No one needs a history lesson to know that Achilles was a demigod and therefore immortal save for one vulnerability which was his heel, the one part of his body that was not dipped into the river Styx by his mother Thetis. And it was into this heel that Paris fired the fatal arrow to avenge the death of Hector.

So before you blame your mother or anyone else, what is your Achilles heel? To give you a perfect example, the Nespresso experience is faultless until it is time to recycle. The delivery person fails to pick up the pods for recycling and in addition, should you wish to take charge, there are no retailers in your area who will take the pods back. For me that was a deal breaker so no more Nespresso. Of course the coffee was terrible but I was prepared to trade taste for convenience until convenience vanished.

BTW, their response to my suggestion that they fix this was a very weird mixture of arrogance and impenetrability, so I gave up.

Another example of an Achilles heel is what we used to call hypocrisy, a quality that we have become so inured to that we now shrug when we see it in politics, er, every day. In my world of media, a perfect example is many influencers. They want to get paid for endorsing your product and will then go on about how much they love it but they really couldn’t care less, and yet this in a world that puts a high price on authenticity. So the influencer uses media, messages and communications that lend themselves to  authenticity and yet are fake. The point is the Achilles heel here is a lack of trust on the part of the consumer.

So, now think about your own areas of weakness. We all have them and we all react to them in different ways. We may feel it doesn’t matter, or that there is nothing we can do it, or the cost to fix will be greater than the benefits, and so on.

For me, part of the solution is being honest about the problem, but getting there may depend on someone else pointing it out to you. So turn to the person on your left and ask them; I suspect you will not want to hear the answer.