Vulnerability – the key to connection and possibility
Brene Brown said, “I believe that vulnerability – the willingness to show up and be seen with no guarantee of outcome, is the only path to more love, belonging and joy.” Today let’s explore how vulnerability creates possibility.
Today let’s explore how vulnerability creates possibility.
Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it.
As adults, we accumulate experiences. Experiences that at best dull our passions and create a guarded participation in our feelings, and at worst shroud our hearts in layers and layers of armor to keep out any more of the hurt life dishes up in all its varieties. “I want to feel passion again,” is a common refrain. Or “I can’t remember the last time I laughed really hard.” There are also all the hidden dreams we don’t dare embark on, and the relationships that die because we aren’t open enough to risk our feelings and our authentic selves. In stories, these are often the issues the protagonist is working through. We celebrate when someone overcomes an obstacle and lives their dream, when the hero finds hope and joy again when the protagonist transforms a relationship from weak and dying into something fresh and passionate. Think about the stories we watch in the theater and read in books. We are always rooting for the characters to be honest and open, to share and connect.
What does that mean? For me, the big emotional work of my later life has been around finding the desire and the courage to strip off the layers of armor I have so carefully placed around myself over the course of my life. I have on a breastplate, a helmet, a nice piece of heavy mail underneath the outer layers. I have a shield…I have it all. I only know this because of how hard it was to get it off. Stories carved from our pain, these are the tales we often hold close to the chest. In our careful protection of our lives, we suffocate a past and a future, hold hostage the creator – ourselves.
The dictionary defines vulnerability as:
Now none of those definitions make me want to jump into vulnerability, but I learned a thing or two this year. Namely, that vulnerability is power. That seems like an oxymoron, but it turns out that it’s true. When we are real, authentically who we are, this is the space where true connection is made – or that the possibility of it even exists. One of the things that I have learned in my writing is that when I share real stories, not crafting them so they sound good, but the raw, real stuff; the stuff that makes me vulnerable, this is the space where people are touched. This is the space where readers can relate. This is the space where writing is not life as it should be, but rather, life as it is. And this makes connection. Writers help society understand the connections that bind us, and this is done, often, through realness, which requires vulnerability.
In my Next Level workshop there were many people who were striving to find their own vulnerability. Men wanted better relationships with their wives and they weren’t sure why they were hitting a wall. Vulnerability was completely foreign to them. That space where you share yourself, your feelings, your fears. Fathers and mothers wanted to reconnect with...
