Quotes About Vulnerability

You were right, you know." "About what?" "About me. About the things I've kept locked within myself, about my dread of getting close to anyone, about everything. I thought you were talking a load of rubbish, but somewhere, somehow, I ended up looking deep inside myself and found that you spoke the truth. You saw something I didn't. Something I didn't want to see. And you've made me realize that allowing one's self to love and be loved isn't so frightening, after all.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land.

The writer's life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.

If you're afraid of heights, lean over a railing. If you're afraid of germs, lick a floor. But what do you do if your greatest fear is of being afraid?

Individual assignments treat people like interchangeable parts, widgets or screws to be shuffled from drawer to drawer. In combat under this system, new guys showed up one at a time, and often got shot all too quickly.

You can never really trust someone who remembers every embarrassing detail of your adolescence.

Building habits of group vulnerability is like building a muscle. It takes time, repetition, and the willingness to feel pain in order to achieve gains.

In Conversation, Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value: The most important part of creating vulnerability often resides not in what you say but in what you do not say. This means having the willpower to forgo easy opportunities to offer solutions and make suggestions. Skilled listeners do not interrupt with phrases like Hey, here's an idea or Let me tell you what worked for me in a similar situation because they understand that it's not about them.

veteran Navy SEALs commander puts it this way: "Your face is like a door: It can be closed or open. You want to make sure you keep the door open.

most of us instinctively see vulnerability as a condition to be hidden. But science shows that when it comes to creating cooperation, vulnerability is not a risk but a psychological requirement.

The mechanism of cooperation can be summed up as follows: Exchanges of vulnerability, which we naturally tend to avoid, are the pathway through which trusting cooperation is built.

They demonstrated that a series of small, humble exchanges—Anybody have any ideas? Tell me what you want, and I'll help you—can unlock a group's ability to perform. The key, as we're about to learn, involves the willingness to perform a certain behavior that goes against our every instinct: sharing vulnerability.

Spotlight Your Fallibility Early On—Especially If You're a Leader: In any interaction, we have a natural tendency to try to hide our weaknesses and appear competent. If you want to create safety, this is exactly the wrong move. Instead, you should open up, show you make mistakes, and invite input with simple phrases like "This is just my two cents." "Of course, I could be wrong here." "What am I missing?" "What do you think?

Spotlight Your Fallibility Early On—Especially If You're a Leader:

She's really listening, hearing what you said and asking what it means, digging deeper," says Nili Metuki, design researcher. "She doesn't let things stay unclear, even when they're uncomfortable. Especially when they're uncomfortable

This kind of signal is not just an admission of weakness; it's also an invitation to create a deeper connection, because it sparks a response in the listener: How can I help?

Building habits of group vulnerability is like building a muscle. It takes time, repetition, and the willingness to feel pain in order to achieve gains. And as with building muscle, the first key is to approach the process with a plan.

Make Sure the Leader Is Vulnerable First and Often:

none carries more power than the moment when a leader signals vulnerability. As Dave Cooper says, I screwed that up are the most important words any leader can say.

In the first two sections of this book we've focused on safety and vulnerability. We've seen how small signals—You are safe, We share risk here—connect people and enable them to work together as a single entity. But now it's time to ask: What's this all for? What are we working toward? When I visited the successful groups, I noticed that whenever they communicated anything about their purpose or their values, they were as subtle as a punch in the nose.

In any interaction, we have a natural tendency to try to hide our weaknesses and appear competent. If you want to create safety, this is exactly the wrong move.

Skill 1—Build Safety—explores how signals of connection generate bonds of belonging and identity. Skill 2—Share Vulnerability—explains how habits of mutual risk drive trusting cooperation. Skill 3—Establish Purpose—tells how narratives create shared goals and values.

Normally, we think about trust and vulnerability the way we think about standing on solid ground and leaping into the unknown: first we build trust, then we leap. But science is showing us that we've got it backward. Vulnerability doesn't come after trust—it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.

Make Sure the Leader Is Vulnerable First and Often: As we've seen, group cooperation is created by small, frequently repeated moments of vulnerability. Of these, none carries more power than the moment when a leader signals vulnerability.