Author: Brené Brown
_Brené Brown_
Reading time: 17 minutes
Synopsis
Strong Ground (2025) is a book that helps you become a brave leader and grow as a person. It is for a time when things are very unsure, confusing, and changing fast. The book gives you ways of thinking and skills to find and connect with your strong base again. This helps you live, love, and lead with calm and steady confidence.
What’s in it for me? Find steady confidence, connect to your strong base, and become a brave leader.
A pickleball injury gave Brené Brown a new way to look at her research. She had been doing this research since her book Dare to Lead came out in 2018.
Four weeks after her accident, Brown went to a personal trainer to avoid getting hurt again. She wanted to play her favorite game soon. She gave her trainer a long list of skills she wanted to improve. She wanted more speed, more power, and more energy! But her “let’s go!” attitude was met with a clear message: she could improve, but it would take time. She needed to change her technique completely and practice a lot. She could not build on bad habits.
Like Brown, many companies and people want to be more flexible, strong, and able to keep going. Also like Brown, many people and companies are struggling. It’s like a sharp pain in a muscle or nerve. Changes happen very fast, and things are always unsure. Often, these places care more about results than people, and more about finishing tasks than human needs.
No matter if you are at the gym, at work, or at home, the answer is the same: we must build on a strong base. To find this strength, we need to slow down and look closely at things. We need to make our “muscles” stronger. These muscles are our values and the people around us in our work and home life. They help us stay balanced when life feels like it’s spinning fast. Simply put, we must find our “strong base” and stay firmly connected to it.
In this summary, you will learn how to connect with your strong base again. You will do this by learning five main ways of thinking and skills. You will learn to improve how you think about your thinking and how you stay present. You will also learn to become braver and more responsible. You will learn to understand more by being aware, think carefully and in a connected way, and talk clearly and with feeling. All these practices together build grounded confidence. This is the inner calm that helps us lead, live, and love with both power and heart.
Blink 1 – Steady confidence exercise 1: Core
Steady confidence starts with truly knowing ourselves. This means understanding how we feel, think, and react. It also means learning to stop for a moment before we respond. It does not mean you have all the answers. Instead, it means being very interested in how you connect with yourself and the world around you.
Self-awareness is the most important muscle. To develop it, you need to understand your own feelings and get help from others, like a coach, therapist, or trusted friend. It can be hard to step back from our past, our body, how we act, and our life story. So, it helps to have someone else give you a different view.
Language is more important here than we often think. Language doesn’t just show emotions; it can also change them. That’s why it’s so important to learn to say more exactly what we are feeling. Doing this helps us control our feelings better, and our feelings control us less. For example, next time you feel “mad,” think if “very sad,” “ashamed,” or “feeling too good about yourself” are better words. Being exact brings clarity, and clarity gives us space to choose our next step carefully.
Metacognition – thinking about how we think – is another very important muscle. As humans, we can make mistakes. Our minds can trick us, changing how we see things to match what we expect or already believe. By noticing these patterns, we can pause just enough to ask if they are true. Even one moment of thinking about how we think can stop a big mistake or help us see things in a completely new way.
Mindfulness then connects everything. The old Latin word for “attention” – attendere – means “to reach toward.” This is what mindfulness asks us to do: to reach toward the present moment. Whether we are leading an important meeting, having a hard talk with our partner, or dealing with a painful feeling inside, staying in touch with what is real right now shows steady confidence in action.
Together, these practices – self-awareness, thinking about thinking, and mindfulness – are the main muscles that help us stay calm when our lives are busy. They remind us that true confidence does not come from knowing everything. It comes from being strong enough to stay open, interested, and aware.
Blink 2 – Steady confidence exercise 2: Strength
Once we start connecting with our inner self, the next step is to build strength. Strength helps us keep trying even when it would be much easier to give up. True strength is not about looking tough and stressed. It’s more about facing unsure times with bravery and respect for yourself.
Courage begins when we are not sure what will happen. Courage is also better seen as a choice, not something you are born with. It’s the decision to tell your boss you made a mistake, to speak up at dinner, or to take a risk that feels right but is still scary. Being open and honest about our feelings is the most important part of courage. It’s the difference between keeping ourselves safe and growing. It’s like putting on our shield or taking it off. Both can make us tired, but only courage that comes from being open and honest can last.
Strength is also made better by becoming very good at something. This takes hard and sometimes painful practice until you are excellent. But let’s be clear: trying to be very good and trying to be perfect are two very different things. Being perfect does not help us become masters. People with steady confidence try new things, even if they might fail. This is where they learn the most.
Accountability then makes strength honest and true. Accountability means taking responsibility for our choices, fixing our mistakes, and doing what we say we will do. Blaming others, avoiding problems, and hiding can seem easy for a short time. But accountability gives a big reward in the long run: trust from others and from ourselves. Dealing with difficult problems honestly and humbly earns respect that no job title or social status can buy.
Finally, strength needs balance. It’s a very important skill to be able to focus very strongly when needed, and then let that focus go when it’s time to change. The strong focus you use to make a report perfect for an important client in the morning is probably not the energy you need when helping your children with math problems in the evening.
Courage, being good at something, accountability, and balance come together to make a real, lasting strength. It’s not a strength that is stiff or bossy, but one that can react well and is open to new things.
Blink 3 – Steady confidence exercise 3: Awareness
As our inner self and strength get better, our next important step is our awareness. Awareness changes steady confidence from being mostly about ourselves to being mostly about others. It helps us understand people and the changing parts of the difficult world around us.
Awareness starts with just seeing, but just seeing is not enough. True awareness asks us to see and understand people or situations, not just notice them. For example, knowing what is happening around us helps us understand the mood of a place and guess what problems might come. Whether in a meeting room or at the dining table, knowing the situation helps us step back, look closely at things, and react correctly and suitably.
Temporal awareness, on the other hand, is a feeling for speed and flow. In leadership and in life, knowing when to go faster and when to stay calm, when it’s the right time and when it’s the wrong time, can change everything. Doing too much or too quickly can make us tired and stressed. Doing too little or too late can make us bored. Learning good timing helps us create “useful speed” – moving forward without stress.
Mental rehearsal is another practice that increases awareness. Sportspeople imagine their game or event before they play. People with steady confidence do the same before going into hard situations. Thinking about what might happen – both good and bad – helps us face anything calmly. Mental rehearsal is not about trying to control things. Instead, it helps us stay cool and calm.
Finally, awareness can go deeper by thinking about different cultures. Having awareness of different cultures means we remember that everyone has their own stories, pasts, fears, and dreams. Understanding that other people’s views are special and staying interested in them, even if they are different from ours, shows the best steady confidence.
Together, these kinds of awareness – about situations, timing, thinking, and relationships – make our actions more correct, purposeful, and honest. And whether at work or at home, with others or with ourselves, being correct, purposeful, and honest are important for living in today’s world while staying connected to our strong base.
Blink 4 – Steady confidence exercise 4: Thinking
The second to last group of skills and ways of thinking we want to learn is about how we think. We talked about thinking about our thinking (metacognition) in the first part. In this part, we will explain different types of thinking. These are very important for living, loving, and leading with steady confidence today.
Critical thinking is the first type of thinking to use. Today, we have endless information and many different stories. So, it is very important to stop and check what we are told. This is much easier to talk about than to do. A simple but useful question to get past the confusion is “Who benefits if people believe this?” This kind of questioning helps us judge things better. It helps us make choices based on facts, not just quick feelings.
Paradoxical thinking is the second type of thinking to pay attention to. This is being ready to accept two opposite ideas without trying to fix them quickly. Life is rarely “one or the other.” It is almost always “both this and that.” When we stop ourselves from choosing one side, we allow ourselves to feel the pull between different views. This can feel uncomfortable, yes. But it is also where we find most of our big changes, new ideas, and new ways of seeing things.
Third is intuitive thinking, which mixes what we have learned with our gut feeling. Many people think intuition is magic, but it is not. It is our brain quickly seeing patterns at its best. When we face situations we have seen before, we recognize signs that people with less experience or who are less open might miss. Developing and trusting our gut feeling helps us react quickly and smartly. You may have noticed this is more and more important at work and at home.
Finally, creative and symphonic thinking add imagination. Creative thinkers learn by trying things many times and doing tests. They see “failure” as simply a step before “success.” Symphonic thinkers connect ideas from different areas and subjects. This helps them create something bigger than all its pieces.
Critical, paradoxical, intuitive, and symphonic thinking all increase our feeling of steady confidence. They help us see things more clearly, more bravely, and with more new ideas. And with change and unsure times always present now, such clear thinking is truly a strong base.
Blink 5 – Steady confidence exercise 5: Communication
The last group of skills and ways of thinking to practice is communication. Once we have learned to think carefully and with new ideas, we need to share these thoughts. We need to do it in ways that connect with people, build trust, and make them act.
Start by making your messages easy to understand and clear. We want simple messages, like DUPLO, not complicated ones, like LEGO. We all know a lot about many topics and problems. But when we talk about these things with others, we want to change complicated ideas (like LEGO) for simple ones (like DUPLO). This is true whether you are writing a message for everyone in your company or talking to your kids in the car. Make your message easy to follow and think about what might confuse people before they get confused.
Then, think about a part of good communication that people often forget: aesthetic force. This means how we feel and react with our senses to strong images. The saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” is true for a reason. But using this power needs honesty. When images are used to trick people instead of truly touching them, we can break trust very quickly.
Next, transparency. When our plans change – at work or at home – we need to say what is happening, why, what is changing, and what is not. It might seem easier at the time not to talk about these turning points. But it usually doesn’t work out well. People notice changes. Not talking about these changes often makes people more worried than the change itself.
Finally, use stories, comparisons, and examples. These ways of speaking can make messages more lively, easier to remember, and connect facts to feelings. Using examples that feel true to us – like a sport comparison or a cooking example – can help others better understand what we mean, and feel it, too.
Clarity, being real, transparency, and storytelling are the signs of communication that comes from steady confidence. When we share from this place, we don’t just send facts. We build connection. And by doing this, we make our strong base a strong base for everyone.
Final summary
In this summary of Strong Ground by Brené Brown, you have learned that true confidence is not about showing a strong image to others. It is about building a calm feeling inside.
Today, the world often feels very big and hard to manage. What helps us stay confident is not being sure or in charge, but connecting with others. We connect to our values, our purpose, and to the people in our lives who help us stay balanced when we lose our footing.
Steady confidence grows from knowing ourselves, being brave, and being curious. We practice this carefully, over time, until being stable feels natural. It’s a quiet special strength that helps us stop before reacting, stay open when things get hard, and keep moving forward with understanding for others and honesty.
When we stand on strong ground, knowing who we are and connected to those who keep us calm, we become braver leaders. We also become more complete people. From this strong base, we can face the changes, difficult parts, and problems of today’s world with clear thinking, humbleness, and, yes, even confidence.
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Source: https://www.blinkist.com/https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/strong-ground-en