Concept
Vulnerability as courage
Brené Brown defines vulnerability as uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure, and her research finds it is the birthplace of courage rather than a weakness: asking, saying, presenting, admitting each carry all three, and there is no courageous act that is not also vulnerable.
In Daring Greatly (2012), Brown reports that her interviews found that the people who lived most wholeheartedly were not those who had avoided exposure but those who had accepted it, and that the rest of us wear armour against it: perfectionism, cynicism, numbing, the joke made before anyone else can make it. The armour does not stop the exposure; it stops the connection and the courage while leaving the fear in place. For anyone working on confidence, the practical reading is that the flutter at the door of anything that matters is not a warning but a signature, and that waiting to feel safe before acting (what Russ Harris calls the confidence gap) is armour of a different kind. The move is to identify your armour, name the situation it protects you from, and do the exposed version once: ask, say, present, admit, with the uncertainty present.
A real-life example
A start-up founder in Istanbul has pitched to investors eleven times with a deck so polished that nobody asks a question. On the twelfth pitch she drops the armour of perfection and shows the one metric that is not working, and what she is trying next. The investors argue with her for forty minutes. It is the first pitch that ends with a second meeting.
How to use it
- 1Name your armour: perfectionism, cynicism, the pre-emptive joke, numbing.
- 2Do the exposed version once, with the uncertainty present.
- 3Expect the flutter at the door of anything that matters; it is the signature, not a warning.