I want to share a personal project that I’m starting for myself called “The Vulnerability Project”.
Vulnerability keeps coming up for me this year in a lot of different ways. I super suck at it, and I want to be better at it. For a lot of reasons. I want to be better at it, because I feel like vulnerability allows me to really experience this WHOLE human experience. It allows me to share and have intimate moments with people.
I’ve been reported to be hard to get to know, and I can definitely see why. In my mind I’m being vulnerable, because I share my story. But I do it like a report or like a war story.
I have my pain and my suffering and my moment. I take that and I open the basement door, and I get in the basement, me and my ego and all my suffering. And I shut the door and I deal with it. I coach myself through it or I make peace with it or I fight fight fight until I’ve “handled” it.
Then I emerge from the basement, shut it, leave all that stuff inside, and report what happened. Then it’s a story of struggle, perseverance, and victory. But there isn’t this sense of what it was really like and what, in real time, I was feeling.
By keeping that in the basement, I’m putting a guard up. That soft gooey middle is protected. But that’s who I am too, and I want to be able to share that. Especially because there is a benefit in people seeing that I’m doing this, too. Sometimes we want to feel like we’ve got it all figured out, we’ve got all of our shit together, before we can go out and do our work.
But that’s never going to work in this situation. I’m teaching people how to deal with their ego, and I’m going to be doing that until the day my human existence is over. So I can’t leave my coaching cape hanging up on the hook until I’ve got this “figured out” or until I’ve got my ego caged and up on the shelf. That menace shows up every freaking day, and I’m dealing with her all the time. Just like you. We can still be great at what we do AND be on the path and on the journey.
So what I want to start doing is sharing myself a little more in real time and allowing people to see that I struggle and what I do with it. Because I do have tools to handle it and I do think they are helpful.
I am so lucky. I am honored all the time by people who are vulnerable with me, and it is such a beautiful experience. It would be a shame for me not to allow other people IN, to let the people in my life to get to have that intimate moment with me too.
That is a project of mine I’m working on. I want to begin to strengthen my vulnerability and share myself in real time. I look forward to sharing some of those moments with you.