An opportunity to be vulnerable

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Back in December, 2023, my eldest daughter bought me a subscription for my birthday. Storyworth would send me a writing prompt each week for all of 2024. The prompts were always framed as a question, and I was invited to login and write a short essay to answer it.

At first, I was intrigued. My kids and grandkids might learn a bit more about who I really was. 

While the prompts often seemed trivial, I often found it challenging to write a good answer. The first prompt was, "What are some of your biggest pet peeves?" I know that I have pet peeves. Lots of them. And anyone who spends much time with me quickly learns what they are. But sitting down and simply listing them is kinda hard.

For starters, I had to look at my personality and habits from an external perspective. I had to put myself in the shoes of people around me. That requires a certain level of self-awareness that I don't often practice.

As I identified some of my pet peeves, I found myself instantly getting defensive, justifying my thoughts and attitudes. I began to worry about what the reader might think.

Eek! Being seen for the real me? Not hiding behind an online profile picture or an in-person facade? That's scary. It made me feel --- vulnerable.

I've been a fan of vulnerability for a while. Only when I started facilitating workshops at Google about team effectiveness and how they are built on a foundation of psychological safety did I start to understand how (and why) vulnerability is important.

Psychological safety is the belief that your efforts and actions, if done in good faith, will not be held against you. You can make an honest mistake, but only if you feel safe are you likely to say, "Yeah, that was me. I goofed." 

(In most cases at Google, the goof probably wasn't yours anyway. You might have been acting on bad or incomplete information. Or the team playbook for handling a certain situation might have been out-of-date, if it contained anything relevant at all. That's why Google SRE is a stickler for keeping documentation current, then testing that documentation regularly in Disaster Recovery Testing, or "DiRT," exercises.)

I know that teams are most effective when everyone shows up as their authentic selves --- not acting a certain way to be perceived well. If someone asks you to take on a project or task and you're not sure how to do it, say so. "I think I understand what you're asking me to do, but I'm not sure about the details. I want to focus on the most important aspects. What is the ultimate objective? What are the factors that might lead to failure? Who are the stakeholders? Can I talk to them to learn what's most important from their perspective?"

If you feel safe asking these kinds of questions, your project is much more likely to succeed. If all of your teammates feel safe asking questions like this, your team as a whole will be more effective.

Feeling like you could be vulnerable is a good thing. It means that you feel safe, that you trust those around you not to take advantage of that vulnerability. I trust my family, so I took a deep breath, logged in at storyworth.com, and answered the question as honestly as I could.

That launched me down the path of answering the Storyworth prompt questions each week so my family could see the real me. But I didn't stay on that path very long. 

I found myself getting frustrated with the idiosyncrasies of the Storyworth editor. I complained to Storyworth about how its formatting of text was inconsistent. And while I was at it, I complained that it lacked basic features like italics, boldface, and underlining. 

I got a kind email back from Customer Service that basically said (paraphrasing), "Our editor is very basic. You can enter text and photos. It's best to keep extra formatting to a minimum." OK, I said to myself. I'll see if I can ignore those idiosyncrasies. 

Yeah, that didn't last long. I gave up after six weeks. 

To honor my daughter's intent, I saved all of the writing prompts, those questions that are intended to show how I think or why I hold certain attitudes. I set up a Gmail filter so that each Monday, when the prompt of the week landed in my Inbox, Gmail would label it "Storyworth" and archive it for me. "Someday," I told myself, "I'll come back and make good on my intent to show my family the real me."

Well, I think it's time to make good on that now here in this blog. I'll start with the six essays that I wrote before I gave up on the Storyworth editor, then I'll move on to new territory, answering the questions now that were asked over 2024.

Can I be vulnerable to everyone who bothers to read my blog? <deep breath> Let's try and see.