04/18/2025
Leaning into vulnerability has been odd. It is oddly working for me. Reason...light rant...
As a very young person I was the most open type of book...why not...I felt like I belonged everywhere. In college in West Virginia, classmates taught me...no, you are not invited, you are not welcome. Oh!? Then I saw it everywhere. Then I decided to melt into the background and magician impacts then *ninja vanish*. I would lurk into conversations and be the best listener, then drop in with a nugget that had been swirling in my mind and people would be startled "where did you come from".
It's just been a pendulum of figuring out to human the way other's want me to human . I would find balance everyone in a while as I swung toward the other extreme.
What I have often voiced is "perceived problem" and "perceived solution"...when I communicate it well, I became recognized as a problem solver or a Subject Matter Expert.
Now, I am differentiating "vulnerability" from "real talk". I am great at real talk; just saying the true thing or having the critical conversation. Vulnerability may not yet have a resolution, it may still be in goblin-mode. Vulnerability is typically not only personal but inherently private.
I am in a different place, now I want to fulfill my personal motto "teach people to teach people to teach people". Now that I am being more vulnerable, people are seeing the mental thought process for themselves...they are defining the problem with more clarity...they are developing the solution with less need for validation. That is what I set out to do but I didn't realize that my own unwillingness to be vulnerable was what was making my job so difficult.
How weird. I was always taught to ONLY talk about my strengths and ignore my weaknesses (the animal school example)...it is definitely a nuanced topic, not something you go to max levels. But my recoil away from vulnerability is reducing.
