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On this episode of Unlocking Us

I wanted to share with you a talk that I did at UCLA’s Royce Hall for Oprah’s Super Soul sessions where I uncovered the fundamentals of trust. What is trust? The data says there are seven parts of trust, and we organize these into the acronym BRAVING. Breaking down the anatomy of trust into specific behaviors allows us to more clearly identify and address breaches of trust. I love the BRAVING checklist because it reminds me that trusting myself or other people is a vulnerable and courageous process.

About the guest

Brené Brown

Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston, where she holds the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair at the Graduate College of Social Work. She also holds the position of visiting professor in management at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business.

Brené has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. She is the author of six #1 New York Times bestsellers and is the host of two award-winning podcasts, Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead.

Brené’s books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and her titles include Atlas of the HeartDare to Lead, Braving the Wilderness, Rising Strong, Daring Greatly, and The Gifts of Imperfection. With Tarana Burke, she co-edited the bestselling anthology You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience.

Brené’s TED talk on the Power of Vulnerability is one of the top five most-viewed TED talks in the world, with over 60 million views. Brené is the first researcher to have a filmed lecture on Netflix, and in March 2022, she launched a new show on HBO Max that focuses on her latest book, Atlas of the Heart.

Brené spends most of her time working in organizations around the world, helping develop braver leaders and more courageous cultures.

She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Steve. They have two children, Ellen and Charlie, and a weird Bichon named Lucy.

Show notes

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Transcript

Brené Brown: Hi, everyone, I’m Brené Brown. And this is Unlocking Us.

[music]

BB: I’m sitting here with Barrett. How is it going?

Barrett Guillen: Hi.

BB: We played pickleball this morning.

BG: I know. I’m really down on my game this morning. [laughter]

BB: Why? We won the first one.

BG: I think I was really distracted and so I was just kind of like, I don’t like when I’m distracted, I want to be in the game.

BB: Yeah, you can’t be distracted and do well in pickleball.

BG: No. I thought I was going to get in around the pole and ATP and hit my leg instead. [laughter] And that’s how distracted I was.

BB: So around the post is, post whatever or pole, but around the post is like when someone hits it so wide you don’t have to hit it back over the net, you can actually go around the post and back in their court. And I thought it was very awesome that you tried that today.

BG: I hit my leg, there is nothing awesome about hitting my leg.

[laughter]

BB: She hit her leg with…

BG: I was like, “ATP, ATP. Ow ow.”

BB: She hit her leg with the paddle, right, because you have to do some fancy footwork to make that work, they make it look so easy, the pros do, but then what was really funny is she said… [laughter] You said, “I hurt my leg and I hurt my ego.” [laughter]

BG: True.

BB: A little bit of the Brown family competitiveness this morning.

BG: Speak for yourself.

BB: No. I speak for both of us.

BB: Alright, it’s been a full on fall, yes?

BG: Yes.

BB: So I went straight from writing Atlas of the Heart into preparing for HBO. Lots of podcasts. Let me tell you something they used to say, I heard this the first time I wrote a book, they’re like, “The work begins when you turn in the book,” and I’m like, “Oh, screw you.” I’m like, “That cannot be true because I’m… That does… ” And it’s actually kind of true. There’s a lot of weird stuff that happens after you turn a book in. So it’s been really busy and nuts, but I’ve also been playing… I have protected my pickleball time.

BG: Yeah, you have. You’ve done a good job. No joke.

BB: I had to make it almost non-negotiable, and I’m playing a lot of pickleball and I’m still grumpy and tired, so could you only imagine?

BG: [chuckle] No.

[laughter]

BB: Rude. And oh my God, now, it’s the holidays.

BG: Oh my God. How?

BB: I don’t know how it happened, but let me just tell you this, when is this podcast coming out? It’s coming out right around the corner, right?

BG: Yeah, this podcast is going to be coming out on Wednesday. [chuckle]

BB: What’s wrong with you?

BG: I’m like every one of these podcasts is Wednesday.

[laughter]

BB: We’re punch-drunk y’all.

BG: Run it by the calendar.

BB: It’s coming out Thursday, the 24th, right?

BG: It’s Wednesday, yes, November 24th.

BB: It’s coming on a Wednesday. It’s coming out…

BG: This is where we are y’all.

BB: Yeah, this is where we are. Yeah. It’s coming out on the 24th. And I don’t even know why that was relevant, but I thought there was going to be something important. Oh it’s going to be… If you’re in the U.S., it’s Thanksgiving week, it’s fall break for us. And let me just tell you this, hold your holiday cards. Right? I don’t want to get a holiday card from you in the next week. It’s over-achieving. It’s rude, it’s not thoughtful. Makes the rest of us feel like shit. Yeah, I’d like it a couple of days after Christmas, with at least one return to sender wrong address on it.

BG: With the Happy Holidays marked out, Happy New Year. [laughter] Or at least that’s how ours would be.

BB: Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. I am very grateful about this Thanksgiving week.

BG: Me too.

BB: I’m so grateful for… Well, I’m always… I’m really… Let me just start with you, because you’re sitting right here, this will be awkward, the Brown family.

BG: We’re even sharing a mic.

BB: We are sharing a mic. I just keep thinking we need to get closer to it like “A Star Is Born.” I’m in the… You have to come in like… Really…

BG: Not going there with you.

BB: Okay, whatever. I’m grateful for you.

BG: Me too, I’m grateful for you.

BB: You put up with a lot of craziness.

BG: It’s fun.

BB: Sometimes.

BG: Most of the time.

BB: It’s hard.

BG: Sometimes.

BB: Yeah, she’s really good at like when I start crying or I’m like, “I can’t do it, I’m really overwhelmed.” She’s really good at, “Okay. Well, we don’t have to do it, we can just not do it.” And I’m like, “Of course, we have to do it.” “You know what, no, they’re all choices, Brené.” That’s pretty good.

BG: Yeah, that’s true.

BB: It’s very helpful. So thank you.

BG: You’re welcome.

BB: For being my person all the time.

BG: You’re welcome.

BB: I’m also just grateful to our broader team.

BG: Oh they’re so kick-ass.

BB: God they’re kick-ass aren’t they?

BG: Yes.

BB: Like what a miracle. I wake up every day and go, “How did this happen?” Like we just have a team of what, 30 people?

BG: Yeah.

BB: And they’re just incredible, and it’s been hard, because we’re on a book, we call it a crash, when you turn in a book and the publisher turns it around really quick, we’ve been on a book crash, unpacking pallets and pallets and pallets of books. Literally, the UPS person…

BG: [chuckle] He was so grateful that he was on vacation this time during our book delivery.

BB: Yeah, because he’s just like, “I just can’t, I couldn’t handle it.” Because we get a lot of books here. So today’s the 24th if you’re listening to it on the day it came out. The book’s going to come out Atlas of the Heart, 11/30. And we’re not doing a traditional book tour this time because kind of COVID stuff, which I did do a small event last night, it was my first in-person event since March of 2020, and it was so fun.

BG: It was fun.

BB: I was in it to win it.

BG: Yeah, it was really good.

BB: So I can’t wait to see y’all. 2022, I’m coming to a city near you hopefully.

BG: I’m about to say amphitheater near you but I don’t even know where that came from.

BB: What is it?

BG: I don’t know.

BB: Okay, I’m coming to an amphitheater, that’s like a rock and roll tour or something.

BG: That’s what we need.

BB: Yeah. Me and some rock band from the ’80s, we’re coming to you. But I’m going to try to get out in 2022 for sure I miss seeing your faces. But no traditional book tour this year, we do have an event on December 2nd at 8:00 PM Eastern time. We are partnering with over 150 independent bookstores around the U.S. and Canada, I have to say that one of the things that’s been really hard for independent booksellers during COVID is that book tours are a big part of their revenue strategy, and so we’re doing our virtual book tour with them. You can go on brenebrown.com on the episode page and figure out how to get a ticket and guess who is, I love this, who’s interviewing me for this, and I’ll be in conversation with Priya Parker, who… She’s amazing.

BG: And just a reminder for the book event, you buy a ticket and you get a book.

BB: Yeah. And if you’ve already bought a book, that’s okay, because you can just get another book and then gift that book. See, you see how that works?

BG: That’s great.

BB: Yeah. That’s about a sales…

BG: Oh my God and it’s a beautiful book. So to give it away, I mean, even our team already has their books and they’re all like, “Oh my God, it’s a beautiful coffee table book, it’s just so beautiful.” You’ve never done a four-color book before.

BB: I haven’t and it was so fun, except it got a little dicey there, because they’d be like, “Yeah, we need four more chapters from you.” And I’m like “I’m choosing a palette for the quote cards in the book.” They’re like, “Tough shit. We need your chapters.” I got really into the aesthetic of it, but it is… It is a really beautiful…

BG: It’s beautiful.

BB: Yeah, and it’s incredible, and big shout out to everyone who worked on that, because that was a thing. So we are going to… For the podcast this week, we are going to share the anatomy of trust with you, we have been talking about trust a lot over on Dare to Lead, we interviewed Charles Feltman, who wrote The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work. Do you know someone told me that it’s not primer, it primer?

BG: Oh really?

BB: Mm-hmm. I said bullshoit instead of bullshit, but… [laughter] I don’t know. I’ll just say The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Primer Primer for Building Trust at Work. Barrett and I also did two episodes on trust in the workplace, and so I did a talk at UCLA at Royce Hall for Oprah’s Super Soul Sessions where I talked about the fundamentals of trust, and I really walked through BRAVING for the first time. So that’s what I’m sharing with y’all this Thanksgiving, and so I think it’s helpful because it’s not using the acronym BRAVING for trust isn’t just a work thing, it’s also… It’s just a life thing, right?

BG: Yeah, even in the event that you did last night, we touched on parenting, and even talking about BRAVING from a parenting perspective was so great last night.

BB: Yeah, it’s very helpful because it’s really hurtful when you’ve got trust issues with your kids and you just use that big gauzy term of trust. They don’t know what it means, we don’t even know what it means, but if you can get really granular and behavioral and operationalize the elements of trust and say, “This is where we’re struggling,” or “This is where I’m struggling.” Super helpful. So enjoy, if you’re celebrating a fall break or Thanksgiving this week, we’re grateful for you, and here’s The Anatomy of Trust.

[applause]

BB: This is my intention right now, don’t cry before you start. Don’t cry before you start. It just feels like an incredible understatement to say how grateful I am to be here with all of you. I feel like I have a relationship with many of you on social media, and you were like T minus two days. I’m like, “It’s coming, we’re going to be together.” So I am so grateful to be here with you. I’m going to talk about trust, and I’m going to start by saying this. One of my favorite parts of my job is that I get to research topics that mean something to me. One of my least favorite parts of my job is I normally come up with findings that kick me in the butt and make me change my entire life, that’s the hard part. But I get to dig into the stuff that I think matters in my life and the life of the people around me. And the topic of trust is something I think I probably would have eventually started to look at closely because I study shame and vulnerability. But there’s a very personal reason I jumped to trust early in my research career, and it was a personal experience.

BB: One day my daughter Ellen came home from school, she was in third grade, and the minute we closed the front door, she literally just started sobbing and slid down the door, until she was just kind of a heap of crying on the floor and of course I was… It scared me and I said, “What’s wrong Ellen? What happened? What happened?” And she pulled herself together enough to say “I… Something really hard happened to me today at school, and I shared it with a couple of my friends during recess. And by the time we got back into the classroom, everyone in my class knew what had happened, and they were laughing and pointing at me and calling me names.” And it was so bad, and the kids were being so disruptive that her teacher even had to take marbles out of this marble jar. And the marble jar in the classroom is a jar where if the kids are making great choices together, the teacher adds marbles, if they’re making not great choices, the teacher takes out marbles and if the jar gets filled up, there’s a celebration for the class.

BB: And so she said, “It was one of the worst moments in my life. They were laughing and pointing and Ms. Baucom my teacher kept saying, “I’m going to take marbles out.” And she didn’t know what was happening, and she looked at me and she just with this face that is just seared into my mind and said, “I will never trust anyone again.” And my first reaction to be really honest with you was, “Damn straight.” You don’t tell anybody anything but your momma. Yeah, right? That’s it. That was like, you just tell me and when you grow up and you go off to school, Momma will go too. I’ll get a little apartment. And the other thing I was thinking, to be quite honest with you is, “I will find out who those kids were.” And while I’m not going to beat up a 9-year-old, I know their mommas. That’s the place you go to. And I’m like, “How am I going to explain trust to this third grader in front of me.” So I took a deep breath and I said, “Ellen, trust is like a marble jar.” She said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “You share those hard stories and those hard things that are happening to you with friends who over time you filled up their marble jar. They’ve done thing after thing after thing, where you’re like, “I know I can share this with this person.” Does that make sense?

BB: And that’s what Ellen said, “Yes, that makes sense.” And I said, “Do you have any marble jar friends?” And she said, “Oh yeah, I totally… Hannah and Lorna are marble jar friends.” And I said… And then this is where things got interesting, and I said, “Tell me what you mean, how do they earn marbles for you?” And she’s like, “Well, Lorna, if there’s not a seat for me at the lunch cafeteria, she’ll scoot over and give me half a hiney seat.” And I’m like, “She will?” She’s like, “Yeah, she’ll just sit like that and so I can sit with her.” And I said, “That’s a big deal. This is not what I was expecting to hear.” And I said… Then she said, “And you know, Hannah, on Sunday at my soccer game?” And I was waiting for this story where she said “I got hit by a ball and I was laying on the field and Hannah picked me up and ran me to first aid,” and I was like “Yeah?” And she said, “Hannah looked over and she saw Oma and Opa,” my parents, my… Her grandparents, and she said, “Look, your Oma and Opa are here.”

BB: And I was like… And I was like, “Boy, she got a marble for that?” And she goes, we know, not all my friends have eight grandparents,” because my parents were divorced and remarried, my husband’s parents were divorced and re-married, and she said, “And it was so nice to me that she remembered their names.” And I was like, “Hmm.” And she said, “Do you have marble jar friends?” And I said, “Yeah, I do have a couple of marble jar friends.” And she said, “Well, what kind of things do they do to get marbles?” And this feeling came over me and I thought the first thing I could think of because we were talking about the soccer game, was that same game my good friend Eileen walked up to my parents and said, “Deanne, David, good to see you.” And I remember what that felt like for me. And I was like, certainly, trust cannot be built by these small insignificant moments in our lives, it’s got to be a grander gesture than that. So as a researcher, I start looking into the data, I gather up the doctoral students who’ve worked with me, we start looking.

BB: And it is crystal clear. Trust is built in very small moments. And when we started looking at examples of when people talked about trust in the research, they said things like, “Yeah, I really trust my boss, she even asked me how my mom’s chemotherapy was going.” “I trust neighbor, because if something’s going on with my kid, it doesn’t matter what she’s doing, she’ll come over and help me figure it out.” You know, one of the number one things emerged around trust and small things, people who attend funerals. This is someone who showed up at my sister’s funeral. Another huge marble jar moment for people, “I trust him, because he’ll ask for help when he needs it.” How many of you are better at giving help than asking for help, right? So asking for help is one of those moments. So one of the ways I work as a grounded theory researcher is I look at the data first, then I go in and see what other researchers are talking about and saying, because we believe the best theories are not built on other existing theories, but on our own lived experiences.

BB: So after I had looked at this, I said, “Let me see what the research says.” And I went to John Gottman, who’s been studying relationship for 30 years, he has an amazing work on trust and betrayal, and the first thing I read, “Trust is built in the smallest of moments.” And he calls them sliding door moments. Sliding Doors as a movie with Gwyneth Paltrow from the ’90s. Have y’all seen this movie? So it’s a really tough movie, because what happens is it follows her life to the seemingly unimportant moment where she’s trying to get on a train and she makes the train, but the movie stops and splits into two parts where she makes the train and she doesn’t make the train, and it follows them to radically different endings.

BB: And he would argue that trust is a sliding door moment, and the example that he gives is so powerful. He said he was lying in bed one night, he had 10 pages left of his murder mystery, and he had a feeling he knew who the killer was, but he was dying to finish this book, so he said, “I don’t even want… I want to get up, brush my teeth, go to the bathroom and get back in and not have to get up.” I just want… You know that feeling when you just want to get all situated and read the end of your book. So he gets up and he goes, he walks past his wife in the bathroom, who’s brushing her hair and who looks really sad, and he said “My first thought was, just keep walking. Just keep walking.” And how many of you have had that moment where you walk past someone and you’re like, “Oh God, they look… ” Avert your eyes. [laughter] Or you look at caller ID or your cell phone, and you’re like, “Oh yeah, I know she’s in a big mess right now, I don’t have time to pick up the phone,” right? Yes or no? [laughter]

BB: This looks like guilty laughter to me. So he said, that’s a sliding door moment, and here’s what struck me about his story, because he said, “There is the opportunity to build trust, and there is the opportunity to betray, because as small as the moments of trust can be, those are the moments of betrayal as well, to choose to not connect when the opportunity is there, is a betrayal.” So he took the brush out of her hand and started brushing her hair and said, “What’s going on with you right now, babe?” That’s a moment of trust, right? So fast forward five years, and I’m clear about trust, and I talk about trust as the marble jar, we got to really share our stories and our hard stuff with people whose jars are full, people who have over time really done those small things that have helped us believe that they’re worth our story, but the new question for me was this, what are those marbles? What is trust? What do we talk about when we talk about trust? Trust is a big word, right? To hear, “I trust you” or “I don’t trust you,” I don’t even know what that means, so I want to know what is the anatomy of trust? What does that mean?

BB: So I started looking in the research and I found a definition from Charles Feltman that I think is the most beautiful definition I’ve ever heard, and it’s simply this, “Trust is choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else.” Choosing to make something important to you, vulnerable to the actions of someone else. Feltman says that, “Distrust is what I have shared with you that is important to me, is not safe with you.” So I thought that’s true, and Feltman really calls for this, let’s understand what trust is.

BB: So we went back into all the data to find out; “Can I figure out what trust is, do I know what trust is from the data?” And I think I do know what trust is, and I put together an acronym, BRAVING, B-R-A-V-I-N-G, BRAVING because when we trust, we are braving connection with someone. So what are the parts of trust? B, boundaries. I trust you. If you are clear about your boundaries and you hold them and you’re clear about my boundaries and you respect them, there is no trust without boundaries. R, reliability. I can only trust you if you do what you say you’re going to do, and not once. Reliability. Let me tell you what reliability is in research terms. We’re always looking for things that are valid and reliable. Any researchers here or research kind of geeks?

[laughter]

BB: There’s ten of us. Okay, so we would say a scale that you weigh yourself on is valid if you get on it and it’s an accurate weight, 120. [laughter] Okay. So that would be a very valid scale, I would pay a lot of money for that scale. So that’s actually not a valid scale but we’ll pretend for the sake of this. That’s a valid scale. A reliable scale is a scale that if I got on it 100 times, it’s going to say the same thing every time. So what reliability is, is you do what you say you’re going to do over and over and over again. You cannot gain and earn my trust if you’re reliable once, because that’s not the definition of reliability. In our working lives, reliability means that we have to be very clear on our limitations, so we don’t take on so much that we come up short and don’t deliver on our commitments.

BB: In our personal life, it means the same thing. So when we say to someone, “Oh God, it was so great seeing you, I’m going to give you a call and we can have lunch.” Yes or no? No, “It was really great seeing you.” Moment of discomfort. “Goodbye.” [laughter] Right? But honest, honest. So B, boundaries; R, reliability; A, huge, accountability. I can only trust you if when you make a mistake, you’re willing to own it, apologize for it, and make amends. I can only trust you if when I make a mistake, I am allowed to own it, apologize, and make amends. No accountability, no trust. V… And this one shook me to the core, vault. The vault. What I share with you, you will hold in confidence; what you share with me I will hold in confidence, but you know what we don’t understand, and this came up over and over again in the research. We don’t understand the other side of the vault, that’s only one door on the vault.

BB: Here’s where we lose trust with people. If a good friend comes up to me and says, “Oh my God, did you hear about Caroline? They’re getting a divorce. And it is ugly. I’m pretty sure her partner’s cheating.” You have just shared something with me that was not yours to share, and now my trust for you, even though you’re gossiping and giving me the juice, now my trust for you is completely diminished.

[applause]

BB: Does that make sense?

[music]

BB: So the vault is not just about the fact that you hold my confidences, it’s that in our relationship, I see that you acknowledge confidentiality. Here’s the tricky thing about the vault, a lot of times, we share things that are not ours to share as a way to hot wire connection with a friend. Right? If you don’t have anything nice to say, “Come sit next to me.” That’s our… Yes or no? Like our closeness is built on talking bad about other people. You know what I call that? Common enemy intimacy. What we have is not real. The intimacy we have is built on hating the same people, and that’s counterfeit, that’s counterfeit trust. That’s not real.

BB: So the vault means you respect my story, but you respect other people’s story. I, Integrity. I cannot trust you and be in a trusting relationship with you, if you do not act from a place of integrity and encourage me to do the same. So what is integrity? So I came up with this definition because I didn’t like any of the ones out there and that’s what I do when I don’t like them. I do, I look in the data and I say, “What’s integrity?” Here’s what I think integrity is: Three pieces. It’s choosing courage over comfort, choosing what’s right over what’s fun, fast or easy, and practicing your values, not just professing your values. Right? That’s integrity.

[applause]

BB: N, Non-judgment. I can fall apart, ask for help, and be in struggle without being judged by you, and you can fall apart and be in struggle and ask for help without being judged by me, which is really hard because we’re better at helping than we are asking for help. And we think that we’ve set up trusting relationships with people who really trust us because we’re always there to help them, but let me tell you this, if you can’t ask for help and they cannot reciprocate that, that is not a trusting relationship. Period. And when we assign value to needing help, when I think less of myself for needing help, whether you’re conscious of it or not, when you offer help to someone, you think less of them too.

BB: You cannot judge yourself for needing help, but not judge others for needing your help, and somewhere in there, if you’re like me, you’re getting value from being the helper in a relationship, you think that’s your worth, but real trust doesn’t exist unless help is reciprocal and non-judgment. The last one is G, Generosity. Our relationship is only a trusting relationship if you can assume the most generous thing about my words, intentions, and behaviors, and then check in with me, so if I screw up, say something, forget something, you will make a generous assumption and say, “Yesterday was my mom’s one year anniversary of her death, and it was really tough for me, and I talked to you about it last month, and I really was hoping that you would have called, but I know you care about me, I know you think it’s a big deal, so I want to let you know that I’ve been thinking about that.”

BB: As opposed to not returning calls, not returning emails, and waiting for the moment where you can spring, “Well, you forgot to call on this important… ” You’ll make a generous assumption about me and check it out. Does that make sense? So we’ve got Boundaries, Reliability, Accountability, the Vault, Integrity, Non-judgment, and Generosity. These, this is the anatomy of trust, and it’s complex. Why do we need to break it down? For a very simple reason. How many of you in here have ever struggled with trust in a relationship, professional or personal? It should be everybody. Statistically. Right? [laughter]

BB: And so what you end up saying to someone is, “I don’t trust you.” “What do you mean you don’t trust me? I love you, I’m so dependable. What do you mean you don’t trust me?” How do we talk about trust if we can’t break it down? What understanding trust gives us is words to say, “Here’s my struggle. You’re not reliable with me. You say you’re going to do something, I count on it you don’t do it,” or maybe the issue is non-judgment, but we can break it down and talk about it and ask for what we need very specifically, instead of using this huge word that has tons of weight and value around it, we can say here’s specifically what’s not working. What’s not working is we’ve got a boundaries issue.

BB: So one of the things that’s interesting, I think, is one of the biggest casualties with heartbreak and disappointment and failure in our struggle is not just a loss of trust with other people, but the loss of self-trust. When something hard happens in our lives, the first thing we say is, “I will not… I can’t trust myself. I was so stupid, I was so naïve.” So this BRAVING acronym works with self-trust too. So when something happens, I just recently went through a really tough failure, and I had to ask myself, “Did I honor my own boundaries? Was I reliable? Can I count on myself? Did I hold myself accountable? Was I really protective of my stories? Did I stay in my integrity? Was I judgmental toward myself?”

BB: And did I give myself the benefit of the doubt, “Was I generous toward myself?” Because if BRAVING relationships with other people is BRAVING connection, self-trust is BRAVING self-love, self-respect, the wildest adventure we’ll ever take in our whole lives. And so what I would invite you to think about when you think about trust, is if your own marble jar is not full, if you can’t count on yourself, you can’t ask other people to give you what you don’t have. So we have to start with self-trust. There’s a great quote from Maya Angelou that says, “I don’t trust people who don’t love themselves, but say I love you.” Right?

[applause]

BB: She quotes an African proverb when she said that, and she said, “Be wary of the naked man offering you a shirt.” [laughter] And so a lot of times, if you find yourself in struggle with trust, the thing to examine first is your own marble jar, how you treat yourself, because we can’t ask people to give to us something that we do not believe we’re worthy of receiving. And you will know you’re worthy of receiving it when you trust yourself above everyone else. So thank you all so much, I’m so honored to be here. Thank you.

[applause]

[music]

BB: Okay, I hope you all enjoyed that. A big shout out and a big thank you to Oprah and the Super Soul team. You can follow the Super Soul podcast on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast. You know that every episode that we do both Unlocking Us and Dare To Lead has a page on brenebrown.com… On the new brenebrown.com.

BG: Yeah, the new beautiful brenebrown.com. Check it out.

BB: We are leveling up our aesthetic game.

BG: Yes, we are.

BB: Yeah. Beauty and excellence is one of our values here at BBEARG, which stands for Brené Brown Education and Research Group, but I think about it so much now, after interviewing Sarah Lewis on Dare To Lead about aesthetic force and the importance of beauty and aesthetics. Yeah, important. So we on a new website, which is so gorgeous, and shout out to the team that made that happen.

BG: Totally.

BB: Big, big, big lift. Don’t forget to join us for the Atlas of the Heart live virtual launch on December 2nd. And stay awkward, brave, and kind, y’all. We’re grateful for you. Want to say bye?

BG: Bye.

BB: Bye.

[music]

BB: Unlocking Us is a Spotify original from Parcast. It’s hosted by me, Brené Brown. It’s produced by Max Cutler, Kristen Acevedo, Carleigh Madden, and Tristan McNeil and by Weird Lucy Productions. Sound design by Tristan McNeil and music is by the amazing Carrie Rodriguez and the amazing Gina Chavez.

[music]

© 2021 Brené Brown Education and Research Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Brown, B. (Host). (2021, November 24). Brené on the Anatomy of Trust. [Audio podcast episode]. In Unlocking Us with Brené Brown. Parcast Network. https://brenebrown.com/podcast/the-anatomy-of-trust/

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