so i'll start with this a couple years ago an event planner called me because i was going to do a speaking event and she called and she said i'm really struggling with how to write about you on the little flyer and i thought well what's the struggle and she said well i saw you speak and i i i'm going to call you a researcher i think but i'm afraid if i call your researcher no one will come because they'll think you're boring and irrelevant and it's like okay and she said so but the thing i
liked about your talk is you know you're a storyteller so i think what i'll do is just call you a storyteller and of course the academic insecure part of me was like you're going to call me a what and she said i'm going to call you a storyteller and i was like oh why not magic pixie um i was like i i don't i let me think about this for a second and so i tried to call deep on my courage and i thought you know i am a storyteller i'm a qualitative researcher i collect
stories that's what i do and maybe stories are just data with a soul you know and maybe i'm just a storyteller so i said you know what why don't you just say i'm a researcher storyteller and she went there's no such thing so i'm a researcher or storyteller and i'm going to talk to you today we're talking about expanding perception and so i want to talk to you and tell some stories about a piece of my research that fundamentally expanded my perception and really actually changed the way that i live and love and work and
parent and this is where my story starts when i was a young researcher doctoral student my first year i had a research professor who said to us here's the thing if you cannot measure it it does not exist and i thought he was just sweet talking to me i was like really and he's like absolutely so you have to understand that i have a bachelor's in social work a master's in social work and i was getting my phd in social work so my entire academic career was surrounded by people who kind of believed in the
life's messy love it you know and i'm more the life's messy clean it up organize it and put it into a bento box um and so to think that i had found my way to found a career that takes me you know really one of the big sayings in in social work is lean into the discomfort of the work and i'm like you know knock discomfort upside the head and move it over and get all a's that's my that was my mantra so i was very excited about this and so i thought you know what
this is the career for me because i am interested in some messy topics but i want to be able to make them not messy i want to understand them i want to hack into these things i know are important and lay the code out for everyone to see so where i started was with connection because by the time you're a social worker for 10 years what you realize is that connection is why we're here it's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives this is this is what it's all about it doesn't matter whether you
talk to people who work in social justice and mental health and abuse and neglect what we know is that connection the ability to feel connected is neurobiologically that's how we're wired it's why we're here so i thought you know what i'm going to start with connection well you know that that situation where you get an evaluation from your boss and she tells you 37 things that you do really awesome and one thing that you can't you know an opportunity for growth and all you can think about is that opportunity for growth right well apparently this
is the way my work went as well because when you ask people about love they tell you about heartbreak when you ask people about belonging they'll tell you the most excruciating experiences of being excluded and when you ask people about connection the stories they told me were about disconnection so very quickly really about six weeks into this research i ran into this unnamed thing that absolutely unraveled connection in a way that i didn't understand or had never seen and so i pulled back out of the research and thought i need to figure out what this
is and it turned out to be shame and shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection is there something about me that if other people know it or see it that i won't be worthy of connection the things i can tell you about it's universal we all have it the only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection no one wants to talk about it and the less you talk about it the more you have it what underpinned this shame this i'm not good enough which we all know
that feeling i'm not blank enough i'm not thin enough rich enough beautiful enough smart enough promoted enough the thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability this idea of in order for connection to happen we have to allow ourselves to be seen really seen and you know how i feel about vulnerability i hate vulnerability and so i thought this is my chance to beat it back with my measuring stick i'm going in i'm going to figure this stuff out i'm going to spend a year i'm going to totally deconstruct shame i'm going to understand how vulnerability
works and i'm going to outsmart it so i was ready and i was really excited as you know it's not going to turn out well you know this so i could tell you a lot about shame but i'd have to borrow everyone else's time but here's what i can tell you that it boils down to and this may be one of the most important things that i've ever learned in the decade of doing this research my one years turned into six years thousands of stories hundreds of long interviews focus groups at one point people were
sending me journal pages and sending me their stories thousands of pieces of data and six years and i kind of got a handle on it i kind of understood this is what shame is this is how it works i wrote a book i published a theory but something was not okay and what it was is that if i roughly took the people i interviewed and divided them into people who really have a sense of worthiness that's what this comes down to a sense of worthiness they have a strong sense of love and belonging and folks
who struggle for it and folks who are always wondering if they're good enough there was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it and that was the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging that's it they believe they're worthy and to me the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy of connection with something that personally and professionally i felt
like i needed to understand better so what i did is i took all of the interviews where i saw worthiness where i saw people living that way and just looked at those what do these people have in common and i have i have a slight office supply addiction but that's another talk so i had a manila notebook a manila folder and i had a sharpie and i was like what am i going to call this research and the first words that came to my mind were wholehearted these are kind of wholehearted people living from this
deep sense of worthiness so i wrote at the top of the manila folder and i started looking at the data in fact i did it first in this very four in a four day very intensive data analysis where i went back pulled these interviews pulled the stories pulled the incidents what's the what's the theme what's the pattern my husband left town with the kids um because i always go into this kind of jackson pollock crazy thing where i'm just like writing and going and kind of just in my researcher mode and so here's what i
found what they had in common was a sense of courage and i want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute courage the original definition of courage when it first came into the english language it's from the latin word cur meaning heart and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart and so these folks had very simply the courage to be imperfect they had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others because as it turns out we can't practice compassion with other
people if we can't treat ourselves kindly and the last was they had connection and this was the hard part as a result of authenticity they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were which is you have to absolutely do that for connection the other thing that they had in common was this they fully embraced vulnerability they believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful they didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable nor did they really talk about it being excruciating as i had heard earlier
in the shame interviewing they just talked about it being necessary they talked about the willingness to say i love you first the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram the willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out they thought this was fundamental i personally thought it was betrayal um i could not believe i had pledged allegiance to research where our job you know the definition of research is to control control and predict to study phenomenon
for the reason for this explicit reason to control and predict and now my very you know my mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting this led to a little breakdown which actually looked more like this um and it did it led to a i called a breakdown my therapist calls it a spiritual awakening spiritual lightning sounds better than breakdown but i assure you it was a breakdown and i had to put my data away and go find a therapist
let me tell you something you know who you are when you call your friends and say i think i need to see somebody who do you have any recommendations because about five my friend's like woo i wouldn't want to be your therapist and i was like what does that mean and they're like i'm just saying you know like don't bring your measuring stick okay so i found a therapist my first meeting with her diana i brought in my list of the way the wholehearted live and i sat down and she said you know how are
you and i said i'm great you know i'm i'm okay and she said what's going on and i said and this is a therapist who sees therapists because we have to go to those because their bs meters are good and so i said here's the thing i'm struggling and she said what's the struggle and i said well i have a vulnerability issue and you know and i know that vulnerability is kind of the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness but it appears that it's also the birthplace of joy of creativity a
belonging of love and i i think i have a problem and i just i need some help and i said but here's the thing no family stuff no childhood i just i just need some strategies [Music] thank you um so she goes like this and then i said it's bad right she said it's neither good nor bad it just is what it is and i said oh my god this is going to suck and it did and it didn't and it took about a year and you know how there are people that like when they
realize that vulnerability and tenderness are important that they kind of surrender and walk into it a that's not me and b i don't even hang out with people like that for me it was a year-long street fight it was a slugfest vulnerability pushed i pushed back i lost the fight but probably won my life back and so then i went back into the research and spent the next couple of years really trying to understand what they the wholehearted um what the choices they were making and what what is what what are we doing with vulnerability
why do we struggle with it so much am i alone in struggling with vulnerability no so this is what i learned we numb vulnerability when we're waiting for the call it was funny i sent something out on twitter and on facebook that says how would you define vulnerability what makes you feel vulnerable and within an hour and a half i had 150 responses because i wanted to know you know what's out there having to ask my husband for help because i'm sick and we're newly married initiating sex with my husband initiating sex with my wife
being turned down asking someone out waiting for the doctor to call back getting laid off laying off people this is the world we live in we live in a vulnerable world and one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability and i think there's evidence and it's not the only reason this evidence exists but i think that there it's a huge cause we are the most in debt obese addicted and medicated adult cohort in u.s history the problem is and i learned this from the research that you cannot selectively numb emotion you
can't say here's the bad stuff here's vulnerability here's grief here's shame here's fear here's disappointment i don't want to feel these i'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin i don't want to feel these and i know that's i know that's knowing laughter i i hack into your lives for a living i know that's oh god you can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects our emotions you cannot selectively numb so when we numb those we numb joy we numb gratitude we numb happiness and then we are miserable
and we are looking for purpose and meaning and then we feel vulnerable so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin and it becomes this dangerous cycle um one of the things that i think that we need to think about is why and how we numb and it doesn't just have to be addiction the other thing we do is we make everything that's uncertain certain religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty i'm right you're wrong shut up that's it just certain the more afraid we are the
more vulnerable we are the more afraid we are this is what politics looks like today there's no discourse anymore there's no conversation there's just blame you know what you know how blame is described in the research a way to discharge pain and discomfort we perfect if there's anyone who wants their life to look like this it would be me but it doesn't work because what we do is we take fat from our butts and put it in our cheeks which just i hope in 100 years people will look back and go wow and we perfect
most dangerously our children let me tell you what we think about children they're hardwired for struggle when they get here when you hold those perfect little babies in your hand our job is not to say look at her she's perfect my job is just to keep her perfect make sure she makes the tennis team by fifth grade and yale by seventh grade that's not our job our job is to look and say you know what you're imperfect and you're wired for struggle but you are worthy of love and belonging that's our job show me a
generation of kids raised like that and we'll end the problems i think that we see today we pretend that what we do doesn't have an effect on people we do that in our personal lives we do that corporate whether it's a bailout an oil spill a recall we pretend like what we're doing doesn't have a huge impact on other people i would say to companies this is not our first rodeo people we just need you to be authentic and real and say we're sorry we'll fix it but there's another way and i'll leave you with
this this is what i have found to let ourselves be seen deeply seen vulnerably seen to love with our whole hearts even though there's no guarantee and that's really hard and i can tell you as a parent that's excruciatingly difficult to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of kind of terror when we're wondering can i love you this much can i believe in this as passionately can i be this fierce about this just to be able to stop and instead of catastrophizing what might happen to say i'm just so grateful because to feel this
vulnerable means i'm alive and the last which i think is probably the most important is to believe that we're enough because when we work from a place i believe that says i'm enough then we stop screaming and start listening we're kinder and gentler to the people around us and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves that's all i have
