How Vulnerability is the Starting Point on your Hero's Journey to your Highest Self?

Vulnerability is the courage to be authentic about your inauthenticities. Vulnerability is calling yourself out when you catch yourself being inauthentic. Vulnerability is letting others know your fears and ugly truths instead of hiding them from not only others but from your own self.

When we have the courage to be vulnerable, we will walk into joyous freedom. When others know our deep dark ugly secrets, the fear of others knowing we are not good enough no longer holds us hostage and can no longer blackmail us into living a small life. That's when we can break free from the chains of bondage, which are inside us rather than outside, to live our greatest life, to realise our biggest dreams in deepest communion with our highest self and fulfil 100% of our intentions in all areas of our lives.

In this way, moving from fear into freedom is the purpose of our life so that we can fulfil on our destiny to be Heroes of our journey this lifetime.

Here's the framework that I use for myself and for my clients:

Gear 0 - At this stage, either we are a Victim of other people or circumstances or both, feeling trapped by Life. Or, we are a Fighter resisting Life, fighting to get what we want. The Universe gifts us with pain and loss to awaken us to our Hero's journey. If we are lucky, we learn the message the Universe is giving us from the gift of the pain and loss and grow bigger than who we are as human beings. This conscious inner growth is our only access to go beyond the pain and loss.

And, yet, there's another way to grow. We choose to grow much before pain and loss is needed to awaken the giant within us. The second path is the path of Insights, which we access through someone mentoring / coaching us if we give ourselves the permission to receive that contribution.

Gear 1 - Either through pain and loss or through insights, we evolve to the next level of who we are as human beings. The first step is to look within for deeper self-awareness, for discovering our fears and ugly truths which we have pushed to the basement of our psyche, for discovering our coping strategy to hide our fears and ugly truths from our own self. 

On discovery, go through the fire of vulnerable authenticity to acknowledge your fears and ugly truths to your own self and to others so that there is no need to hide behind a mask or an armour anymore. In doing that, the stress and heaviness falls away. There is a sense of relief and a lightness of being.

By doing this, we have truly embraced ourselves - flaws and all. Now we are ready for the next stage of our Hero's Journey.

During a session I was leading for entrepreneurs and business owners, I got present to a neediness to get one of the participants to renew his engagement with me as his coach. I called myself out and acknowledged that to the group. Before that acknowledgement, my stomach was in knots and my heart was burning with humiliation. On acknowledging my ugly truth, I freed myself, him and the group because 80% of communication happens non-verbally and the group energy would have been vitiated by my pretence of that neediness not being there. In that space of authentic vulnerability that got created, I was able to coach more effectively and powerfully making a much bigger difference than I would have been able to do otherwise because most of my energy would have been consumed in the hiding of the neediness. Not only that, the participants experienced the courage to be vulnerable. That single act of authentic vulnerability contributed massively not only to the participants but to me, their leader.

Just by shifting to this first stage, so much locked up productivity, performance, creativity and innovation gets released because we become true collaborators, can give up competing with each other and the concomitant hideous pretence, to now connect authentically and deeply with each other.

Gear 2 - After having forgiven ourselves for our flaws in the first stage, we are now ready to evolve to the next stage of leadership - to forgive others for their flaws and accept them the way they are and the way they are not, without any need to control them, to simply love them unconditionally without the need for them to change for us to love them, giving them the space to grow at their own pace and on their own path, experiencing joyous gratitude for being on our own journey and for all beings who share a bit of our journey with us. 

Gear 3 - At this stage, we begin to experience reverence for all beings and all things. There is childlike trust and faith in the Universe. We begin to receive with joyous gratitude whatever situations Life sends our way as gifts of the Universe. We no longer try to make things happen our way because there is an inner knowing that our way is already unfolding. We leap into exponential productivity, performance, creativity and innovation. We have the clarity on which 20% gives us 80% outcomes and courage to do only those 20%. From complexity, we move towards simplicity realizing that good solutions are complex but great solutions are simple. The power of clarity helps us go deeper within and create higher levels of success on the outside, unimaginable before. From 'so much to do, so little time' frenzy of Gear 0, we flow into abundance of time for all that we want to do. We begin to welcome and embrace whatever we resisted before, uncovering more fears and dropping more layers of the thick dark wall to finally connect to our inner Light, our innate Greatness.

Gear 4 - Our power to create continues to expand and we find ourselves in the 4th stage, Gear 4. In this stage, we have the power to inspire people in our space to step into Gear 1.

Gear 5 - This is when we step into mastery consciousness and experience the power to inspire people in our space to step into Gear 2.

Our productivity, performance, effectiveness, creativity, innovation continues to expand exponentially from Gear 3 to Gear 4 to Gear 5 as we now have the ability to inspire other people to expand their productivity, performance, effectiveness, creativity and innovation. We now have the power to lead our businesses, our communities, our countries from good to great.

The evolution from Gear 0 to Gear 5 is an outcome of a conscious decision to transform who we are as human beings. To progress on this path, we begin to drop bit-by-bit limiting habits and take on growth habits across all the 4 bodies of our Being (physical, mental / intellectual, emotional and spiritual).

As we continue walking on this journey from fear to love and freedom, from scarcity to abundance, from a victim to a creator, from struggle to effortlessness and grace, from ignorance and unconsciousness to deep awareness and wisdom, from lethargy of the mind / body / soul to joyous energy of effective and powerful action; we realise our greatest dreams in deepest communion with our highest self and have it all - deeply fulfilling successful abundance-creating creatively self-expressed career, loving harmonious relationships, happy responsible kids with their genius joyfully expressed, nourishing nurturing our own self, while making a difference in the world through our work and life.

Wishing you the joy of the journey to come home to yourself.

Love, Jyoti.