My last post explored opportunities and assets when they were vulnerable and still forming, including seedling ideas that may have merit but are at risk of being shot down before their time, and potentially powerful contributors who lack the confidence, the leadership presence, or the ability to formulate and present their arguments well enough to hold their own against the classic “Type A’s” and the commanding presenters.

Communication advice for the STRONG person or idea: adding more of what got them there won't deliver like cultivating their vulnerable side will, for balance and a more complete strength.

My intent in the post was to spot and nurture more of those vulnerable assets, because I’ve found they increase the yield with the same crop.

This post is about the vulnerable resources inside the strong. Within the ones who already command, who have already conquered, who are on the rise as contenders, and in those already have in power, there is an equally fragile side to them, and often under-explored, if not buried entirely. That is where the biggest individual potential lies, to balance, to differentiate, to take farther, and to complete.

We’re currently coaching a strong leader who’s got a reputation for being blunt, and emotionally damaging to anyone sensitive. You have to know this man pretty well in order to realize that he likes you. He’s a top performer whose teams hit their numbers. When he came to us for coaching, were we thinking, “We need to find some way add more strength?” No. We began exploring his fragile side to find undiscovered country for him to expand within.

As with the last post, I’m extending this notion of fostering the fragile side to communication itself – so much of our belief system centers around solid, clear, assertive communication skills, but there’s somewhere else to look as well.

We foster strong communicators in the classic sense, but that’s not the zone where we’re finding the bulk of our communication wins. Clarity and conviction are key building blocks in the foundation, but our most powerful leaps are coming through the intangible, more fragile aspects of communication. Our intuitive potential, and our emotionally sensitive capacity, is the growth opportunity for someone who already knows how to make and present a strong argument.

One of my mentors is so assertive, and so together in her creativity and her process-orientation that her very presence can be threatening to anyone who has any questions at all about themselves. Her effect on others was to stir up their own self-questioning, and that experience would turn potential allies into either road-blocks or competitors.

She resolved that issue by incorporating vulnerability in her communication. She intentionally volunteers her weaknesses (without crossing the line into self deprecation), and actively affirms others as part of her evolved communication pattern. As a result, she balances her scary-smart with humility, and her resulting likeability makes it easy for others to take direction from her, collaborate with her, and align to her as an ally.

We spend a lot of time trying to be smarter, stronger, tougher, more durable, less reactive… less soft. But inside everything strong is a sensitive core, and for all the toughening up we do, it’s harder to find more progress by adding more strength or credentials. The quicker leap forward is to embrace the fragile forces inside you.

Coaches are “allowed in,” to places few are permitted to see. We often get the real story, or the inside glimpse of the strong leader’s vulnerability, hidden carefully away from the rest of the world and sometimes even from themselves. Our job, though never hired directly for it, is to ask for the breakable yoke inside the egg, handle it, work with it, strengthen it, and return it unbroken – this amidst the process of delivering concrete skills and addressing actionable goals.

From what I’ve seen in the very places that you don’t suspect fragility to exist at all, it’s there in abundance, but it’s well concealed. We wear our “yang” side out in the open, proudly, puffing ourselves as big as a balloon, but the balloon is filled with “yin.” Eastern thinking might say:

Yang will include things like:
hard, sun, rock, invincible, stubborn, rational, victory, engage, and destroy.

Yin will include things like:
soft, moon, water, vulnerable, flexible, emotional, surrender, deflect, and embrace.

These aren’t male and female traits. They’re human traits, on a spectrum, and classically men are more associated with the Yang-set and women are more associated with the Yin-set. Clearly, men and women have both. Equally clearly, the working world favors the Yang collection of attributes and values over the Yin collection.

A big advocate of the yin virtues, I find that annoying in one sense, but the exciting part is that the hidden power of vulnerability (and yin aspects of communication) represents the bigger opportunity for evolution in professional communication.

That translates to our SagePresence focus on the softer, emotional, intuitive, and less visible qualities that fly under the radar in terms of what most people focus on in presentation and communication skills. With them, you can maximize influence and inspiration. As you get more proficient in participating with your emotions, you develop a better radar for reading others, and become more able to interpret the signals around you.

In my new book, The Chemistry Of Presence, co-developed with Pete Machalek, I quote Abraham Lincoln as a strong leader who knew the value of the “yin” attributes.

“Am I not destroying my enemy when I befriend them?”–– Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln knew that there was much more total power in balancing the strong and the sensitive. He was ingenious in his ability to see more opportunities by looking at strength through the softer lens. When the strong embrace nurturing communication, win becomes win-win, and its power doubles by taking the prospect of “losing” out of the equation.

Of the billion and a half dollars in winning sales presentations Pete and I have coached, more of the winning has been accomplished with soft skills than by adding more “strength” in the classic sense. We focus on emotional intelligence, working with genuine feelings, adding humility, passion, and compassion.

We embrace vulnerability and use it as our strength.

Put Your Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing

Pete and I began our SagePresence careers when when we were training acting skills to government undercover agents. These were inherently tough men and women who resisted working with soft skills like emotion. They would prefer a class on field-stripping their firearm, and perhaps a thousand push-ups to three days of acting, sharing emotions, and working with their fragile side.

So we often packaged soft skills in a tough skin. Positioning our ideas in a more masculine way seemed to make them easier for the strong-centric and the soft-averse. If we wanted them to engage in emotion-practice, we had to call it “emotional boxing,” and they would more readily participate. If we wanted them to practice intuitively reading emotions in others, we’d call it “night-vision for conversation.” We found early on that the best place to hide a sheep is in a wolf costume.

In the business world, words like “strategic” and “performance” allow you to conceal soft skills in sturdy wrapping, making them more palatable for people who identify with their strength and fear their fragility. There is nothing to fear in vulnerability, just new territory to understand and work with.

Next week, we’ll break down the top five skill activities that build sensitivity and the unseen edge. For now, just process the concept: inside each strong person, idea, argument, or presentation, there is a softer, more fragile center. Within that center is your next arena for growth.