My strength was striving

In my recovery from burnout, I have been faced with the question:

How vulnerable am I willing to be?

over and over and over again. Being vulnerable is not something that I had ever considered as a strength. In my career, vulnerability did not equal strength. Now that I reflect back, I saw my strength coming from striving, from fearlessly doing more and more.

Our culture seems to have a love affair with fearlessness and an even bigger affair with striving for more, overcome adversity and with an almost insane need to be the conquerer.

Our culture sees vulnerability as a weakness

Vulnerability is something our culture sees as a weakness and to be perceived as weak may just be career ending. Strangely though, we have all felt vulnerable. We have all at sometime in our lives felt vulnerable. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines vulnerable as capable of being physically and emotionally wounded and open to attack or damage. Yikes. Who wants that.

Vulnerability my lesson to learn

Yet being vulnerable is a lesson that someone wanted me to learn. When I think about it now, I have felt vulnerable so many times in my life. When I changed schools in grade 6 and was tripped by some guy as I walked down the aisle to the desk I had been assigned. I felt vulnerable when my mother died. I have felt vulnerable more times than I can say in the workplace. I felt extremely vulnerable when I left the workplace to recover from burnout. The burnout that I really did not understand I had. I never shared these moments of vulnerability with anyone.

Slip and fall accident

And then I had a freak slip and fall accident in California. I broke my left wrist which required surgery and I fractured the top of my left tibia. I found myself alone in a hospital bed being told I could not put any weight on my left leg for three months. Never in my life have I ever not been physically capable of looking after my own needs. I am so filled with gratitude for those who offered help at that time. It was a humbling experience to receive help for the simplest of tasks. Vulnerability, the opposite of the strong and independent woman, I so emphatically identified myself as.

An invitation back home to myself

Parallel to all of that, I had my book journey, an immersion course in vulnerability. I loved the idea of sharing transformational stories of the amazing women I interviewed. It was my story that was challenging to me, how to share my journey. The story of burnout is not a hero’s journey with which our world is so enamoured. My story was about vulnerability and reaching out to women for help. (Though I must admit I did not share that with them). What I have now realized is burnout was an invitation to a pilgrimage back home to myself.

How to be okay with vulnerability

When the boxes of my books were delivered, I sat with them for a few days. “Maybe I just wrote this book for myself,” I thought, denying how vulnerable I felt. After a few days I realized, I really need to give the women that I interviewed a copy of the book. So I bought some envelopes to send them off and the envelopes sat on my desk for awhile as I sat with my vulnerability. Then  I got up one day and decided it was time to address the envelopes and I did that. I even put the books in the envelopes that day. Huge celebration. After a couple of days of sitting with the stuffed addressed envelopes, I took them to the post office and mailed them. Each day and each step forward, learning the lesson of how to be okay with vulnerability. What I noticed is that with each step into being vulnerable, I became more of myself again. I felt stronger. I felt more empowered.

Willing to be vulnerable

My sense is the world would be better off if we were more willing to be vulnerable and to share our true stories of vulnerability. Maybe not with the world but with those trusted confidantes that are able to hold space and to listen deeply to us as we share.

Who knew how sharing my vulnerability would strengthen me? What is waiting to open up for you in sharing your vulnerability?

Remember even in your most vulnerable, you are amazing, you are capable, you are worth celebrating.