Who Do You Trust Enough to Be Vulnerable With?

Who do you trust with all you hold?

Carrying a lot is one thing; carrying it without trusted people who know what you’re carrying is another.

So many of the incredible human beings I support carry big loads, not just at work but in their lives. They offer a buffer and protect their team from a lot of BS in the organization, advocate for promotions and bigger budgets, and care for family, their own health issues (physical and emotional), and what it’s like to be a citizen in this timeline.

And those I support share on repeat how lonely it feels to carry it all without someone they trust to know what they carry.

Trust Has Layers

Trust is foundational to any relationship.

Trust has different components: family, friends, team members, community members, and the culture at large.

And most importantly, our ability to trust ourselves. Self-trustc- or the lack thereof - is one of the most common focuses of my leadership coaching work.

Sometimes, because painful lived experiences still hang out in our memory networks, they affect our ability to trust ourselves and others. As a result, we can struggle with the vulnerability required to try something new, whether that’s entering a relationship, taking a big risk at work, or relying on someone else to represent or support us.

From an internal family systems perspective, this gets interesting because parts of you might trust you, and parts of you might not, depending on whether you can handle rejection or feel safe. Some parts of you trust a team member, and others don’t.

Our intellectual parts can think, ‘Let’s go, this relationship is good, this plan is good,’ and then the parts of us that carry echoes of betrayal show up anyway and block needed action because you do not trust yourself or others.

From a polyvagal theory perspective, our autonomic nervous system is like a little lighthouse, scanning our environment for two things: safety and connection, and it can impact our grounded confidence when the stakes are high and the demands are intense.

One of the most frequent things I work on with clients around self-trust is this: they’re the first to blow through their own boundaries as a way to navigate anticipatory anxiety, rejection, and disappointing others.

“Oh, I’ll do it anyway.”

“That’s okay. Just send it to me.”

“I’ll stay later.”

“I’ll make it work.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got it”

Minimizing needs. Minimizing hurts. It all adds up.

And listen, there’s adulting here. Sometimes we don’t always get our way and have to navigate a lot of constraints, too much to do with not enough time. But when you stop asking for help and keep pushing through on your own, you crash.

And there’s a flip side worth naming: are you trustworthy? Leaders often don’t feel like they have many people to trust or lean on, especially as they grow in their leadership. But I also ask them: what are you doing that builds trust in others? How are you making the people in your life feel seen, heard, and valued? How are you being consistent and reliable in your actions? Do your words and your actions follow each other? Trust goes both ways.

When Trust Disappears, Leadership Gets Lonely

A lack of trusted relationships contributes to loneliness.

I love how Brené Brown puts it: trust is earned through connection, in the everyday moments when people feel seen, heard, and valued. She calls it BRAVING: boundaries, reliability, accountability, the vault, integrity, non-judgment, generosity. It’s a framework I often talk about with my clients.

Research on CEOs specifically backs up the connection between leadership and loneliness: roughly half report feeling lonely in their role, and 61% say it hurts their performance. Based on what I see in my work, I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers were similar for people in other leadership and helping professional roles, too.

Leadership Loneliness is:

• Not an isolation problem, but a right-fit support problem. Leaders are rarely alone in the room. The loneliness isn’t a lack of people. It’s a lack of the right people, the ones safe enough to be fully human with.

• Carrying what they can’t unsee. Leaders often carry pending decisions, financial pressure, and information not yet ready to share that no one below them can know yet. Not because of distrust. Because sharing it would be inappropriate or destabilizing to the people who depend on them.

• The performance of “fine.” The gap between how put-together a leader has to look and what’s actually happening underneath is its own kind of isolation not from people, but from being known. (Note: ‘Fine” is considered a swear word in my home. I know… )

• Having fewer trusted peers. The higher a leader goes, the fewer people share the specific weight of their seat and their personal lives. That’s a different loneliness than simply being alone.

So many of the people I worked with over the years don’t sense how bad and hard things are until they are on the other side and get some needed relief. I work with leaders who are skilled, self-starters, and have an incredible work ethic and capacity to adapt. And when they push past their limits, it takes them out.

That’s when people come to me. I joke that they come to me metaphorically hanging off a cliff by their pinky finger, saying, “Yeah, things are feeling a little on edge right now”, because they’ve been able to function for so long just below their limits.

And not having a place to integrate all of what you’re holding, even while you’re forward-facing and leading, is a recipe for burnout and other health and wellness complications.

We Are Asking a Lot of Leaders

We also hold unrealistic expectations of leaders, and as a result, the leaders I work with have unrealistic expectations of themselves.

Modern leadership requires Olympic-level skills.

There is so much pressure to be all the things: we’ve got to be more adaptable, more strategic, more forward-thinking; we’re supposed to see the scenarios down the road. And a lot of us are carrying real burdens, real time.

If leaders can’t hold all that they’re holding, it’s harder for them to create a psychologically safe place sustainably.

I think we need more honest conversations about the tension between navigating loneliness and deepening trusting relationships, which I love having on The Unburdened Leader podcast.

Connection Is Part of the Work

In my recent conversation with Dr. Jamie Shapiro, author of Connected Culture, we dug into some of this.

Jamie’s research found that trust isn’t just a mood; it’s a physical state.

High-trust environments show up in the body: more energy, lower stress, access to a different part of the brain than fear-based environments give you. She reframed most “accountability problems” as connection problems. And you have to hear what chickens taught her about high-performing teams. (Check out the full episode for that one.)

Bottom line: It’s hard to trust who is safe enough to see the cracks. But you can’t lead what you won’t face or tolerate in yourself.

And having insight into how hard things are doesn’t necessarily make carrying them easier.

Trusting relationships do.

So, what gives you the oxygen you need to keep going? Not a quick fix, but something that’s actually sustaining you.

Where do you feel the most connected right now?

Who or what helps you feel centered? And how do you create that kind of connection for yourself and for others?

And, maybe most importantly:

Who do you trust enough to be vulnerable with?

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Harvard Business Review, “CEOs Often Feel Lonely. Here’s How They Can Cope,” Dec 2024.)

Brené Brown, “The Anatomy of Trust” brenebrown.com.)