The Power of Vulnerability: Knowing and Being Known
I’ve been thinking about what it takes to build a life of love. In this episode of the Daron Earlewine Podcast, we’re exploring the second foundation: to know and be known.
This foundation requires us to face one of life’s most terrifying words: vulnerability. Vulnerability isn’t easy for any of us. It’s scary and unsettling. But without it, we miss out on what matters most.
As Brené Brown says, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity.”
Think about that list. Who wouldn’t want these qualities in their life?
The challenge comes when we look at the definition of vulnerable: “being open to harm, attack, or emotional or physical injury.”
No wonder we avoid it.
Yet here’s the truth: if I want love, I must risk. There are no guarantees in love. If love came with a guarantee, it wouldn’t be love.
Four Steps to Building This Foundation
I see this process in four clear steps:
- Know yourself to lead yourself
- Lead yourself to know others
- Know others to lead others
- Lead others to know themselves
Make sure to listen to/watch the episode to see how we break each of these steps down.
Try This
This week, have a conversation where you share something personal. Try saying: “I’m working on vulnerability so I can know others better. I’d like to share something I don’t often talk about.“
Also, draw the grace and truth matrix in your journal and mark where your leadership style falls:
- Upper right: Call up culture (grace + truth)
- Upper left: Hangout culture (grace only)
- Bottom left: Checkout culture (no grace, no truth)
- Bottom right: Call out culture (truth only)
Remember these three things:
God is for you, not against you. God is near you, not far away. You were created on purpose and for a purpose.
What step will you take today to know yourself or others better?
Key Takeaways:
⚡️ Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, and creativity
⚡️ You can’t lead others until you learn to lead yourself
⚡️ Self-awareness grows when we embrace self-compassion
⚡️ Compassionate curiosity is a powerful leadership tool
⚡️ Real leadership is serving others—not needing to be the hero
Notable Quotes:
⚡️ “To know yourself, you must sacrifice the illusion that you already do.”
⚡️ “Owning our story is hard, but not as hard as running from it.” – Brené Brown
⚡️ “People won’t trust you to know them if you don’t know yourself.”
⚡️ “We’re called to create a culture that calls people up—not out.”
⚡️ “Jesus came full of grace and truth—and so should we.”
Episode Resources:
Connect with Daron on Social Media:
Links to the Daron Earlewine Podcast
YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Libsyn
TRANSCRIPT
What if we could, in every interaction, say, here’s how I’m going to lead them. I’m going to lead them to know themselves by being 100% honest and 100% gracious all the time. And what that does is it begins to create what we might call a call up culture of our life and our leadership there. We’re calling people up to know themselves and to become what they were created to be.
Tagline: Created on purpose and for purpose.
All right, everybody, welcome back to the next episode of the Daron Earlewine podcast. Daron Earlewine, your host, as always, it would be awkward, wouldn’t it? If it was hosted by someone else and called my name. Anyway, hey, we’re getting to the next foundation of the four foundations, which are the four foundations that we need to build our life upon if we’re going to live a life of love. So let’s jump right in. The second foundation we’re going to take a look at today is to know, to know and to be known. And if we’re gonna make progress building on this second foundation, we’re gonna have to embrace one of life’s, I would say, we’ll just call it one of life’s most terrifying words and that word is vulnerability. And it doesn’t matter what type on the Enneagram that you are, it doesn’t matter what your five voices are, it doesn’t matter everything you’ve learned or that we learned in the four core questions. When we get at the issue of vulnerability, it is a challenge to all of us, right? It’s scary, it’s unsettling, it puts us in a place of vulnerability, which most of the time we don’t like. And we’re gonna unpack some of that, but we have to get comfortable with this reality, with this word, if we’re going to build this foundation.
And if we’re going to actually step into love, another great quote by Brene Brown here, she’s showing up a ton here in the four foundations. She says it like this, vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. Wow. There’s more to the quote, but I just want to stop there for a second. Love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. I would say all of us, if we were to go with the maybe top 10 things we would like our life to possess, does somebody say, you know, wouldn’t mind them using these words to describe me, right? Loving, belonging, joyful, courageous, empathetic, creative. Be like, yeah, I’ll take all of those. That’ll work for me. Okay, well then here’s what has to work for you. Vulnerability. She goes on. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. Wow.
Brene really packed a lot of stuff into that one quote. Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. And it’s the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. All of those terms I think, like I said, we’d all go with at the end of my life, I would love people to say all of those things were true about me. And so if that’s the vision that we’re going forward for as we move forward, we have to go, okay, I’m going to have to get really comfortable with the uncomfortableness. Is that even a word? It is now. A vulnerability. And I think the whole process gets worse when we look at the actual definition.
of vulnerable, Vulnerable defined as being open to harm, attack, or emotional or physical injury. No wonder we avoid this at all costs, right? We would say, man, I want to be about love and belonging, joy, courage, empathy, authenticity, all those. I want those to be true to me. But to have those, to possess those, for other people to experience that in relationship with us, means we have to be open to harm, attack, or emotional and physical injury. And isn’t this the dichotomy or the struggle, the tension of love, right? Is if I’m going to love, I’m going to risk.
It always is, there’s no guarantee in love. If it was a guarantee, it wouldn’t be love. if someone was forced to love you, wouldn’t feel like love anyway. we say, I don’t know how I do about risk. I don’t do very good with love. I don’t really want to go out there and not have a guarantee that things are gonna work out, that you’re not gonna be vulnerable. And you’re not gonna build a life on one of these core foundations. We have to be uncomfortable with the uncomfortableness of vulnerability. We have to be open to the fact that you know what, I’m going to live my life in a way where I’m willing to, or at least open to the reality that this decision, this way of living is going to open my life up to harm, attack, or emotional physical injury. Hopefully not physical injury. A lot of this, what we’re talking about is in the emotional side of the relational side of things.
But when we step into this world, there’s no guarantee from others. The guarantee we have is if we don’t do it, we’ll be cutting ourselves off from the birthplace in the source of the things that we want to be true about us, right? And I think if we look at this process of this foundation of being known and knowing others, to love them, to love ourself, I think it kind of follows a four step process.
Okay, I think it looks like this, and we’re gonna walk through these four in this episode. First and foremost, we have to know ourselves. We have to know ourself to lead ourself. If we don’t know ourself, we’re gonna really struggle with leading ourself, because as we’ve talked about, as we’ve talked about through the whole course, is when we don’t understand our why, we don’t really understand ourself, we just shadow box our way, we guess our way through becoming who we’re born to be. Not a good strategy.
So we’re gonna look at that. What does it mean to know yourself and the vulnerability it takes to do that, right? Because we have to know ourselves to lead ourselves. Once we know ourselves, we’ll begin to lead ourselves. We begin to then, the second step is we lead ourselves to know others. I have a peace, I have an understanding, I have a self-awareness of myself. So now I’m able to lead myself. And as I’m leading myself, I wanna build on this foundation for love. So now I’m going to step in to knowing others. The key here we’re gonna look at is that we love in that process through curiosity and servanthood, okay? Once we get to the place of knowing others, right, now we get the opportunity to know others, to lead others.
I’ve known myself, now leading myself. Now I’ve led myself to know others. Now that I’m knowing others, now I have the opportunity, the privilege to begin to lead others. And I’m going to do that through compassion and servanthood and bring those into it. The last step we’ll take a brief look at today is once I begin to lead others, what happens is I lead them to know themselves. It’s a huge, vulnerable cycle.
I lead others to know themselves. And the strategy that we need here is we do this and we love them with grace and truth. Okay? Let’s take a look first one. Let’s take a look at the first one. There we go. I speak for a living, ladies and gentlemen. We got to know ourselves to lead ourselves. A couple of cool quotes here that I like, right? Aristotle, he knew some things about life. He said this, knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Strong start.
Knowing yourself was the beginning of all wisdom. Carl Jung says this, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Now that’s a deep end of the pool there, right? Until you make the unconscious conscious. I think we talked about this a little bit in the Enneagram session of the four core questions.
Then understanding that the unconscious motivations of my life are creating unconscious expectations of my environment, right? Which when I’m unconscious of them and I uncommunicate them, I don’t communicate them, they’re just resentments under construction in my life, meaning they are deteriorating the foundations of my relationships and my love.
And then what he says is those things will direct your life and then you’ll call them fate. Well, it’s just the way it was. No, it’s the way it was because you were unconscious of what was actually happening. You didn’t know yourself. Okay. Last one is by an author named Veronica Tugalovia. She said this, to know yourself, you must sacrifice the illusion that you already do. This is how we get.
To know yourself, must sacrifice the illusion that you already do.
I see this so often in my line of work and have for a long time is the majority of us are dangerously unself aware.
We don’t know ourselves, we don’t know why we do what we do. We think we do and then we become really defensive and uneasy about that. And I think that shows itself in the depths of our relationships. I think people that are really, really have a low level of self-awareness have a low depth in their relationships because until you know yourself, right, and love yourself, like we already talked about, it’s very tough for you to lead yourself into the deeper places of life. And if you can’t lead yourself, you can’t lead others.
And so this vulnerable journey, right, of allowing ourself to know ourself first, it’s completely impossible, okay, without self-compassion. And I’ve talked about this years ago, I think, on the podcast, but a real watershed moment for me was, I don’t know, 15 years ago or something when I was going through some counseling, trying to know myself, right? So I could love others, lead myself, love others. And my counselor told me, think, I think you need to read this book called Self-Compassion. Never heard the phrase before. Thought it sounded weird, wasn’t sure it was great. Kind of made me think that sounds selfish, but it’s not.
This is written by an author named Kristin Neff and she talks about this and check this out, this idea of self-compassion, of coming to know ourselves. She says, instead of seeing ourselves as a problem to be fixed, therefore, self-kindness allows us to see ourselves as valuable human beings. I come back, we talked about in the last episode about the idea of being worthy of being loved. We’re valuable human beings who are worthy of care.
When we experience warm and tender feelings towards ourselves, we are altering our bodies as well as our minds. Rather than feeling worried and anxious, we feel calm, content, trusting, and secure. Self-kindness allows us to feel safe as we respond to painful experiences so that we are no longer operating from a place of fear.
And once we let go of insecurity, we can pursue our dreams with the confidence needed to actually achieve them. Thank you, Kristen. Powerful stuff. If we won’t face the fear, of really knowing ourselves that here’s the tough truth. No one will trust us enough to be known by us because we’ll feel unsafe versus no, they don’t even know themselves. How am going to trust them to know me? And you’ve already started that. If you’ve been listening to this podcast series, or if you’re part of the road collective coaching, if you want to be a part of it, road collective coaching.com, go check it out. You started this process, right? We did a pretty deep dive back in the four noble quests.
Taking a look at that destiny, going through that flow console, looking at the idea of freedom, the things that you had to forgive, that you had to let go of, the truth that you spoke of your life. You probably have 10X more self-awareness now than you did when you started this whole rogue way process, which is a huge, huge step in the right direction. If you just jumped into this episode, and this is your first one ever listened to it, you don’t know what we’re doing with the Rogue Collective, you don’t know what the rogue way is, and you’re intrigued, there’s probably a pretty amazingly vulnerable journey of self-awareness that we would love to lead you on, Because back to Brene Brown again, this is a great one. She says, owning our story can be hard, but it’s not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it.
Yeah, we have to own our story. That’s hard. This process of self-awareness, difficult, but it’s not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. And I’m sure you’ve met somebody, you may be related to somebody, maybe it’s you, but you’ve got some pain, some struggles, some things that you’re not proud of in your past and you just run from it. You don’t wanna know what’s in there. You don’t wanna know what’s going on below the surface and what’s happening is you’re missing out becoming who you were born to be. Right?
Epictetus, one of the great stoic philosophers said it this way, it’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. And that’s so true. So much of your story about being aware of how you do what you do, why you do what you do, the pain that’s been in your life, right? Some of that, it happened to you. It’s not a process that you’ve even chosen some of those things. And you’re not responsible for that, but you are responsible for how you proceed, how you respond, how you move forward through that. And that process is saying, I’m going to grow in self-awareness.
Once again, we talked about this through the idea of the pain wheel, the pain continuum, right? Where so often we have pain and struggle in our life, what we do first is we bury it. And as we bury it, we’re hiding from it, we’re running from it. But this process of self-awareness, so we can know ourselves with self-compassion, right? Allows us to say, I’m going to profess this thing. Once I profess it, bring it into the light, right? Now I’m at a place where I can say, okay, now can process this with others, with God, with a counselor, with my own journal. As I process this too, I begin to unpack it and it begins to lose its power of me. And then it gets to this place where it can become a present, a gift to my life. It’s not the part of the journey that I probably would have ordered off the menu, but it is a gift to me because it’s a unique part of what’s made me me. And once it becomes a present, then it can actually step into the place where it becomes fuel. It becomes passion for your life.
You know yourself, you treat yourself with kindness and self-compassion and what that begins to allow you to do is now have the foundation and the vulnerability to say, okay, now that I know myself, I can lead myself. You begin to lead yourself, you come to the second step, you lead yourself to know, right, to be known and to know others. And this whole process, it has to be paved with bricks of compassionate curiosity and servanthood, right?
Now I’m leading myself, I’m going to lead myself to go to know others. I’m seeing them, now I’m going to know them. And if I’m going to know them, I have to be vulnerable enough to be known by them. And that’s why that first step of knowing yourself is so key because we don’t want to be on this vulnerable journey of trying to get to know others in the whole time we’re trying to hide things about ourselves. Right, because people pick up on that and they go, ooh, unsafe, can’t step into this, that person’s a mystery.
I heard a quote one time, somebody said, I wish I have looked it up before we started recording, basically like to beware of the man with no old friends. You may have met somebody where you’re like, hey man, tell me about your high school buddies. No. you got any college buddies? No. Anybody you grew up with, like you used to play like in the backyard, in second grade? No, not really.
Right? That’s concerning, right? Because there’s a past there. The person didn’t just show up at like 40 years old. They weren’t born at 40. There’s a life there and they’re not aware of it and they’re kind of hiding from it. And when that’s happening, it’s very tough, difficult to open up and say, I want to be known by this person to trust them with what is vulnerable with me because they won’t trust me with what’s vulnerable with them. So if we’re going to lead ourselves to know others, we have to embrace the vulnerability of being willing to be known by others. And that process has to be a process that’s lived out with compassionate curiosity for ourselves and for others. And we’ve talked about this phrase before. I say it a ton, I’ll say it, I’ll say it a ton more, because it’s so key that in this process of saying, listen, I want to know other people. I’m leading myself to know other people. I have to embrace that with compassionate curiosity, meaning that condemnation, judgment, these kinds of things, when you’re getting to know someone, they can’t be present. That doesn’t mean that you endorse or go along with every new thing you learn about someone, but can you stay in a place of compassionate curiosity in the process of coming to know people, right? Huh, that’s interesting. Tell me more about that. I’ve never experienced that. That’s not really my lived experience. That’s very interesting to me. Could you tell me more, right?
That’s a lot different than, I don’t do things like that. You’re weird. Which a lot of times can be our reaction because it makes us feel uneasy, makes us feel vulnerable. Like, I don’t know. Like, I don’t think that way. I never lived that way. Like, I’m not sure what that is. And my mom told me I shouldn’t hang out with people that have done that. Whatever the reaction, whatever the soundtrack that gets playing in your mind, you have to stay, we have to stay at a place of compassionate curiosity if we’re going to build a foundation of love because people need to feel safe to be vulnerable enough to be known.
I read the quote already in the intro from Tim Keller, that idea that, to be loved and not known as comforting, but superficial, to be known and not loved is our greatest fear, but to be fully known and truly loved is a lot like being loved by God. And that’s what God does for us. I love the story in the New Testament of Jesus and the woman at the well. And we’ve talked about that as well in past episodes. Decided that this woman comes to this well trying to escape her own story, trying to escape the community that had condemned her. And here comes Jesus, God Himself, and He sees her. He came to that well just to specifically see her. Then through the conversation, she realized, oh my gosh, this guy knows me. This guy knows everything about me. And in that moment, she experiences divine, unconditional love, right? And it changes everything.
Because in that moment, Jesus stayed compassion, compassionately curious through her story. And that’s the way that we lead ourselves to know others. That comes to the third step. Once we know others, we can begin to lead others, right? This is great. Okay, now that I know others, I can begin to lead, I can begin to influence their life for love. And how do I do that? I love them through trust in servanthood.
I love them through trust and servanthood, right? Where I’m in this process now and what I want to do in this process is in your life as I’m beginning to lead you, right? As I’ve earned that trust, because I know you, you know me, I know myself. We’re embracing this vulnerable place of compassionate curiosity, of self-compassion and self-kindness. Now what happens is I get to step into your life and as I’m leading others, I know them so I can lead them.
I do this through trust and servanthood. And the big piece about here is, I believe is so key, seeing ourself as a guide in their life, not the hero. Have you ever interacted with somebody like that? That they may have a leadership role in your life, but you feel like, I feel like in every conversation, every scenario that somehow they need to feel like they’re the hero, like they’re saving me or like my life couldn’t go on if it wasn’t for them. And it creates this weird, uneasy, distrustful type of thing where you can’t figure out like, you in this relationship for me? Are you in this relationship for you? Because I feel like you’re kind of treating me like a project and like, I need to see you as my hero. And that never works well because that doesn’t show that you’re there to serve. It shows that you’re there to fill up some need in yourself.
So if we’re going to lead others, once we know them, we can lead them. We have to lead them through trust with a trust in a servant hood where we play the role as a guide, a guide to help them become who they were born to be. I’m here to serve you, to be a guide, to help you understand yourself. And when you begin to know yourself, I’m here to help you find self-kindness. I’m here to help you find compassion. I’m here to treat you the way that God has treated me.
That is a powerful way that you build that foundation. The last one is this, once we’re leading others, we lead them to know themselves.
Once we begin to lead others, the goal there is to lead them to know their self, right? As a guide, not the hero. And the thing that I think is so key in this process of building this foundation of knowing is that we love them through grace and truth.
In the odd coaching that I do, I love this tool we use called the grace and truth matrix. And the grace and truth metrics is basically, it’s a four quadrant metrics, right? And in the horizontal quadrant, you’ve got grace and on the horizontal you have truth and on the vertical quadrant you have, or axis you have grace. And in that upper right quadrant, we call that like the quadrant is full of grace and truth. And that term comes to us once again through the life of Jesus, where it says that he came full of grace and truth. And that’s love. When you have someone that is loving you well, there’s someone who calibrates grace and truth in your life very well. And we don’t see grace and truth. I don’t think often it’s something that co-mingles, that lives in this kind of upper white quadrant together for us. I think most of time, we think that love and grace and truth are kind of on this continuum. We’re at one end of it, you’ve got truth, one end you’ve got grace. And if I like you, if I love you, if I’m in a good mood today, if you’ve done something good for me lately, right, I’m gonna extend grace to you. I’m gonna extend grace, an unearned, maybe an unmerited amount of my favor, even my presence, you’re gonna get grace. If I don’t like you, or you’ve not done well for me, or you’ve hurt me in the past, you’re gonna get truth.
It’s not going to be gracious. I’m going to tell you what you need to hear because I don’t like you. But what if we could actually build trust in our relationship as we lead people to know themselves, meaning that we’re trying to call them up into the best and greatest version of themselves? What if we could, in every interaction, say, here’s how I’m going to lead them. I’m going lead them to know themselves by being 100% honest and 100% gracious all the time.
And what that does is it begins to create what we might call a call up culture of our life and our leadership there. We’re calling people up to know themselves and to become who they were created to be.
The upper left part of that metrics is if we have all grace, no truth. And basically what we create there is a hangout culture. We’re never going tell anybody the honest truth about themselves or about anything in life. We’re just going to hang out. Everybody just be okay. And we’ll be gracious. I’ll overlook everything. I’ll never tell you what you really need to hear. I’m not actually developing. I’m not leading you. I’m not helping you know yourself. We’re just hanging out.
That feels good for a while, but it doesn’t take you to any depth. It doesn’t help you become who you were born to be. The bottom left quadrant, right? No grace, no truth. That’s kind of a checkout culture. There’s no love in that situation. This person doesn’t love me enough to actually be gracious or spend time with me. And they don’t love me enough to even tell me the truth about my life. We don’t want to live like that. And the bottom right would be all truth, no grace. We call that the call out culture. You could also call it a stressed out culture.
Right? Where basically someone, they’re always, they’re always busting your chops about something. They’re always telling you the truth and it’s never wrapped in a gracious type of way. There’s kind of throwing truth grenades in your life. That’s a tough environment to really get to know yourself or lead yourself because there’s no grace involved and all you’re doing is getting hit with truth all the time. And if we’re going to lead others to know themselves, we have to lead them with grace and truth.
We see this littered all over the leadership of Jesus’s life, well as pick any great influential servant hood type leader, like a level five type leader. If you look at their life, you’re going to see someone who loved people with grace and truth. Okay. Those are the four steps I would say for us to really move into helping people be known. The second foundation of love.
And so I’ll just give you a couple of maybe call the actions, a couple of things, and maybe put some of this into practice, okay? This week, here’s what I would say, try to do. What if you were to have a conversation with someone where you actively shared something personal? Maybe it’s been a minute before you’ve done that. Maybe you could come in and say, I’m really trying to know myself, I’m really trying to grow in vulnerability so I can know others, and I really want my life to be about love. So maybe you could even set up and say, I want to share something I don’t share with a lot of people.
And would you be invited to do the same thing? Could we just kind of have a get to know each other type conversation? It could be something you could try. I’d love to hear your feedback on that. can email me, Daron at DaronEarlewine.com. Here’s another thing I’d like you to do. As we drew out the grace and truth metrics there, I’d love for you to take some time and draw that out on a piece of paper, maybe in your journal.
And then chart yourself on where you think as far as your leadership culture that you’re creating with your life. you, are you, are something who’s creating a call up culture that grace and truth, are you creating more of a hangout culture? Is it more of a checkout culture or would you say it’s kind of a stressed out or a call out culture? Because what we want to do is we want to lead, right? We want to live. We want to be about love. And it’s that, that’s, that’s so key.
that it’s something that is done with full of grace and truth. Just a couple of things for you to maybe work on before listening to the next episode of the podcast. But this is our second foundation, to know others. And I’ll just recap what we just talked about, just so you get it again, right? The four steps of this process is we got to know ourselves to lead ourselves. Once we lead ourselves, we lead ourselves to know others. Once we’re knowing others, we know others to lead others and when we’re leading others, we lead them to know themselves. Appreciate you listening to this episode of the podcast. We love your feedback. You can always email me. And until we talk again, remember these three things. God’s for you. He’s not against you. He is near you. He’s not far away. And He’s created you on purpose and for a purpose. Talk to you guys next time, right here on the Daron Earlewine Podcast.