The Secret to Showing Weakness at Work (And Maintaining Respect)

Most men are terrified to show weakness at work. We think if we admit struggle, we’ll lose credibility or respect. But the truth is, learning how to be vulnerable the right way actually earns you more trust — and frees you from the pressure to fake strength.
In this episode, Don shares how men can open up at work without losing respect. You’ll learn:
 • Why courage and skill are both required to show vulnerability well
 • How to identify the right person and setting to share honestly
 • Why vulnerability builds stronger teams and better leaders
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Question for You
 What’s one weakness you need to open up about at work? Drop it in the comments — your honesty might give another man the courage to do the same.

⏰ TIMECODES
 00:00 The Struggle of Showing Weakness at Work
 01:05 The Importance of Addressing Weaknesses
 05:13 Understanding the Five Marks of Manhood
 05:54 Combining Courage and Skill
 07:20 Practical Steps to Open Up at Work
 15:27 The Benefits of Vulnerability in the Workplace
 19:00 Conclusion and Call to Action

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 #ManhoodTribes #MensGrowth #WorkplaceCourage #FaithForMen #MensLeadership #Vulnerability

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Transcript

0:01

One of the hardest things for us as men to do is to show any kind of sign of weakness. And this is especially true in the workplace because our work environments tend to be more cutthroat than they are empathetic. And so showing signs of weakness often feels like that's going to be the way that we lose credibility and respect in our work environment. Work can often push the message of be strong, don't show weakness, always have it together. But the reality is that for all of us, especially as men, there are plenty of things about our work environments that mean that we don't have it all together. That stress can pile up, we can make a mistake, we might not know how to do something that we need to know how to do, or there's just some kind of conflict going on with someone else on your team. So the question isn't. Are you experiencing any kind of weaknesses at work? The question is how do you actually show it? How do you demonstrate that you don't have everything together in the workplace, but still do it in a way that maintains credibility and respect with your coworkers? That's the question we want to try to answer today Here on the Manhood Tribe Show. My name's Don. I'm your host here at Manhood Tribes, and I'm really glad that you are joining us here on this episode. We are in the midst. Of a series where we're talking about men and work and just kind of all of the different ways and angles that men have to relate to their work and to their workplaces and to their coworkers, and to just the way that work affects the rest of our lives. There's all kinds of things about work that really affect us significantly because work dominates our schedules. It takes up more hours than pretty much anything in our lives. Including our families. And so because of that, we do really need to think about how we as men relate well to our work. And this idea of being able to share our struggles or open up about our weaknesses in the workplace is one that I think most of us have men, as men have dealt with at one time or another, feeling like. I don't know that I act, I actually can share any of those kinds of things. Or if I did share those kinds of things, it's probably gonna cost me in some way. Either my teammates are gonna look at me as somehow inferior or less than, or like I'm not really pulling my weight or like I don't have it all together and they're not sure they can trust me with some of the harder things because maybe I'm a little too fragile or I might even just like. Come off the wrong way to somebody in authority and then I get overlooked for the possibility of promotion or a raise or some other kind of something that I want to be able to do within my workplace. All of those things can feel like they are real risks in the work environment, especially if you're not working in a place where someone else is already demonstrating those things. If your work environment is. Only ever professional, and it doesn't ever feel like it's actually personal where it's just kind of a, like a, yeah, we don't, we don't talk about personal things here. We're just here to work and get the task accomplished, which, let's be honest, that's a lot of workplaces. But if it does feel that way, it can feel even more risky to be the guy who steps out and takes a risk and tries to open up about, I'm not sure everything is going as well as it could be for me and. To be able to be honest about those kinds of things can feel really scary. So how do we do that? How do we open up about those kinds of things? Because we do really need to, as men, we need to be honest about our vulnerabilities, about our weaknesses, about our flaws. Not because we're trying to just show that we are weak or that we're incompetent, or that we're incapable, but we need to do it one. Because we're human, none of us have it all together. And often being the man who can open up about how he doesn't have it together will free up some of the other people on your team to be able to do the same. But we also need to do it for our own, just personal and mental health. Being honest about the ways that life isn't working or that work isn't working the way that we think that it should, or the ways that I'm feeling, not really a hundred percent, and I'm having to show up to work and give a hundred percent when I'm not at my best. Those are things that just make us human, and we need to be able to talk about those things with the people that we're around in order to be able to actually be at our best. We will be at our best by allowing other people to enter into those things and to care for us in the midst of it, not by isolating ourselves from others and pretending like we have everything together when we really don. So it is important for us to be able to do those kinds of things, but doing them well is also really important. It's not just as simple as like vomiting your latest struggle on the, you know, next, uh, zoom call that you have with your team. Right? It's probably not gonna go over super well. It's maybe gonna leave people feeling more awkward than it does, feeling compassionate or empathetic towards you. And it might put you in a really strange place with your boss or with your coworkers, or, you know, whoever was. In that meeting or on that call where you opened up about some of those things. So figuring out how to do it well is really important. So let's think about that. What are some of the ways that we could do it well in order to be able to be honest about our weaknesses and still maintain credibility and respect with our team and with our supervisor? As we often do here on the Manhood Tribe Show, I'm gonna fall back on a couple of our five marks of manhood. Now, if you're new to manhood tribes, you may not know what our five marks of manhood are all about. These are the things that we believe every man should possess in order to demonstrate what it means to be a man. In other words, these are the ways that you live out manhood. This is what it actually looks like. If you have these things going on in your life and you're demonstrating them to others, you're showing what it means to be a man. And those five marks are strength, courage, skill, honor, and allegiance. If you want more information about that, you can go check out some of the very first videos on our channel where I go into more depth about each of the five marks. But today we're gonna talk particularly about the combination of courage and skill. Because I think learning to do this thing well of offering up your weaknesses in your workplace is really a matter of those two things. It takes the courage to actually be able to be honest about what's really going on with you about, you know, what's happening under the hood, so to speak, and letting people see that. Not everything is maybe as rosy as it comes across that there are cracks, that there are chinks in the armor and that that's actually okay. But learning to be able to open up about that takes a lot of courage, especially if you're the first person in your work environment to have to do it. But it also takes some skill. There is a real art here that's required in terms of knowing how to do this, when to do this. What the right environment at your workplace is to be able to do this. And so there is some skill and some technique involved in being able to do this well. Okay, so courage and skill, that's what we're looking for here. Again, manliness, right? That's what we're talking about. This is a manly thing to do, and using your marks of manhood will help you be able to see how this contributes to you getting better at being a man. This actually isn't what some of us tend to think, which is that if we show a sign of weakness, we're actually being unmanly. In fact, this is quite the opposite. You're summoning your marks of manhood so that you can get better at being a man in your workplace. So let's talk about that skillset a little bit. What are some of the things that you need to think through when it comes to opening up about your weaknesses in the workplace? The first thing is that you want to choose the right people. Okay? So maybe that means the person or persons that you need to open up to is your boss or your supervisor. Maybe that's the last person that you need to open up to. Maybe you just need to find a trusted confidant on your team who you need to be honest with and just say, Hey, I've got some tough stuff that I'm dealing with and it would really help if I could open up about it. Do you have a minute that I could share some things with you? Or maybe it's just as simple as, Hey, is the stress of what we're dealing with getting to you? Because it's really starting to get to me. Could we go to lunch and just talk about it Some like there's really simple ways of being able to do that, but choosing the right person to do it with. Is really what's most important, especially at the beginning. There may come opportunities to be able to open up to more people, but starting with the first one, that really key first person is really important. So find somebody that you trust. Maybe it's another guy on your team who kind of operates at your peer level and you kind of feel like, yeah, you know, the things that I say to him, I feel like he's gonna keep to himself and we can be honest. Or maybe he's even hinted about the fact that he's dealing with some of the things that you might be dealing with as well, and that would be a great way. To initiate that conversation. If you don't feel like that's the case, then you know, honestly, maybe it might be the HR person on your company's staff and you need to just go talk to somebody who you know, legally is required to keep in confidence what you're going to be able to share to them. And if that's the case, then that's okay. Go start there. And they may actually have some recommendations for you of how you can continue that conversation with other people on your team or with your supervisor and some ways to be able to do that well. But choose the right person to start with that is not likely to cause you any kind of blow back or any harm to your career. And by starting there, you might see some other doors begin to open of where you can go from that particular conversation. So the second thing is, is now that you kind of have identified the right person or the right people from there, you want to. From there, you want to figure out the right setting. So you really probably don't want to do this initially in some kind of a public or team setting, right? This is not something to do in the midst of your like, you know, normal, uh, check-in meeting that you do every week with your team. It's not really something to do in the middle of a sales call. You know? I mean, obviously we, we don't have to go over all of the wrong places to do it. A lot of those are pretty obvious, but the point is like. There are some right places and you need to figure those out. For the most part. I wouldn't start by doing it in a more public setting where multiple people are involved and they're not quite sure how to react, and everybody's kind of looking at somebody else to figure out what they should say. It's usually best to start with just one person and to do it in. Private to actually ask that person for some specific time where you could talk about some things. Maybe if it's a peer on your team who you kind of already trust, then it could be just going to lunch or maybe if it's your supervisor, it needs to be a scheduled, you know, on the calendar kind of conversation where you say you've got some tough things that you need to talk about and would just like to talk with them about it first. Okay, so any of those are possibilities. Maybe you already have a team that you really trust and you know that everybody kind of has your back, but just nobody has actually breached the topic of talking about personal matters. And then it might be okay to bring that up in a team setting. Maybe if your team has more of a like. Casual hangout or check-in meeting during the week, that would be the appropriate place to be able to do that, where you can bring up something that's a little more personal than simply professional, and that would be a good environment for opening up about those kinds of things. And in that setting, you may get some other team members who open up as well, and then you've been the one to crack the door, but other people were probably waiting for somebody to do that so that they could walk through it as well. All right, so figure out who's the right person, what's the right setting? And then you also wanna make sure that the way that you share really focuses on a couple things. You wanna focus on being specific. Not dramatic. Okay? So this is not really your opportunity to whine and complain or really even to vent, right? That's kind of our like catchphrase work now in the corporate workplace, which is to say, I just want to like kind of dump all of my problems and let it all out for a moment, and then it's okay. Venting, right? Uh, you don't really want to start off by venting. You want to be specific about. These are the things that I'm struggling with. This is why it's hard on me and you know, this is how it's leaving me kind of feeling, or how it's affected me as a worker. And some of that may be specific things about what's going on in the workplace. Some of it may not. It may be things that are just personal to you. You're having a particular family crisis or there's something going on with your health that needs addressing and it just hasn't, you know, been able to be brought up in the professional workplace setting yet. So whatever it is, you just need to be specific and not dramatic. Don't focus on complaining or over-exaggerating or overdoing what the problem is. Just give some details and talk about how it's affecting you. The second thing is that you want to focus on probably some solutions or some possible next steps. So for example, again, instead of just venting, which is just kind of airing all your grievances, it's okay to talk about the things that are hard, but it's also good to be able to come with some suggestions or recommendations of things that could be done to make things better. So if you're dealing with some personal problems, coming to your supervisor to talk about how hard things are on you is one thing. It leaves them in a place where all that they really can do is be compassionate and empathetic, and hopefully that's how they'll respond, but probably they will feel like they're in a better place if you come. Asking for, here's what I could really use to help kind of lighten the load for me at work a little bit so that I could effectively address some of these things at home. And you're focusing on a solution. You're trying to say, Hey, I, I think that during this season I could be a more productive worker if, for example. I could really be done at 4:00 PM in the evening. And if that's the case, then I'm willing to give a little extra time. You know, earlier in the mornings I can show up before other people do, or you know, I've got some other additional time carved out. I can work through my lunches or you know, whatever. Like you make the suggestions of how you can be able to address that, but just saying, here's what I need and here's what would actually be really helpful. Full. And a boss who's understanding which believe it or not, most bosses are, I know that there's plenty of them who aren't, but most bosses are, all bosses are human and most of them have problems that they're dealing with as well. And so learning to be able to show some compassion and empathy towards your employees is something that I think all bosses are trying to do.'cause they would love to be shown that same compassionate empathy by the people who are supervising and in charge of them. So just focus on some solutions and some ways that you can take some next steps towards things continuing to improve. Now, I do want to say to you, if you are a man who is kind of in a place where things just feel like they have. Completely spiraled out of control. You are really hitting, you know, rock bottom or near to it and things just really feel like you're not able to manage what's going on in your workplace and in your life, and you're just not sure how to handle things. If that's the case, then I would love to recommend to you my victorious man coaching. This is my coaching program that enables men to kind of get out of the pit that they find themselves trapped in and move towards a life of more meaning. Purpose and joy. Now, it does take some process and some investment to be able to get there, but if you are finding yourself in that place, I would love for you to reach out to me and just see if this would be a program that's a good fit for you. You can email me at info@manhoodtribes.com, and I would love to connect with you about what you're facing and how I might be able to help. Now as we kind of wrap up, I want to talk with you a little bit about if you are the kind of man who chooses to pursue this path, this courage and skill of being honest about your weaknesses and your struggles in the workplace, what might that do? What kind of results could that really produce for you and for your workplace? Here's what I want you to see. You are more likely to gain respect by being vulnerable and opening up about your weaknesses than you are to lose credibility. Okay? You're more likely to gain respect, like I mentioned before. Most people in your workplace are hoping that someone else will go first at being honest about how things are difficult. They're hoping that someone else could do that because they're afraid of the same things that you are. But in honesty, they really just want the opportunity to be able to talk about those things the same way that you do. And that's true for peers and supervisors alike. Everybody really does want an opportunity to be able to talk about those things well. And so if you can model it, you will be the one to set the pace and actually help set the culture of what it looks like to be able to be honest in your professional workplace, even about things that are personal and might feel like weaknesses. It will also help you form stronger relationships at work. People will feel safe with you, like they can talk about real things with you, and you're not just some, you know, corporate stand in that nobody really knows how to relate to except about professional things. Now you become a real human being that they may be interested in developing a friendship with not just a working relationship. With, and that actually can translate to all kinds of good things in the workplace that can help you earn a raise or a promotion because people see you as somebody that they want to work with and want to see succeed within the company that you're a part of. It's also going to help you reduce stress. The more that you can share the load and share the burden, the less that you have to carry by yourself. And if you're not having to carry it by yourself, your stress goes down, your productivity actually goes up, and your ability just to relate well to your teammates, your supervisor, your customers, or clients, all of that goes up. Your stress will go down and you'll see. Results continue to improve as you begin to recognize your workplace as an environment that is safe for you to be honest about what's really going on, and you will start to be able to move towards freedom. That's one of our big goals here at Manhood Tribes is being free of the obstacles that keep us set back from becoming the men that we want to be. And the more that you can open up about those things and the more safe places that you create for you to be able to be honest about those things. The more freedom that you're going to be able to move towards. If your workplace could become an environment of freedom, how much better could your life really be? If you were able to look forward to your work environment as a place where you felt known, where you felt seen, where you felt trusted, and maybe even where you felt loved, wouldn't that motivate you more towards the work that you're doing and being a part of the workplace culture that you're in? I know it would for me. So I want to encourage you towards those things that the rewards far outweigh the risk of the consequences in this particular situation. It doesn't mean that there won't ever be consequences. You might have some real jerks in your workplace environment who are gonna try to take advantage of your weaknesses or put you down because of it. That could happen. It is a risk, but it's an. Unlikely risk and the much more likely possibility is all the things that we've just talked about. So by opening those doors, you might actually be the catalyst that creates the change and the freedom that you're really looking for in your life and in your work environment. Okay. I hope this has helped you guys out some. I hope it's given you kind of a framework for how you can view your workplace a little bit differently, and I would love to hear from you. I would love for you to comment down below and just say, what is one weakness that you need to open up about in your workplace environment? It may help another guy be able to think about his own weakness and how he could do that, but just get the conversation started. Put a comment down below, and I look forward to engaging with those comments as well. I look forward to seeing you next time. Right here on the Manhood Tribe Show. We'll see you then.