What BRAVE Isn’t
I had a lot of fun weaving this narrative together for you. Enjoy!
Last week in an alumni lab, one of our leaders — we’ll call him Steve — raised his hand with a story he was sure proved he hadn’t been BRAVE.
He’d been tough on the team. He drew a hard line and with no questions or “help me understand”, he just said no.
He thought he’d abandoned BRAVE in that moment. But actually, he was far from right about that…
As we walked through the situation in hindsight, detail by detail, as we often do in labs…
💡A lightbulb went on for him. He realized that he didn’t abandon BRAVE in that moment. In fact, it was BRAVE that had earned him the positive results of that moment.
Here’s why…
He’s the guy that everyone turns to with issues because he just “makes things work.”
He’s the guy on his team who is always braving the conversation — asking the harder question, naming the dynamic, sitting in the discomfort, letting other people rise.
And that’s just the thing: he had built a trust account so deep that when he assessed a situation and just said no, it didn’t read as harsh. It read as a state change. The exact one the situation needed.
This is the thing people miss about BRAVE (but only when they have a shallow understanding of it).
When people hear empathy, they hear: be soft, give grace and space.
When they hear rapport, they hear: make small talk, don’t push back, stay on the same team.
When they hear vulnerability, they assume it means the standard Brené Brown pitch to: be more vulnerable.
But if you’ve been in workshops with me, you get it —
I don’t want you to fumble around trying to be vulnerable for the sake of it. I’m teaching you to recognize and respond to vulnerability in others.
I don’t want you to have small talk and waste time at the start of meetings just to check a box.
I don’t want you to feel like you have to give people unlimited grace and space when what they need is a state change.
That has never been what BRAVE is for.
🧠 First, BRAVE teaches you the neurobiology of business and performance, so that you know the science of how to accurately assess situations like this. (Even leaders who mean well fail at this 97% of the time before they learn the science).
❌ Second, BRAVE is not a permission slip to bend, be soft, abandon yourself to make things work, waste time with small talk or posturing. BRAVE is about truth. Yours and theirs.
The first person you always have to be BRAVE with is you.
If you’re using empathy as a workaround for hard conversations — softening, delaying your feedback, calibrating yourself out of existence to make someone else comfortable — that isn’t BRAVE. That’s anxious. And it costs you. It costs your team. It costs the company.
BRAVE gives you the bumpers to stop bending. To stay honest with yourself about what you actually think, what you actually need, what you are actually willing to allow. The trust account starts internally — and it compounds outward.
BRAVE is not even about being a certain way — it’s a delivery system. It’s the conversation code that invites high performance, for people to step into their potential. For you to step into your potential.
The reason we run every conversation through Be present, Rapport, Active Listening, Vulnerability, Empathy isn’t so you can avoid the hard thing. It’s so the hard thing can land when it needs to.
🧐 McKinsey studied this directly with Amy Edmondson — the Harvard professor who built the entire field of psychological safety. The finding was unambiguous: when leaders challenge their teams without first establishing support and consultation, the challenge has no significant effect on psychological safety and hence, performance. None. Zero. It bounces off.
Pair both — support and challenge — and 72% of teams report a positive climate. Drop the support and keep the challenge, and that number collapses to 32% — what Edmondson calls the anxiety zone. People feel alone, in over their heads, and stop bringing their real ideas and truth to the table.
That’s the coach who screamed at you in high school sports. He didn’t earn the right to be heard. He didn’t create change. He created compliance for as long as you were on the field — and silence for the rest of your career.
Now meet the other coach…
I was lucky enough to have one of these. Meet Chris, my first coach at CrossFit Union Square.
💪 Chris remembered everything.
He remembered the weight on your bar.
He remembered the shoulder you tore in college and how it made you flinch on a snatch.
He remembered who wanted to go heavier but had the form of someone about to hurt themselves, and he knew exactly how to deliver that without bruising the ego.
He remembered who was tired, who was scared, who was lit up that morning.
He didn’t dive in and fix you.
He got curious first: Is there a reason you’re not loading more? How did you sleep? How’s the shoulder feeling today?
He watched. He listened. He built the trust account.
And then — then — he could say anything he needed to you, without explanation, from across the gym. Take a plate off. More weight. And no matter who it was. No matter how well we slept (it was often 5 or 6am). There were no excuses, eye rolls or hurt egos.
Because his words were carrying every observation, every question, every moment he had spent earning the right to say them to you.
He learned you. Your tendencies, strengths, weaknesses, confidence, fear.
You trusted him because he had trusted you first — with his full attention.
That’s the delivery system.
That’s what BRAVE is built to do.
Empathy and curiosity are not the opposites of challenge. They are the prerequisites for it.
You get curious so you can challenge with precision and purpose, instead of force.
You build trust so the tough love lands instead of creating resentment.
You consider their nervous system so yours doesn’t have to win by volume.
Remember:
Performance is shaped by conversation.
Conversation is shaped by biology.
Performance is shaped by your ability as a leader (especially in the AI era) to see and shift biology in real time.
To change the state of the room. At will.
Like Steve did.
Not in spite of BRAVE. Because of BRAVE.
Because you used it so much before that you earned the trust to challenge anything that needed challenging.
People also think that BRAVE means just be bold, direct, “just say the thing” and disregard how people hear it because “that’s a them thing.” Why should you have to pander to people, they can figure out what you mean.
Haha.
Sure. But if that’s your way, just know this: you’re not leading.
You’re getting compliance at best, and likely getting eye rolls behind your back.
Being direct isn’t having courage or being bold or being “strong.”
Being direct before you’ve been curious and built trust (and are sure you’ve actually succeeded) is lazy, unaware and lacking the emotional grounding required for leading in this new world of work.
…What? Someone had to say it. 💁🏼♀️
If you can’t sit with their perspective for thirty seconds — if you make a face, fly off the handle, interrupt, defend, shutdown — why would they ever tell you the truth? Why would your team risk a real answer? You’re not creating honesty. You’re creating a filter, but here’s the rub: you’re the one being filtered.
BRAVE is the discipline of being more honest. With them. With yourself. And making it safe enough that they can be more honest with you. That’s the whole game.
The leader in the alumni lab? His hard no wasn’t a betrayal of BRAVE. It was BRAVE doing exactly what it was built to do — giving him the clarity to know it was time, the trust account to spend it, and the self-respect to stop bending and say what needed to be said.
Chris’s cue for more weight and Steve’s hard no are the same thing =
Earned.
Delivered.
Trusted.
Truth.
That isn’t softness. That isn’t directness. That’s a third thing. And it’s the thing I’d argue your team is starving for.
If any of this resonated, our How to Talk to Humans Bootcamp is built for the leaders who are tired of the false choice.
Tired of being told to be more empathetic and tired of being told to be more direct. Tired of bending and tired of breaking.
You don’t need another framework that tells you to be nicer. You need one that tells you the truth about what is actually happening in the conversation — biologically, structurally, strategically — and gives you the operating system to move differently inside it. So you can feel good about yourself AND the results you get.
[Apply for the Fall cohort of Bootcamp → here]
Or send a handful of your leaders to learn it together — and they’ll be able to create more change for your people than another keynote, assessment or offsite. You have my word.
You don’t need to choose between being a doormat or a drill Sergeant. Those might have been the choices in the 1990s, but we know enough about the brain now to know better. Let’s act like it.
Everything you want for your business (and life) is on the other side of a BRAVE Conversation.
Love,
Elisabeth
Source: McKinsey & Company, “Psychological safety and the critical role of leadership development,” February 2021, with Amy Edmondson (Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School).
