Brad Stulberg

And it helped you have more genuine confidence in yourself.

Because if you're hiding something from yourself, you might intellectually know, but your subconscious, it can discern bullshit from truth.

So if you're pushing this part of yourself away, you can't ever really be confident because you know that you're hiding something.

where if you can get to know all of yourself, including your fears and your doubts, then you can be really confident.

So the example that so many ancient wisdom traditions talk about is what I would argue is the most universal human vulnerability, and that is death.

And we often go through life just pushing death aside, not thinking about death.

And in a way doing that, it puts up this wall to something that is going to happen to all of us.

And if we can just learn to name our fear and to be with it for a little, and perhaps in the company of a friend or therapist or spiritual advisor or counselor, then the edge gets taken off and we can relate to it a little bit differently, which allows us to have more confidence and live more fully.

Um, so I think that that's what I really learned, you know, back to that three-legged stool, the spiritual traditions don't mess around, right?

Like they're not talking about vulnerability in your workplace.

They're like, we're all going to die.

Let's talk about it.

So I think we can learn a lot from those extremes and then you can also lift them to the normal fissures in daily lives that bother us, right?

And I think something else that's really interesting here, and you will probably know better than me from your marketing agency, but it seems that there's a difference between performative vulnerability and the real thing.

So performative vulnerability is like crafting some Instagram post or tweet storm because you read my book or Brene Brown's work and you think that being vulnerable is good for you, so now I'm gonna be vulnerable so more people follow me.

A, that generally feels pretty gross, and B, it generally doesn't work.

Versus actual vulnerability, which is like, this is scary, I might even feel ashamed to share this,

And I'm going to say it and do it anyways.

And that's the stuff that makes you feel good, not gross.

And that's the stuff that goes nuts.