Why People Cry in My Workshops

For the first seven years of my work with leaders, something puzzled me. People cried.

Often, and in sessions that had nothing to do with grief or hardship. Accomplished professionals who had sat through countless corporate trainings would stop mid-sentence and need a minute.

I didn’t understand it. The content wasn’t designed to be emotional. We were talking about how they lead, how they see opportunity and how they contribute. So for years, I simply made room for it and kept going.

Then someone explained it to me, and I have never seen my work the same way since.

“We’re never taught who we are”

What they told me was close to this:

“Glenn, everything we’ve ever been taught at work is a skill that helps the company make more money. Sell better. Manage better. Present better. Nobody ever teaches us who we are. And when you show us that we can grow a business by being more of who we are, it feels completely backward. I didn’t know who I was until today.”

That was the answer. People weren’t crying because the material was sad. They were crying because, for the first time in a long time, someone was asking them about themselves instead of asking them to fit something.

The emotion in those rooms was the release of years spent performing a role while setting the person aside.

Think about how most careers are built. We are taught to become qualified for a job, and then we are on our own. School prepares us to pass the test. Training prepares us to do the task. Almost nothing prepares us to claim who we are and bring it into the work. So people learn to succeed by fitting in, and the part of them that doesn’t fit gets quietly packed away.

What happens next

The tears are not the point. What happens afterward is.

The same person told me what changed once they understood how they were built. Their teams got better. They were more productive. They had fun again. They genuinely cared about one another. And because they knew and trusted each other, they could challenge traditional thinking without anyone feeling threatened. The logic of a new idea could win on its merits.

I have heard versions of that story many times since. It points to something most organizations overlook. When people bring more of who they are to work, performance doesn’t suffer. It improves, because people stop spending energy on pretending and start spending it on contributing.

I explored why that matters for every leader in What Do Your People Naturally Solve For?

I am not here to teach you to think like me

The way I teach has a lot to do with why people react this way, and it starts with what I tell every group at the beginning.

I am not here to teach you how to think like me. That would be a waste of everyone’s time. The world doesn’t need more copies of anyone.

The content is about you. Everything is designed so participants see themselves in it: their instincts, their history, the moments they held back and the moments they were at their best.

That approach feels unfamiliar because so much professional development works the other way. We hand people a model, a framework or a hero to imitate, and we measure success by how closely they follow it. Imitation can teach a skill. It can’t teach someone who they are.

Why this starts long before work

Many of the people crying in my workshops learned to set themselves aside long before their first job. They learned it in school, at home and among friends, wherever fitting in felt safer than standing out. I wrote about that in The Exhausted Executive Was Once a Kid.

That is why I now spend so much time on the next generation. If a young person learns early that their value comes from who they are, not only from the skills they can be trained in, they may never need that moment in a workshop decades later.

A few questions to start with

If you lead people, try asking these in your next one-on-one.

• What do you do here that you’d still want to do even if no one measured it?
• When did you last feel fully yourself at work?
• What part of you do you leave at the door when you walk in?

Then listen without trying to fix anything. You may be the first person to ask.

People don’t cry because they are weak. They cry because they recognize themselves after a long time away. The leaders who make that recognition possible build teams that perform better, and they help people get back something that should never have been lost.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.