Liz Armbrecht

3.5/5 Stars

I was so impressed with Nicole Bianchi when I got to see her speak last September that I obviously had to buy her book Small Brave Moves afterwards. In fact, I got a copy for my friends at work so that we could all read Nicole’s wisdom together.

Small Brave Moves refers to little acts of bravery that can help you make a leap into something new, whether that’s a career path, a promotion, or even just becoming a better leader for your team.

Nicole’s formula for bravership, which is bravery + leadership, begins with becoming vulnerable and facing your fears, which she divides into three categories:

1. Fear of not being perfect or good enough
2. Fear of loss
3. Fear of change

But she doesn’t stop there; Small Brave Moves is also full of advice for just good leadership. I love the way she connects living an authentic life with serving others as a good leader: You need to be vulnerable and authentic yourself, living with intentionality and full of hope in order to lead others to do the same. And when you’re living your best life, and your team is living their best lives, then the magic happens at work and some really great things can be accomplished.

I won’t give more away because Nicole has a great collection of ideas and accompanying PDF workbook that are well worth your time in encountering for yourself.

Now, this is a blog about writing so I must include a caveat that says this is not the most stylistically perfect book ever. Nicole writes like she speaks, which makes her writing very conversational, and she is without a doubt a talented presenter. But, as happens when speaking, the ideas in the book sometimes jump from topic to topic without a lot of wayfinding signage, and I got lost every so often trying to figure out what we were discussing at the moment.

However, as a small group of leaders reading this together, we got a lot out of it.

One of my friends who read this with me stopped me in the middle of our meeting to say, “Liz, small brave move. You have something in your teeth.” To which I a) immediately went to the bathroom to fix, but then b) also got a great chuckle out of. Thank you, Nicole!