I’ve been thinking about vulnerability differently lately.
Not vulnerability with other people.
Vulnerability with ourselves.
The willingness to become available to what we’re actually feeling. What we’re experiencing. What we may already know but haven’t quite allowed ourselves to say.
I think we can become surprisingly disconnected from those parts of ourselves. And there are lots of reasons…
Sometimes because we’re busy - life asks a lot of us - and when we’re in survival or burnout mode we many not even realize it.
Sometimes because looking closely feels like it will take more time than we have - it becomes a future-self problem…maybe stays a future-self problem for years.
And sometimes, I suspect, because we aren’t entirely sure we want to know what we’ll find.
I’ve been noticing this in my own life.
For a long time, I carried a condition I hadn’t really recognized as a condition I’d made.
I was in a leadership role that had become increasingly difficult for me. I was burned out. I could see problems I desperately wanted to help solve. And I was beginning to feel a growing distance between what I believed about leadership, what mattered to me, and what I was experiencing around me.
I had been sacrificing a lot of what I loved.
Still, I had an answer whenever I wondered whether it was time to leave:
As long as I’m still learning, I’ll stay.
It sounded reasonable to me.
Maybe even wise. Honorable.
I value learning. I believe our experiences have something to teach us. I don’t want to leave simply because something becomes difficult.
I love a good challenge.
And I was still learning.
What I wasn’t asking was whether learning was enough reason to stay.
Because we can learn almost anywhere.
We can continue learning in places we’ve outgrown.
We can learn while compromising something that matters to us.
We can learn while carrying responsibilities that no longer belong to us.
We can learn while becoming increasingly disconnected from ourselves.
So I’ve started asking different questions.
What am I outgrowing?
What am I no longer learning here?
What values am I compromising in order to stay?
Those questions feel different.
Not because they immediately give me an answer.
They don’t.
But because they require a different kind of honesty from me.
They ask me to become vulnerable enough with myself to listen to what I may already be sensing. To notice and name more of my actual experience.
And I’m beginning to wonder whether this is one of the things that keeps us where we are.
Not simply fear.
Not simply resistance to change (I thrive in change, honestly.).
Sometimes it’s the conditions we’ve quietly placed around our own permission to change.
As long as I’m learning...
When this happens, then I’ll...
If they do this, then I’ll know...
As long as this line isn’t crossed…
We create these little if/then agreements with ourselves.
And perhaps they give us a sense of certainty in something that isn’t particularly certain.
Because life doesn’t actually unfold in neat if/then statements.
Neither does leadership.
Neither does becoming.
The questions we ask shape what we’re able to see
I’ve experienced another version of this through years of knee surgeries, rehabilitation, and healing.
I’ve worked with extraordinary people along the way - orthopedic surgeons, physical therapists, massage therapists, acupuncturists, and others who brought knowledge and expertise I didn’t have.
I needed them.
And for a long time, without realizing it, I also gave them authority over something they couldn’t actually hold for me.
I wanted them to heal me, fix me. Take my chronic pain away.
Tell me what came next.
And I’ve had to learn, more than once, that their expertise and my own knowing aren’t in competition.
A surgeon can repair damaged cartilage.
A physical therapist can see something in my movement and strength imbalances that I can’t.
Someone can give me an exercise, an interpretation, a possibility.
But ultimately, I am the one living in this body.
I am responsible for listening to it.
Caring for it.
Learning from it.
Trusting when something feels right, and becoming curious when it doesn’t.
That lesson of self-responsibility has apparently needed to find me more than once!
And lately I’ve been noticing how much it has to do with leadership.
We can lose contact with our own authority there, too.
We look to the person above us to tell us whether we’re doing it right.
We leave a conversation and make meaning from a comment before asking what was actually meant, or becoming curious about the meaning we made from it.
We silence a question because we think we’re supposed to know.
We override something we’re sensing because someone else has more expertise, seniority, or certainty.
Or we collect more information when perhaps what we need is enough quiet to hear what we already know.
This isn’t an argument against expertise, quite the opposite.
I’ve needed the wisdom and expertise of other people throughout my life, I value it deeply.
I’m suggesting that perhaps the practice is learning to be in relationship with that wisdom without abandoning our relationship with ourselves.
To listen.
Ask.
Experiment.
Notice.
Try something.
Learn what happened.
Try again.
That’s different from believing we need to know everything ourselves, or think that’s what everyone expects from us.
And it’s different from believing someone else can know for us.
Perhaps, this is where change actually begins.
We’ve all heard about the gap between knowing and doing or awareness and action.
It’s so real! We can know something intellectually for years and still find ourselves living the same pattern, the same reality.
Maybe part of bridging that gap isn’t acquiring more information.
Maybe it’s becoming willing to trust what we’re noticing enough to practice something different.
And before even that, perhaps we have to become available enough to ourselves to notice.
To hear the answer we might not have been ready to hear.
Not because noticing requires us to act immediately.
But because we can’t make a discerning choice about something we aren’t yet willing to see.
So that’s what I’m practicing this week.
Not rushing toward an answer.
Not demanding that I know what’s next.
Just becoming available to a different question:
What am I outgrowing?
And I’m curious what happens when you ask yourself the same thing.
Not What should I change?
Not What should I do next?
Just:
What no longer fits?
And what might that be telling you?
Notice what comes up, and don’t rush to act immediately, but sit with it, see if you can go a little deeper.
P.S. If you’d like to explore this with me rather than only read about it,
I’m opening a live space this Wednesday (Aug 26) at 10 a.m. around one question: What are you outgrowing?
There won’t be much teaching. I’ll bring a few questions, give us some space to reflect, and we’ll see what we notice when we allow ourselves to hear our own answers, and one another’s.
Come as you are. You don’t need to know what’s next. You don’t even need to know your answer.
Wednesday, August 26 @ 10:00am PT
And if this question touches something larger for you, we’ll continue the conversation on September 9 in Leadership Through Transition.
We’ll explore a question I’ve been sitting with in much of my work lately:
How do we continue leading while becoming more fully ourselves?