Cornerstone Leadership Solutions: The "V" Word...

In celebration of TEDx coming to our city of Lincoln this week, we thought it would be fun to highlight some of our favorite TED talks – those which have inspired, empowered and changed the way we think about the world.

One of these talks came to me by way of a conversation with a friend who introduced me to the terrifying concept that vulnerability might just be a good thing.

At the TEDx Houston event in 2012, researcher-storyteller Brené Brown dove into a conversation that I feel is one that needs to be had with our friends, our families - even our coworkers. She talked about connection, worthiness and vulnerability as the keys to our deep desire to be known and accepted.

Brené is a researcher who collects people stories. She’s quoted to say that maybe “stories are just data with a soul.” Each of us has our own set of soul-filled data which make up the stories of our experiences. But all too often, our stories are riddled with shame and guilt, of heartache and rejection. It’s universal. Life is hard and quite messy. I think we can all agree on that.

So in her research of shame, she came to a crossroads of two types of people: those who had a sense of worthiness and those who didn't The only difference she could find in these two groups was that those who had a sense of worthiness, a sense of love and belonging, were those who believed that they were worthy of love and belonging. Simple as that.

Then digging further, these people with such a great sense of love and belonging also had three things in common.

Courageous – tracing this word back to its Latin origins, “courage” means to be willing to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. These people saw the purpose of courageously being honest with who they are.
Compassionate – this group of people understood that you can’t practice compassion with others if you can’t even treat yourself kindly. First they were compassionate with themselves, recognizing that, again, life is messy.
Connected – at the root of their fulfillment was the idea to fully embrace vulnerability as fundamental to deep connection.

And yet, we don’t like that part of life. We don’t want to be vulnerable and expose ourselves. We don’t want to feel weak and unable. We rather shove out the hurt and the shame. We work really hard to not feel the guilt and to block out the memories of the pain. (I say “we” because this is something WE ALL struggle with) But what her research identified is that when we chose to numb these feeling of shame and guilt, we simultaneously numb joy.

We cannot selectively numb our emotions. We are hardwired to be more connected than that.

According to other research (and personal experience), this attempt at selective numbing has resulted in the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated populous of all time. We are miserable, looking for purpose and meaning but coming up short.

But there is another way.

What would it look like if we let ourselves be truly seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen?

What if we chose to love with our whole hearts with no guarantee?

What if we changed our perspective that vulnerability isn't something to avoid, but rather embrace and cherish?

What if I began to believe that I’m not alone on this journey of life? Maybe we could stop yelling at each other and begin to listen to each other. Maybe we could learn to be kinder and gentler to those around us and in turn to ourselves.