MBA1218 Must Read: Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 the Business podcast that gets straight to it with daily business tactics and strategies every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a must read episode on our Must Read Episodes. I share with you a book that I've read that has influenced me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its takeaways and why you should read it too. Today's must read is Dare to Lead by Brene Brown. Dare to Lead is a book that explores how you can find your inner courage to lead a great team. The author of this book, Brene Brown, draws from her own experiences as a leadership coach and shows you how to harness your emotions, quash your fears of failure, and become a daring leader in an increasingly competitive world. I wanted to share this must read with you today because I know many of you know you have to be a leader as the leader of your company, as the founder, as a CEO. But maybe leadership is not something that you incline to. Maybe you don't have that much experience. Maybe when it comes to leadership, you're not that confident, but you want to see your business win. This book is all about getting over these hurdles and to understand the impact of your values, your emotions, your interpersonal relationships on the effectiveness of your leadership, as well as learning what skydiving can teach you about leadership skills, why vulnerability leads to innovation, and why bravery and perfectionism don't mix. Can't wait to share with you some of the great golden nuggets. The great takeaways from this book Dare to Lead by Brene Brown so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Dare to Lead by Brene Brown is a really good book if you feel a little shaky when it comes to leadership. And that's pretty much all of us. We all have a little bit of, you know, self doubt sometimes and the book starts off by talking about vulnerability. A lot of us feel like if you're vulnerable, it's a weakness, but Brene says that it's essential for innovation. She presents the question what makes you feel vulnerable? Vulnerability is the first date after a difficult divorce, starting to run your first business, or how you feel when you get laid off from work. Vulnerability is a universal human emotion that we all feel when we expose ourselves to others during times of risk or uncertainty. Despite being such a common feeling, there are some damaging myths around being vulnerable. A lot of people equate it to being weak. Experiences that make you feel vulnerable, like losing a job or putting yourself out there emotionally, can bring you feelings of anxiety and uncertainty and the desire for self protection. But if you look at the data, there is no data that proves that vulnerability equals weakness. In fact, the opposite is true. Acts of courage are impossible without first putting yourself out there and being vulnerable. Giving something a shot I'll give you a good example. I was in a meeting with my team of developers a few weeks ago and we were trying to solve a problem that we had. We're working on a project, an innovation project in our software and I didn't have an answer to this problem. I had to go to the meeting and just say I don't know, I don't know how to solve this problem. I don't have the answers, I'm vulnerable here. And that was the only way we're really going to actually improve as a company. Instead of me just faking it and be like, hey, there's no problem, it's perfectly fine how it is. Sometimes it's just important for you to recognize there's a problem even if you don't have a solution. As leaders, sometimes we want to come up with solutions for everything So I presented a problem. I said, hey, team, we have this problem, this challenge that we have coming up ahead of us when we're trying to, you know, build this part of the software. How are we going to solve this? What are some ideas? I don't have the answer. I'm looking to you, and this is where innovation happens. This is where you break through these problems, is where you actually make a change. You make a discovery where people discuss and toss ideas. Some are great ideas, some are not so great ideas. It doesn't matter. The point is, is that you're looking for answers outside yourself and you're admitting to your team, hey, I don't have all the answers. And luckily, we are able to come up with a great action plan to solve that challenge. And it would never happen if I didn't just admit the fact that I don't have a solution and this is actually a problem we have to solve. Now, don't get me wrong, when I actually presented this problem, when I said, hey, I don't have any answers, it didn't feel great. It almost felt like, man, am I shifting my responsibility to them. And I had a bit of fear, like, what if they don't have the answer, we're going to be in trouble. And am I just putting myself in this position for no reason? You know, feeling vulnerable? But I realized, hey, I don't have a choice here. I can't bury my head in the sand and say, hey, this is not a challenge. We don't have. We do have this challenge. So sometimes you just gotta put yourself out there and be a bit vulnerable. To innovate in your business, you gotta hush those whispers of doubt. Those whispers of, what are you gonna look like? What are you gonna be seen as in front of your peers, in front of your, you know, employees? We live in this world where we put our best life, our best version of ourselves on social media. We don't wanna show the struggles or the difficulties or the problems cause we would look like a loser or something like that. But when it comes to business, you have to put yourself out there. You gotta admit problems and you gotta be a bit vulnerable if you want to innovate. She has another great chapter in this book about courageous leaders give and solicit honest feedback. Sometimes the truth hurts. And that's just the honest truth. Brene talks about. In her early days, when starting her own company, her employees asked if they could sit down and discuss some concerns. They had stunned. Brene Brown listened as her employees relayed how bad they Thought she was at time management and pointed out her habit to set unrealistic deadlines that they often struggle to meet. When I read that, I was so self conscious because that's me. I go through that challenge all the time. And it's something I'm working on constantly keeping our meetings within time, not going over time, being respectful of my team's own time so they can get to work as well as the deadlines. I mean, every cycle we have for our sprints, our projects with Webinar Ninja, I'm reminded by my lead dev and some of our teammates, hey, you know, we can't go pedal to the metal constantly, month after month. We gotta have a few breaks or a few times just to regroup, to modify things, to improve things, to fix bugs or just be at a steady pace instead of just constantly running 100 miles per hour because I want to go, go, go. I'm being impatient. I want the product to be amazing tomorrow, in fact, today. But that's not practical. You have to make sure that you're respectful of your employees. And I wouldn't know that if my employees didn't feel comfortable enough to give me feedback, to say, hey, this is my feedback to you. This is where I think we can improve. And it's gotta come from you because you're the leader. Although sometimes that criticism hurts because it makes you feel like you're not serving them, you're not doing a good job or a perfect job. It allows you to improve and allows you to run a better team. I'm so glad that I got that feedback and I endured that kind of initial sting, but then I was like, okay, let's give this a shot. Let's plan this accordingly, and it's helped us tremendously. So as a leader, you gotta be open to feedback, honest feedback from your team so you can improve. They gotta hold you accountable just like you hold them accountable. Another powerful, powerful chapter in his book is about learning how to fail and how it helps us to be brave. She says in the book. Believe it or not, business leaders could learn a lot from skydivers. Before aspiring skydivers were allowed to hit the skies, they spent numerous training sessions learning how to hit the ground safely by simply jumping off ladders. The lesson here for us, if you're going to be brave, then it's best to prepare yourself for a bumpy landing. In other words, you need to learn how to be resilient. Things are not going to go perfect, things are going to be hard, they're going to be Challenging. I've been building businesses for 17 years and I got to tell you, it's not like the challenges stop. They just get more and more challenging. And what happens is that you just become more brave. You just start to realize, hey, things will happen, things will hurt. I just gotta be able to be prepared for it. I need to train for it. I gotta be ready for it. You gotta expect challenges to happen, because when it happens, you're like, okay, this is par for the course. This is what's supposed to happen. And I just gotta be resilient. I gotta work my way around it, I gotta work my way through it. I always say to new entrepreneurs that failure is a rite of passage. You have to fail, you have to get things wrong, gotta do things wrong so you know the right things to do. It's very hard to build any kind of significant business without any of these challenges, without any of these failures. People that don't fail are people that don't actually try things or do things. They play it safe. I'm sure you heard about the metaphor about babies learning how to walk. You know, when a baby learns how to walk, they don't just get up one day and start walking perfectly across the room. They fall over and over and over and over until they start to fall a little bit less and a little bit less and a little bit less. But they endure a lot of failure before they actually are able to walk. And then that's just the beginning. They got to learn how to run, they got to learn how to jump, they got to learn how to skip all that kind of stuff. By failing, you learn to be brave. Another powerful chapter is about perfectionism and how holds us back from self improvement and true courage. When you're trying to be perfect, when you're trying to be a perfectionist, you stop yourself from trying new things because you don't want to fail, you don't want to mess up, you want to keep things perfect. It's a form of self protection. But to become a daring leader, you must get rid of perfectionism. To do this, he starts busting some myths about this damaging phenomenon. Perhaps the most damaging myth of all is that perfectionism is about self improvement and striving for excellence. But in fact, perfectionism is really just about getting approval from people. Most perfectionists are raised in environments that praise exceptional performance. So they'd get straight A's and they would get praised for it. And it becomes a cycle. As a result, perfectionism and perfectionists develop a damaging belief that follows them all their life. They believe that things have to be perfect in order for them to be significant, to be important. This locks a perfectionist into an exhausting behavioral pattern of trying to please people about perfecting their efforts, about performing for others and proving to themselves that they're perfect instead of really trying to improve and develop themselves. You gotta shrug that all off if you want to be a daring leader. You gotta be willing to make mistakes. You have to be willing to not be perfect to get things done. Perfectionism is, I think, the kryptonite of productivity. I mentioned this before, but my fellow entrepreneur and buddy Mary Brown says, take massive imperfect action. Sometimes you just gotta do it, as Nike says, even if it's not perfect, just to get the ball rolling, just to get things done. Perfectionism is gonna kill you in the long run.

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Wrap up today's must read episode Dare to Lead by Brene Brown. She really highlights in this book why we need to open ourselves up to vulnerability and open ourselves up to being courageous and creative in the process. And that perfectionism is not going to lead us down the right path, not going to allow us to fail, and therefore we're not going to learn how to be brave. I highly recommend you pick up this book. Brene Brown is a great author. It's a well, well written book and it's one of those books that doesn't speak at you. It's actually including her own experiences to make you feel like, hey, she's not perfect. I'm not perfect. We can improve. That wraps up today's lesson. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Stitcher Radio, whether it's Apple podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Castbox, we're on it all. By hitting subscribe, you get the next episode automatically on your device, so it's ready for you when you're ready to listen. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Some people think that the more successful you get as an entrepreneur, the bigger your ego. That may be the case for some entrepreneurs, but I believe the really successful ones, the ones that really make a difference in this world, learn to control their ego, learn to understand they don't have all the answers, that they need to be vulnerable, that they need to ask for help. They need to ask upon their team. Hey, I need you to help me with this challenge. Let's do it together. That's when you innovate. That's when you change. That's when you do something bigger than yourself. Alright, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With usaa, you can bundle your auto.

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