Transcription
Foreign [Music] has been my most steadfast counselor for my entire life. I discovered her probably 30 years ago when I was in college, and I lean into her work. You know how when you find those people that just are inspiring and honest in their work, they also bring you joy and comfort? She's that for me.
And I love everything she does, except for that quote. That quote has pissed me off for decades, and I never understood this idea that you're free when you belong nowhere. And as a social scientist, I know that belonging, I know this for sure. Like, if you ask me the one thing I know for sure, 200,000 pieces of data, I know in the absence of love and belonging, there's always suffering. That I know for sure.
So this quote from her about belonging everywhere, which is really nowhere, is what sets us free, was so troubling to me. But then I started digging in and I started trying to understand what does it mean to belong? And I never thought of the concept of belonging. I thought belonging was like, we have a crew. [Music] And and belonging to something, you kind of negotiate with external groups of people. Um, but it's not what I found.
Very quickly is the rest of that actual quote is part of an interview that she did, um, where she ended with Bill Moyers, where she ends up saying, you know, he ends up pushing a little bit on and saying, "So are you saying that you belong nowhere and to no one?" And she said, "I belong to Maya." And what I found is that true belonging is a spiritual practice, and it's about the ability to find sacredness in both being a part of something, but also the courage to stand alone. And the people, for those of us who struggle to have the courage to stand alone, especially when we know that at risk, we're risking that sense of being a part of something because we disagree, yes, because we have a different opinion, because we love something different, that is the mark. That's the mark of true belonging, to be able to say, "Yes, I am a part of something bigger, but I also will stand alone when I need to." You belong everywhere and nowhere, and that is liberation.
Foreign [Music] leadership work, I talk about understanding your personal values. And my two personal values are faith and courage. And so they say, "Don't talk about faith. It's inappropriate. It's this is an, you know, an organic corporate corporation." And so I just got to the point where I'm like, "Look, I've sat across from thousands and thousands of people over the last two decades of my life, listening to the hardest things you can imagine." And the two things that everyone has in common when they're talking about those things are cussing and praying. If you don't want me to cuss and you don't want me to pray, that's awesome. Ask somebody else, because what I'm not going to do is get up and, you know, and there are a million people in this space who, who are better than I am, who know different things than I do. Invite them. If you need me to wear a suit, I totally get it. I'm not going to do that.
When I speak in public, I don't get up there to talk to my, you know, to talk from my Brooks Brothers self to your Brooks Brothers self. I get up there, and when I walk on the stage, I'm going to talk about things that 90% of the people in the audience have never thought about, talked about, and are scared to listen to. And they need to see me as a person, and I'm just that person.
There's this part from "Braving the Wilderness" that it really changed me. It's the practice that came from the book, and it is: "Don't walk through the world looking for evidence that you don't belong, because you will always find it. Don't walk through the world looking for evidence that you're not enough, because you will always find it." Our worth and our belonging are not negotiated with other people.
[Music] Carry those inside of our hearts. And so for me, I know who I am. I'm clear about that, and I'm not going to negotiate that with you. I will negotiate a contract with you. I will negotiate maybe even a topic with you, but I'm not going to negotiate who I am with you. Because then, and this is, I think, the heart of the book, then I may fit in for you, but I no longer belong to myself. And that is a betrayal I am not willing to do anymore. I spent the first 30 years of my life doing that. I'm not willing to betray myself anymore. I just can't do it.
[Music] is all about trust. And so probably three or four years ago, in a lot of my leadership work, I, I probably, and this is something people don't know about me, I probably spend 90% of my time inside big organizations working with C-suite teams. That's what I do most of the time. And so in working with leaders, one of the things that kept coming up is trust. Trust building in teams, building trust in a culture.
The thing that's hard about trust is if I work for you and you call me in, and I'm like, "Really upset because I got passed over for a promotion," and you say to me, "Look, Renee, you're doing great work, but there are some trust issues." The minute you say anything that I can perceive as, "I am no longer trustworthy," or "You don't trust me," we go completely limbic. We go completely out of listening with our prefrontal cortex to listening, you know, to fight, flight, freeze, defend, because our trust is our integrity. It's who we are.
So I kept wondering, like, when we talk about trust, what are we actually talking about? Like, what could you, what could you call me into your office and say to me that would be more helpful, more impactful, and productive than, "We have trust issues," or "I don't trust you"? So we dug into the data to figure out what is trust. What do we mean when we say trust? And what I found are there are seven elements that we're talking about when we talk about trust, and these are observable and measurable. These are what we can talk about with each other.
So BRAVING is the acronym we use. B is boundaries. You set boundaries when you don't know what they are, you ask. You're clear about what's okay and not okay, which is, as you know, so hard for people. Boundaries are really hard. R is reliability. You do what you say and you say what you do. The big hard thing about reliability is you're not hustling for worthiness. So you're not completely overcommitting and not delivering. That's the reliability issue. A is accountability. You don't back channel and blame. You hold people accountable in a straightforward way. V, which I think is really interesting, is the vault. What people don't understand about the vault that's really interesting to me too is that
You say, "Look, we've got some trust issues that we need to work through. Specifically, I want to talk about confidentiality in the vault." And I look at you like, "Marie, I've never shared a single thing that you have told me in the 10 years we've known each other." And you look back at me and say, "Yes, but you come in here on a regular basis and share things with me that are not yours to share." It's the other side of confidentiality. It is not only do you not talk out of school between us, you don't come in here and say, "Hey, look, I know what's going on with John Baba. You know, this is what's happening with, you know." So because when I do that, and I, I do that to get connection with you, I do that as a bid for connection. Let me tell you what's going on that you don't know about. But when I walk out of the office, you trust me less.
[Music] Because I'm using stories that are not mine as currency. So we got the vault. Then we go to I, integrity, which is choosing courage over comfort, practicing your values. And this is a big one. I think we have this in common. I love this about you. It's choosing what's right over what's fun, fast, and easy. You know, we have a culture of fun, fast, and easy. We have a culture of people who don't do discomfort. I've never achieved a single thing in my career or life comfortably.
And then we go to N, for non-judgment. You can ask for help without feeling judged, and I can ask for help without judging myself. And then generosity, which I think is probably the biggest, hardest one for me sometimes, which is when something happens, I assume positive intent. So if things go sideways between us, I'm like, "Damn it, Marie, I'm so pissed off." I go and say, "Let me assume the best. Help me understand what happened, Marie. I thought we had a plan around this." That I give you a chance, the benefit of the doubt, before I launch into my anger. You know, that's that's human nature. That's wiring. And the absence of data, we will always make up stories.
And so I think for "Braving the Wilderness," the whole idea of the wilderness being those times when we stand alone, and those times when we go out on a limb, the times we walk away from what we know, our ideological bunkers and our beliefs, braving is the tool to help us manage the wilderness.
[Music] I'll leave you with this. There will be times when standing alone feels too hard, too scary, and we'll doubt our ability to make our way through the uncertainty. Someone somewhere will say, "Don't do it. You don't have what it takes to survive the wilderness." This is when you reach deep into your wild heart and remind yourself, "I am the wilderness."
[Music]