August 21, 2026Connecting on Stage Through Our Vulnerabilities

What if the moment an audience remembers isn’t your best day, but the day everything fell apart? That question sat with me long after my conversation with Nicole Malachowski.

It’s the reason I keep coming back to the idea of vulnerabilities, not as a soft word we use to sound thoughtful, but as the actual mechanism behind connection.

Nicole spent 21 years in the Air Force. She flew combat missions over Iraq. She became the first woman pilot on the Thunderbirds. Then a tick-borne illness took her ability to speak clearly and walk steadily for almost nine months. None of that sounds like material for a talk about weakness. But when we talked, she told me something plain and hard to argue with: every story she tells on stage is built around a mistake, a failure, or a moment she wasn’t in control. Her vulnerabilities, not her wins, are what she leads with. She’s convinced that’s the only reason her stories actually land.

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Why We’re Trained to Hide the Wrong Things

Most of us grow up learning to lead with our strengths. Job interviews reward it. Performance reviews reward it. Even casual conversation rewards it, because nobody wants to be the person at a dinner party listing their failures. So we build a habit, quietly, of editing ourselves down to the highlight reel. We show the summit and skip the part where we got lost on the trail.

Nicole’s approach to speaking pushes directly against that habit. She isn’t interested in the summit. She’s interested in what almost stopped her from getting there. That’s not a stylistic choice. It’s a strategic one, built from two decades of standing in front of people who have very little patience for polish and a lot of respect for honesty. Fighter pilots don’t survive by pretending they never make mistakes. They survive by studying them.

What struck me most about this is how counterintuitive it feels at first and how obvious it feels once you sit with it. We don’t actually trust people who never seem to struggle. We trust people who tell us what the struggle looked like from the inside. Vulnerabilities, when shared with intention, aren’t a liability on stage or in a boardroom. They’re the entry fee for being believed. Anyone building a career around leadership eventually runs into this same lesson, usually the hard way.

The Debrief Is Where the Real Growth Happens

One of the most useful ideas about vulnerabilities that Nicole brought into our conversation had nothing to do with speaking at all, at least not at first. It came from the cockpit. In fighter aviation, the flight isn’t over when the wheels touch the ground. The debrief comes next, and in a lot of ways, the debrief matters more than the flight itself.

A debrief isn’t a pat on the back. It’s an honest accounting of what happened, what went wrong, and what needs to change before the next mission. Nicole carried that habit directly into her speaking career. After every event, she asks specific questions. What landed. How it landed. What could have gone better. She treats her own performance the same way she treated a training sortie, which is to say, without ego and without flinching from the parts that didn’t go well.

This is where I think a lot of professional growth quietly stalls. We finish the project, close the laptop, and move on without ever asking what actually happened and why. We skip the debrief because it requires sitting with our own vulnerabilities long enough to learn something from them. Nicole’s discipline here is the opposite of comfortable, and that’s exactly the point. The debrief only works if you’re willing to look directly at the moments you’d rather forget.

I’ve seen this same pattern show up far outside aviation and far outside the stage. The best teams I’ve watched operate this way too. They don’t just celebrate a win and move on. They ask what almost went wrong even when the outcome was good, because near misses hide the same vulnerabilities that eventual failures expose. That habit of looking backward with honesty is one of the clearest markers of a team built for teamwork rather than performance theater.

Stopping at Admiration Is Stopping Too Soon

Here’s a small moment from our conversation that I haven’t stopped thinking about. Nicole talked about what happens when someone comes up after a talk and says, “You were great.” It’s a compliment. It feels good. And for most speakers, that’s where the conversation ends.

Nicole doesn’t let it end there. She treats “you were great” as a starting point, not a finish line. She’ll ask what specifically stood out: What line stuck? What story made someone feel something? That single follow-up question does two things at once. It gives her real feedback instead of a polite reflex, and it often uncovers new material she didn’t know was there.

This idea applies far beyond speaking engagements. Think about how often we accept vague praise at work and never push past it. A manager says “good job,” and we nod and move on, without ever learning what specifically worked so we can repeat it, or what didn’t quite land so we can fix it. Admiration without detail is comfortable, but it’s also empty. It doesn’t teach you anything about your own vulnerabilities or your own strengths. Real feedback requires someone willing to ask a second question, and it requires the other person to be willing to answer honestly, which means being willing to expose a few vulnerabilities of their own in the process.

I think this is part of why so much professional feedback feels hollow. We’ve built a culture around employee engagement that measures whether people feel good, without always measuring whether people are actually improving. Nicole’s instinct to dig past the compliment is a small habit with a large payoff. It turns a passive audience reaction into an active source of insight.

None of Her Stories Are About Success

This is the part of our conversation that I keep returning to. Nicole told me, plainly, that none of her stories, not one, are about her success. Every single one is about a weakness, a failure, a mistake, and how she got through it, over it, or occasionally how she wishes she’d avoided it altogether.

Think about how unusual that is for someone with a résumé like hers. She could build an entire keynote around the moment she became the first woman to fly on the Thunderbirds. She could talk about leading a fighter squadron, or advising the White House on issues facing military families, or the day she led the first fighter formation providing security for Iraq’s historic democratic elections. Any of those moments would impress a room. None of them, on their own, would connect with one.

What she’s figured out, and what I think most of us miss, is that impressing an audience and connecting with an audience are two different outcomes. Impressing them keeps you at a distance. It puts you on a pedestal, and pedestals are lonely places that nobody in the audience can actually relate to. Connection requires the opposite move. It requires stepping down from the pedestal and showing the audience the version of you that struggled, doubted, or got it wrong. That’s where the vulnerabilities come in, and that’s why she builds every story around one.

This matters well beyond the stage. In business, in business leadership, and in ordinary conversations between colleagues, we tend to default to the polished version of events. We tell the story where we made the right call, not the one where we almost didn’t. Nicole’s approach suggests that the second story is almost always the more useful one, both for the person telling it and the person hearing it.

When Vulnerabilities Weren’t a Choice Anymore

There’s a part of Nicole’s story that isn’t about a stage at all. After 21 years of flying, after surviving combat and commanding a squadron, a tick-borne illness took away her ability to speak clearly and walk without difficulty for almost nine months. This wasn’t a story she chose to tell for effect. It was a period of her life where her vulnerabilities weren’t optional or curated. They were simply the truth of her body, every single day.

I think there’s something important in the difference between vulnerabilities we choose to share and vulnerabilities that are forced on us. Nicole’s illness didn’t ask her permission. It stripped away the things she’d spent a career mastering, her voice and her physical control, and left her to rebuild from close to nothing. That kind of forced vulnerability tends to either break people or teach them something they couldn’t have learned any other way.

What Nicole took from that period, based on how she now talks about resilience, is that recovery isn’t the same as returning to who you were before. She now serves on the board of the LivLyme Foundation and advises on tick-borne illness advocacy, work that only exists because she was willing to talk publicly about a struggle most people would have kept private. Her chosen vulnerabilities on stage and her forced vulnerabilities in recovery aren’t separate stories. They’re the same instinct, applied to two very different situations. In both cases, she decided that hiding the hard part would cost more than showing it.

This is also where her story connects naturally to health & well-being and healthcare & healthcare policy, two areas she now speaks on directly because of what she went through. A career built entirely around performance had to make room for a period where performance wasn’t possible at all. That’s a hard adjustment for anyone, and it’s a particularly hard one for someone whose identity had been built around precision and control.

Vulnerabilities and the Teams We Build

There’s a leadership lesson buried in all of this that I don’t want to skip past. Teams that can’t talk about vulnerabilities honestly tend to repeat the same mistakes. Not because the people on them are careless, but because nobody feels safe enough to say what actually went wrong. The debrief culture Nicole described from fighter aviation only works because everyone in the room has agreed, ahead of time, that honesty won’t be punished.

That agreement is rare in most workplaces. We say we want honest feedback, and then we react badly the first time someone gives it to us. Over time, people learn the lesson underneath the words. They learn that admitting a mistake is risky, so they stop admitting mistakes, and the team loses its ability to actually improve. This is one of the quieter costs of avoiding vulnerabilities at an organizational level. It doesn’t just limit individual growth. It caps the entire team’s ceiling.

I’ve watched this play out in future of work conversations again and again. As teams get more distributed and more automated, the temptation is to smooth everything over, to communicate only the wins and keep the struggles private. But the teams that actually adapt well are the ones that keep a version of the fighter squadron’s debrief alive, a regular, low-drama habit of asking what went wrong and saying it out loud. That habit depends entirely on people being willing to show their vulnerabilities in front of colleagues, which depends on leaders modeling it first.

Nicole’s own path, from combat pilot to squadron commander to White House Fellow, gave her a front-row seat to how differently teams perform depending on whether vulnerabilities are treated as a threat or as useful information. The squadrons that flew well were the ones that debriefed honestly. The offices that functioned well were the ones where people could say “I got that wrong” without it becoming a career risk.

What Technology Still Cannot Replicate

We also talked about something that feels more relevant every year: artificial intelligence, and what it can and can’t do on a stage. Nicole put it simply. AI can, at this point, only imitate human feelings, emotions, and relationships. It can generate a polished story, but it can’t have actually lived through the mistake it’s describing.

That distinction matters more than it might seem. A machine can produce a technically flawless narrative about failure and recovery, but it has no stake in the outcome. There’s no real vulnerability behind the words, because there was never any real risk to begin with. Audiences, whether they can articulate it or not, seem to sense that difference. Nicole told me event planners are increasingly asking for exactly the kind of story that technology can’t fake: something lived-in, something with real consequences attached to it.

This is, I think, the strongest argument for why vulnerabilities will keep mattering even as more of our world gets automated. The parts of a talk, a meeting, or a piece of writing that come from genuine human experience are becoming more valuable precisely because they’re harder to fake. A speaker who’s willing to stand in front of a room and admit where they failed is offering something a generated script simply cannot produce. That’s not a nostalgic argument for keeping things human. It’s a practical one, based on what audiences are actually asking for.

The Discipline Behind an Honest Story

It would be easy to read all of this and assume Nicole’s approach is just about being open or emotionally transparent. It’s more disciplined than that. She’s not oversharing for the sake of it. Every story she tells is chosen and shaped with a specific purpose, usually to help someone in the audience recognize their own struggle and see a way through it.

That’s an important distinction. Sharing vulnerabilities well is a skill, not just an impulse. It requires knowing which parts of a story actually serve the audience and which parts are just noise. It requires the same kind of editing and precision Nicole applied as a flight lead, where every maneuver had a purpose and nothing was wasted. The stories that stick with an audience aren’t the ones with the most detail. They’re the ones where the vulnerabilities are specific enough to feel real and clear enough to carry a lesson.

This is also where the debrief habit comes back into play. Nicole doesn’t just tell a vulnerable story once and assume it works. She tests it, watches how it lands, asks for detailed feedback, and adjusts. Over almost a decade on the speaking circuit, that process has shaped which stories stay in her keynote and which ones get cut. The vulnerabilities she shares today aren’t raw and unfiltered. They’re the ones she’s confirmed, through years of honest feedback, actually help someone else.

The Lesson That Stayed With Me

The more I think about this conversation about our vulnerabilities, the more I think most of us have the instinct backward. We assume vulnerabilities are something to manage, minimize, or explain away as quickly as possible. Nicole’s career, on stage and off it, argues for the opposite. The moments she once might have wanted to hide, a mistake in the cockpit, a hard illness, a story where she wasn’t in control, turned out to be the exact material that built trust with the people listening to her.

That’s the piece I want to carry forward from this conversation. Vulnerabilities aren’t the thing standing between you and connection. They’re the thing that makes connection possible in the first place. Whether you’re leading a team, giving a talk, or just trying to have an honest conversation with a colleague, the instinct to skip past the hard part is usually the instinct working against you. Nicole’s whole approach, built from a debrief culture, tested through years of feedback, and hardened by a recovery nobody would have chosen, comes down to one simple idea: show people the truth of what happened, not the version that makes you look best. That’s what actually stays with them.

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