I recently read two articles on being vulnerable – one promoted the importance of sharing when you’re not sure what to do or that you’re struggling, the other warned of the pitfalls of doing this which can lead people to question your competence. So what to do?
What this made me think about wasn’t whether being vulnerable is a good thing (for me it is). Instead it made me think how often we’re really not sure what to do when we interact with people and what we try doesn’t work. This can often happen. Always knowing the right thing to do is hard and we get things wrong.
I believe we hold ourselves to way too high a standard about how well we interact with others. And because we’re not realistic, we can be guilty of focusing too much on the error (how it feels to be wrong) rather than on how they reacted – in the example above this would be worrying that you’ve been too vulnerable and what they must think of you rather than staying in the moment to pick up the subtleties of how they reacted to point you towards what to do next.
You WILL get stuff wrong. Accept it quickly, be kind to yourself in the moment (“it happens”) and focus more intently on how they reacted and then work with that.
Tony
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