Prioritizing The Puzzle

Part II: People Puzzle

As you are actively piecing your personal puzzle together it will be important to remember all people are doing the same. Every single person in the world is trying to find their way, their sense of purpose, their tribe, their gifts, their values. Our personal puzzle is always in progress.

Sometimes people are exchanging one piece for another, sometimes they are forcing pieces in that do not belong, sometimes they are being offered a missing piece and refuse to accept it.

Why do you need to care about other peoples' puzzles?

The short answer, they may have some of your pieces and you may have some of theirs. The long answer...

Humanity craves community, it is part of what makes us human. Community cannot be achieved without others to commune with. The depth of the community you create will depend largely on trust. The level of trust you are able to achieve with another person will depend on two things.

• How well you know yourself; you can only be known by another as much as you know yourself
• How much you are willing to be known

While these two characteristics can help you to achieve a heightened level of trust, there are other factors to consider when building trust as well. The following slides were created as a part of our Art & Storytelling Book Club for children. It was our attempt to simplify the relationship between vulnerability, empathy, and trust.

If you want to build trust it will require your own vulnerability.

I like to call Brené Brown the queen of vulnerability. If you have not taken the time to learn about her work you are missing out! Her definition of vulnerability from her book Braving The Wilderness is, "...uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure."

Making the choice to risk emotional or physical harm is scary. But the opposite, choosing never to risk emotional or physical harm is lonely.

If you or someone you know is strong enough to choose vulnerability, it will be important to remember that vulnerability needs to be received by empathy in order for trust to be established and grow.

There will inevitably be times you have been vulnerable and not been met with empathy. There are also times someone you know was vulnerable with you and you did not meet them with empathy. In some cases our upbringing may have hardened us against vulnerability all together.

Where ever you are in this journey the challenge remains the same: being vulnerable is hard, but if met with empathy trust will grow.

At Cultured Kids, our team focuses on building a Culture of Trust. We believe that we have to exemplify internally what we are trying to achieve with all of our partnerships and what we would like to see in the world.