The Power of Vulnerability with Becca Pearce [Episode 412]

I had a conversation with Becca Pearce recently — executive coach, former nonprofit CEO, brain tumor survivor, author of You Don't Have to Achieve to Be Loved — and one thing she said has been sitting with me since.

She was walking through the ten realizations in her book, and she said this: vulnerability is the key to making change because if you're not vulnerable, there will be no change.

That's not a soft observation. It's a description of a mechanism.

And the more I think about it in the context of nonprofit leadership specifically, the more I think most leaders are trying to create change without doing the thing that actually makes change possible.

When nonprofit leaders tell me they're stuck, the conversation usually starts with the usual suspects:

• Not enough funding

• Not enough staff

• Too many competing priorities

And yes, those are real. But they're rarely the root of the problem.

What I see more often is this: leaders are operating inside a set of assumptions they've never questioned. About what success looks like. About what their role requires of them.

About what good leadership is supposed to feel like. And those assumptions — most of them inherited, not chosen — are doing a lot of quiet damage.

When your actions are out of alignment with what you actually value, everything gets harder. Not because you're doing things wrong, but because you're measuring yourself against a standard that was never yours to begin with.

Becca put it plainly: 

“You're probably living somebody else's definition of success.”

That's true for individuals. It's also true for organizations.

Here's what I see happen in nonprofits specifically. Most organizations start out on a clear path — usually tied directly to the founder's vision, their proximity to the problem, their lived understanding of what needs to change. That clarity is one of the great assets of early-stage nonprofits.

Then things shift. Funders come in with their own definitions of impact. Industry norms start to accumulate. Boards begin setting direction — and boards, while essential for oversight, are watching the journey from the outside. They aren't walking it. And when the people setting the path aren't the ones who have to walk it, the path usually isn't as good as the one the organization would have found for itself.

So the mission stays intact. But the how — how to pursue it, what it looks like in practice, what success actually means day-to-day — gets progressively shaped by other people's expectations. And the leader is left trying to execute someone else's vision with their own energy. No wonder they're exhausted.

This isn't because people are bad. It's because the system makes it very easy to inherit a direction without noticing you've done it.

Here's the part that tends to make high-achieving leaders uncomfortable: to question those inherited assumptions, you have to be willing to not know. You have to be willing to look at what you've built and ask honestly whether it's what you actually want to build — and whether the way you're measuring success is actually measuring the right thing.

That's what vulnerability means in practice. Not oversharing. Not performing openness. It means being willing to ask:

• Is this definition of success mine, or did I absorb it from somewhere else?

• Are the things I'm spending my time on actually connected to what I care about?

• What would I do differently if I started from what I value instead of what I've inherited?

Those questions are uncomfortable precisely because the answers might require you to change something.

One of the other things Becca said that I keep thinking about: 

“Time is your only non-renewable resource.”

This matters more than it sounds. Leaders often try to solve misalignment problems with efficiency — better time management, tighter systems, more focus. And those things help. But if the underlying direction is off, being more efficient just means executing the wrong things faster. You will get very, very good at building something you didn't actually want to build.

If the system is running on inherited values you haven't examined, the results are predictable: leaders who are constantly busy and persistently unfulfilled. Organizations that are technically functional and quietly stuck.

Becca works with leaders who have, in her words, done everything they were supposed to do and are waking up to the fact that it still doesn't feel right. That's a specific and uncomfortable place to be. And it takes real vulnerability to stay in that discomfort long enough to figure out what's actually going on instead of just working harder.

For nonprofit leaders, I'd add one layer: this work isn't optional. The clarity you have about your own values, the degree to which your daily decisions actually reflect those values, the willingness to question whether the direction you're heading is the one you'd choose — that's not just personal development. It shapes everything downstream. It shapes your culture, your team, your relationship with your board, your ability to make good decisions under pressure.

Values misalignment is actually a structural problem. And you can't fix it by adding more capacity or tightening your operations. You have to look at it directly.

That's the vulnerable part. That's also the necessary part.