Vulnerability means uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

You might love someone, for example, and in doing so expose yourself emotionally; but you can never be certain that they'll reciprocate, thus you risk being rejected. Like any other feeling, love entails vulnerability.

Embracing our vulnerability can help us to learn and develop, both professionally and socially.

• Social development: embracing vulnerability allows us to both experience our emotions authentically and be empathic, enabling us to connect with others. Just as you'd appreciate others being open and honest with you, your vulnerability and willingness to share your feelings and thoughts will be received positively.
• Professional development: it's only by taking risks and daring to expose our work and ideas to external criticism that we can improve ourselves. If you practice only what you know you're good at, you of course avoid the risk of failure, but you also miss out on a potential new experience.

If you ignore your vulnerability, or you're simply unaware of it, you might end up increasing it.

As one study demonstrated, people who believed themselves to be invulnerable to the persuasive power of advertising were, in fact, the most susceptible to it; participants claiming to be unaffected by commercials responded more to them than those who acknowledged their own suggestibility.

In order to remove our armor and put down our weapons, it’s necessary to identify how we are masking our shame and protecting our vulnerabilities. 

The three major shields that we use to protect ourselves:

• Foreboding Joy (Imagining dreadful outcomes that clamp down on momentary joy)
• Perfectionism (Believing that doing everything perfectly protects us from shame)
• Numbing (Embracing anything that deadens the pain of discomfort and shame)

The powerful disarming strategies for freeing ourselves of these masks:

• Worthiness (I am enough)
• Boundaries (I’ve had enough)
• Engagement (I’m taking risks and letting myself be seen).

Talking about our feelings of shame and naming them often diminishes their power. In fact, verbalizing our shame actually makes us resilient to it.

This is because shame gains power through being unspeakable: the less we talk about it, the more control it has over our lives.

The problem is that it's natural for us to keep our shame to ourselves. Shame doesn't even require the presence of other people: most of us are likely to be our own worst critics and maintain a stockpile of shame to draw from.

 Leaders in education, work, and society as a whole should combat disengagement by encouraging.

Such a culture of worthiness and openness towards vulnerability can combat shame-based problems, and if we learn to engage our own vulnerability we can transfer the same values and concepts to our workplaces, schools, and families. vulnerability over shame.

• Shame is the fear of social disconnection; it’s only human, but harmful nonetheless.
• Shame is part of our current culture and it promotes a fear of unworthiness – of never having or being enough.