Five Things I’m Still Thinking About After Seeing Brené Brown

There are speakers you’re excited to see, and then there’s Brené Brown. I think I actually yelped when Virtuoso CEO Matthew Upchurch announced her as the opening keynote and she walked onto the stage.

I have read her books, listened to her podcasts and followed her work for years, so seeing her in person was like seeing a rock star.

Brown, the researcher and bestselling author whose work centers on courage, vulnerability and leadership, delivered the opening keynote at the 38th annual Virtuoso Travel Week. It was also a return engagement: she first spoke to Virtuoso 15 years ago.

This time, her message centered on what leaders need to navigate uncertainty and change: self-awareness, courage, emotional regulation, learning agility and trust.

Brown spoke from experience. She opened by thanking her own Virtuoso travel advisor, Houston-based Christina Buaas, and sharing photographs from trips Buaas has helped create for her family, including her daughter and son-in-law’s honeymoon, multigenerational travels and a particularly meaningful Christmas-market journey with her daughter shortly before Brown’s mother died.

“Those pictures are not photos,” Brown said. “Those pictures are my life. They’re my family. They’re my time. They’re how we choose to come together.”

It was a powerful way into a talk about leadership, trust and what it takes to stay grounded when so much around us is changing.

Here are five things I’m still thinking about.

1. Your value isn’t what you know. It’s your ability to learn.

The best leaders today aren’t the people with the most answers. They are the ones with enough self-awareness to know what they don’t know, enough confidence to admit it and enough curiosity to keep learning.

That matters even more in the age of AI. Computers can already process and retrieve more information than any one person ever could, while what we know is changing at extraordinary speed.

Brown said that in 30 years of working with organizations, she has never seen C-suite leaders so frustrated with the executives directly beneath them. The problem, she said, is a lack of learning agility.

“When you look at a senior leader who says, ‘My value is what I know,’ that is not your value anymore,” she told the room. “Your value is your capacity to learn.”

Experience still matters. But increasingly, its value may be in helping us ask better questions, not convincing us we already know the answers.

2. Fear isn’t the problem. Armor is.

Brown said the biggest barrier to courage isn’t fear itself, but how we react to it. Perfectionism, micromanagement, cynicism, resistance to change…all of these traits can become a kind of armor we use to protect ourselves when we’re afraid.

She gave a great example from her own life. Brown prides herself on being decisive, but her coach recently challenged her to consider whether decisiveness had become her armor. Was she making quick decisions because they were the right decisions, or because she couldn’t tolerate the discomfort of not knowing?

Brown also talked about learning to recognize when you are “above the line” or “below the line.” Above the line, you can name what you’re feeling and stay curious. Below the line, you tend to fall into familiar roles: hero, victim or villain.

Her teams use it as a kind of shorthand, calling a timeout when someone slips below the line.

That point made me think. Many of the qualities that help us succeed can become liabilities when we cling to them too tightly.

3. Trust is built in the small moments.

Brown describes trust as a marble jar. It isn’t created by one grand gesture, but accumulated through small interactions over time.

According to Brown’s research, one of the behaviors that builds trust is asking for help.

Brown described giving someone an important assignment and having them come back to say they were “over their skis” and needed guidance. Her reaction? She trusted them more.

“You care more about winning than protecting your ego,” she said.

For travel advisors, that trust matters enormously. Brown described them as being in the “vulnerability business” and said, “Trust is the operating system under all luxury travel.”  

Brown used Buaas as an example. When Brown calls worked up about something going wrong on a trip, Buaas doesn’t immediately rush to fix it. She slows things down, plays back what she is hearing and makes sure Brown feels understood before jumping to the solution.

Sometimes the most human thing you can do is create a little space before responding.

4. The best teams challenge each other.

A healthy team isn’t one where everyone agrees. It’s one where people feel safe enough to disagree.

Brown measures belonging through what she calls productive challenge. Can someone raise their hand and say, “Not so fast”? Can they question the data, challenge the boss or ask, “What data are you using?”

We talk constantly about getting different perspectives around the table. But representation means very little if everyone feels pressure to agree once they get there.

The strongest cultures are the ones where people trust each other enough to challenge the thinking.

5. Strength comes from a solid foundation, and recovery is part of it.

Brown’s Strong Ground metaphor started with pickleball. After an injury, a trainer told her she had almost no core strength and was compensating with the wrong muscles. They couldn’t “build on dysfunction”; they had to strengthen the foundation first.

Brown saw the same pattern in leaders and organizations. The core skills she points to include self-awareness, emotional regulation, mindfulness and systems thinking.

But building that foundation isn’t just about growth. It also means knowing when to recover. Brown calls that being able to “lock through”: deliberately transitioning out of work rather than staying locked in all the time.

One more thing: winning is fun.

There was one moment in Brown’s pickleball story that had nothing to do with her larger leadership point, but made me laugh because it was so relatable.

Playing with a much younger partner, Brown found herself down 0–6 and told him to “lock in.” They came back and won 11–6. Afterwards, she asked if he wanted to stack their paddles together again. He said no, that hadn’t been fun for him.

Brown’s response: “Winning is fun.”  I felt seen. I like to play to win! Being competitive is the fun part. We need to normalize more women saying that out loud. Thank you for leading the way, Brene Brown!

Finding strong ground

Since I’m a fan, I already have Brown’s latest book, Strong Ground, and hearing her talk about these ideas in person truly brought it to life.

As Virtuoso Travel Week opened with so much focus on AI, technology and the future of travel, I loved how Brown brought back the humanity.

We spend a lot of time trying to predict what comes next. The more important question is whether we are building the trust, in ourselves, in our teams and with the people we serve, to navigate whatever does.