The old perception that leaders can’t be vulnerable is absolutely wrong. Vulnerabilities will build over time and create so much noise that they drown out everything.

… and run the risk of eventually snapping and setting you on a bad course

Rather than burying your vulnerable areas and pretending they don’t exist, finding effective ways to harness your vulnerable areas will instead turn them into an ally.

Working through the story, building protections and boundaries around yourself. Knowing what will activate this vulnerability in the future so you can preempt these feelings.

Links

Register for my Virtual Happy Hour: https://www.adamliette.com/virtual-happy-hour

Learn more at https://www.adamliette.com

Activate The Warrior Within https://www.adamliette.com/awaken-the-warrior

Transcript

Let me ask you a serious question today. What makes you vulnerable? Like, what is it about your professional life or your personal life or the way you live in the world? That leaves you with that feeling that things are not quite right, or you're not quite right in the moment? There's certainly something. And I want to start just by smashing that perception that we see if you if you're looking at just what other people are putting out in the world, with their, with their content with their images, and what it leaves you with this perceptions that leaders can't be vulnerable. And I just want to dispel that notion that's complete. Bullshit. Okay, every one has vulnerabilities matter of how we deal with them. So thank you so much for joining me for this episode for that initial kind of thought piece. Because you do have vulnerabilities. And I want to talk about them today here on smooth operator. Because yeah, you guys know my story. You know, I'm Adam Liette. But um, I've been in online entrepreneurship.

For a while, I've worked at various levels of leadership to include extremely high levels of the military and special operations. And yet, it's been this whole process to discover how to best work through my vulnerabilities. That's been a major growth curve. And just these last couple of years, and allowed me to really expand the possible in a way that I never really thought would be presented to me. Because what I noticed was a couple of years ago, I had been under that, like, Hey, man, Macho Man bullshit, smash your vulnerabilities down and work through them and like, don't allow them any place in your life. And what happened was they built over time. And they created so much noise in my brain and my life that when that leadership moment finally came, you know, you know, I'm talking about that moment where you need to just go forth, and be a bull in a china shop kind of leadership moment, when it came. Eventually, it broke me. Because I had so much build up that It drowned out everything else. And put me in a place. I mean, I was still working through it, I was still able to do my work. But I was failing in a lot of parts of life. So eventually, I mean, these things build up and eventually you snap, right. And so it's everything you do on a bad course, you might be you know, the happy clown, you know, pretending everything's all right, when you know, everything's not. And so learning how to work through these learning how we best operate, is really critical. And I'm going to tell you some things that work for me. But I want you to begin with the idea that this is what works for one man. Okay, it doesn't mean it's going to work for you, it doesn't mean it's going to be the right pathway for you. But it's been a pathway, it's been very effective for me. So if you don't have a pathway, this might be the start of one and you might have to make major or minor modifications to the pathway that I take. Because I'll be perfectly frank, mine is still a work in progress. I'm still working to optimize this whole thing of how I express my vulnerabilities and process them and find ways to strengthen myself through them. Notice that phrasing not in spite of them, but through them use my vulnerabilities as a tool as a mechanism as a impetus to see an area of my life where I can plus up where I can improve or at least have the awareness that it causes this reaction in me. And now I know just having that awareness means you're able to do course correction. So, that being said, whatever it is that will work for you is ultimately what works for you. And what I found is for me, I'm a very A narrative driven person. Like, I tended to tell things and stories, and I know a lot of entrepreneurs are like that. So I thought this one might resonate with you is that I allow my vulnerabilities to tell me to tell a story about myself. And it's a story that I'm telling myself to be perfectly frank, where if something isn't quite right, or isn't going through correctly, I start to allow it to tell me a story about where I'm operating. And I'm nice, I just must not be good at this. Or someone else is better at this than I am. Or man, I always seem to fuck this all up when this kind of things happens. That's a story. And it's a story we're telling ourselves and it becomes kind of a self fulfilling prophecy, when you allow that story to be told to yourself and you perpetuated over time whenever that vulnerability comes back up. And that thing that you need to do that you hate doing, and you're telling yourself that you don't do this? Well. That's a story. And now you're living from the your pre determined outcome when you're telling yourself that story.

So the next time this pops up, and this happened to me, I mean, just very recently, which is why I wanted to record this episode today. And by recently, I mean, like, the last 24 hours, where I had a vulnerability pop up, I heard the story that was going on in my brain, I verbalize it a little bit. And within eight hours, I'm like, What are you telling yourself? It hit me right between the eyes, because I realized that I was perpetuating bullshit. And it's absolute idiotic story. That didn't make sense. That's not true. And knows by spending time in silence and reflection and looking at the whole because this last week, I'll be honest, this last week was one of those weeks. Like, if you want to look at it from a pure effort standpoint, this last week kind of sucked. Like it was a week of effort. Like, everything felt like I was working to get it there. You ever have those weeks, where like you weren't successful, like the things that you set out to do at the beginning, the week you got done, it just every project seemed difficult. And there was nothing that anyone did nothing that you even did to make them difficult. It was just nature of business cycles. And sometimes you you know, get a basket of lemons. And you got to kind of suck your way through that. You know, the projects all came to fruition, they're all going good. But man, it was like, everything I had in me to bring those projects to fruition. And then when this thing hit me at the end of the week, and I just reverted back to this story.

So I spent time in silence and reflection, reflecting on the past week, everything that brought me to this point where things went, right, right, right, right, wrong. And I was like, what was it about those things that went right? So I'm focusing on my successes, versus the areas that make me feel vulnerable, my failures? And going, what is the correlation here? That silence and reflection, allow me to reframe that story into a place of opportunity. Where I was able to say I don't suck at this, I just have a blind spot. Okay, why do I have that blind spot. And by looking at things at a hole, I was able to pinpoint three or four very specific, controllable inputs that allow me to directly out or impact how my my view on something is to impact that blind side to bring better clarity to it. And so I was able to reframe my story that I've been telling myself for the last, you know, 12 to 24 hours, from a place of you suck into, you need to do this, when you're feeling this way. It's because you did this, or you didn't do that, that you ended up in this place with a blind spot. So now I'm able to work from the plan of action, because most of us in this line of work, our personality types were people of action, we want something to do. And it's when we don't have that thing to do that we feel super, like uncomfortable. So give yourself something to do. That's I mean, that's just part of the personality type. So why run from it? Let's embrace it. By doing that my entire mindset has shifted very, very quickly into a place of action, which is where most of us want to be like I said, there's just that deliberate reframing of that story and understanding vulnerabilities impact our stories. And we can change our stories.

Because stories are some of it's some of the way we tell the tale about our life. It's through story, right? I know I've recorded episodes about that one before, you should go back, check them out. From here, I'm, I'm gonna bring this story to a couple people. Because I mean, it's one thing to tell it to yourself, something has to verbalize it out loud. And this is the second part of this that I think is the most misunderstood. But in my mind, the most important because of what we're going to do here, and what I'm going to do is I have a couple of trusted allies, that I'm going to now bring my reflection on this event too. So for me, I have a mastermind I'm a part of so this is a group of guys, we get together and we just talk about this stuff. And we put everything on the table, make a big ol mess, mess and help each other. And what I found particularly remarkable, is that, like, someone else will express a vulnerability or something that's going on that they don't know how to work for through and you're like Son of a biscuit like, I'm having the same thing. And it wasn't until you told me years that I can now see clearly what I need to do. When I was telling myself your story, I couldn't but now that I'm being asked to advise you, I know exactly what to do. Oh, crap, now I gotta do this for myself. really remarkable thing that happens. So bring it to a mastermind, if you don't have a mastermind group yet. Start one. Starting a mastermind it's as easy as can be, you just find people that you connect with, you know, connect with on social or whatever business relationships you have, and just start getting together just to talk just to shoot the breeze, to work through these things. Let's have a couple of business connections, I'm going to bring this to these quite art mastermind levels, where I'm not like really involved with them. But I do have some people that I talk with on a regular basis, especially on socials. So I'll probably post this in a couple of forums, my thoughts on this, just to get some feedback. Maybe inspire a couple other people as well to start that conversation. And the final one, the most important one for me is coaching relationships. So if your organization like if you're the head of the organization, and you haven't implemented coaching and mentoring into your probe into your organization downwards, like you need to do that yesterday. Having coaching even for your subordinates is hugely effective for you, especially if you're at the top, you need to be looking outside. For coaching relationships. Being part of a coaching program, having a coach to work through these things has been, oh my gosh, I can't tell you the difference is made in my life and continues to to this day, where, you know, I'll actually strategize what I'm bringing to my coach. Because I know the impact I wanted to have and I want to make sure that that time together is really valuable. And I'm able to get best get my next steps from that. So if you don't have coached, man, get one like the best performers in the world have coaches. Let's be perfectly frank Tom Brady, you know up till the day he retired, had a quarterback coach. That's not the greatest quarterback of all time had a QB coach Tiger Woods had a coach. I mean, even I don't care what business I mean Russell Brunson has coaches, for goodness sakes, the level of your that you're able to ascend to is going to be largely dependent on some of the coaching relationships that you have.

And from here, you know, bringing these experiences to those relationships, being able to expose your vulnerabilities verbally talk through them, we can now work on building protections and boundaries around ourselves. So if you know that the on this type of activating event exposes a vulnerability, how are you going to protect yourself from that in the future? Are you going to require certain types of information to be present before you can take on a project? Are you going to only take on certain projects at certain times of the week? Are you going to you know, work through your calendar and go back to the last episode. Talking about owning your calendar, are you going to block that time to work through this again protections and boundaries around yourself. And then knowing what will activate this vulnerability allows you to preamp those feelings that feeling of being stuck in between. If you know what's going to happen and you feel it coming on. Well then you get to go through the thought and reflective exercise you know, prior to things getting out of hand. This particular episode was a bit introspective and might not have been. You know, there were a couple of very cool Their two dues. And by this very nature, this conversation is a bit more esoteric than I'd like it to be. But that's kind of the nature of it when we're not talking particulars, and I hope you understand that due to confidentiality. You know, there's some particulars, I can't share in relation to this. And that's it that just says what it is. Okay, I can tell you, I've worked through these vulnerabilities on a regular basis, and my, my vulnerabilities keep getting exposed, but they're definitely working at a higher level, that's what I've noticed is that things that made me feel vulnerable three years ago, don't anymore. And the things that make me feel vulnerable now, like I didn't even think of that as a possibility three years ago, it wasn't even something that was in my lexicon. So we're definitely moving up. And I think it's a healthy thing.

And I also believe that if you take a deliberate approach to this, you're going to find that same correlation between what you're working through and your place in, in your business growth. I do hope that helps. And hope that inspires you a little bit of way to take these things head on. If you don't have some of those relationships, yet, you're not sure how to work through them, please do reach out, I do coaching. So shameless plug I do work directly with entrepreneurs and second commands, to help them through their their vulnerabilities that we go through some great exercises, and I've always found a lot of clarity that comes with it, and then therefore a lot of action. So do reach out to Adam at Adam liette.com. I look forward to seeing you next time. And even when we're feeling vulnerable, we have to lead. And that's what I want you to take away the most from this is that it's by working through these that we're really established, establishing our leadership potential, what we're going to be able to do in the future and how much our team is going to be able to follow us. Because they're going to see you work through them yourself. They're going to be I mean, they know even if you're not telling them you're feeling this way they know and then they're going to be able to see the outcome that comes from this and that will inspire people to move forward. Thank you so much for joining me until next time operators lead the way. Hey, operators, I believe that within each and every one of us lies a warrior in waiting this warrior is able to conquer any obstacle that comes their way to discover how to awaken your warrior spirit and conquer what's holding you back. Go to Adam liette.com and join awaken the Warrior Within