#2. The Shrub That's Just Too Perfect

A few years ago, there was a Speaking Tree article in the Times of India that began, unexpectedly, with a Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary guide seemingly giving advice on seduction and philosophy:

"Let your weaknesses show... it is as titillating and attractive as showing a bit of skin!"

He was saying this to describe the nature of Juliflora, a shrub that is "too perfect for its own good": it has no smell and no secretions (so does not attract insects), has a dense, thorn-like exterior (making it unapproachable), and produces nothing for the nutrition of species around.

In the natural world, Juliflora is painfully perfect, and unpopularly so. Perhaps, we've all known a human equivalent of it. Maybe we've all been one at some point.

The fact is, we've grown up believing that sharing a weakness makes us vulnerable, and that sharing a vulnerability is a weakness. But it takes a change of perspective to see how it's the other way around.

Dr. Brené Brown has built a career and a content franchise through her excellent work on vulnerability. In one line, 'Vulnerability is not weakness; it's our most accurate measure of courage', she says. And it's best exhibited through stories about ourselves that we tell other people. So, here's this week's experiment that I am proposing.

The experiment: Tell someone a raw story about yourself. Use the following principles:

• It should be unplanned. So, if you’re having a conversation and it triggers a certain memory, don’t keep it in. Share it spontaneously.
• Make it as vivid as possible. Describe it in all its details.
• It's related to a weakness, or a quirk, or an imperfection, or a raw human emotion, positive or negative. Basically, any truly real human experience.
• Optionally, follow it up with how you feel about it today.

Last week, I met a prospective team member and I shared how I wasn’t a very high performer at McKinsey, and how it was disturbing for me (a top student in college who thought he was smarter than everyone else) to see some of my peers performing noticeably better than me.

I did not engineer that sharing, and certainly didn't plan on doing so beforehand, but I just felt in that moment, 'let her meet the real Cyrille'...

And it was therapeutic for me. Storytelling is therapeutic. Sharing something that you might still be feeling a little sensitive about is a sturdy step towards accepting it, and healing from it. For your counterpart, seeing you do this is seeing a sign on strength.

Can you recall a time when you shared something 99% of others would not have shared? I would love to know how that experience turned out for you and your counterpart!