This is Anne with your Coaching On The Go.

I’m continuing to share with you some elements that you see in your life when you have underlying fear and when that fear protects you and prevents you from moving forward.

Today’s discussion is about the avoidance of vulnerability.

Do you avoid being real and true and revealing some of your struggles or challenges?

Do you avoid being vulnerable?

Whether you’re in a small group, with a friend or in a learning situation, growth often requires vulnerability and the possibility of failure or rejection.

Fear of being vulnerable may manifest itself as defensiveness, overconfidence, or the reluctance to ask for help.

These three are all things that I demonstrate, I have to say.

Because of the stories that we grew up in and what we decided was true in those scenarios, there are certain things that pop up for us regularly as we go to the next level in our lives.

For me, the fear of someone discovering that I might not be enough, keeps me, sometimes, from being vulnerable.

I know it.

It manifests in these three ways:

Defensiveness, which I exhibit in those instances,

Overconfidence, which I can be known to exhibit, and also

Reluctance to ask questions and ask for help,

up NOW, or up to five years ago, because I’ve been doing the work for a long time.

Now when I see defensiveness come up, I can start to work with it immediately.

When I’m in a situation where I want to ask a question and I’m feeling resistant to it, I can deal with that now because I know it’s a sign of things from the past that are coming up and blocking me from taking the next step.

I don’t know what your stories are, but I share mine with you at times because I’m sharing them so they can support you in uncovering something for yourself.

When I was a little girl, my dad was a teacher whose mission in life was to be the best he could be every day.

He felt as though correcting us, adjusting things we were doing, and making clear to us the ways we could improve, would be supporting us in becoming more powerful.

I looked at those things as a child and a young adult as ways that I wasn’t enough, that I couldn’t be perfect enough.

So those three pop up for me.

When you avoid vulnerability, you also keep people around you from coming to you with the support that could move you forward.

When you know that somebody struggles in this one area and you have the tools to support them in that area, you can bring those, but if they don’t reveal it to you, you can’t provide the support they could use.

Support is different than help.

Support is just, “Here are some tools!”

Help is like, “You can’t do it without me.”

If you’re somebody who avoids being vulnerable, consider that you’re keeping yourself from the tools that are there for you to step beyond that.

And perhaps that vulnerability, when it shows up, that feeling of fear of being vulnerable when it shows up, is letting you know that you’re on the verge of another next level.

Your next level is just on the other side of your opening and being vulnerable.

Have a beautiful day.