The blogs are coming thick and fast, I hope you are still enjoying them. I’m not the sort of person who does the edges first when I do a jigsaw, I just get stuck in and it’s all chaos…until its not. Thinking of ways I can also share the structure as it begins to (rhizomatically) emerge.
Vulnerability is…?
That’s the question with which Brené Brown ends every Dare to Lead podcast. Listening to them in my car, as I often do, I wonder what I would say, if I was ever a guest. Would it be too cheesy to use Brené’s own metaphor of ‘stepping into the arena’? Maybe, but those are certainly the words that come to mind. Vulnerability is associated with mental movement in my mind, that stepping forward through resistance, opening up as I go.
My son’s recovery from his illness has kept us both quietly at home, and in recent days he has felt well enough to pick up his uni studies. He is writing an essay on vulnerability from an anthropology perspective and our conversations have been inflected with our freshest thinking on the topic. From time to time I’ve picked up his textbook, an incredible piece by Ruth Behar called The Vulnerable Observer, written in the year of his birth and reissued with an epilogue in 2022. The book’s subtitle is ‘Anthropology that Breaks your Heart’ and as anthropology is the study of how humans operate in community, it has lots to offer, whether we are anthropologists or not.
My own journey into vulnerability is long practised but never smooth; I’m still coming to terms with the miasma of anger I often need to get to the other side of, before I am able to allow that my heart might be broken. Brené defines vulnerability as,
the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.
If we always run away from it (or, in my case, batter it away with words) we remain ‘armoured’, not open to people or possibilities.
Vulnerable Leadership
What I love about Brené’s work is that vulnerability is always balanced with boundary setting. It’s worth exploring her work around this; she often defines boundaries as “an act of self care” and (after Prentis Hemphil) “the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously”. Vulnerable leadership, which has become quite the thing recently, is not an excuse for fake vulnerability: oversharing for attention, without leaning in to uncertainty and risk to do the work on yourself. In a similar vein, Ruth Baher reminds us to “act as a participant, but not forget to keep our eyes open.”
If you’re interested in finding out more about vulnerable vs armoured leadership, the Dare to Lead Hub has some interesting activities, which I often use in changemaking sessions. And the podcast introduces phenomenal thinkers who are leading the way.
Vulnerable People
In public service, we are very quick to slap the label ‘vulnerable’ on others, as though we are somehow not subject to vulnerability ourselves. This comes from a good place, a safeguarding place, I recognise that, but it’s often unhelpful in terms of equity. I don’t want to be regarded as vulnerable because I have ADHD wiring, for example, because I genuinely appreciate my strengths. Of course there are challenges, but I imagine neurotypicals have challenges too…all those lists! (Gentle tease).
What we end up with is a place where nearly all ‘service users’ are vulnerable and that’s quite othering, when you think about it. It’s certainly the enemy of co-creation, because divides settle deep into the consciousness. As someone teaching on a social change research degree it also makes it super difficult to get research ethics passed - if undergraduates can’t work with ‘vulnerable’ people on a social change degree, on this definition who else do they know!
I don’t have all the answers by a long chalk, but I know that vulnerability is deeply embedded in joy work, given that joyful practice is about channelling the fear, sorrow, anger and frustration that knock us all for six from time to time. As always, I sincerely appreciate your thoughts.
What the World Needs Now
…is love, sweet, love. Bacharach and David wrote that the year before I was born and with my hand firmly on my heart, I truly believe we are waking up to it now. We can’t go on as we are. And we can’t change, until we are ready to step into that arena. I’m less and less interested in the opinions of people who are not prepared to be brave and I don’t believe you can have true courage without vulnerability. When we are vulnerable, in a boundaried sense, that’s when others reciprocate. We have to risk that heartbreak. It’s the work.
Thanks Lou for yet another great read that unearths so much in such a short space. Really glad to see such an eloquent and compelling critique on the use of language to describe groups and people such as 'vulnerable' (or another big one) - 'disadvantaged'. Who gets to apply these labels and mainstream then in policy and practice...