As a leader, as a friend, as a partner, a parent, a colleague, we build relationships. I often say, and fully mean the words, that life is all about relationships. It is how we accomplish things, how we solve problems, how we enrich our life experiences, how we perceive, and appreciate, the world around us. Without relationships, we cannot achieve our potential in any aspect of our lives.

Yet, having relationships that are deep and meaningful requires an element of risk. We have to open ourselves to others, we have to share honestly and we have to feel safe in holding other’s confidences and trusting them with our own.

That is not to say that we should begin to tell our darkest secrets to every person that we meet. And many of us have parts of our life that we may share only with those closest to us, truths that are too painful or raw to see the light of day.

We have to decide how open we are in every situation, how much we are willing to expose that “soft underbelly” that we keep hidden.

For many of us, there are parts of our lives, of our pasts, that we often share. We can recount the non-emotional details of our lives and we can talk about the big, difficult things as facts, but not emotions.

And when we are fortunate to be connected with someone we feel we can trust to accept us as we are, we can open the door to being more vulnerable, to recounting both the events as well as the feelings.

It’s complicated, this willingness to be vulnerable. We wonder what a person will think if they really know who we are and what is on our minds. We wonder if they’ll judge us and find us wanting or whether our truth will change their feelings about us or, worse yet, if they will fail to keep our confidences and keep them private. We have to trust to be open and to feel that our trust will not be misplaced.

I had lunch the other day with someone who has been a casual friend for several years. We know each other, we’ve talked about some personal things, but we live in different geography and our interactions are sporadic so our friendship, while warm, has not been close. Over our salads, our conversations went to a new level, things she faces, things I have faced, a more deeply personal level than we’ve had in the past and we left that lunch knowing one another better than we ever have.

In some respects, it seems that the longer we live, the more we build up the walls around our vulnerability. We have more to hide, more to protect and we may be slower to be open and fully honest with others. Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, to be open, to trust, enables us to continue to grow and to continue to fill our full hearts.