My Kryptonite Skill
Got a question for you today: How comfortable are you with making yourself vulnerable?
A recent picture of me, circa sometime between 2000-2019, when the idea of vulnerability was in front of me.
The very word used to make my skin crawl. But I’ve learned (if you put aside its buzzword quality), there’s a time and a place for both vulnerability, and its underappreciated opposite—invulnerability.
I think they’re both useful, and they’re both potentially harmful. It all depends on the context.
My entire career in sport hinged on invulnerability. In bobsled, vulnerability is dangerous. You’ve got 20 competitors who want your job knocking down your door. If you show vulnerability of any kind, those guys will smell blood. You get sick or show the signs of an injury and those 20 guys will do anything to slip into your spot on the team.
Anything! In Olympic years, we would even need to keep one eye on our water bottles at all times with the fear of contamination. Not kidding.
Besides that, when you’re doing something as dangerous as careening down a mountain at 95 miles an hour, you need to armor yourself as much as you can, both physically and emotionally. That’s what training is for: to help you do hard things.
When I retired from sport and entered the “real world” though, my invulnerability got me into trouble.
After I became the best in the world at something, I figured the skills and tools I’d used to make that happen would hold steady across other areas in life. Wouldn’t you?
But my invulnerability didn’t transfer well. My leadership struggled and my mental health suffered. Rather than talking about it, I tried to conceal how I was feeling.
As my mental health spiraled, I started to clue in that what I thought was a strength was actually a liability.
At the same time, I began looking around at my peers and noticed something: many high-level leaders are bad at this whole vulnerability thing, too. The ability to admit mistakes, reflect honestly on poor decisions, and conduct “lessons learned” is sorely lacking in many, many leaders.
But the best? They can nail this skill when they need to.
One day, I thought to myself: was vulnerability really absent from my career in sport? It dawned on me that vulnerability was there all along, just in different forms.
After all, in training, we watch tape and find where others are better than us. We look at our stats in the weightroom or on the track to identify weaknesses. Then we attack those weaknesses and turn them into strengths.
But in order to get better we first have to admit to ourselves we need to get better at something.
This is the crucial step that I think many leaders are missing.
(And the crucial step that I missed when I first moved from sport into other forms of leadership… and a step that still isn’t natural for me, but it’s getting better!)
For me, the shift happened when I realized that I love the process of getting better at things. I don’t need to be great at everything right away. In fact, I’m never done getting better at anything. There’s always more room to grow. (Besides, being immediately great at something would really take the fun out of things.)
This mental shift allowed me to leave behind the pressure to be perfect in every context, and focus on doing better.
It also opened the door for me to be more honest about my struggles. I spoke honestly to friends, mentors, my doctor, and a therapist. (As I discuss on his podcast here, my friend Dave Epstein was one of the first people I talked to.)
As a result, my mental health got better — and so did pretty much everything else.
Invulnerability might have helped me compete and do incredibly challenging things. But vulnerability made me a better leader, and a happier person.
I think they both have their place.
- Steve
