#275: I'm feeling vulnerable
Starting something new
I’m building again but it’s not certain.
Everything is nascent, embryonic. It’s early days and everything feels wobbly, like a seed with a tiny bud popping out, fighting to get through the soil towards light and air.
I launched my founder coaching proposition and I’ve started working with more founders. It’s good and I’d like to work with a couple more.
It’s a relief turning up to something and knowing I can do it. I feel in flow. Working from experience giving guidance - there’s no faking it - I am just being. I feel at ease. I know I can help and I am doing work which is valuable.
Yet as soon as I launched it I knew it couldn’t be all of me.
I love helping founders grow their business and express themselves through it, but it’s too much like watching someone else paint.
Pass me the brush. I want to make my own.
The energy I feel in men is good. I’ve launched a movement to build a community of 1000 good men. I’ve already got 100. That’s momentum.
The impact is huge and needed. I want to continue to break down barriers for men to look after themselves and grow. I want to inspire men to break the mould from narrow masculinity. I believe by doing this work, we help everyone and take another step towards equality.
I feel it in my heart - the importance and power of this movement.
When I connect with likeminded men on their own journey to build something positive in the world, I feel kin. That’s a good feeling. Meeting men, who are like me. They want to be active in the wave of community, support and products that will support other men and change the world.
I don’t know what it all is though.
I’ve been speaking to businesses. Winging some proposals. I’ve even got some speaking fees in. Revenue - that’s good the little mentor on my shoulder tells me. But there’s nothing concrete. No obvious scale. No path to repeatable revenue.
So. I feel vulnerable. Scared.
The business is vulnerable, obviously, because there isn’t one.
But I feel vulnerable, in me. I’m on calls doing customer development like a good boy and I’m talking, sharing, almost… pitching… myself. As I’m doing it all I’m looking down upon myself, observing me, thinking - ‘is this me?’
I’m checking myself - am I being authentic? I’ve said that same sentence about having an itch to scratch in men 10 times in 10 calls. Is that definitely me? Is that definitely true? Or am I telling myself that? Am I talking myself into this?
That’s the vulnerability. I’m like an actor playing a new part. Am I doing this right? Is this true to me? I’m on a date with myself, do I feel totally comfortable with this new person, part of me, environment, work?
I’d love to avoid it all. The vulnerability - wouldn’t that be great. Yet I also know this feeling is good. Because it’s new. And new is good.
This is an ongoing theme for me, I love to wrap myself up in perceived knowns and certainties when really life is uncertainty, risk and the great unknown. I’m embracing that so much more these days.
I’ve been drawing on guidance from my favourite spiritual teacher - John O’Donohue. His writing helps me sink down into the true reality of our fragile life here. His writing helps me realise how much we truly don’t know and never will about life, why we’re here, how we got here. In a passage I’m reading currently he writes about Air and Space, how air is all around us and integral to life but we can’t see it. Actually, we carve our life into air and space, our form exists within it.
How this writing helps me is always on the tip of my tongue, beyond what I can say. I just know when I read it I feel comforted that I’m not fully responsible for everything, instead I’m more of a vessel for whatever the world needs to come through me. That takes a lot of the pressure off that I put onto myself.
Also, it’s Easter and there’s a rich spiritual tradition here for me to understand. Renewal, regeneration, resurrection. Passover, full moons, Jesus rising from the dead and chocolate easter eggs - I’m not sure how yet but I’m sure I’ll learn something from these stories to guide me over the next couple of weeks. I keep seeing a lot of rabbits.
Now comes the out-breath, the big long sigh and I can trust in whatever is. I can trust in life.
I can trust, believe and know from experience that absolutely everything worth having in life starts with feeling vulnerable.
I’m feeling vulnerable.
And that’s a good thing.
James x
p.s I forgot to share #274 before I went on holiday.
