Brené and Adam Grant on Empathy vs. Enmeshment

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Dare to Lead with Brené Brown

Episode: Brené and Adam Grant on Empathy vs. Enmeshment
Date: October 8, 2025
Host: Brené Brown
Guest: Adam Grant
Series: Strong Ground Special

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Episode Overview

In this insightful episode, Brené Brown and organizational psychologist Adam Grant tackle the complex territory explored in Brené’s book Strong Ground, focusing on the nuances of empathy, compassion, and enmeshment—especially in an age of instability and information overload. With research-driven arguments and vulnerable personal stories, Brené and Adam discuss the distinctions between cognitive and affective empathy, the dangers of enmeshment, and the impact of media consumption on our ability to remain compassionate without losing ourselves. The episode is both intellectually rigorous and deeply personal, with memorable metaphors and moments of genuine disagreement and growth.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Empathy Under Attack

• Context: Adam opens by noting a societal decline in empathy, referencing recent public criticisms of empathy from various ideological sides.
• Brené: Notes that some “far right conservative churches” and public figures like Elon Musk have labeled empathy as dangerous ([01:30–01:50]).
  • Quote: “...I think Elon Musk said that it was going to be the end of Western civilization, that empathy was the primary driver of our civilization.” – Brené ([01:50])

Takeaway

• Brené observes that empathy is inconvenient for those who use power over others and underlines that conversations around empathy have become politicized.

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2. Empathy vs. Compassion: The Scholarly Debate

• Distinction:

  • Affective (emotional) empathy: Feeling others’ feelings, which can result in emotional overload and withdrawal.
  • Cognitive empathy: Understanding and acknowledging another person’s experience without over-identifying.
  • Compassion: Witnessing suffering and taking action to help ([04:40–05:45], [08:29]).

• Adam: References Paul Bloom’s research, which critiques affective empathy and advocates for compassion and cognitive empathy:

  • Quote: “I do not need to feel your feelings or know exactly what it’s like to be in your shoes in order to care about your feelings and want to alleviate your suffering.” – Adam ([05:27])

• Brené’s Stance: Challenges the notion that empathy and compassion are interchangeable:

  • Quote: “Empathy and compassion in my research, I think, are very different things. And I think we actually need both.” – Brené ([05:53])

Takeaway

• Both argue that affective empathy can be harmful if unchecked, while cognitive empathy plus compassion offers a healthier, more sustainable path.

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3. Redefining Empathy & The “Enmeshment” Problem

• Adam’s Proposal: Suggests rebranding ‘cognitive empathy’ as ‘perspective-taking’ for clarity ([10:54-11:18]).
• Brené’s Counter: Wants to reclaim the term 'empathy' and proposes calling unhealthy affective empathy ‘enmeshment’ ([12:00–12:13]):
  • Quote: “Let’s call this, let’s call affective empathy enmeshment.” – Brené ([12:00])

Metaphor & Teaching Tool

• Brené shares her teaching metaphor:
  • Quote: “If you do not know where you end and someone else begins, you are not practicing empathy. You’re in enmeshment.” ([13:20])
  • Empathy means staying whole and present—not jumping in someone’s metaphorical hole of suffering. ([13:45])

Takeaway

• Enmeshment blurs boundaries and leads to burnout and secondary trauma; true empathy means engaging with but not becoming subsumed by another’s pain.

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4. Personal Stories of Enmeshment & Boundaries

• Brené’s Experience:
  • Shares her near-breakdown after working with trauma survivors and how her therapist helped her see the difference between empathy and enmeshment ([16:00–19:45]).
    • Quote: “You cannot work from a place of empathy when you take on the suffering of other people … your empathy has not gotten you in trouble. Your overidentification and secondary trauma has got you in trouble.” ([18:50])
  • Her husband, a pediatrician, explains his approach:
    • Quote: “I walk up to the fence, I lean over the fence, I embrace, I hug, I often cry with, but I have a job in that room and I never walk through the gate because when I become that parent, I can no longer help that parent.” ([19:40])

Takeaway

• Personal boundaries are essential for maintaining compassionate action without succumbing to emotional collapse.

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5. Media Consumption, Empathy Fatigue, and Processing the World

• Both Adam and Brené share: They avoid watching news and instead read, to protect themselves from emotional overload ([20:42–22:51]).
  • Quote (Adam): “I don’t want to get enmeshed in the melodrama of other people’s suffering, but I want to think about it … which is much easier to do when reading than watching.” ([21:18])
  • Quote (Brené): “When I read, I am much more likely to understand how my daily decisions are impacting other people ... When I watch, my nervous system becomes so overwhelmed I just shut it down.” ([22:00])

Takeaway

• Processing news through reading sustains perspective and encourages thoughtful, ethical action, whereas visual saturation drives numbing and disengagement.

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6. “Just World Theory,” Dehumanization, and the Limits of Numbing

• Just World Theory:

  • People protect themselves from overwhelming empathy by believing “bad things only happen to bad people” ([24:20–26:39]).
  • Research shows even minor negative information about a victim changes how we perceive their suffering and their deservingness.

• Dehumanization:

  • Repeated, graphic imagery and certain language can subtly erode compassion and foster dehumanization.

Takeaway

• Numbing via overexposure to suffering makes us more likely to judge and less inclined to help—a cycle exacerbated by modern media.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “My academic response would be, fuck you.” – Brené, about those trying to eliminate empathy to maintain power ([03:36])
• “If you do not know where you end and someone else begins, you are not practicing empathy. You’re in enmeshment.” – Brené ([13:20])
• “When I have to tell a parent something heart wrenching ... I walk up to the fence ... but I never walk through the gate because when I become that parent, I can no longer help that parent.” – Steve Brown, relayed by Brené ([19:40])
• “The moral of the story is: nuance matters … There’s different types of empathy, enmeshment—not good.” – Brené ([27:30])
• “Enmeshment gives me an exit ramp from accountability ... when I know where I end and you begin, then I can more accurately assess how my decisions are affecting your suffering.” – Brené ([29:47])

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Key Timestamps

• [01:12] – Empathy under attack: social and political context
• [05:45] – Brené and Adam debate empathy vs. compassion
• [12:00] – Rebranding the terms: empathy, enmeshment, and perspective-taking
• [13:45] – Brené’s teaching metaphor: “the hole”
• [16:00–19:45] – Brené’s personal story of secondary trauma and boundaries
• [20:42–22:51] – Media consumption, emotional overload, and news
• [24:20–26:39] – Just World Theory and dehumanization
• [27:30–29:47] – Final insights and nuanced conclusions

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Conclusion & Main Takeaways

• Empathy isn’t bad—enmeshment is. There’s a vital distinction between feeling with others (without losing oneself) and being so consumed by others’ feelings that you can no longer act.
• Boundaries matter. Empathy requires knowing where you end and another person begins. Enmeshment leads to burnout and less effectiveness.
• Media matters. Curating how we process suffering—through reading rather than watching—can help maintain empathy and support healthy engagement without overload.
• Nuance matters. In debates about empathy in society, simplistic arguments miss vital distinctions that are foundational for both leadership and humanity.

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Transcript

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Hi, everyone. I'm Brene Brown and this is Dare to Lead. And I am back with my good friend Adam Grant, and we are digging into strong ground lessons on daring, leadership, the tenacity of paradox, and the wisdom of the human spirit. Welcome back, Adam.

[Adam Grant]

Thanks, Brene. I've been thinking a ton about our last conversation and the difficulty that so many people have finding empathy for others, which seems to have gotten worse in the last few years. What do you make of that?

[Brene Brown]

I mean, are we just really just gonna go right here, right now? Like, we're just gonna start right there? I love it. The attack on empathy is so interesting to me especially, you know, there are kind of like far right conservative churches that are saying actually practicing empathy is a sin. I read an article about it.

[Adam Grant]

What?

[Brene Brown]

Yeah. And then I think Elon Musk said that it was going to be the end of Western civilization, that empathy was the primary driver of. Of our civilization. Now, on the surface of things.

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[Brene Brown]

Could make a very easy argument that folks who are using power over to lead, including occasional bouts of cruelty to make sure people really understand there's someone to be feared, would not be a fan of empathy. Right. You would not want us to turn on the television and empathize with immigrant families or LGBTQ community. You could understand that at a very primal level, but I think it's actually deeper than that. And this is a good conversation for us to have because it's not just there are criticisms of empathy from, I guess you could say both sides of the aisle in some way. And for me, at one level, I think you've got people saying, and this is so, like, this is such smart, Machiavellian politics to me, to say, you shouldn't feel bad. How dare people make you feel uncomfortable when you witness something like, that's not that you shouldn't have to go through that. And then on the Other hand, you've got a school of people saying, no, wait, wait, wait. I'm not saying that. I think you should not only be moved by people's suffering, but you should move to help. And that's compassion. That's different than empathy. So what I. Yeah, so what I'd like to say is for the people who want to get away with shit by making sure that we don't feel and observe and have reactions to other people's suffering, I think my academic response would be, fuck you. But for people who really want to engage in a serious debate about this, I think we need to make the distinction between cognitive empathy and affective empathy. And that's where I think people don't understand what empathy is and what empathy isn't. And so I do believe that understanding the different types of empathy makes the argument much fuller.

[Adam Grant]

I think that's really important. I've been very persuaded by Paul Bloom's research on empathy versus compassion, which I think it really speaks to the cognitive affect of difference. I think, like the affective part of empathy, the I feel your feelings can be weaponized and misused. We know that it tends to be biased, right. That it's much easier to empathize with people who come from our own group and look like us. We know that a lot of people suffer from empathic overload. That and actually ironically, then end up less kind and generous to others because they. They feel so much of other people's suffering, they just have to escape or withdraw. And I think that that's. That's obviously not healthy or sustainable. I think the cognitive part of empathy, and I guess the behavioral part too, the action involved in compassion, I would love to see more of that in the world. Like, I do not need to feel your feelings or know exactly what it's like to be in your shoes in order to care about your feelings and want to alleviate your suffering.

[Brene Brown]

So this is so interesting. I will start here. Disagree with Paul Bloom.

[Adam Grant]

Ooh, yeah, interesting. Tell me more.

[Brene Brown]

I think empathy and compassion in my research, I think, are very different things. And I think we actually need both. What I think we need, though, is I think we need cognitive empathy and compassion, not effective empathy. So I think this is the problem when we spend more time scrolling and less time reading, more time judging, less time learning. And so affective empathy is very related to burnout. It is also related to just kind of a numbing that I've desensitized myself from, really without any of my cognitive awareness. I've desensitized Myself to. I don't give a shit with intention. Like it's just to feel what people feel is not a good idea. But it is not. It is a very specific type of empathy. There's another type of empathy which is cognitive empathy, which I think is important and as important as compassion, which is. I'm thinking of Teresa Wiseman scholarship on this. She's a UK scholar, comes out of nursing, studied empathy across every profession where people rely on connecting compassionately and with empathy to patients. Dentistry, medicine, psychiatry. And so cognitive empathy is the ability to. To listen and believe someone's experience. To listen, understand and believe someone's experience even when it's different than your own. And I think that without it, I think compassion is almost bankrupt, to be honest with you, because I think compassion means to witness suffering and take action. But I think the problem with empathy is when I see your struggle or you tell me your story and it doesn't match my lived experience. Without cognitive empathy and some perspective taking skills and some skills of staying out of judgment, I have a hard time believing that was your experience.

[Adam Grant]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Brene Brown]

And so I think cognitive empathy is critically important and for wholesale dismissal of empathy. I think you don't know what you're talking about. I think you've taken one strain of it and vilified it because it fits your compelling, provocative title of a book or an article that empathy is bad. That's what I think.

[Adam Grant]

Yeah. Yeah. You're throwing out the baby with the bathwater there.

[Brene Brown]

Yeah.

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[Adam Grant]

What what's interesting about that though is, is what you outlined. I actually think is, as I understand it, Paul Bloom's argument, which is that affective empathy is where we get the double edged sword, agree, but that we need the cognitive understanding of, you know, I may not agree with you, but I get where you're coming from, and I think it's. It's an understandable or reasonable position to hold. And the compassion of, yeah, I've seen your suffering and I want to do what I can to support you. If I can't make it, if I can't make it go away and I can't make you feel better, I can at least help you feel seen, then.

[Brene Brown]

I would have loved some work from him that said cognitive empathy plus compassion is the way to go. Yeah, but we're not gonna do that because we're going to underestimate the public's ability to understand and it doesn't make for a great headline.

[Adam Grant]

That's exactly the challenge here. Like cognitive empathy and affective empathy already are more. They're a bit of a mouthful, I think. I don't know. I've wondered if we need a rebranding here of saying, let's just call the affective part empathy. Let's, you know, let's rename the cognitive part perspective taking and talk about how we need perspective taking and compassion.

[Brene Brown]

Hold on, let me think through it. Pausing. I'm here, but I'm thinking. I need a wheels turning sound machine. Say it one more time. Tell me what your rebrand is.

[Adam Grant]

Yeah, I'm wondering if empathy is the affective part and we agree has some problems associated with it. Do we stop trying to rescue cognitive empathy and just call it perspective taking and say you don't need the empathy of feeling other people's feelings. What you do know, what you do need is the perspective taking of understanding other people's feelings and the compassion of responding to them.

[Brene Brown]

I hear your argument, honorable Adam Grant, and I.

[Adam Grant]

You don't want to lose the word empathy, do you?

[Brene Brown]

And I just, I disagree. Let's call this, let's call affective empathy enmeshment.

[Adam Grant]

Ooh, that's. That's really good. And it's much better than my proposal.

[Brene Brown]

Let's call that enmeshment. Meaning, I don't know, if I take on your feelings, then I, you know, let me, let me just, let me tell you this. Let me share a story with you, if you don't mind. Like, when we teach empathy, I have two people stand in the front of the room far away from each other with an outstretched hand, and I have them grab that hand and say, I ask the two people, where do you end? And this other person begins, and they're clutching each other's hands and we're like, well, it's kind of hard to say. Then I say, if you do not know where you end and someone else begins, you are not practicing empathy. You're in enmeshment if you're clear where you end and someone else begins. Because here's the thing. If you. The way I describe empathy when we're teaching it is you've got this kind of hole in the ground. And I'll link to a video on the podcast where we have someone drew a little cartoon of this, but that's really kind of helpful. And I come up to you and I see you're in this hole, Adam, and I'm like, hey, you okay? What's going on? You say, I'm really. I'm in this really hard place. If I just jump in that dark hole with you, that just means you've got two people in deep shit. It's not helpful at all. That's affective empathy. Oh, I'm going to feel it now. We're both in the dark. Hell, I get it shitty down here. My job is to remain whole while being curious about your situation and listening to your situation and letting you know that I see you. I'm glad you shared with me and you're not alone. It's not about jumping in the hole with you. Does that make sense?

[Adam Grant]

Makes sense. That's profound. That is such a beautiful encapsulation of what's wrong with affective empathy. And I think. I think you. You crushed it.

[Brene Brown]

I've been teaching it for 20 years. But I do think, like, especially imagine in a situation where you've been, you know, teaching. You know, I don't. I teach. Interesting. I teach an mba. An MBA program now, and not in a social work program, but we still teach empathy as part of dare to lead. And so many people think that the kind thing to do is to jump in the hole. And it almost goes back to one of our earlier podcast conversations about generosity as other focused. When you're not taking care of yourself and your emotional sovereignty, when you're not doing that, you're not being other focused. And that is a very difficult paradox going back to yet another podcast.

[Adam Grant]

Yeah, it is.

[Brene Brown]

Do you understand what I'm saying, though?

[Adam Grant]

I think that's brilliant. I think we want empathy and compassion. We don't want enmeshment.

[Brene Brown]

We do not want enmeshment. Enmeshment is like, I don't know where I begin and you end. And if you feel good, I feel good. And if you're sad, I'm sad and it's over. Identification and it's secondary trauma. And it's. I'll tell a really personal story. I'm trying to. I've been debating whether I should tell it or not because it's really hard. When I wrote my first curriculum on shame, I collected research by going into with clinicians, with therapists. I am not one. I have one. I am not one. But going in and co facilitating the work with clinicians who were trained to do that. And it was a really hard experience because we were running one set of groups at the Houston Area Women's center, which is domestic violence and sexual abuse and a lot of women living in shelters during this period of time. I don't know if you remember this news story. Story. Andrea Yates drowned her four or five kids in Houston. Do you remember this story? Yeah. It was like really devastating and I couldn't get out from underneath that story. I think Ellen was young. I don't think Charlie was born yet. I don't know what year it was. And I actually almost stopped functioning. And I was doing this, like, very serious visualization of what that process must have looked like and how it worked and like, just really crazy stuff. And I think I was a relatively new mom, so it must have been, you know, Ellen's 26 now. So I went to go see my therapist and her name's Diana. And she asked me this really weird question that I felt like was out of the blue. She said, I bet when you're kind of co facilitating these groups, piloting this curriculum at the women's shelter, I bet you're hearing horrific stories. And I said, I am. And she said, are you reliving those in your mind and putting yourself in those images and putting your daughter in that situation? And I said, no, no, no, no, no, not at all. And she said, why? And I said, because I don't know. I have a job to do in there. And she said, what's your job in there? You're not the clinician. And I said, well, at the very least, my job is to be empathic. And she said, let's stop right here. You cannot work from a place of empathy when you take on the suffering of other people. What you're doing with this news story is you're not being overly empathetic. You came in here telling me that your empathy has gotten you in trouble. Your empathy has not gotten you in trouble. Your over identification and secondary trauma has got you in trouble. And I was like, what? Right? And I was like, I don't understand. She said, yes, you do say it back to me. And I said, I'm over identifying, I'm taking on the feelings, I'm doing this really dangerous visualization and I'm becoming traumatized by something that didn't happen to me, therefore I'm of no use. And she said yes. And so that night when I got home, it was really interesting. I was telling Steve about my therapy session and my husband's a pediatrician and he sees a disproportionate number of really hard cases because he doesn't use a hospitalist to follow his patients. He does all his own following. And so I said, what do you make of what Diana said today about I'm subjecting myself to secondary trauma and enmeshment versus boundaries and distance and empathy? And he said, when I have to tell a parent something heart wrenching about a test result with their child or something, I have a rule. And it is I walk up to the fence, I lean over the fence, I embrace, I hug, I often cry with, but I have a job in that room and I never walk through the gate because when I become that parent, I can no longer help that parent. Do you think that's what we're talking about here?

[Adam Grant]

So powerful. Yeah, I think that's exactly what we're talking about here. And it speaks to a couple of things. One is you alluded earlier to the problem of like people just kind of scrolling and watching reels and short videos as opposed to reading. And I never realized it before, but this is one of the reasons that I don't watch the news ever. I only read the news in part. I want to curate my own feed as opposed to letting other people show me what to watch. But I think just as much of it as I listen to you is not wanting to be enmeshed in the melodrama of other people's suffering, but wanting to think about it and think critically about it, which is much easier to do when reading than watching because I don't get emotionally overloaded. And I can ask myself, is there something I can do here to be helpful?

[Brene Brown]

I mean, it's so weird. I didn't know that about you. I only read the news as well, and I read the BBC and I read Al Jazeera, I read across news and I absolutely have a curated reading list that I read every morning. Multiple perspectives, but I read it. And one of the reasons I read it is exactly, I didn't even know why I did that, because the whole idea of if it bleeds, it leads and emotional manipulation through visuals. When I read this is weird. This is counterintuitive. When I read, I am much more likely to understand how my daily decisions are impacting other people in ways that are not okay with me, ethically and morally. When I watch, my nervous system becomes so overwhelmed I just shut it down and I go straight to fuck it. I can't do this and I don't change my behaviors.

[Adam Grant]

This is also why I will never watch Schindler's List. But I've read a ton of Holocaust literature and I feel like my worldview has been shaped heavily by reading Anne Frank and Viktor Frankl and Primo Levi. But I do not want the images in my brain that I can't unsee and especially can't unfeel.

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[Brene Brown]

I wonder what happens in a world where I actually think compassionate numbing, like kind of compassion fatigue. I think we just shut down. I think just too much is too much and we can't do it. You know, we have to wrap up pretty soon. But one of the things I think is interesting to bring in here that I got it. Maybe you'll know the scholar's name I can't forget. And you're so good at this. Just World Theory Melvin Lerner. Okay. That whole idea that I remember when I was writing. I don't know, I don't remember which book it was I was writing on. I think it might have been the book on women and shame. This idea that using mock juries as research and they would tell the graphic story of, you know, this was a 80 year old woman who was killed in this incredibly violent way. And the jury would say, death penalty or most severe consequence. And then they'd say, let me add a variable. She was a sex worker when she was younger. Well, I don't know, maybe that punishment's too much like how the only way we get up in the morning and make it through the day is if we have this really kind of theory in our minds that it's a just world. That if I use my car seat and I don't drink and drive, that my car will never be the image on the 10 o' clock news turned upside down with a car seat 30ft away from it. Like, I'll never be that person. And that we live in this just world and that bad things only happen to bad people. And I actually believe when we over saturate with images, it drives the thinking because our nervous system can't handle it. And we start thinking, how did you get yourself into this situation? You know, as opposed to taking in information where we can stay emotionally moved but cognitively engaged to interrogate our own behaviors.

[Adam Grant]

Yes. And that's where instead of feeling concerned and trying to help, we blame and shame the victim. Because in a just world, it must have been their fault. They must have deserved it.

[Brene Brown]

I mean, yeah, could you imagine these mock juries saying, oh, I think it was some kind of like brutal situation, like stabbed in the head or something. And you know, they're like, full sentence, whatever it is, life without parole, death penalty, whatever the harshest sentence was. Until they got one variable, that when she was younger she was a sex worker. Well, maybe we let him off the hook. Like it goes back to dehumanization. And I think we, you know, when you. I did a deep dive into dehumanization and the practice of dehumanization and the use of language in dehumanizing tactics and moving people out of kind of a moral arena where the rules of humanity apply to them. When we. Yes, you can use dehumanizing language. Yes, you can dehumanize people in graphic representation. We've seen history, we've seen history books full of that. I think we're seeing it now with immigrants choice words like infestation, you know, like. But the thing that no one talks about is you can also leverage imagery and over saturate imagery and frame news stories in ways that also more subtly and possibly more dangerously lead to dehumanization. I think the moral of the story is, for me, for this podcast, is nuance matters. There's different types of empathy, enmeshment, not good. And maybe invitation to people listening to read and not watch and take your own inventory of that, how that shows up in your life. What's your takeaway? It was a hard conversation today.

[Adam Grant]

You captured it much better than I would have. My big light bulb from this conversation is definitely enmeshment. And linking that which I never thought to do, even though I've been doing it in my daily habits, to these very vivid, visceral images that are great at commanding our attention both in, you know, on the news and on social media, and saying, I don't want to get enmeshed. I want to maintain empathy and compassion and therefore I need to process in a way that gives me a healthy distance from these events but also gives me balanced information about what's going on.

[Brene Brown]

Yeah. And I think for me, the light bulb moment is when I don't know where I end and you begin. Not only does that drive compassion fatigue and empathy fatigue, the good kind of empathy fatigue, enmeshment gives me an exit ramp from accountability because if I know where I end and you begin, then I can more accurately assess how my decisions are affecting your suffering. And I think we just for me, the caution of this conversation is when people attack a construct that for you or for me or for anyone has meaning. Dig in. You know, dig in because there's probably a fair amount of nuance to understand. Dare to Lead is produced by BR Renee Brown Education and Research Group. Music is by the sufferers. Get new episodes as soon as they're published by following Dare to Lead on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast network. Discover more award winning shows@podcast voxmedia.com.