CHAPTER 3
The Hidden Power of Vulnerability

Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.

—Dr. Brené Brown

Detective Anthony Terrell

Detective Anthony Terrell knew every second counted. Weaving through Los Angeles rush hour traffic, the 20-year veteran and LAPD lead hostage negotiator was en route to an ugly standoff. More than 30 officers, including the SWAT team, were already on the scene. Inside the house, Robert, an alcoholic in his fifties, was holding his wife and children at gunpoint. Things hadn’t been going well for Robert. After he was fired from his job as a clerk at the DMV, his wife had kicked him out. Now he was planning to take his family’s life and then his own.

The police tried to reason with Robert. They told him they had 15 squad cars blockading a three-block radius and all the firepower they needed to end the situation. Their rifles were trained on every window in the house. There was no escape.

“Either you come out,” the captain said into his bullhorn, “or we come in.”

“Shut up!” Robert screamed.

“At least let your family go,” the captain said. “They have nothing to do with this.”

“I’m not coming out,” Robert said, “and neither are they.”

By the time Detective Terrell arrived, the SWAT team was ready to storm the house. Terrell’s job was to get Robert to release his family and surrender, but this would be difficult, because he had little time and Robert had little to live for: if Robert didn’t give up, he was going to be shot and killed; if he gave up, he was likely going to prison.

The detective quickly established phone contact. With extensive training in psychology and more than 10 years experience negotiating in crisis situations, Terrell didn’t bother trying to reason with Robert. Rather, the detective knew that his first order of business was to establish an emotional connection. He needed to put aside his personal feelings about Robert—a monster threatening to kill his own wife and kids—and convince Robert that he was on Robert’s side, get him to think, “That guy is like me.”

Once he had Robert on the line, Terrell introduced himself. “Robert,” he said, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through. I’ve been in situations where I felt like there was no way out. I actually lost everything—my job, my home, my best friend—all at the same time. It might not be the situation you’re in, but I remember how bad it was.”

Terrell didn’t try to convince Robert to give up. He didn’t ask any questions. He just held his breath and waited.

Finally, Robert said, “When was that?”

And that’s when Terrell knew he had an opening to connect with Robert. He told Robert a little about the darkest time in his life. Then he asked, “Do you want to tell me what’s going on with you? It’s okay if you don’t, but I do want to know.”

Robert eventually told Terrell he didn’t feel like he could face his kids after losing his job and getting kicked out of the house. He was angry at his wife. He believed the easiest way out would be to end it for them all. Once Robert opened up, it was only minutes before Terrell was able to negotiate a surrender that saved the lives of Robert, his wife, and his kids.

Going First

As a student of psychology, Detective Terrell understood the power of “going first”—showing his own vulnerability as a way of getting Robert to open up and show his. By going first, Terrell essentially gave Robert permission to share his problems.

Outside of the corporate world, the power of vulnerability is well known. It’s the basis for trust. The thinking goes: If he’s willing to open up and be vulnerable, then he must trust me, in which case it’s safe for me to open up and share something in return. When we allow ourselves to be seen—really seen—we create the potential for emotional connection. Research shows that self-disclosure is a common feature of healthy relationships.

Research also points to an instinctive response to vulnerability—the desire to reciprocate. Remember mirror neurons from Chapter 2? Mirror neurons are brain cells that fire both when we act and when we observe the same action performed with intent by another. They essentially “mirror” the behavior of the other, as though we ourselves were acting. Mirror neurons help explain why vulnerability is contagious. When people see us opening up and being authentic, they’re inclined to open up and be authentic themselves. We are all imperfect—it’s a universal truth. And, ironic as it seems, we trust people more when they’re willing to expose themselves as imperfect. Allowing ourselves to be seen as vulnerable fosters an environment of openness and leads to trust.

In the business world, however, vulnerability is often mistaken for weakness. Salespeople have traditionally been trained to have all the answers, to be superhuman, to be perfect. But it’s hard to connect with perfection. As buyers, our BS meters go off. We know nobody’s perfect; we know nobody has all the answers. Also, when a seller presents herself as having all the answers, her attitude is contagious. A buyer is inclined to think: Everything is good with her? Then everything is good with me, too. As in: There’s nothing I need to buy.

But in many cases, selling something to someone requires the buyer to more or less admit that change is necessary—to admit that everything isn’t good. As in “I have a problem” or “my situation isn’t ideal” or “I’ve made a mistake.” This is particularly true when the sale involves something that is new to the buyer. In these cases, our success as sellers depends on buyers showing vulnerability by admitting imperfection. It’s a lot easier for them to open up if we as sellers go first.

Ben’s Story: Alana

I learned the danger of perfectionism first-hand from my therapist, Alana. As salespeople, we’re taught that we should be flawless: we should possess complete knowledge of our products. We should have complete knowledge of the sales situation. We should have all the answers to our customers’ questions. We should be able to overcome all of our customers’ objections. I was as guilty of this attitude as anyone, if not more so. I’d bought into it for my whole career, as both a salesperson and a trainer of salespeople.

A couple of years ago, I went in for a session with my therapist, Alana, prior to an important workshop with the senior executives of a new client. I felt I had to pull off a perfect workshop in order to sell the company more workshops. I would need to be at the top of my game and look the part too, right down to my best suit and a nice, clean haircut. I told Alana I was feeling a lot of anxiety about the workshop.

“I can’t blow it,” I said. “I have to be absolutely perfect.”

Alana’s reaction surprised me. It was practically a reprimand.

“Who do you think you have to be, Ben?” she said. “You just don’t get it, do you?”

And then she proceeded to tell me a story. She said that in the psychology profession, after graduation, you have to put in a number of hours as an intern before you’re fully licensed to practice on your own. She did her hours at a battered women’s shelter in south-central Los Angeles. She led a weekly evening group therapy session with several young women, mostly teenaged moms, some of them homeless. One by one, she said, the women in the group began to open up—all of them, that is, except for one. During the sixth week, this particular young woman came up to Alana after the session and said she wasn’t coming back. Alana asked why. The young woman regarded Alana as if the answer were self-evident.

“Look at you,” she said, “with your Gucci bag, your expensive shoes, your perfect hair, your perfect smile. Why would I ever open up to you?”

Alana was devastated. For six weeks, she’d been trying to connect with this woman. At 30, fresh out of graduate school, Alana thought she’d been doing all the right things. She thought it was her job to look the part of a successful professional and to be an expert in her field. But in the process of trying to project an image of perfection, she’d managed to scare off one of the people she was supposed to help.

“When you talked about needing to be perfect in your workshop,” Alana told me during our session, “you reminded me of myself, of how I was back then.”

I immediately identified with Alana’s story. What she said next made a lot of sense to me. She explained that the best teachers teach by sharing their mistakes and what they’ve learned. She used the analogy of ex-addict counselors who help recovering drug addicts.

“We don’t connect with perfection,” she said. “We connect with people who’ve been there.”

That day’s session with Alana was more than just a reality check; it was a revelation. Alana gave me the confidence to be imperfect. She also helped me understand that not only is imperfection natural and human, it’s absolutely necessary if we hope to connect to other people.

Shame and Courage

Dr. Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, has spent the past 10 years studying vulnerability, fear, authenticity, shame, and courage. Her research led her to conceive a spectrum on which shame and courage occupy opposite ends (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 The Spectrum of Shame and Courage

Source: Dr. Brené Brown

Research shows that the only people who don’t experience shame have no capacity for human connection or empathy—people with psychopathic disorders. Shame is universal among the rest of us. “Shame is the most primitive human affect or emotion that we experience,” says Brown. “Everyone has it. Nobody wants to talk about it. Yet the less we talk about it, the more we have it.”

Shame and fear are the emotions that prevent us from being vulnerable—the fear of not being successful enough, not rich enough, not smart enough. According to Brown, it drives two primary “tapes” in our minds: “never good enough” and “who do you think you are?” The more shame we have surrounding a given issue, the less we talk about it.

Shame is best understood, says Brown, as “the fear of disconnection.” Shame feels the same for men and women, but the cultural drivers of shame—the messages and expectations that fuel it—are very much gender based. For women, shame is about not being perfect, not being everything to everyone, not being thin enough, not being able to do it all and smile the whole time. For men, the primary cultural “rule” that drives shame is “do not be perceived as weak.” Men are expected to be emotionally stoic. In the world of sales, however, we believe the fear of perceived weakness drives both men and women, to the extent that all salespeople are expected to be superhuman.

When we ask students in the workshop, “How many of you struggle with shame?” no hands go up. It’s a silent epidemic. But if we ask, “How many of you struggle with perfectionism?” we get a lot of responses. Brown sees shame and perfectionism as inextricably linked. “Shame,” she says, “is the birthplace of perfectionism. Where we struggle with perfectionism, we struggle with shame.”

“The hard thing,” she says, “is you can’t get rid of shame. So what can we do? We can be resilient.” In other words, tame it. Her research shows that people with high shame resilience have several things in common: They understand shame and what triggers it. They talk about it. They have more authenticity. They live with a stronger sense of love and belonging. And they tell their stories.

The key to resilience is courage, which comes from the Latin cor, meaning “heart.” We must have the heart to be imperfect. “To me,” says Brown, “courage is the ability to tell your story and like who you are in the process of doing that. And that’s hard.”

You Can Go There

During our Story Leaders workshops, we delve into vulnerability on the second day. Sometimes it’s a tough sell—pun intended. Once, a young woman in her early thirties—a well-dressed, highly educated saleswoman—stood up and objected.

“There’s no way we can go there in a business conversation,” she said. “It’s too touchy-feely. We would look weak in front of a buyer.”

That stirred up a hornet’s nest in the workshop. Half of the students were on her side, the other half on ours.

Believe me, we understand why vulnerability can be so hard for salespeople. We’re salespeople ourselves; we’ve experienced the fear of having a buyer think poorly of us; we’ve been there. And we realize that the idea of showing vulnerability can seem counterintuitive. By revealing ourselves, we worry we will appear weak or submissive. Like most salespeople today, we were taught that in order to be “consultative, trusted advisors,” we must be perceived as experts who have all the answers.

The truth of the matter is, we agree. A salesperson absolutely should be an expert in his or her field. We just disagree that trying to come off as an expert—presenting yourself as superhuman—is an effective way to sell. Research and other disciplines have proven that the opposite is true. We don’t lose power by showing our vulnerability; we gain power.

But there’s another problem. Many of us simply don’t know how to be vulnerable. We lack the vocabulary of vulnerability. Showing vulnerability involves the use of recall and self-reflection, putting language (left-brain processing) around emotions and autobiographical memories (right-brain processing).

If you’re convinced of the value of vulnerability but aren’t sure how to go about showing it in a business setting, don’t worry. In subsequent chapters, we’ll take you through the process, step by step, of developing the necessary language and narrative skills.

What Therapists Do

When it comes to understanding the power of vulnerability, the sales industry is still primitive. Therapy is but one of many fields that has long understood vulnerability better than we have. Like salespeople, therapists need their clients to open up to them. But unlike salespeople, therapists aren’t trained to interrogate their clients with questions. Instead, they use a range of techniques based on a fuller understanding of trust and emotional connection. (Too Much Information alert: If the following sections are too technical for you, feel free to skip ahead to Mike’s story about Juliet.)

Inclusion and Presence

One of these techniques involves inclusion and presence. Inclusion means putting oneself into the experience of the patient as much as possible, feeling it as if in one’s own body. When a therapist does this, it confirms the patient’s existence. By imagining the experience of the client, in a sense, the therapist makes the experience real. By making contact with the patient in this way and not aiming to “move” the patient—by meeting the patient and not aiming to make the patient different—the therapist supports the patient in growing by identification with his or her own experience. Dialogue between therapist and client requires not only practicing inclusion but also a certain kind of presence: authenticity, transparency, and humility. Both therapist and patient must connect with their whole selves, including their flaws. Inclusion and presence require self-disclosure on the part of the therapist. In this model, think of the client as the final authority. If the patient says, “You don’t understand,” the therapist doesn’t understand.

Commitment and Surrender to the Between

An indispensable core aspect of therapy is the commitment to dialogue, the surrender to what emerges between the participants in the dialogue when the therapist and the patient contact each other—without the therapist aiming for a particular response. Conditions for maximum growth and healing are created when the therapist practices inclusion with authentic presence and commits to what emerges in the contact. This requires that the therapist not be committed to any predetermined outcome.

In this approach, the therapist also changes. The therapist is touched, feels pain, gets satisfaction from contact with the patient, and learns from the contact. By accepting that the patient’s perception of the therapist might accurately point to a blind spot in the therapist’s self-awareness, the therapist also grows. This is especially true when the patient criticizes the therapist. For the patient, this can be an experience in which her opinions and feelings are respected and in which she is able to recognize the therapist (in whom she has invested time, money, and respect) as an ordinary human being.

Mike’s Story: Juliet

Perhaps because I’m known as a “sales and messaging” guy, a number of friends and acquaintances have asked me for advice regarding things in their personal lives. Not long ago, my dear friend Juliet asked me for help with her profile on Match.com, the online dating website.

Juliet is in her mid-forties, very fit, very vital, and very attractive. She gets lots of inquiries on Match.com. Juliet is also a recent cancer survivor. She beat a very aggressive, fast-growing cancer. When she was ready to start dating again, she was unsure whether to share her battle against cancer in her Match.com profile.

Most of her friends advised her not to mention that she’s a cancer survivor. But the way I saw it, it’s obviously a very big deal, and it would have to come out sooner or later. I suggested that if she put “cancer survivor” in her profile and got just one response a month, at least she’d have the peace of mind of knowing that her date already knew, and she wouldn’t have to dread bringing up the subject.

So Juliet did it. She changed her profile to indicate she’d had cancer. And very quickly, her “winks” and matches doubled.

At first, I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. Juliet’s experience validated everything I’ve come to understand about vulnerability. I ended up putting her story on our Story Leaders blog. Within a day, we had more comments than for any previous blog posting. Everyone wanted to share their experiences with vulnerability.

Mike’s Story: Bob Populorum

During my years at Xerox Computer Services, one of my mentors was a salesman named Bob Populorum. Bob was 10 or 11 years older than I was. He’d been smart enough to get into Northwestern, and while he was there, he’d taken an interest in human psychology. By the time I knew him, he was a keen student of human nature.

As a parent, Bob often found himself at social events— PTA meetings, school fund-raisers, and so forth—with other parents. When the small talk inevitably turned to kids, the parents inevitably turned to bragging. You know, the “who has a better kid” contest. If the first dad mentioned that his oldest daughter was an aspiring concert pianist, the next dad might mention that his daughter had gotten into Yale, and then the next dad might start in about his daughter’s Olympic chances, and so on.

Bob never cared for this sort of one-upmanship. He was much more interested in having real, authentic conversations. He understood that if you lead with a story about how great your kid is, chances are that’s what you’ll get in return. And so he began to experiment at these gatherings. Instead of starting with a boast about his kids, he’d start with a little humor.

“I have five kids,” he’d say, keeping a straight face. “One of each.”

Then he’d shoot from the heart. “The first four are all doing great—good grades, well rounded, volunteer work, you name it. But oh, that number five.” Bob would proceed to talk about his youngest son’s problems: flunking out of school, shoplifting, drug rehab, the whole nine yards.

Whenever Bob did this, without fail, the other parents would then open up and share stories about their difficulties with their kids. Suddenly, Bob and the other parents weren’t engaged in a “top this” contest; they were forming real emotional connections. By having the courage to be vulnerable first, Bob was encouraging other parents to be vulnerable, too.

Bob is the person who helped me understand the importance of vulnerability in gaining a stranger’s trust. And it’s as true in sales as it is at PTA meetings. A stranger is more likely to buy from you if he trusts you, becomes curious about what you have to offer, believes you have his best interests at heart.

Bob used to say that there is a “veneer of bullshit” between any two strangers, and as we all know, that’s especially true with a seller and buyer.

“Until you break through that veneer of bullshit,” he’d tell me, “you have no chance of selling anything.”

Vulnerability in Sales

It takes courage to admit your flaws first. It’s a risk. But it’s a risk with enormous potential rewards. When a buyer meets with a salesperson, the buyer expects to feel “sold to.” The buyer’s reaction, based on her previous experiences with salespeople, is likely to be some variation of fight, flight, or freeze. But you can overcome a buyer’s expectations and preconceived notions and give her a chance to be truly receptive to you by taking a chance and being vulnerable first.

Granted, being vulnerable is more easily said than done. Most salespeople we know have been indoctrinated with a left-brain approach. We’ve been trained with hundreds of PowerPoint slides that cover every salient detail regarding our markets, our products, our pricing, company procedures and systems, contract approval processes, and so on. Make no mistake—a salesperson needs to know all of this and more. But these things aren’t enough if you want to forge emotional connections with buyers.

So how do you teach people who have been trained to turn off their feelings to be vulnerable? It’s a question we’ve confronted in our Story Leaders workshops, which are a work in progress that we’re constantly fine-tuning.

At a recent workshop, we felt we made a giant leap forward in teaching highly disciplined left-brain thinkers (in this case, a group of engineers and scientists) to take the risk of being vulnerable by using the whole brain rather than just the left brain. In order to do so, they had to (1) have the courage to overcome the survival instincts of the left brain, (2) put narrative around feelings they had never articulated or shared with anyone, and, (3) most importantly, open themselves to the experience of feeling the connected space between two human beings.

Our workshops last two and a half days. On the first day of this particular workshop, we asked the participants to build a “Who I Am” story (see Chapter 6)—a step we normally take later in the workshop, as this is usually the hardest story to build. Basically, it’s the story of how you, as a person in the world, ended up across the desk from this person (the buyer), in this moment in time, representing this company and this product. The story requires that the teller take a risk and show vulnerability.

The next day, we began to teach “story tending.” Story tending is covered in detail later on, too, in Chapter 7. For now, all you need to know is that we conduct small-group exercises in which one person is a storyteller, one is a story tender, and one is an observer.

In this particular workshop, the teller in each group was instructed to tell his or her Who I Am story—created on the previous day—to the story tender (the listener). The tellers were asked to tell their stories at a slower-than-normal pace, allowing the listener to “tend” the story with sincere curiosity and a lot of encouragement, with comments such as, “It sounds like that was a real struggle for you. Can you tell me more?”

What surprised us was how emotional the storytellers became when their personal stories were so sincerely tended. A couple of them actually wept. Through this exercise, our highly disciplined left-brain participants were able to experience the emotional connection that occurs when we truly feel heard, when our stories are closely listened to. The strong feelings they experienced were, in turn, proof positive of the power of taking a risk and showing vulnerability first.

Others Knew Better

The power of vulnerability is largely unknown in American business, but it’s no secret in other fields. Dr. Brené Brown and other researchers have devoted their careers to further understanding its power. Still others have been putting its power to use in both professional and personal settings. Detective Terrell opened up to a potential murderer—and in the process saved both the man and his family. Ben’s therapist, Alana, learned the hard way the dangers of trying to project an air of perfection, of refusing to be vulnerable. Juliet openly shared the most difficult aspect of her life—and was rewarded with an outpouring of support and human connection. Bob Populorum, in confessing his youngest son’s struggles, was able to establish trust and authenticity in a setting that otherwise encouraged shallow bragging. All of these people understood, at least intuitively, the power of vulnerability. And the best salespeople among us know it too. Remember John Scanlon in Chapter 1? Now it’s time for the rest of the sales world to take notice.

We understand that you think this might be off limits, that this isn’t what a salesperson should be doing, that showing vulnerability is a weakness, that it’s too touchy-feely. We get it. But it’s not touchy-feely. Vulnerability is a key ingredient— perhaps the key ingredient—to emotional buy-in, to cutting through the “veneer of bullshit.” It’s what other disciplines do, and it’s what works in sales, too.