Day 89: This One Almost Made Me Cry

Screen capture from Brene Brown's Ted Talk.

I've had a couple of moments in my 100-day-quest of goosebumps: when I heard back from a distributor I'd been courting for years, when I received this generic email that felt written directly to me. But up until this point, I've never felt such a strong connection with another person's words that I wanted to cry--like goosebumps times a thousand--until tonight.

Watching Brene Brown's Ted Talk on The Power of Vulnerability kind of freaked me out. I realized that making myself vulnerable is at the heart of my fear of rejection: that I am saying "I love you" first, I'm making the attempt at connection, and someone else may just leave me hanging out there all alone. By sending an email or making a call I am opening myself up…standing there a bit naked and waiting to see how someone else will respond. And not just once, but over and over again with the hopes someone will say "yes, I have the time and interest to get back to you."

And here's the beauty in it…vulnerability leads to joy. No one can say "yes" if I don't ask. How can we achieve our goals and dreams if we never open ourselves up to the possibility that we are worth a response? That we are worthy of our dreams?

Since Brown's video has been seen over seven million times, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who has connected to this message about fear, vulnerability, courage and joy. But I also have a feeling that part of the video's success has been that it resonates in a personal way to many people in many different ways.

To me, my own take was that, in order to make connections (which are at the very foundation of what we as humans need in order to be happy) I need to...

…be my authentic (nerdy/night-owl/know-it-all) self, to lean into the discomfort of the work, to fully embrace necessary vulnerability, to not let the fear of shame stop me from jumping, to be courageous and tell the story of who I am with my whole heart, to have the courage to be imperfect, to let go of who I should be in order to be who I am, to be willing to start a project when there are no guarantees of how it will end, to let myself be deeply seen, to believe I am enough,
or,
to knock discomfort upside the head.

If you take 20 minutes to watch Brown's talk, let me know what you think.