Why The Bravest Leaders Are Afraid All the Time | Brené Brown (E401)
The High Performance Podcast
High Performance
4.6 • 4.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Brené Brown is a world-renowned researcher and author, known for her work on vulnerability, courage, and what makes truly effective leaders. She has spent decades studying human behaviour, uncovering how fear, connection, and self-awareness shape performance at the highest level.
In this episode, Brené sits down with Jake and Damian to explore the difference between safe and unsafe leadership, and how fear quietly drives decisions at work and at home. She explains why the best leaders don’t avoid vulnerability, but use it to build trust, clarity, and stronger teams.
They cover why your greatest strength might secretly be your armour, the formula every elite performer needs to understand (performance = potential minus interference), why organisational leaders are the only high-performers in the world where coaching isn't expected, and what England's penalty curse and Liverpool's current struggles really tell us about the psychology of winning.
Plus — a special surprise message from Steven Gerrard leaves Brené lost for words!
Subscribe to Brené’s podcast ‘The Curiosity Shop’ on YouTube or your favorite app for new episodes every Thursday.
Brené’s latest book ‘Strong Ground’ is available now: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strong-Ground-Leadership-Tenacity-Vermilion/dp/178504320X
Links referenced in podcast: The lethality of loneliness: John Cacioppo TED TALK
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks very much for being here. Can I be so boldest to start with a line of yours that I think is powerful and important for our audience, which is the opposite of courage is armour. And I think so many people listening to this will not even understand that maybe they're living with a suit of armour. And then if they realise they are, I think they may well not have the |
| 0:21.1 | courage to be able to take that armor off. So what could we talk about now to allow people |
| 0:26.8 | who are living behind a suit of armor to finally let go of it? It's a powerful place to start |
| 0:34.1 | because I think it's the underlying premise of all of my work. So when I first |
| 0:39.5 | started researching courage, my hypothesis was, I call it DAW, D-A-W, dead-ass wrong. My hypothesis |
| 0:47.1 | was that fear got in the way of us being brave with our lives, with work, sport. We really, if we face too much fear, we couldn't be brave. |
| 0:58.3 | When I started the research, what I realized is the most courageous people I interviewed, |
| 1:03.5 | whether it was a CEO or someone behind the pitch or someone running their family. |
| 1:08.6 | The bravest people that we talked to were afraid all the time. |
| 1:12.2 | And in fact, one CEO told me when we were checking data, listen, if you're going to make a list |
| 1:17.1 | of folks that you're going to call daring leaders and you're defining that as not being afraid, |
| 1:22.7 | don't put me on your list, I'm afraid every day. And so I was like, shit, like what is, what's getting in the way? |
| 1:30.9 | And the more we went back into the data, what we realized is to be afraid is to be human. |
| 1:36.4 | What happens when we go into fear is that we often reach for armor to self-protect. |
| 1:44.7 | And we can get into this in a minute, but it's interesting about how this plays into age. |
| 1:50.0 | So for me, as a leader, I have I have arsenals, all kind of arsenals. |
| 1:56.4 | I have my leadership arsenal where I keep my armor. |
| 1:58.8 | I have my mom arsenal where I keep my armor. I have my mom arsenal where I keep my armor. |
| 2:01.0 | I've been with my husband for 40 years. |
| 2:02.9 | I have that. |
| 2:04.6 | But like when I'm leading and I get afraid and I reach for my armor, I micromanage. |
| 2:12.0 | My perfectionism gets ramped up. |
... |
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