“There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.” Scott Peck, Author of The Road Less Travelled
This morning I got an email from an editor at O Magazine in New York. “Would I be available for an interview on an article for their June issue?”
I rejigged my schedule. Who wouldn’t, right? Particularly given March is International Women’s Month!
I’m not going to tell you what the article is about. You will just have to buy the June edition of O Magazine and find out for yourself. But I will tell you this: it’s about making courageous choices and the impact they can have on our careers, on our relationships, and on our lives.
There is no subject that I am more passionate about than courage, what it means, and what it takes. Of course the word COURAGE, while resonating strongly for many, is also quite amorphous. I mean, what does it really mean to live courageously?
Courage has many faces, so what it means for one person to be courageous is very different for another. But at the core of courage is a willingness to become vulnerable. Vulnerable to rejection, criticism, failing, social humiliation, to messing up, falling short of the mark or simply to the disappointment that comes when we don’t achieve what we set out toward.
We live in a world that prizes outward signs of success: Lovely homes, nice cars, beautiful clothes, exotic holidays, Tiffany diamonds … the list goes on. But to me the most meaningful marker of success are people who have been willing again and again throughout the course of their lives to keep faith in themselves in the midst of life’s difficulties and disappointments, and who take continual risks toward inspiring goals that make them vulnerable to more of it.
Around the globe today millions of people live in abject poverty. Around the globe today, yes T-O-D-A-Y, thousands of young women are forced into the sex trade. Around the globe today countless unwanted babies are aborted. Around the globe today thousands are mourning the loss of those they love to war, to disease and to malnutrition. Around the globe today, but particularly in the wealthy developed corners of the western world, people are taking their own lives, because they have given up hope that life will ever offer anything for them to make it worth living. Without courageous action on the part of those of us who can influence change, nothing will.
Sometimes courageous risk taking results in monetary gain and social status. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s about giving up a material gain to fulfill a long held calling (like a former client who left a lucrative career in banking to become a High School math teacher). And sometimes affluence and influence has nothing to do with it at all. Like the courage it takes to speak up in a relationship and bare our deepest doubts and vulnerabilities with another human being. Sometimes it about ending a relationship that we have long given up hope will ever fulfill our need for intimacy. Sometimes it’s about rolling up our sleeves and starting out on an audacious new venture that involves risk, hard work and no guarantee of success, but that excites us like nothing else.
It’s the scariest things I’ve done in my life that have ultimately [Read more…]