0:00:02 - Mark Henderson Leary

Welcome to Practice Freedom. What if you could hang out with owners and founders from all sorts of healthcare private practices, having rich conversations about their successes and their failures, and then take an insight or two to inspire your own growth? Each week on Practice Freedom, we take an in-depth look at how to get the most out of both the clinical side and the business side of the practice, get the most out of your people and, most of all, how to live the healthy life that you deserve. I'm Mark Henderson Leary. I'm a business coach and an entrepreneurial operating system implementer. I have a passion that everyone should feel in control of their life, and so what I do is I help you get control of your business. Part of how I do that is by letting you listen in on these conversations in order to make the biggest impact in your practice and, ultimately, live your best life. Let's get started. 

Welcome back to Practice Leaders. Today, I want to talk about vulnerability. I'm not going to try to take the spot of Brene Brown she is the absolute world authority on that but I got to say the topic of vulnerability comes up a lot in terms of when it's good and when it's not, and I had a recent epiphany about how to explain it, so I'm going to jump into that. But of course, I got to make sure to remind you that the reason we have this podcast is to convey the power and possibility of running a great practice, a great business of any kind, but certainly in private practice healthcare. The idea is that you can run a great business and have a great practice and you can have a great culture and you can make a massive impact. But if you're stuck and it's not running right, that just might mean you're normal. It's a very common problem and there's lots of reasons why you're stuck. But the answers are there and it's not secret sauce, it's not magic. And so if you're ever stuck and you feel like you want that high culture, high impact, amazing life, living your best life, making your biggest impact but if you're stuck and don't know what's going on, please reach out, don't stay stuck. We'd love to have a conversation about what a first or next step could look like. So let's dive into the topic. I want to land this. Maybe this is a super quick one. I can't believe I said that out loud because that pretty much jinxes. But vulnerability really had some epiphanies and if you listen to Ben McCauley. A lot of this is in there, but I just want to summarize this to a simple episode so you can convey to somebody why vulnerability matters and how it works at its highest. Vul matters and how it works at its highest Vulnerability the openness to injury, the guard down. 

Oftentimes, the assumption here is that this is admitting defeat, showing weakness, and sometimes it is in the form of displaying what happened as weak or flawed, what actions or activities were done or could be done that are not as perfect as we want them to be. And vulnerability is oftentimes just the conversation, to call it as it is, to be honest, to speak about the truth of what is imperfect, and I think that's the reason why it's so important, right, when we're not vulnerable, we're essentially intentionally concealing truth, right? So why does it feel so awkward? Why does it feel like it could be bad? And not to get too woo on this, I think the boiling of it down is that if we admit that we don't know what's going on, we're not sure what to do, we don't have an answer, we made a mistake, the orders I gave turned out to be tragic or cost us something important time, money, energy or life if we expose that that's external. I mean, our identity is so often associated with our actions, our decisions, our ability to be right, and if we take that away, we say we're not right, what I told you was wrong, I don't know what to do right now. We take that and put that out there. I think that we're afraid that there's nothing left, there's nothing that stands behind in support of those actions. And I think this is where it gets a little tricky, because I don't want this to get so spiritual woo woo, but we are. 

I mean so much of the work that people are doing these days and in leadership and meditation and understanding true purpose is understanding the true self, and maybe that's a safer place to talk. Purpose is understanding the true self and maybe that's a safer place to talk about it. The true self and you know, if you're writing, reading Michael Singer's books or Eckhart Tolle, you know there's a lot of conversation around the voice, the words, and then the inner self, the inner knowing, jack Canfield, the inner knower, I think, the inner whisperer. Maybe we, most of us, have that. Understand that the negative self-talk is not us, it comes from our mind, it comes from our experiences. But something sits below that. That self is there and I'll urge you that that self is there and that self is knowable and experienceable. 

And when we let down the guard of defense of our actions, that we have to have the faith and reliance that that self is still there. It's still visible and still meaningful. And so if you're having difficulty being vulnerable, it might be that you have a lack of trust in your own sort of existence from a moral purpose, soulful perspective, whatever your language is to describe that, you know it's there. You might be more religious and spiritual on this, you might be more atheistic on this, but you know that core is there and that's what you have to rely upon. But Ben also really helps me through the language. So that's the start of the conversation. 

If we can let go of the actions, we can say you know, hey, what I said didn't make sense, what I did was wrong, what I said to you was hurtful, my predictions were wrong, the product I designed no one's buying. I don't understand it, I'm confused, I lost. Those are just actions, or potential actions, or perceptions and answers and things that they're just. They're not us, they're not ourselves. We can let go of those things in the moment and just be confident that our existence, in its strength and its purpose and its desire, is enough in the moment. But that's not the end of the conversation. The purpose, purpose of being vulnerable is nothing more than removing the obstacles to be receptive to what is true or what is possible or what is unseen. And so all we're doing in vulnerability is just listening and stop talking and stop defending internally and externally, because that's another important part of this thing. 

You know, being externally defensive is the most common way to perceive this. We're sort of saying, but that's, but you don't understand and you know what. There was a whole bunch of reasons and you know, and then we still can do this. And you know and this was your fault and this was out of our control, and all these defensive things that they're just absolutely roadblocking the conversations and need to stop if we're going to listen and learn. But that's not the end of it. That inner monologue, you know that one too, all the explanations of this person, doesn't know what they're talking about, if they knew, and that all that defensive does all the protection that we have to make sure our ego and our rightness. 

And you know one of the things that I struggle with is if this, if I'm wrong about this, there's a variable in there or a constant that actually changes, that means I'm wrong about 14 other things. And I can't bear the weight of being wrong on so many things that I purported for so many times that this was the truth. And if it's not the truth, then I will have been wrong 10 times, a hundred times, a thousand times in the past and I cannot bear that. But that's the past and we got to let go of that. And if the truth is there, the truth is there. And if we want to have success in the future, we're going to have to honor the truth. We keep moving into the future, holding on to the hope that the world is a way that it is not, is going to continue to give us predictably incorrect, non-desirable outcomes. We have to let go of that in some way or other. 

So, like I said, the intent is to be receptive to the truth. To get every possible obstacle to listening to what we could learn from and adapt and course correct to is the intent. That's the utility of vulnerability and, if I didn't finish the point, it has to be inside as well as outside. You have to be able to stop dismissing what you're hearing, have to find that presence and hear that judge, hear that commentator in your mind saying well, that's not true, this person doesn't know what they're talking about. What they don't know is this and there's little reasons for that, and this person, they're just not a good, credible source or whatever that inner monologue is, that's just throwing and judging and protecting you with all best intent. So no reason to not thank your inner self for saying thank you for looking out for my ego. I appreciate you trying to protect me from potentially painful truths, and that's good, that's admirable. You can thank yourself for trying to protect yourself. That's very important. But you also need to say sit down, I need to listen and I'm ready and I'm capable. 

And I think a lot of people talk about the weakness. I don't want to be weak. How strong do you have to be to say I can hear the truth? Get out of the way, let me hear the truth. I'm strong enough to handle the truth. That's the strength I want you to really get ready for that being so much harder than bringing up those guards and the armor, as Brene Brown likes to describe it, and I think it's very apt. Letting that armor down is the strength, because you have to be able to listen and accept the truth and be ready to learn. Let ideas, dreams and thoughts and hopes die, because that's what happens. All of the potential flawed thinking, mindset, plans they die, and that's very painful and it's a lot of strength required to accept the death of the dreams and the commitments of the past that can no longer be, in the light of the truth, of the mistakes and what's going on. 

But to continue the point that Ben made from there, what do you do? That's where the manifestation comes. That's where the positive feedback loop comes from. That's where we build on the power of vulnerability. We accessed the truth, we weathered it with strength and now we're going to make new plans or new dreams that we're going to bravely commit to, knowing that they can die too, that they will be flawed, that we will have to be vulnerable once again and learn what is working and what is not. We'll get feedback from people about our tone of voice, about whether we were moving too fast or too slow or whether we left somebody behind from the vision because we got too obsessed with something and we weren't listening to things in the past and now we can learn more. And so that commitment, that recommitment, the rebuilding of the plan, the rebuilding of the vision is just as vulnerable as those plans and visions of the past and they will have to be modified and we'll have to be vulnerable and open and get access to that feedback and get access to the truth. 

I think that lands the point. I don't want to belabor it. To summarize, the whole point of vulnerability is to get access to the truth, to remove the obstacles to that. And why is it strong, why is it strength rather than weakness to be vulnerable? Because we're going to have to let some commitments and some parts of our identity and parts of our future die, because the truth is going to shape us and it's going to error correct course correct. And we're going to have to have that willingness to commit again, knowing that some death to our vision, some changes to our vision, some future wrongness is inevitable by being vulnerable again. But we're going to build on that positive feedback loop by showing we've got the capacity, showing we're willing to listen and learn, which builds confidence, and leading those around us, especially when we show that we take that information and put it to use and build new plans and learn from that and build on that over and over again. 

I hope that was helpful. Please share that with those people who you think could use it. Give us the feedback. We'd love the feedback. And, of course, as I always say, if you're stuck, please reach out. Practicefreedomcom slash schedule. We'll see you next time on Practice Freedom with me, mark Henderson Leary.

‍