Hey it’s Stacy Rocklein, and this is My Vulnerability Project.
So I want to talk about risk-taking and how important it is to put yourself in situations where you are exposed, you are vulnerable, and you are taking a risk.
I’m going to use the example of making dinner. This is my job in my house. That is planning meals, shopping for meals, prepping meals, and cooking meals. It’s actually quite a lot of time and energy. Well, I put a lot of time and energy in it because I love doing it. I love to cook and so I’m adventurous. I try a lot of new recipes and I expose my family to a wide variety of things.
My family is very generous with their critiques which used to make me so pissed. First of all, I don’t know why anybody who has just been cooked for would sit down and eat a meal and then think it is appropriate to criticize it. But that’s life. That’s how kids are. And some adults. And that’s how the world is. Just like unsolicited advice, you get unsolicited reviews and critiques. That’s fine.
I used to get so upset about it, because I would take it personally. To take the project that I’d put my time and energy and love into, then to have it criticized felt like an attack on me. It used to be really upsetting to me.
But I figured out along the way that you’ve got to walk this line. On the one hand if it’s important to you, you absolutely have to put a hundred percent into it. You have to take the risk. You have to completely expose yourself. Put it all out there. All of your love. All of your energy. Do it one-hundred percent. Don’t hold back. That is a vulnerable thing to do, because you are going to have critics. You’re not going to have handed out the feedback forms to get those critics either. They’re just coming.
So you have to put your all into it, but on the other hand you also have to detach from that feedback. You have to detach from what’s going to come back at you so that you can use it to move forward. So that you can know when to ditch something, when to make an adjustment to something, when something was a home-run.
But you can’t take it as a reflection of who you are. It doesn’t mean that I’m awesome or I’m not awesome. It’s more like this is how it ended up and what do I want to do with this going forward. And once I figured that out, then I didn’t have to get so angry all the time when I would get negative feedback.
So it’s that balance, right? You can’t phone it in so that you don’t get hurt. You have to take the risk. You have to make yourself vulnerable. You have to put yourself out there. But then also, be able to take that feedback and use it without allowing it to dampen your spirit or keep you from throwing everything into it next time.
So keep taking risks, peeps. Seriously. That’s the vulnerable tip for today. That’s what we’ve got to do.