Here in the United States we love to poke and prod and measure everything.

We start holding kids up to imaginary yardsticks when they are tiny. Oh look, he’s walking ahead of schedule! Good boy!

We start measuring kids’ performance in kindergarten or first grade. Measurement is an addiction for us, and a sickness. It’s not just in the business world. We love to evaluate and assess everything, including the people around us. We need to compare them to ourselves. If someone appears to be exceptional, we need to cut them down to size.

We say “She’s pretty, but not as pretty as she thinks she is” or “That guy is smart enough, but it’s his dad who paved his way by bringing him into the family business.”

We love to size people up, and down, and up and down again a few more times.

Over time we notice that the people who honestly, truly couldn’t care less what other people think are always the happiest people.

We have an idea handed down to us from our religious-fanatic Puritan forebears, and the idea is still going strong today. It’s the idea that people come to earth with weaknesses that they must correct.

You’ll run into the ‘weakness’ dogma if you go on a job interview and someone asks you “What’s your greatest weakness?”

When I was working with folks in Europe in the early nineties, they were often puzzled by this question. “Why would you ask someone about his inner thoughts and concerns on a job interview?” they asked.

Now the intrusive American interview style has taken hold in many international workplaces. Now we think it’s normal to ask perfect strangers about their failings. We don’t see the impoliteness in it.

If you were honest and didn’t care about getting the job you could say “I don’t have weaknesses, and neither do you.

“Why do you assume that people have weaknesses – because they aren’t good at every single thing that it’s possible to be good at?

“Why would that matter? Who says which capabilities and talents a functional adult should have, and why would I care about that person’s standards, anyway?”

The weakness dogma is a curse and a negative influence, because it gets us to focus energy on things we don’t do well (and don’t care about) rather than investing the talent God or the universe gave us in doing what we were put down here to do.

I don’t believe that people have weaknesses, but I know that people think they do. They have things to hide. Most of us walk around with a soft spot that we’d rather not talk about.

For some of us, it’s our physical appearance. We wish we were skinnier or taller or didn’t have that bald spot. We wish we were smarter or sexier than we are.

We might worry about our age or the fact that we don’t have a college degree. These soft spots hurt us, because our focus on not talking about them or dwelling on them gives them energetic weight they don’t deserve.

We have a client who is a brilliant strategist and manager. She was a corporate director for years. She sent aPain Letter and got an interview for a plum job. A not-for-profit organization was looking for a new Executive Director.

“I feel very confident about every aspect of the role,” Melissa told us, “apart from the fund-raising part.”

“You’ve done plenty of fund-raising in your corporate life,” we told her. “You got executives to part with millions. You got money from vendors in negotiations. You know how to build relationships at varying levels of depth, whatever the situation requires.

“Fund-raising has to do with mission and connection, and you are the queen of those two things.”

“Thanks for saying that,” said Melissa. “That’s my one Achilles’ heel on this upcoming interview.”

“Let’s practice an answer, then, to the question ‘What kind of fund-raising have you done?'”

Together we constructed Melissa’s answer and practiced it with her. She was set. She was ready to go. She was stoked to talk about how she’d done fund-raising for years in her corporate career.

The interview day came and Melissa was rocking and rolling. The interviewer asked Melissa “What about fund-raising?”

Melissa said “I haven’t done any fund-raising yet.”

“I panicked,” she said. “I forgot what we practiced.”

Melissa got the job anyway.

Why did Melissa panic? The fund-raising ‘weakness’ was still very real to her. It was the one question she was hoping the interviewer wouldn’t ask. She gave the fund-raising topic more weight than it deserved, and when the dreaded question came, her rational mind shut down and her fear spoke up.

Melissa had practiced her answer to the interview question, but in her heart of hearts she still believed that she was no fund-raiser.

Most of us have soft spots that we hope no one notices. They hurt us at work and on the job hunt. We give them power over us that they don’t deserve, because we fear that we are defective or wanting somehow.

There might be something you’d rather not focus on and very much prefer that other people not notice. It might be your ‘checkered’ background or your age.

It might be the fact that you took three years off the conveyor belt to try something different in your life — God forbid! — and you worry that someone won’t let you back on the conveyor belt now.

The soft spot will be tender until you look at it closely and soften your attitude toward it. When you give yourself a break, stop beating up on yourself and finally believe that your age, your waistline, your educational credentials, your crappy car or your termination from your last job are all fine, whole and worthy, the soft spot won’t be tender anymore.

How do you shift your view of your own so-called weakness? It takes courage, because the easiest thing to do is to ignore your soft spot. The easiest thing to do is to build a wall around it. If you don’t get a job you wanted, you can always say “Well, it’s because I’m too old” or “It’s because I don’t have a degree.”

Our own soft spot, the one we tiptoe around, becomes a crutch, because we can blame our problems on it. We don’t have to look at it or shift our view about it.

Our client Amy was a VP at a bank for decades. She quit her job when her mother needed Amy’s help as she declined in her later years. Amy took care of her mom until her mom passed away.

When she began job-hunting six months after her mom died, Amy said “I can’t get to first base in my job search.

“Every time I go on an interview, they ask me why I took time off with my mom, and they don’t ask in a pleasant way. They’re critical. Some people are horrified that I took a two-year break from my career. Now they don’t want to let me back in.”

But Amy, we asked, how do YOU feel about your sabbatical? “I feel fine about it,” said Amy. “Other people need to stop judging.”

When we start to believe that our problems are created by other people, and that therefore those other people have power over us and control whether we can be happy or not or have the things we want in life or not, that’s a big obstacle! We said “Amy, can we give you a new frame for the two-year gap on your resume?”

“Sure,” she said.

“One frame says that it’s bad and unprofessional to take time off the conveyor belt.” we told her. “Through that lens, you are defective. Undoubtedly you lost touch with banking systems and forgot everything you learned throughout your career, when you took those two years off. You aren’t as sharp now, or as capable as you were. Why should anyone hire you?”

“That’s how I feel that people are thinking about me,” said Amy.

“And maybe you are feeling just a tad the same way about your step out of the paid workforce and your attempts to step back in now,” we said.

“Here is a new frame. You worked hard in banking for twenty years and rose to the VP level. Your track record is unblemished.

“You left your career at a high point to do the one thing that deserved your time and energy more than your work did. Your mom needed you and you were privileged to have been successful enough in your career to take two years off from it without worrying about money.

“That’s the American dream. You got to control your priorities. You got to make your own choices as we all hope to do, and you chose to tend to your mom in her final years. That’s was the right choice.You know that as strongly as you know anything.

“You have nothing to apologize for. You’d be amazed and disappointed that anyone would think you should grovel and beg to come back into the workforce when you are obviously very competent and powerful. You’d feel sorry for a person like that, rather than be afraid of him or her.

“You don’t have time to waste with anyone who would question or criticize your sabbatical. To you it’s obvious that anyone in your situation would have done the same thing and helped an aging parent.

“You’re going to sail right past the people who can’t understand your choices, and keep looking for the leader who is thrilled to see you coming.”

“I wish,” said Amy. “I wish people would see it that way.”

The next afternoon Amy sent us an email message. “I got it!” she said.

“I got the message. I got it all at once in a visceral way. When you ran down that alternate frame, you were talking to me. That’s the view I need to adopt.

“Why am I apologizing for having had the means and the wherewithal to take two years off from my career after twenty-five years in it? I got the message myself, in my body, while I was gardening this morning.Why did I worry about what some interviewer thinks? If someone really can’t see what I bring, my job is to move on.”

Hurrah, Amy!

Amy got a great job seven weeks later. It wasn’t that other people were in her way. Amy was in her own way until she turned the crystal to see her precious two-year time with her mom as a positive instead of a negative.

You can do the same thing. You can look closely at whatever blemish or embarrassment you feel is holding you back in the eyes of other people.

You can bravely face it and see your ‘weakness’ in a new light. When you realize that you are fine with all the quirks and complications you bring, your muscles will grow.

Then your soft spot won’t be soft anymore. Its power will be neutralized. It can’t hurt you any more.

Anyone who doesn’t like you the way you are can go jump in a lake, or live a long and happy life without you.

You’ll be delighted to talk about your so-called weakness then. Not everyone has to like your story. Anyone who doesn’t get you doesn’t deserve you anyway. There are seven billion people in the world. You need one manager who gets you, or several clients who see how awesome you are. That’s all.

You don’t have any weaknesses, but the first person who has to get that message is you.

Listen to the podcast Human Workplace Lunch Hour Episode Five, in which Liz and Molly talk about this topic!

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