I start with my own experience. I worked for a family business. The father was a very successful businessperson and built a fast-growing company.
The father died and his son took over as CEO. He was self-inflated and could not sense the big gap that existed between what he thought how successful he was and how little he could do.
He addressed a regional workshop while reading the text from a paper hurriedly and with a shaking voice. He did not stop at the end of a sentence and what he read was ambiguous.
People sensed his concept of himself as an inflated successful person because he attributed his success to himself and forgot that he inherited his fathers’ success.
The audience made sure to ask him questions, which he could not answer. The prickly people with their thorny questions deflated him. I felt ashamed to work for a man of his quality. I then wrote, “Prickly people deflate self-inflated people”.
What reminded me of this story is a comment by John Moore in which he wrote, “to see if the company you’re eyeing has had more complaints than a porcupine in a balloon factory.”
Some people have the prickles that porcupine has and inflated people are like balloons for them to enjoy puncturing them.
When we try to hide our weaknesses, we actually expose them more. The writing of this post coincided with a brilliant article that Zen Benefiel wrote and titled “Miracles Do Happen”. He wrote “I’d been taught by a mentor, that when someone was trying to take your energy, give it to them. Just be open and defenseless. The perfect protection is no protection, that way there is nothing for them to manipulate.”
Had the inflated CEO exposed his weakness as a weakness and not attempted to hide it under the “umbrella” of his inflation he would have avoided the embarrassment he found himself experiencing.
Denial is a big weakness because it leads to no corrective acts and only to the risk of prickly people to deflate.
This conclusion is in complete agreement with what Zen Benefiel ended his article with “When we are open and vulnerable. In perfect love, there is no fear. As a male, we are not taught to be vulnerable; just the opposite. Therefore, this supposed weakness is actually our greatest strength”.
Admitting our weaknesses and not denying them are sure signs of our growing strengths.
