Vulnerability

My friend Michael has a weekly Substack that I can recommend. You can find it here:

Recently he wrote about vulnerability and he started with this sentence: Being vulnerable with yourself is the foundation for unlocking your earned lessons.

It kind of stopped me in my tracks because I had always looked at vulnerability as something you are with other people. I’m not sure I had ever considered being vulnerable with myself.

But it makes complete sense, and it is maybe harder than being vulnerable with others.

When I am being vulnerable with others, I run my vulnerability on a throttle. How vulnerable I am is based on who I am talking to, my relationship with them, my trust in them, my awareness of their story and how vulnerable they are being with me. In other words, I am rarely, if ever, 100% vulnerable.

As I thought about what Michael wrote, I realized I also run a throttle on my own self-vulnerability. You’d think I would be honest with myself because I know myself best, right?

I once heard Andy Stanley teach about dual lives. You know that saying, “I couldn’t live with myself”? Turns out I can. And so can you.

We develop dual lives, and we change, and we’re capable of dual life stuff. That means we have the potential to become someone we would despise. And we have the potential to shut down or hide portions of our life, forgetting about them, ignoring them, secretly feeding them, and so on.

Generally this catches up with us.

Being honest with yourself and facing these things, self-imposed or forced upon you, is the only way to be truly whole. Sometimes you can do it alone. Sometimes with a trusted friend. Sometimes we need professional help.

Today’s goal: closing the gap between how people see me and who I really am.