(Wk 13) Vulnerability Part 2 Of 5 - Unleash Your Peace

In the second episode talking about Vulnerability, I share a personal story that made me feel vulnerable, and I ask you to chime in: Was the way I handled it courageous or did it make me an idiot?

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Unleash Your Peace. My name is Elly Shouja. I am your host. I'm a positive mindset coach, A personal transformation expert, A deliberate creator, And I am your peace trainer. And this podcast, Unleash Your Peace, Is your peace training. Every single week we dive into a different topic about the internal world. We do that over the course of five episodes published Monday through Friday. The episodes are super short and sweet. They are under 10 minutes each. They're meant to just simply uplift you, Inspire you, Give you something thought-provoking to think about, Remind you that you are an infinite being, A creator here to create. So hopefully that's what this podcast is doing for you. Hopefully it's helping you shed all of that unwanted pain you want to not carry with you anymore, Find internal peace and live your best life. Because when we live from this place of joy and peace and connectedness to that infinite beingness, That non-physical that holds all of our potential within us, We don't just incrementally improve the quality of our lives. We actually exponentially innovate every aspect of our experiences on this physical plane. We become whole. We become powerful creators. We live deliberately and we live authentically. We live the lives of our dreams and we become uplifters in our families, In the society as a whole. And next thing you know, We are leveling up as a human race, Which is my wish for all of us. This week we have a very, Very important topic and that is the topic of vulnerability. Now a lot of people think that vulnerability, Allowing yourself to be vulnerable is a weakness. I can't go there. It's weak. Here's your homework. I'm going to share a story with you that makes me incredibly vulnerable. And at the time I experienced extreme vulnerability and I want you to send me a message and let me know if you thought it was courageous for me to share this story or if you think it just demonstrated what an idiot I am. And this story took place a few years ago. I was at a writer's group. This is a group of a lot of very successful writers, Screenwriters, Script doctors, Novelists, A lot of them published. And we would meet every single week and critique different people's work, Very structured, Incredible good notes. And I brought in a script that was very new. It was in its first draft. I brought in 25 pages of it and we would read it like a table read. And I handed all of the scripts out and I sat down to listen to it along with the rest of the 30 or so writers who were in the audience. And to my chagrin and complete horror, My narrator started by saying, Untitled Femme Fatal script by Ellie Shouja. I had mistyped Fatal as fatal and my writer, Narrator thought it was absolutely hilarious. So he kept saying it. He kept saying it multiple times throughout the evening. And every time somebody would say Femme Fatal instead of Femme Fatal, I just sank a little bit deeper internally. I went through all sorts of emotions. How could I have missed this mistake? What was wrong with me? What a fraud I am now. Everybody's going to know that I am a fraud. I'm not really a writer. If I don't know the difference between Fatal and Fatal, What kind of a writer am I? And I also felt betrayed. Why would this person point out this mistake that clearly I did not mean to make? Why was he ridiculing me in this way? And it wasn't until I was sitting on stage ready to receive notes from these wonderful writers and one other person said Femme Fatal as a joke and just started laughing afterwards that I realized what I needed to do. I needed to just lean into it. So I did. I leaned in and I made a joke out of it. I said, Yeah, That is funny. You'd think I would know the difference between Fatal and Fatal by now. And to my surprise, Everything just dissolved in that moment because everybody felt like, Okay, Now they have permission to laugh and done and done and done. It was completely done after that. And we were able to give notes and receive notes in a very sophisticated LA writer fashion. And later when I was thinking about that incident, I thought, You know, It is interesting. I had the option of becoming defensive, Of holding my cards really close to my heart, Barricading my heart in that moment and just showing a complete poker face. Or I had the option of saying, Yeah, Guys, I messed up. And I was able to make a joke of it and just kind of like lighten it up. And more than anything else, I was able to own it. And in that ownership of that moment, My heart was not barricaded. I just allowed myself to be exposed. I allowed myself to be open and present and available in all of my grandeur. Yesterday, We talked about how not allowing ourselves to become vulnerable is like putting ourselves in a glass cage. Nobody can get to know you through a glass cage. But if you are vulnerable, If you just allow those vulnerable moments to play themselves out without closing up and shutting down, You'll be surprised. You'll get to know yourself. And what I learned in that moment about myself was that, You know, Yeah, I'm not perfect. I make mistakes. I have typos. I also can survive them. And this mistake doesn't mean anything. It doesn't say anything about who I am, About what I am, About my worth, About my abilities as a writer. It doesn't say even anything about my relationship with all these people, Many of whom are still friends. The other thing that I learned in that moment is that people respond to the way we respond to the moments that make us vulnerable. So if something creates a lot of tension within me, People are going to respond a certain way. And if I take it lightheartedly and with an open heart, People are going to respond in a completely different way. It is in the human nature to want to point out something that is not right, Not because people are malicious or they want others to hurt, But simply because I think people distract themselves from their own problems and whatever is happening for them with whatever is happening for other people. And if I have an extreme amount of shame around what I am doing, Then I am inviting in those types of people who do have nothing better to do than really poke fun of or be critical of others into my life. And I'm giving them something to focus on that takes the attention away from themselves. Now by being wholehearted in that moment, So by being exposed in that moment, I actually did something very powerful, Which is I took my power away and I turned myself into a mirror. And I could feel in that moment that the persons who were making fun of me for making this mistake instantly felt a bit of shame because they had the lens turned on themselves rather than having the lens be turned on me. And that was also part of the reason why this moment that was, Let's have fun at Ellie's Expanse suddenly dissolved into lightheartedness. They felt bad about what they had been doing, Making fun of me and I owned what was happening. Yeah, Guys, I made a mistake and the entire situation was deflated. When we hide from vulnerability, We create a lot of tension around us and it's tension that we don't really know how to kind of address because we don't know what it even is. It's a general sense of unease and density that builds up. We do various things with this unease. We take it to mean a lot of different things about ourselves. We turn it into all sorts of stories about ourselves and about other people. But if we just allow vulnerability in those moments, And what I mean is we just come into that vulnerability with a level of compassion and love and allow ourselves to experience whatever that experience is offering to us. And we offer ourselves love and compassion in that moment and support in that moment instead of further criticism, We find that we actually may enter entirely new territory of openness with ourselves and also with others around us. So going back to that question I posed to you earlier in this episode, What do you think? Do you think me in that moment I was being courageous by owning that moment and being vulnerable, Allowing myself to feel vulnerable and owning that mistake? Yeah, I made it. Or do you think I was being weak? I was being stupid and unworthy of being there. So I will leave you with that today. Until tomorrow, Do check out Instagram. Com and find Peace Unleashed on there. Peace Unleashed is where I share a love note with you every single day and those notes come directly from my heart. They're meant to uplift and inspire you. They are there for you to just receive and feel loved. And if you want to work with me at any capacity, You can reach out to me through my website. It's peaceunleash. Com. And if you haven't done so already, Do leave a review on this podcast. I would really appreciate it. Now that it's on Spotify, I would love more people to be able to find this resource. I love doing this and a lot of you have been sending me really wonderful messages to keep going and I do want it to reach as many people as possible because I know it has the power to help you be uplifted and find peace within yourself. So until tomorrow when we come back to dive a little bit deeper into this topic of vulnerability, I wish you a peaceful day.

Reviews

It was very brave of you to own your mistake, I think. It's always the best path to be able to laugh at ourselves, our humanness and find lightness in situations which could otherwise cause distress. Much love to you Ellie 💜 x

Thanks for sharing this anecdote and reflection. It was courageous of you to act in that way. Sometimes people don't react quite so well to evidence of others vulnerability and it might well be a defence mechanism on being reminded of their own vulnerability. Namaste and thanks.

You were being treated most unkindly. Therefore you were courageous and cowardly maybe? You could have told them that?