Vulnerability Is The Key to The Doorway Named Trust

We live in an age characterized by a lack of trust. Many don’t trust politicians, kids don’t trust their parents and many workers don’t trust their coworkers, bosses or companies. This lack of trust has slowly spread and become ingrained in our culture and lifestyle.

How did this happen? The causes are many, but one hits home with me. As our society has attempted to reduce the pain of failure and its counterpart – one’s vulnerability to any pain – we have seen a rise in a false trust (i.e. society and the system will take care of us). As the realization spreads that this is not politically, emotionally or financially possible, we lash out and lose trust in a cascade of other institutions – including our families.

How did we come to this? It’s a failure to comprehend vulnerability. And more importantly, the value to our personal growth that this pain to our hearts provides is priceless. Vulnerability serves a constructive purpose. This emotional pain creates boundaries for us, fuels rebuilding, drives us and gives us passion, allows us to persevere, teaches us what we want and don’t want and most importantly it’s what makes us human.

It is also a basic, if somewhat ironic byproduct of life. We experience emotional and physical pain for a reason. But many of us find every way and reason not to experience emotional and physical pain.

We cannot and should not reduce all risk to our hearts. If we spend all our time building defense mechanisms, we will have no time to experience life to its fullest. I have to admit opening up one’s heart, ego and mind to be vulnerable is exceedingly difficult. But it has a powerful after-effect – you can focus and be true to yourself. The fear from worrying what others can do to you will be replaced by the insight you can gain by listening to what they have to say about you, no matter how much it hurts when you hear it.

Convert this negative energy of worrying to the positive energy of having others to share your vulnerabilities with.  This is a classic conversion of a negative into positive; a minimization of your weaknesses while playing to your strengths, thus creating opportunities where none existed before.

In the end you have less to fear from your vulnerabilities than they have to fear from you!

Reread the above. Most of our vulnerabilities exist only in our own mind. It’s our perception of reality. It’s not necessarily the perception of the people around us.

But when it is the reality of the people around us, they can then help us modify our behavior if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable.

So how do you open your heart and mind to be vulnerable?

Step 1 is to commit to the process of change. It’s the key to open the door.

Step 2 is building some level of trust in a person, group or process so they can help you modify your behavior.

Step 3 is understanding true trust is usually a function of time and as a result the corollary accepting vulnerability is also a function of time.

Step 4 is the willingness to accept you are human and are a sum of imperfections and perfections. The goal is to shift focus to the results of your perfections while working to reduce the negative behaviors of your imperfections. You are who you are; all you can do is change some aspects of your behavior.

Step 5 is when you no longer fear being vulnerable because you now fear running out of time to be the new you.

Step 6 is repeating the above until you can be vulnerable and willing to listen to what you really don’t want to hear about yourself, whenever you need to modify a behavior to reach a new goal in life.

The result of opening your heart to true vulnerability is finding true inner peace.  All your energy is spent being you; none is wasted powering the electric fence surrounding your heart.  This is a process, embrace it, try it, but don’t ignore it.

I will share that my journey of exposing my heart to this process has been exceedingly painful and has taken me over 50 years.  But understanding that vulnerability is the key to the doorway named trust makes all that pain worthwhile and in the end it wasn’t really pain. It was a good feeling, that of personal growth and trusting I am on the right path and sadly so few of us ever feel it. In the end that lack of familiarity manifested itself as a temporary pain, a part of the old you being pruned away. Each cut hurts, but the buds of the new you are growing quickly, releasing a happiness that makes the pain disappear from your memory.

The question is can you learn to flick off the switch of the electric fence surrounding find your heart more and more?

Winter Porn

We finally got some good snow. I took out my snowshoes for my first walk on the Lake Michigan shore ice with Stella and Loki. Many don’t know that winter is my favorite season. It is a season of testing your ability to survive while resources are limited. You can hide from it, by sitting indoors next to a warm fire or you can face it and see all the hidden beauty.

My favorite winter memory is watching the steam from a bull buffalo’s breath comingle with the steam from Old Faithful in the dead of winter at Yellowstone National Park.

Blog Porn

My family loves to write about our adventures and our lives. Michele used to write a blog about her daily experiences. My son Brandon writes a blog called Badger Preview, a mixture of his passion for the University of Wisconsin sports teams and his comedic view of occurrences in his daily life.  If you are a Badger fan I would check it out but be prepared for an under 30 view of the world.

His brother Dustin writes Getting Lost Is Not A Waste Of Time. A true free spirit, Dustin got a Master’s Degree in social work, packed up his car with his GPS set to Montana. He got as far as Jackson, WY, where he works as a counselor in a school for troubled youth. In his spare time he skis, hunts, fishes, hikes and as his blog name suggests gets lost quite often.

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