#UULent: mistakes and courage.

I doubt it’s a mistake that these two words were next to each other on the UULent calendar. It takes courage to make mistakes. It takes courage to admit to mistakes. We make more mistakes when we are courageous. Without the courage to make mistakes, we are not really learning, growing, or living life to its fullest.

Brene Brown researches courage, vulnerability (that’s where our willingness to make mistakes comes in), and leadership. Her work has inspired me to think more about bravely living my values and making an impact on the world around me. It definitely pushes me out of my comfort zone, and that’s the point because I’m not going to get anywhere, I’m not going to lead this community anywhere, if I/we don’t get uncomfortable. And that means making a lot of mistakes. Brown writes:

To scale daring leadership and build courage in teams and organizations, we have to cultivate a culture in which brave work, tough conversations, and whole hearts are the expectation, and armor is not necessary or rewarded. We have to be vigilant about creating a culture in which people feel safe, seen, heard, and respected.

What is this “armor” she speaks of? From a list of 16 ways we tend to “armor up”, the one that sticks out to me in the context of mistakes and courage is “being a knower”:

Having to be the “knower” or always being right is heavy armor. It’s defensiveness, it’s posturing, and, worst of all, it’s a huge driver of bullshit. It’s also very common—most of us have some degree of knower in us. Unfortunately, needing to know everything is pretty miserable for the knowers and everyone around them. It leads to distrust, bad decisions, and unnecessary, unproductive conflict.

I find that many of us in UU culture tend to armor up with this “being a knower” thing. Being a knower protects us from being wrong, from the shame of making mistakes, and it doesn’t move us closer to building a community around our values of love, connection, and transformation. Being a knower means we aren’t willing to be courageous and curious, to say “I don’t know”, and to ask questions to help us connect with one another, therefore transforming ourselves through listening and learning.

Think about the times you’ve insisted on “being the knower” instead of being curious, when you refused to admit to your mistakes instead of courageously being vulnerable and empathetic. Write about them so that you bring this awareness to the forefront of your mind. By doing this, you will become more aware of when you’re armoring up instead of actually being courageous and doing the work that our values call us to do. When we build a culture with our whole hearts, and not our armored hearts, we will be the community that listens, respects, and can be truly multicultural, multiracial, and multigenerational.

This is what we strive to be. It’s going to take a lot of courage because we don’t know how to build something that has never been. We are going to make a lot of mistakes and we are going to learn and grow and be stronger because of it. I can’t wait to see what we discover!