This leader struggles with vulnerability

This leader struggles with vulnerability. There. I’ve said it. 

In a recent posting I quoted Rilke’s words, ‘I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief[1]’. I think I would like to add my own line. ‘I don’t have much knowledge yet in vulnerability’

Earlier this year, in returning to the wise writings of Francis Weller, I bumped into an interview he did, posted on YouTube[2], with CNN anchorman Anderson Cooper about how he had spent a lifetime avoiding his emotions, particularly grief, and how it had caught up with him. What struck me more than anything was Anderson’s vulnerability with Weller. As a man (me), listening to this man (Cooper), by a man (Weller), I would say it was a Masterclass in vulnerability.

The subject of vulnerability and its essential quality in the lives of effective leaders was brought up front and central by Brene Brown in her famous TED talk[3] and her subsequent book Daring Greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent and lead. I could also suggest the opposite it true: - Avoiding Daring Greatly: How avoiding vulnerability can destroy the way we live, love, parent and lead.

Talking about vulnerability, even talking about our emotions, is so much easier than actually being vulnerable, or being present with and sharing emotion in real time. Words are just words, but vulnerability costs us every time.  It is an out of control, feel-like-I’m-going-to- die moment. I’ve realised that the key is in the word ‘Be’. BeVulnerable. It’s this prefix ‘be’ that is the killer. Be vulnerable is a place of being, not knowledge, smart words, doing, or defending, or posturing. You have to be it, not talk about it, write books about it, or give seminars on it. Vulnerability is a place of undefended ego and, as Fr. Richard Rohr often says, ‘ego would rather die than let go of control’. I know that I am psychologically literate enough to talk smoothly about vulnerability and all kinds of emotions and yet do it all from a well disguised, defended place. Intimacy and real relationship are impossible from this place. I’m sure we have all experienced those conversations where we feel confused because the other person is using all the language of deep honesty and yet, at best, we don’t feel close to them at all and may, in fact, feel quite repelled. True vulnerability is attractive. It attracts. And all this we know about others, but the truth is I need to turn the mirror on myself and own that this is exactly how I can leave others feeling.

The second of the Beatitudes[4] of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was about vulnerability. “Blessed (the truly happy) are the meek’ – the meek’ means those who have surrendered their defensiveness of their ego identity. (“I’m this, I am not that, notice me for these great attributes or gifts” etc). This second Beatitude is firmly built on the first. ‘Blessed are the poor in Spirit’. Anyone familiar with AA[5] knows all about this, because it is enshrined in the First Step of the twelve. “We admitted to ourselves and others that we were powerless…’  We had stopped kidding ourselves and stopped trying to kid others. We were humbled. Humus. Brought down to earth, to the ground.

I have realised that vulnerability starts with me being vulnerable to myself. When I say to myself “I can’t do this”; When I just stop talking and let silence be my bass note; When I admit to myself that I can’t change me, fix me, make me a more acceptable version of me in my own eyes. When I admit to feeling ashamed of how much anger or sadness I seem to carry in me.  But I also realised that there’s real vulnerability, even to myself, and there is disguised vulnerability. The masks I wear are usually two-fold. Self-contempt hides vulnerability quite well and self-pity disguises it very well. Self-pity is the anger in its disguise of choice. Anger, self-contempt, self-pity, are all so much easier than the ‘cleanness’ of true vulnerability – the kind that AA means when you surrender to a higher power, when I admit that I can’t change me, but you don’t hide from the impossibility. You sit with it, in the Presence of your higher power and then sit with it with your friends.

Stephen Covey taught us years ago as leaders that all the victories in our outer world, the observable world of work, rests firmly on these inner victories. No exceptions. All my clever defences against pain and loss and powerlessness just keep me safely at a distance from being the effective leader, or human being, that I can be. Brene Brown sums up the challenge of vulnerability wonderfully.

“Vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you, but it's the last thing I want you to see in me. In you, it's courage. In me, it's inadequacy. In you, it's strength and lovability. In me, it's shame.[6]”

It’s a hard, courageous, but priceless road to walk.

TW Aug 2026

[1] Rainer Maria Rilke ‘Pushing Through’ in Selected poems trans Robert Bly   Harper Row 1981

[2] Creating A Companionship With Grief 2025

[3] TED talks 2011  & Daring Greatly     Penguin Life    2015

[4] Matthews Gospel Ch. 5

[5] www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk

[6] Brené Brown, The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connections and Courage