In a world that will always give you something to fight against — fight FOR something
There will always be something to fight against.
It’s the easiest thing in the world right now to find: a side to pick, a villain to label, a neighbor to write off because of a sign in their yard or a vote you’ll never see them cast.
Fighting against asks nothing of you except that you kick your feet up, jump on the bandwagon, and hate in the right direction.
Fighting against is boring to me.
Fighting FOR something however, is infinitely more interesting.
It’s harder. It requires a vision. A mission. The willingness to build instead of burn.
And if you’ve built anything, you know how much more work it is to create something real than to burn it down. One takes time. The long game. The other takes seconds.
THE HISTORY
This month the USA celebrated 250 years of independence. Fighting FOR is one of the oldest American instincts there is.
Every man in my family fought for this country. Two of them weren’t even born here. I remember my Dad talking about his experience as an immigrant who came here as a teenager. It wasn’t a desire to leave where he was. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his country — Italy. He wasn’t running from anything or fighting against anything about it.
Coming to America was purely about moving toward something. Possibility. Opportunity. It was actually really hard for him to leave because he had to leave his mom and grandmother, his best friends and the only family he’d ever known, behind.
Do you see the difference? The desire to leave / running from something vs. the desire to pursue, to move forward, to build a life / running toward something.
Every person who ever fought for this country was fighting for something — not just against an enemy, but for an idea of what we could be.
Every immigrant who left everything they knew and crossed an ocean with a suitcase and a hope was fighting for something — a life, a future, a better chance for their family, a shot they couldn’t get anywhere else.
Every entrepreneur who bets on themselves, who builds the thing from nothing, who refuses to let someone else write the script for their life — that’s fighting for something too.
Every leader who bucks the status quo, who pushes for excellence, sees the potential in people when they don’t see it in themselves. They’re moving toward something. Not because they are ungrateful or dissatisfied, but because they know that human potential is infinite and they want to be instruments of progress and purpose. They’re fighting for something, too.
The pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
That’s the whole American story. Not the fighting-against. The building. The becoming. The pursuit. The stubborn belief that we’re here to create something and realize the full weight of our potential — and that everyone else deserves the same shot at theirs.
We come from for.
But too often these days it seems that we’ve forgotten it under all the noise telling us to pick a side and swing.
THE PRESENT
Watching the World Cup has been reminding me of this.
Look around the stadiums. Thousands of people, packed shoulder to shoulder. Different countries, different languages, different politics, different beliefs, different lives. And for ninety minutes, none of it matters.
I can’t help but think that we used to be better at this. We used to be better at coming together. At uniting. But the data says we’ve forgotten.
THE RESEARCH
For the last several years, the researchers who track this have watched us descend, step by step — from fear, to polarization, to grievance, and now to something they’re calling insularity.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, which surveys nearly 34,000 people across 28 countries, found that 70% of us are now unwilling or hesitant to trust anyone who holds different values, backgrounds, or ways of seeing the world.
Here in the U.S., it’s the same story. Only about a third of us believe most people can be trusted at all. Our mindset, in their words, has shifted from “we” to “me.”
We’ve pulled back into hard little shells. We favor the familiar over the risk of being curious, being challenged, being changed…growing.
And the worst part is that the more we retreat from each other, the more judgmental and afraid we become — because we’re defending our side, our position, our identity, our sense of self. Which, as it turns out, makes us retreat further. Great.
That’s what fighting against actually costs us. It feels like strength, but it’s actually just our fear parading around with a jersey on. Choosing a side, when the actual beauty of “the game” (soccer or life) is best experienced as one unit, one heartbeat, one moment that unites us all.
THE FLIP SIDE
Now for the flip side. The same research found that the people who do still trust someone different from them — and they exist — say they trust that person for a specific set of reasons.
And if you’ve been here for a while, these reasons might sound pretty familiar to you. Spoiler alert: this may be the most beautiful example of The BRAVE Framework® in action that I’ve ever read (and they had exactly no knowledge of BRAVE at all). Get this:
The research says that when people trust someone different from them it’s:
Because they don’t try to fix or change them. That’s the B in BRAVE. Be Present.
Because they don’t force them to agree. That’s the R. Rapport.
Because there was, at some point, a real experience between them — real vulnerability — they helped each other, or stood up for each other, when it would’ve been easier not to, and to instead follow the trend or the crowd. That’s the V. Vulnerability.
Because that person keeps an open mind, they don’t filter life through their perception. They get curious. That’s the E. Empathy.
Yes, we are missing the A, Active Listening — and it’s the key to the rest. Because you can’t do a single one of the others without it. You can’t stay present, build rapport, be vulnerable, or hold an open mind if you’re faking it, assuming you already know what the other person intends or if you’re building your defense or your reply. Listening is the skill the whole thing stands on. People who are worthy of trust, listen and no matter what don’t try to fix, force, follow or filter.
Read that again, because that’s the whole newsletter. That’s the whole message. It encompasses what I have spent the last decade teaching. I’m at once shocked that it matches up so perfectly, while also not at all. This is what it takes to build trust.
And the mechanism of what it takes is not a political platform. It’s not a strategy. It’s not even a culture.
It’s a conversation.
We reach for culture like it’s the lever — build the right culture and everything else follows. Yes. And —culture isn’t the lever you can pull. It’s the thing that forms downstream, one conversation at a time. Conversations are the lever. Your culture is a lagging indicator of the quality of your conversations
Conversations are what turn the concepts above into action. Repeated over time, those actions become skills, embodied wisdom. Leadership. And that’s what builds a culture worth having.
These skills — skills that earn you trust and influence — are learnable, coachable, repeatable skills — the exact ones I’ve built BRAVE® around.
THE CURE
The researchers gave the disease a name, "insularity." The origins of that word trace back to the word island. We’re turning ourselves into islands. And one of the first things I learned about brain science (what feels like a million years ago) is that human beings cannot exist as islands. We are social beings. And need connection.
This was one of my biggest AHAs when I started my coffee company, Caffe Unimatic. The conversations we have over coffee are more honest, more true, more connective than the ones in the boardroom. Amiright? Coffee is the physical manifestation of psychological safety -- feeling safe enough to tell the truth, without fear of judgment, punishment or rejection. This is why coffee brings people together. And we need connection as much as air to breathe.
This is why I felt a deep joy when I read their description of the cure for insularity… it was almost word for word BRAVE®... (it’s what I teach in our workshops inside companies, in Bootcamp, in our immersive leadership certifications that are taking companies from moving fast and falling apart, to moving faster, together).
That said, I get it. We were truly never taught how to talk to humans. Not really. Not across difference, not when it’s hard, not when every screen in our lives is rewarding us for the opposite.
So of course we’re here. But never taught is very different from incapable. I’ve always been an optimist. To such a degree that Simon Sinek gave me the title of "Optimist Instructor" at his leadership company aptly named The Optimism Company (find your people!).
Anyway, I’ve always seen people’s potential, sometimes even more than they can see it themselves. And I don’t let them forget it. So, if disconnection is a thing we built, I know we can also choose to build the opposite.
All we need is the bridge. The thing that gets us from here to there. I’m sure there are many. But from where I stand the most tangible and fastest working is BRAVE®.
YOUR CHALLENGE
So this is my challenge, and it’s really just an invitation.
Stop looking for what to fight against. It’ll always be there; it doesn’t need your help. Plus, it’s not that interesting.
Instead, find something to fight for.
Sit down with the person you’ve already decided is on the other side — over coffee, if you want — and have one real conversation. Open mind. No fixing or forcing. Honesty about where you differ. Really listening for what matters to them, the uniting thread.
Because what I know for sure — after facilitating conversations with groups involved in the same scenarios but on polar opposite “sides”: from 9/11 survivors, first responders, the Muslim community and students in NYC to women on both sides of the Kavanaugh trial, to leadership teams with starkly different viewpoints — the inner why beneath the belief is what actually matters. And usually doesn’t look as different as the external belief.
I’d bet almost anything that in your next disagreement, underneath the context and the culture and the conditioning that made you look so different on the surface, you’ll find someone who wants what you want. Who fears what you fear. Who’s just been wearing a jersey that means the same thing to them as yours does for you: home, family, ancestors, origin, the beginnings of me and all those that I love most and want to give the world to and protect.
Eventually we’ll realize that we’re not on different sides at all. We’re standing in a circle. When we are able to have conversations that are brave, the “sides” we’re on find their point of connection. Maybe it’s a circle, maybe it’s an infinity sign. Either way, as humans, our path always leads back together. Not further apart.
Land of the free, because of the brave.
For the soldiers in my family, and every one before and after them, “the brave” meant exactly that — the willingness to fight. To stand on a line and defend this place so the rest of us could inherit the freedom to disagree out loud.
But maybe now, for the rest of us, brave means something almost opposite.
Maybe brave is the willingness to not fight. To not swing back. To not pick the side. But rather to stay in the conversation with someone who sees the world differently and choose the harder, stronger, braver path of understanding them instead of defeating them. Because we don't need to "win" the conversation to know who we are, and stay confident in ourselves.
Our soldiers were brave so we could be free. The least we can do with that freedom is be brave enough not to waste it turning on each other. On tearing apart what so many of our ancestors fought to preserve.
That’s the work. I think it might be the most important work we can do — for our teams, our kids, our neighbors, and the next 250 years of whatever this country is going to be.
Let’s learn it. Together.
With you,
Elisabeth
