Protecting the soft spot
We all have one. Or more than one. It's that place where we can get hurt, the one we seek to defend.
For some people, it's a boss calling us out in front of our peers. For someone else, it's an angry customer. For someone else, it's being confronted with a problem you can solve–but that the effort just seems too great.
The key question is this: how much does the act of protecting the soft spot actually make it more likely you will be hurt?
It turns out that the more you angle yourself, the harder you work to protect the soft spot, the more likely it is that you'll get hurt.
All the time and effort you put into ducking and hiding and holding and avoiding might be sending the market a signal… the irony of your effort is that it's probably making the problem worse.