"The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation."
Emmanuel Levinas
As practitioners, coaches, supervisors, leaders, educators, we are often taught to look for patterns of behaviour, potential, strengths, resilience, and motivation. These are useful lenses. They help us see what a person is capable of, what they can build on, where the energy for change might come from.
But what if, before all of that, we asked a different question?
What vulnerability is this person carrying into the room?
Not only emotional vulnerability, though that is real, and it matters. Structural vulnerability too: the conditions someone was born into or has landed in, largely outside their control. And relational vulnerability: what a person risks simply by being in relationship with us, by trusting us with what they say and how they say it.
To look at others and at ourselves, through the lens of vulnerability means looking at the tender, undefended place that has no armour. It is an exposed, gentle, delicate corner of our existence that belongs both to our humanity and to the conditions in which we live. Not a flaw. Not something to fix. Simply what is there, underneath the role, the title, the presenting problem.
What if we began by looking for the vulnerability brought by grief, migration, gender, exclusion, financial insecurity, identity, power, or simply by being human? Some of these a person can name easily. Others they may not yet have language for, or may have spent years learning not to show.
What changes when we begin there?
Perhaps we become slower to judge. A behaviour that looks like resistance, defensiveness, or difficulty often has a vulnerability underneath it that hasn't been seen.
Perhaps we understand resistance differently, not as something to overcome, but as a form of protection that once made sense, and may still.
Perhaps we stop mistaking survival strategies for personality. What looks like "who someone is" is sometimes closer to what someone had to become, in order to get through something.
Perhaps we become more careful with the trust that has been placed in our hands. Trust, once given, is itself a form of exposure. It is not a neutral transaction.
Practice this with yourself too. The lens works both directions. What vulnerability are you carrying into the room, into the session, into the relationship and how much of your own practice is, quietly, a way of managing it?
Once we see it, once we become aware of it, it asks something of us: a responsibility towards what we have seen. This is close to what Levinas meant. Ethics, in his account, does not begin with a set of principles we apply from a distance. It begins in the encounter itself, in the moment we actually face another person and register what is exposed in them.
Every person who sits opposite us carries something that makes them vulnerable in this world. Some vulnerabilities are visible. Many are not. Some are chosen - the vulnerability of asking for help, or speaking honestly, or letting someone see more than is comfortable. Others are structural - the conditions a person lives within, often long before they enter the room, and often not by choice.
This distinction matters in practice, not just in theory. Chosen vulnerability can be met with an invitation: more space, more safety, an encouragement to keep going. Structural vulnerability asks something different of us, not encouragement to open further, but recognition of what is already true, and care about what our own role might be doing to it, whether we intend it or not.
It also matters for how a person comes to understand themselves. There is a difference between someone concluding "I am vulnerable" and someone recognising "these are the conditions I live under." The first can quietly become an identity, something a person carries as who they are. The second stays what it actually is: a set of conditions, which can be named, worked with, and sometimes changed. Part of what this lens offers, done carefully, is help making that distinction for the people we work with, and for ourselves.
Looking through the lens of vulnerability is recognising that every intervention, every question, every organisational decision, every relationship can make another person's world a little safer. Not because we can remove what makes someone vulnerable, often we can't. But because how we meet it is not neutral. It either adds weight, or it doesn't.
Ethics begins there.