How Your Vulnerability and Tender Heart Give You an Advantage as a Writer
If you struggle to share your genuine self in your writing, you’re not alone. When I worked as a managing editor at a publishing company specializing in self-help books, I witnessed firsthand the internal conflict authors confronted as they tried to zero in on their messages. Should I tell my whole truth? Or tell only part of my truth? What if my truth hurts someone I love? What if not sharing this hurts me? How much should I share to help someone else who’s going through what I went through?
Because of the deadlines and agreements involved in the publishing process, the authors we worked with didn’t have the option of not confronting their fears around being vulnerable in their writing. More often than you might expect, this pressure-cooker turned emotional, as the safety of writing in private moved into the stark reality of exposure in the public sphere. The intense process of becoming an author who bares a tender heart and shares vulnerably in public prompted tears, misdirected anger, excuses, bargaining, rebellion, and more. We saw it all. And we dealt with it all.
One of the most effective methods for helping authors through their conflicts around vulnerability was to remind them that even though exposure comes with a risk of judgment, their willingness to share their own story (as they’d intended when they set out to write their book), would help their intended readers recognize themselves in that story. Recognition of shared experience builds trust and makes a deeper a connection.
Have you ever searched Google for information about something you’d never dared to tell anyone about, a secret or a shame or a confusion you didn’t know who in your life to talk to about? I have. Plenty of times. The feeling of realizing that I’m not the only one, that other people (sometimes many other people, according to the many zeroes in the number of search results) have searched on this topic before me, relieves and reassures me. When I can read what someone else wrote about my issue, my gratitude is profound.
Writing vulnerably and with a tender heart powerfully binds us to our readers—whether we’re writing self-help, fiction, poetry, marketing copy, magazine articles, or anything else. But how do we actually do it?
Let’s take a closer look at where the ability to be vulnerable comes from. The degree to which we’re able or willing to share genuinely is affected by things like childhood experiences, current dynamics in close relationships, personality traits, ingrained habits, the extent and quality of friendship networks, and much more. Whatever the cause, the result of these influences is our level of self-trust around sharing.
Exposing a vulnerability—sharing a truth that feels risky to share—is easier when we trust ourselves to assess the risks with self-compassion and to take care of ourselves no matter the outcome. In other words, giving to others is easier when we give to ourselves first.
No one else can tell us what’s right for us, including when it comes to deciding what to expose about ourselves. But what if how we are on the inside meets with disapproval on the outside? Anticipation of rejection can stop us in our tracks, freezing the flow of creativity. A powerful tool for building self-trust around creative vulnerability is to reclaim love from the clutches of trying to be cool.
Coolness is the enemy of the tender heart.
How good it feels to love without concern that what we love or how we love is somehow uncool or unacceptable. If you’re like me, you’ve had experiences that drove home the pain of rejection for being who you really are. If we’re not careful or vigilant about healing these old wounds, they can keep us from actively connecting with the truth of what we love in the present. Without that internal connection, creating suffers. What you love informs everything you create.
What did you love as a kid, back when your enthusiasms sparked and pulled at you to follow and you did? In that soft place of uncoolness, what treasures captured your attention?
A round pebble reaches for me. A tiny green bug on the tip of a blade of green grass waves hello with one leg. A seed pod rattles when shaken. A stranger’s shopping list tucked among the cans at a grocery store asks to be found again. The beauty of someone not considered conventionally beautiful. A kind word from someone who understands. A pen and a piece of paper. A silence long enough to find myself within.
Loving with a tender heart and sharing the truth magnetizes treasures. So define what cool is for yourself. Check in with the circulatory systems pulsing across your neurons and through your heart and into your gut. Create what really matters to you. Put it out there. Release it into the wild to roam. What if your writing is exactly the right answer for someone who’s scared and googling questions in the dark?
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Grace Kerina is a writing coach with more than twenty years of experience helping authors find their true voices. To receive the free PDF “50 Creative Writing Prompts for Intuitive Writers,” sign up for her mailing list here. She also writes novels as Alice Archer.