In September of 2016 we landed in Florence with everything we owned for the next ten days in the back of a rental car.

We were there for a Six Seconds Master Class — emotional intelligence practitioners from around the world, at a castle in Tuscany about ninety minutes out of the city. At the airport we picked up a woman we had never met, a Six Seconds colleague working out of Dubai who needed a ride. Canadian originally. Talkative in a way I was in no condition for after six hours of time difference.

We stopped in a village to eat. Busy square, cars everywhere, a small restaurant up a flight of stairs where the owner greeted us in English and talked us into the local red.

When we came back, every other car in that square was gone, and Lynette’s jacket was hanging out of a broken rear window.

They had used it to cover the hole. Suitcases, backpacks, computers, iPads — all of it. We stood on opposite sides of the car, looked at each other over the roof, and started laughing.

And my passport

It took a while for that one to land.

The clothes were an inconvenience. The computers were expensive. The passport was something else, and I did not have words for it that afternoon.

In a foreign country, that document is not a travel convenience. It is the only thing you carry that says who you are. Without it I could not prove my name, my nationality, my right to be standing where I was standing, or my ability to go home. Every other claim I had on the world — the company I had built, the work I did, the people who knew me — was eleven hundred miles away and completely unavailable.

I had my wife and the clothes I was wearing. That was the whole of my identity for the rest of that week.

We were in a liminal space from that point on, and I do not use that phrase loosely. There was the navigation of the loss itself, in another language. And underneath it, something I had not had to think about in decades: we had to work out how to fit in, where to fit in, and how to do it without any of the usual equipment.

That is a different experience from going to Italy on holiday. On holiday you are a visitor with a return ticket, and the question of whether you fit never comes up, because you are not trying to.

We were trying to.

Three things happened, and only one of them was kind

A policeman. I tried to explain to a local officer, in sign language, that our car had been emptied. He understood enough to send us back to Florence to file a report. Procedural. No warmth required, and none given.

A document we could not read. At the station the shared language turned out to be bad French, between our friend from Dubai and the officer. Lynette signed a theft report in Italian with no idea what it said. Her words for it, in her chapter of our book, are that she was entirely at the mercy of two people she had met only that day.

Then I got lost looking for parking and had to text and ask where they were, which was my contribution to the afternoon.

And whoever broke the window. That square was full of people. Someone put the glass through on a parked car in daylight and nobody stopped them.

I want that third one in here, because the comfortable version of this story is people are good. People are various. Belonging is not a claim about human nature. It is about what particular people do when you can do nothing for them.

The question

Two colleagues from the Six Seconds community in Italy — Tomasso and Ilaria — heard what had happened and texted to find out where we were. We asked them to meet us at the rental place, where we were swapping a car with a hole in it and paying for the hole.

They arrived. And their first question was not how are you, and it was not let us know if you need anything.

It was: what do you need first?

And I cried.

I will leave that where it is rather than dress it up. I was in my sixties. I had built a company with several hundred people in it and the words failure is not an option painted above the door. I had spent the whole day being competent at a robbery — sign language with police, a report I could not read, a rental counter, a wife to get to a castle. I had not come close to losing it once.

Then two people I barely knew asked me a question I could answer, and I could not hold it.

I have had nine years to think about why, and the best I can do is this: for most of that day I had been a problem being processed. A case number, a damaged vehicle, a man gesturing at a policeman. What do you need first was the first moment anyone had treated me as a person who still had needs rather than a situation requiring management. It arrived about four hours after I had stopped being able to prove who I was.

Then they drove us to an electronics shop and spoke Italian while we stood and watched, and we came out with phone chargers and a hair dryer with the right voltage for Lynette. Then they took us to a restaurant, got us a table in a sheltered corner, and ordered for us — because they had worked out we did not have another round of language in us that day.

Why that question and not the other one

Let me know if you need anything sounds generous and does almost nothing, because it hands the work back to the person who is already carrying too much. They have to work out what they need, decide whether it is fair to ask, find the words, and risk the no. Most people, at their lowest, will simply say they are fine.

What do you need first does the opposite. It assumes there is a list. It assumes the list is long. It asks for one item. And it can be answered in four seconds by somebody standing in a car park with nothing.

That is not a warmer way of saying the same thing. It is a different thing, and the difference is who does the work.

If you lead people, this is the single most portable thing in this post. The next time someone on your team is underwater, do not offer to help. Ask them what they need first.

Gentle while we got it wrong

Here is what I remember most clearly, and it took me years to understand it.

We messed up the language. We messed up the customs. We turned up at the wrong hours, mispronounced everything, misread how things were done — and the Italians we met were gentle with us the entire time.

Not patient the way people are patient with a nuisance. Gentle. The restaurant owner who switched to English unasked. Tomasso and Ilaria ordering our dinner. The people at the training who told us where the shops were and then took us — three separate trips before we were dressed again. A waitress at the end of that week who kept her restaurant open past closing for our first wedding anniversary, put American music on, and made us a meal we still talk about. We ran into her in the square afterwards and met her son.

None of them were buying anything from us. We had nothing to trade, no standing, and in my case no document proving I was anyone at all — and we were welcomed anyway.

That is belonging, and it is worth being exact about why. Identity is what you can prove. Belonging is what happens when you cannot prove anything and are received regardless.

Most organizations never find out which one they are running on, because almost nobody in them is ever that exposed. What gets measured is contribution — so people quietly conclude that their standing is their usefulness. That holds up fine until the week they have nothing. Then they find out what they actually had.

The part I did not know at the time

Near the end of the week we asked Josh Freedman, who runs Six Seconds, about getting more involved. He told us he had been watching how we handled it.

That conversation is why the SEQ assessment exists. The framework this series is about came out of a week in which I had no passport, no luggage and no language, and was carried by people who owed me nothing.

I did not know I was being watched. Nobody does. Worth sitting with, if you lead anything: people are deciding whether you belong with them based on what you are like when it has gone wrong — and no one is going to tell you they are deciding.

Post 2 of 3 on the domains of spiritual emotional intelligence. Part 1: The Last One to Know — Awareness. Next: It Isn’t Confusion, It’s Exhaustion — Insight.

Peace and every good.

A companion workbook for this post: Who Gets to Arrive With Nothing (PDF).

About Jim & Dr. Lynette Vaive

Jim and Dr. Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of Spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. Jim is a Master Certified Coach and Lynette a Professional Certified Coach; both are certified Narrative Enneagram teachers and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources and credits

The events of September 2016 are told more fully in Dr. Lynette Vaive’s Chapter 1 of our forthcoming book on Spiritual Emotional Intelligence. Her account is the source for the sequence of that afternoon and for her own words about signing the theft report.

Tomasso and Ilaria are named with thanks, and with permission.