Brené Brown: Hi everyone, I’m Brené Brown and this is Dare to Lead. We are coming to the very final episode in our special podcast series on Strong Ground. As usual, I want to thank my good friend Adam Grant for doing the first six episodes with me. I want to thank all of you for listening, submitting great questions for the AMA. I have to say, of all of the questions that we received, so many of them were about the Above and Below the Line practice. So what I thought I would do is, with the permission of Penguin Random House Audio, I am actually going to share the audio from the book on the Above and Below the Line practice with you as the final podcast. It’ll walk you through everything I learned from my coach Courtney. It’ll walk you through the attribution of the practice. I think it’s helpful. You know, I talk about a lot of skill sets and mindsets that make up the future of leadership. And this is the kettlebell exercise that I think really hits, you know, 10, 12 of those with one practice if we can integrate it into our daily lives. Again, thank you so much for joining this special eight-episode series on Strong Ground.

BB: I appreciate this community. I appreciate your great questions. Stay awkward, brave, and kind. Chapter 12. The Above/Below the Line Practice In our work, there are three or four tools that consistently receive the highest feedback from Dare to Lead participants. Again, in our strength training metaphor, these are definitely the kettlebell workouts, the ones that strengthen many areas at the same time. The Above/Below the Line Practice is a highly praised tool, and it builds strength across every single one of the grounded competence tool sets and mindsets that we’ll talk about in Chapter 15. It also facilitates accuracy in the grounded thinking tools. Too good to be true? I thought so too. But now, after using it for the past year, embedding it in our organization and teaching it to hundreds of leaders, I believe it’s that good. I was introduced to this idea by my coach, Courtney. She is an extraordinary coach, an incredible thinker, and possibly a dangerous mind reader. Often when I say something to her like, “No, that’s not really an important detail of the story that I’m trying to tell you right now. Can we just focus on this other part?”

BB: She’ll pause and smile. Then there’s this awkward silence until I finally concede and say, “All right, all right, we can go back to that little detail for just a second if it’s going to make you feel better.” Again, nothing but a slight smile. And then I’ll finally give up and acknowledge that that moment that I’m dodging is not a small part of my story at all. It’s the entire story of why I was either proud of how I showed up or why I will have to circle back and apologize for something I’ve done. On one such occasion, I told her about a really terrible meeting I’d had earlier that day, and she said, “It sounds like you were below the line.” I asked her what she meant, and in the course of 10 minutes, she reorganized how I show up at work with my kids and in my marriage. I am not exaggerating one bit. I was even weepy when we got off the call. When she asked me why, I told her, “I think I’m really emotional for two reasons. One, this is going to help me every single day. It’s going to make me a better partner, better mom, leader, and a better person.

BB: And I’m sad that I’m just learning this. Like, I’m sad I didn’t know about this sooner.” I teach it the way that Courtney taught me and how she’s actually teaching it to our senior leaders right now. She does a lot of coaching across our leadership team. So the line that we’re talking about when we say above, below the line, the line is fear. And when we’re above the line, we feel fear, and we acknowledge it. And we’re not unknowingly acting from it. We’re feeling it, and we’re able to maintain the wheel. We’re driving with awareness. When we’re below the line, we’re acting from fear, and our behaviors are mostly outside of our awareness. Fear is driving. Below the line, our behaviors typically fall into one of three roles. The hero, the villain, or the victim. These align with Stephen Karpman’s model of the Drama Triangle that he developed in 1968. Above the line, our roles are normally creator, challenger, and coach. And these are based on David Emerald’s 2005 Empowerment Dynamic. This framework has evolved over the years, and I’m going to keep it very clean and straightforward in my explanation. But I want you to pay attention to the attribution.

BB: If you look on your PDF, there’ll be an image that kind of shows this practice. And on the image, there’s the attribution. I’m going to read it to you right now because it’s really important that we give credit where credit is due. So it’s got a story. It’s got a wild history. It appears that the concept of kind of “above and below the line” originated with Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Then Carolyn Taylor talked about it in her book, Walking the Talk. Taylor acknowledged Kiyosaki as the source of her introduction to the idea. She goes on to explore the “above the line/below the line” concept in depth. And she applies it to leadership and organizational culture. Then the Conscious Leadership Group, which is Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kayley Warner Klemp, popularized the framework among coaches and leadership consultants in their book, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. They also advanced this concept by adding Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle and David Emerald’s Empowerment Dynamic. So this is just a practice that I think has been so meaningful for people over the years that they have taken it, added to it, made it stronger and stronger.

BB: But the attribution is always important, so I want you to understand it. So let me just go over, since you’re not looking at the visual, let me go over it with you as you’re listening. So you’ve got a line. The line is fear. Above the line, we’re in fear, but we’re driving. We’re aware of it. We understand we’re in it. And we’re aware how it may or may not potentially move our behaviors and our thinking. When we’re below the line, we’re in fear and it’s driving and we’re not even riding shotgun. We’re like hogtied in the trunk. Like it is driving. It’s changing how we think and we feel, how we’re showing up. When we’re above the line, we’re kind of our best selves and we’re working out of one of three positions. We’re doing great creator work. We’re challenging and productive challenging or we’re coaching. Under the line, we usually fall into a hero, victim or villain stance. And this is where things get really dicey. Let’s breathe some life into the concept by sharing some real examples. And these are hard to share because they’re very real. So my teammate says to me, “Hey, Brené, we accidentally copied the wrong person on an email. And there was some confidential information about Josh’s new book in the email.

BB: The book is under wraps and we’re not really sure how to handle it.” Me, I go immediately below the line. “Jesus, this is not the first time this has happened. No one understands how shitty I look when we do this. Look, people trust me with early drafts of their work. And then this is how we treat them. I mean, you know what? From now on, I’ll do it myself. Clearly, no one understands how freaking hard this is on me. It doesn’t make you look careless. It makes me look bad.” Oh, I wish that didn’t sound familiar, A. But B, I want you to notice the language. Hero, I’ll do it myself. Victim, no one understands. Villain, who’s going to take the blame for this? Now, let’s do the same scenario where someone says, “Hey, Brené, we’ve accidentally copied the wrong person on an email. There was some sensitive and confidential information about Josh’s new book in that email. We’re not sure how to handle it.” So then here’s my response. “Holy shit. Okay. You know what? This puts me below the line. I’m going to need a minute.” I come back 10, 15 minutes because I know that’s what it takes me, personally. I know I’m going to have to take a walk. I’m usually going to be in the parking lot. I’m going to come back, I’m going to acknowledge that I’m in fear. I’m going to try to drive and not let fear drive. So I come back and say, “All right, let me just start by saying these situations are rare, and I know that people are very careful. I’ll be really frank. I can go below the line in a second with this because people trust me, and I take that very seriously. And I also know that our team takes that seriously. Can we dig into how this happened and how we can put some kind of system in place that’ll protect us against this happening again.” In this situation,  I’m a challenger. How do we fix this? A coach. We should look for patterns. Creator. We need to build systems that support people that we trust who are doing good work. I think what’s critical to understand when you’re using this tool is that the awareness of being below the line, naming it and pausing is the big win. That’s the door prize, baby. Like, taking the time I need is my strength and courage.

BB: This is my practice. And I think in an organization, when a critical mass of people start practicing this strategy, it is a culture changer. As I’m reading this book to you right now, I’m just going to share a little aside for the audiobook listeners. We are in, like, big time, pre launch mode, and things are stressful and we’re trying to get everything ready. And I bet twice a day in meetings, someone right now will say, “You know what, I’m under the line.” And we just take a break and we come back. And we come back, you know, 10 minutes later, and we talk about how they got under the line and what we could do differently. And we thank them for their courage and their, you know, self awareness and insight. In the book I write just a few days ago on a call with more than 90 senior leaders and this is one of the best stories of this is why I love my work. I’m on a call with more than 90 senior leaders. One of the most senior leaders shares a story about going below the line while giving hard feedback to a direct report.

BB: He says this to the entire group on the team’s call. “I just stopped us and said, ‘I’m below the line. This is not productive. Can we pause and circle back in an hour or so?’” He told his peers that his direct report responded with, “I’m below the line as well. I appreciate the time out. An hour will be great.” This exchange sounds simple, but it took courage, vulnerability, and skill. These types of exchanges create trust, respect, and honesty. This is what transformation looks like. This is what it means to break old ways of communicating and risk trying something new. This is what it looks like when a critical mass of people are building new muscles at the same time. This five-minute act of courage is how organizations create strong ground. I call this next section Fear and Friends. I have found out that I am the most challenged to remember this practice when I don’t immediately recognize that I’m in fear because fear is showing up for me as anger. Anger is a powerful emotion that’s often ignited by a sense of injustice. I mean, it can definitely serve as a powerful catalyst for courage, love, change, compassion, or justice if we tap into its power to transform.

BB: But when we just hold on to being pissed off, it’s crushing. In most cultures, it’s more acceptable and even safer to be pissed off than it is to be in fear or feel sad or feel vulnerable. When it comes to my kids, 90% of my frustration turns out to be fear. Underneath kind of what I might say out loud to Steve about why are they going there? What are they doing? Is the voice, what if they get hurt? What if they’re not safe? What if they can’t pull this thing off? It’s really important to them. I grew up in a family where being pissed off was fine. Being in fear was not okay. It’s taken a lot of unlearning and my Above/Below the Line Practice has helped me in a very unexpected way. I recognize the hero/villain/victim language before I even know what I’m feeling sometimes. As soon as I hear myself say something close to one of these things, I know I’ve got a below the line problem. I’ll do it myself. Oh my God, I am so on my own here. Nobody gets it. This is so much harder on me than it is on other people.

BB: You know what the problem is? I just care more. If other people gave a shit, it’d be better. I can go really quickly into villain. I don’t give a shit whether you like me or not. Or I’ll be the bad guy. I don’t care. When I find myself in that language, that’s when I can say something to myself like, oh my God, I’m in some fear. Maybe I’m pissed off, but I must be in fear. Or this is my favorite thing I say to myself. Easy does it, Brené. You can be really scary when you’re scared. Building Up and Breaking Down. If you’ve ever practiced anything, playing the guitar, making free throws in basketball, yoga, a new language, drawing, you know it’s hard and it requires deliberate practice. That uncomfortable stretching and failing and learning and moving forward a slow inch at a time. As adults, so many of us are torn between the achiness of muscles that are atrophying from not trying new things and the reluctance to subject ourselves to the vulnerability and awkwardness of not being good at something. This practice that I’m talking to you about right now transformed my life. I have seen it help many, many people, and I have never, ever seen anyone master it from the get-go. It’s a practice.

BB: As a former competitive swimmer and someone who fell in love with my husband a lifetime ago when we were coaching swimming and lifeguarding together, I love Bonnie Tsui’s beautiful book, Why We Swim. As soon as I heard that she had a new book out titled On Muscle:The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters, you can only imagine my excitement. As we think about our own Above/Below the Line Practice and how it can be a part of finding our strong ground, I find these words from Bonnie’s new book inspiring. Bonnie writes, the way you build muscle is by breaking yourself down. Muscle fibers sustain damage through strain and stress, then repair themselves by activating special stem cells that fuse to the fiber to increase size and mass. You get stronger by surviving each series of little breakdowns, allowing for regeneration, rejuvenation, regrowth, building up, breaking down. We exist in this constant cycle. In fact, it is the cycle that allows us to exist. When it ceases, so do we. Dare to Lead is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group. Music is by the Suffers 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 at podcasts.voxmedia.com.

© 2025 Brené Brown Education and Research Group, LLC. All rights reserved.