The power of vulnerability

Do you feel as I often do that in business it’s hard to admit to having a difficult time, that your business is teetering on the brink, or even gone over the brink? We present ourselves on social media and feel scrutinised by the rest of the world, all of whom seem to be having a wonderful time and being very successful. We’re told that no one wants to hear bad news, so we keep it to ourselves until such time as we’re through the bad time and have a better chance of telling a story of heroism.

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Partly we feel the need to protect ourselves which is perfectly sensible. Faced with being told about difficult situations, people either back off, not knowing what to say, or are horrified because they’re afraid the same could happen to them, or they offer well-meaning advice which isn’t sought and doesn’t help.

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This week I’ve been contrasting two different approaches to being open about our difficulties. One person I know who had a very difficult year in 2023 claims to have ‘bounced back’ but there’s a brittleness about it which makes me wonder.

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The other person is Penny Power OBE , founder of BIP100 (a business community) with Thomas Power . BIP stands for Business Is Personal and they live it. I was very struck reading Penny’s newsletter this week about how open she was about the business difficulties they’ve been through along with health issues.

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Guess which one of these people I warm to most? What about you? When someone in your business network makes themselves vulnerable, how do you respond? Find that your opinion of them immediately goes down and you want to avoid them? I don’t. My respect for them increases exponentially. I feel I can trust them even more and relate to them because they have been open.

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It also set me thinking about different ways of responding to difficult change. The writer William Bridges talks about transitions and differentiates between change that is simply events happening to us, and the change that takes place psychologically inside us – a real transition. This is when we must let go of the old ways of doing things, leave behind what doesn’t serve us anymore and start moving into a new future when we don’t know what it looks like.

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He describes this as a time of much confusion, when we might try heading off in lots of different directions, trying to find the right one, when we lose a sense of who we are, but we have to go through it if we’re going to take what life has given us and work with it to write our next chapter. If we don’t and simply bounce back to where we were, we’ll have missed a real opportunity for personal growth and renewal.

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How could you use being open/honest/vulnerable to help people around you? What about opening up to others so that they can be honest about what’s really going on with them?

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Get in touch if this has sparked anything you’d like to talk about.

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