t really have integrity without being brave, too.”
NONJUDGMENT.
“Good for her, not for me. It works.”
“This is hard because as women we are more prone to empathy I think, but we also get really set in our ways thinking our choice is the only choice, even if it’s flipped from what it used to be. So women leaders might have judgments about stay at home moms who work from home and vice versa. Then all the other issues like breastfeeding and parenting and who volunteers more and who works out and so on.”
“I think this does improve with experience. The more you see other people go through things and you yourself going through stages, you become more empathetic. I used to judge people who didn’t go to church or who got a divorce and so on. Now I just see it as another life experience. We never know who or when something will happen, so why judge?”
GENEROSITY.
“For me understanding personalty types (like MBTI, Enneagram) help me to apply this concept. We see things through different lenses, so trying to see it through theirs can help assume the best and not the worst from their words or actions.”
“It also reminds me of The Four Agreements. Never assume is a biggie. Sometimes we jump to assume the worst when that wasn’t what was meant at all.”
“I like Brene’s idea of starting with, “the story I”m telling myself is…” so you are sharing what’s coming up for you instead of blaming the other person when they may not have intended to hurt you.”
Thanks, Chicks! Our next book club happy hour pick will be announced next week. We’ll be discussing the book in July.
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