I was talking to a coaching client about leadership, which works with people’s intrinsic motivations. Since our greatest motivations and passions tend to be our greatest vulnerabilities, we tend to protect ourselves by hiding them.

A challenge, then, for the leader who wants to go beyond just managing, beyond just leading, to inspire people, is to learn their deepest motivations, which they often protect the most.

I was working with the client on how to make people feel comfortable sharing their vulnerabilities. As much as we protect them, since they are passions we care about, we want to share them… as long as we feel the person we’re talking to will support us, not judge us, make fun of us, manipulate us, or otherwise use them against us.

I told him that since we want to share these things, many things we do reveal them. Nothing we do is inconsistent with them. When you know what to read about someone, everything about them reveals their passions and often their histories: their triumphs, traumas, and so on.

I pointed out that my book Leadership Step by Step reveals a lot about me. He’s read it and we’re doing exercises from it. I asked him what he could tell about me from it.

He couldn’t tell much, so I pointed out some of its main teachings:

• How to express yourself authentically
• How to make people feel comfortable sharing what they care about most
• How to make people feel understood, especially on what they care about most
• How to empower people to act on their passions

Then I told him these skills and experiences meant so much to me because I didn’t experience them from my parents, growing up or now. Never did my dad, mom, or stepfather express to me, “There are things about you that I don’t understand. I’d like to understand you. I’d like to take the time to put what I want aside and listen to you until you sense that I understand you.”

My client laughed from the heart. He knew what I was talking about because he lived it. He would have liked for his parents to try to make him feel understood. We both experienced that our parents never had and had mostly concluded that they never would. They didn’t seem to know that they could.

I told him how I told my parents how much it would mean to me. I told them that my book describes step by step how to do it. There’s no guesswork. I assured them it’s simple, easy, and everyone finds it rewarding. I told them that my coaching clients pay me a lot of money to walk them through the exercises because it helps them with all their relationships, including work and family.

My clients who do it consistently report back to me that applying the exercises brings tears of gratitude from people they lead, saying things like “Nobody has ever understood why I work so hard, and enabled me to give all I had to a project.” Even the clients with whom I only work on their work life tell me that their spouses and kids pick up on their new relationship skills and like the changes.

Yet not once has a parent or stepparent done it with me. It could take five or ten minutes and would cost nothing.

He recounted similar indifference. I’m not sure if that’s the right word. Incapacity? Disinterest? Uncaring?

He isn’t the only person who has told me about parents not even trying to understand them. Several people have told me they concluded that something about that generation of parents blinds or inhibits them from empathizing or trying to understand, like how people who lived during the Depression would save everything. But maybe other generations do it too. We don’t know.

We only know that beyond never feeling understood by our parents, we’ve never sensed our parents putting in the least effort to try.

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Writing the post was partly difficult because it feels raw and vulnerable to share something so personal that’s missing, creating emptiness in a deeply important part of life, but mostly easy because I’m just recounting a set of conversations. I don’t like that I’ve lived the content of the story, but I’m just sharing what happened. I’m not complaining about how I was raised. My parents supported me in other ways, just not this one.

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