I am design­ing a new lead­er­ship work­shop and recent­ly I asked a friend and col­league for some feed­back about the design. As we reviewed the mate­ri­als and exer­cis­es, he stopped at one point and said, “I think you are going too fast here. What you are ask­ing peo­ple to share about them­selves in this part is very sen­si­tive. You are deal­ing with the ten­der spot.” This was impor­tant feed­back for me to hear.

Yes, the ten­der spot, the soft spot, a place of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and feel­ings that can’t be eas­i­ly sup­pressed or “man­aged.” We may not want to see this soft spot in our­selves and we may try to hide it from oth­ers out of anx­i­ety, embar­rass­ment or shame. We may even do pret­ty good job of that, but it’s there nonethe­less. The ten­der spot is often con­sid­ered a weak­ness, and yet it is also direct­ly relat­ed to our humil­i­ty and val­ue as human beings. I sug­gest to a client that his jour­ney isn’t just about his con­tri­bu­tions at work but it’s a per­son­al jour­ney as well. Sud­den­ly, tears come to his eyes. Anoth­er client is invis­i­bly angry about how she feels she has been treat­ed and is search­ing for the words to describe what she’s expe­ri­enced. Sud­den­ly the word unfair unlocks her deep sense of hurt. Anoth­er client, inspired by his boss’s vision, shares how he feels he’s con­demned him­self to a scarci­ty mind­set and must some­how get out of that prison. 

Pema Chödrön, the Bud­dhist writer, says that the soft spot is “a place as vul­ner­a­ble and ten­der as an open wound,” and she goes on to say that “It is equat­ed, in part, with our abil­i­ty to love. Even the cru­elest peo­ple have this soft spot.”

The irony of this soft and ten­der spot is that although it is so sen­si­tive and also often cov­ered up, it is always present in the back­ground of our rela­tion­ships. If some­one else nev­er reveals some lev­el of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, it may be dif­fi­cult to ful­ly trust that per­son. Shar­ing our vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties with one anoth­er can cre­ate a bond, a friend­ship, a sense of equi­ty, even some­times a shared iden­ti­ty, so that if one per­son clos­es off that ten­der spot, a part­ner may feel dis­tanced, aban­doned, dis­missed and hurt, lead­ing to the loss (or tran­scen­dence) of the entire rela­tion­ship. Trust­ing anoth­er ful­ly means that I give you access to my own ten­der­ness, my heart, and no one of us gives such a gift light­ly, lest the priv­i­lege be abused. Where dif­fer­ences of pow­er are involved, what­ev­er the cause of that dif­fer­ence (gen­der, posi­tion, etc.), this becomes an even more com­pli­cat­ed, and poten­tial­ly volatile dynamic.

And yet, we can­not grow as peo­ple unless we do open up that ten­der place to oth­ers, whether in a work­shop, a coach­ing or ther­a­py ses­sion, or in any oth­er impor­tant con­ver­sa­tion that life or work has brought us. We shield and defend our­selves, the most nor­mal thing in the world, but if we tru­ly want to learn and grow as lead­ers and as peo­ple, we’ll have to become stu­dents of our own ten­der spots, for sure. I remem­ber a work­shop par­tic­i­pant one time who brought in a poem to read to the group as part of her assign­ment. It was a tough thing for her to do it, very tough. She could hard­ly get through the words. Oth­ers imme­di­ate­ly offered to read her poem for her. How­ev­er, this is a way that we deflect from our own ten­der spots by usurp­ing those of oth­ers. Here, I’ll read it. I’ll be the res­cuer. I’ll illu­mi­nate your vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty rather than focus on my own. I said to the group, “She can do it. Let her read her poem.” And she did, and it was a triumph.

As a coach and con­sul­tant who works with those in lead­er­ship roles, I have been called on many times to help a client deal with neg­a­tive feed­back. The per­son may be on the edge of being asked to leave and yet the orga­ni­za­tion may want to offer one more chance. Or the per­son may want to advance and not under­stand the nature of the his or her self-cre­at­ed bar­ri­ers to that ambi­tion. My job is to help the client frame the feed­back so that he or she can hear neg­a­tive mes­sages with­out freak­ing out, shut­ting down or deny­ing the issues that need to be addressed. 

Can you see how the ten­der spot would be involved in that? We can be so very impa­tient with oth­ers while being so frag­ile our­selves. We want the oth­er per­son to “own it” and change, prefer­ably today, with­in the hour if pos­si­ble! But were it us, things might look quite dif­fer­ent. We’d want patience and an oppor­tu­ni­ty to defend our­selves, a chance to build up the log­ic of our denials, to process all the dam­age and pre­tend we are only deal­ing with mis­un­der­stand­ings — maybe for a long while until we are tru­ly ready to touch that ten­der place once more. 

Again and again, the answer appears to be invit­ing our ten­der places for­ward, hope­ful­ly in safe­ty (maybe express­ing them as a way to cre­ate safe­ty), to feel­ing them just as they are, to express­ing them how­ev­er we can, art­ful­ly or awk­ward­ly. The answer seems to be in sen­si­tive lis­ten­ing to oth­ers, to slow­ing down enough to cre­ate that lev­el of true under­stand­ing that we all need, and to awak­en­ing to what is so “per­son­al” in all of us. These are the sorts of things we can do for our­selves and for one anoth­er with our shared human­i­ty, imper­fect, raw and utter­ly beau­ti­ful as we are.

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