The Power of Telling Your Own Story
I am months into a Leadership Cohort with nine other guys. We meet every few weeks for a few hours. There’s a lot of work. There’s a lot of inertia and output from each individual, not just with homework but emotionally, mentally, and relationally. It’s pretty intense.
The first few months were getting some basic blocking and tackling under our belts. Then we jumped into our current phase, where each person tells their individual “Personal Story.”
Our “story” is the whole story, the real story, and not just the “pretty” story. It’s a story that unpacks our family of origin, education, impactful relationships – good and bad – career ladder, personality, leadership choices, and so on. There is a lot of stuff that is shared.
A few guys jumped in this past Tuesday and shared their stories. As each one spent a lengthy time sharing their history, we sat there and took it all in. Listening as a person opens their heart and shares their deep story is a privilege, something to behold. For most, if not everyone in the group, things are being shared that have never been shared with anybody before – or, at most, only a few trusted people. We are all trusting each other with deep, deep, deep trust. You feel like you are taking your heart out of your chest and putting it in the middle of the room for everyone to see. Fully exposed. Fully vulnerable.
I have to tell you, it’s the most relational thing that I’ve ever been through.
One of the gentlemen in my Leadership Cohort asked, “Now that you know the full story about Bob – the good, the bad, all of it – do you love him more or love him less?” The question mark was not even at the end of his sentence yet, and the nine guys replied in unison, “We love him more!” That’s because we know the real Bob and accept the real Bob.
Most of the time in the world, especially the business world, we are cautious and nuanced about what we decide to share with people around us. It’s very filtered and guarded. To use a metaphor, we usually wear a mask when marching around the office, in the boardroom, and in a business meeting. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that we should not be thoughtful and conscientious about what we present and what we say. But the more significant point to be made is that the greatest gift we can probably give somebody is to have a desire and curiosity to know them fully. To know them for who they really are. And not just to know them but to accept them. And the greatest gift we can be given is to have that reciprocated to us. It’s both deeply humbling and deeply honoring.
There’s not one person I know who is perfect in this world (except for one who walked this Earth 2,000 years ago). We all have room to grow, and we can’t do that if we are keeping everything locked up inside. We can’t grow if we always wear masks to hide our inhibitions, insecurities, fears, and failures.
How liberating does it sound to be fully known by the people around you AND to be FULLY accepted?
There’s a lot of different threads that can come out of this. Is this about integrity? Sure. If you have integrity and honesty about who you really are instead of who you try to pretend to be, that exclaims great integrity.
Is this about being a safe place? Absolutely. To share in such a vulnerable way, you need psychological safety in the room and with your people.
Many other threads can come from this, but I want to tie this back to one thing – it’s a thread throughout many of the RethinkWork articles. That is, we, as leaders, should fight for the highest possible good of those around us. To do this means that we really want to know who our people are. We want to know their strengths, their weaknesses, their failures, their innate skills, their personalities, their hurts, their hopes, their dreams. We want to know why they do things the way they do and why they don’t do things the way others do. And this isn’t so that we can just “know them,” but so that we can fight for their highest possible good. The more we know them – really know them – the more we can fight for them. The more we know our people, the more we can serve them well.
In a book I read called The Cure, there’s a quote that I love, “as long as we're behind a mask, any mask, we will not be able to receive love.” I believe this, but it is definitely a heavy topic, and it’s something to think through.
To do this “Story Sharing” in a group requires a lot of art and science, truth and grace, trust and vulnerability. So, I’m not suggesting you jump in with no thought and plan and say to your team, “Hey, everybody, share your deepest, darkest story with me and each other?” But at a minimum, I would say that you avoid helping to protect a culture where everybody wears a mask, where everybody walks around with insecurities, inhibitions, and a poser persona.
So here are a few questions for you:
Do you know your team well?
Do they really know you?
Do you want to know them?
Do you want them to know you?
And if your answer is “no,” what are the reasons behind that? Is there fear that you will not be fully accepted? If that’s the case, maybe you need to work through that.
We believe in the power of “Story Sharing” so much that when we do one-on-one coaching with executives and senior leaders, this is one of the first things we dive into. Just about every client we’ve ever had says it is liberating, and they’ve learned so much about themselves from the process. They also feel grateful that they knew what they shared with me, or someone else on the RethinkWork Team, was in confidence. Coming out of this, we – as Coaches – admire and care for our clients even more than we did before we knew their story. Coming out of sharing their story sets the trajectory for them to do some intense work to get equipped as a better leader, so when they finish coaching with us, they will be some of the most high-performing leaders in the world.