Authenticity: don’t just be yourself, make the most of yourself

This post, and many more, is available on my personal blog.

Just be yourself, there is no one better

(Taylor Swift)

Thanks Taylor, but it’s not quite as simple as that for many of us.

If I went around just being myself, I wouldn’t last very long, and I certainly wouldn’t have anything like the impact I want to have in the world.

If I didn’t get fired for lying around in bed listening to music, reading books and eating chips, I’d probably get fired for snapping at people who dared to interrupt me when I was busy doing the crossword.

I don’t do any of those things though, not just because I need the job, but also because putting what Daniel Kahneman (reference) calls the “experiencing self” in charge (the indulgent me lolling around in the present), rather than the “remembering self” (the me that looks back at my past actions), is a terrible strategy for life.

So, to add to Taylor Swift’s quote:

Just be your remembering self, there is no one better (and don’t be your experiencing self, there is no one worse)

(Taylor Swift, plus me (with help from Daniel Kahneman))

This sounds like I am going against the ubiquitous “live in the present” advice that carpets so many social media channels, but I’m not. I’m saying we should live in the present, pay attention to the moment, but put our future-selves (Kahneman’s “remembering self”) in charge of the decisions.

This “two self” approach is fundamental to understanding authenticity – being “authentic” doesn’t mean “just be yourself” in the Swift-ian sense, it means understanding the layers of “self” and then going deep, away from the mood of the moment, to the impact you want to have in the world.

We all have this superficial moody outer layer that is vulnerable to our emotional responses and our physical state in any given moment. Maybe we’re irritated and snappy, tired and grouchy, or even ecstatically happy and full of joy – this is our child ego state, to use Transactional Analysis language, and whilst it is sometimes useful (to energise us if the feeling is positive and constructive, or to understand our own wellbeing etc.) it is mostly unhelpful and fickle, biased and indulgent, and not really the self we should be leading with at work.

It is authentic in one way, but it’s not only ineffective and unprofessional, it’s unethical.

Why should other people have to suffer the slings and arrows of our moodiest of moments?

They don’t.

Wherever we sit in a hierarchy, the people we work with are our social equals and they don’t have to put up with our crap, however superficially “authentic” our crap may be.

At first sight this might feel like an unsatisfactory dichotomy: be authentic on the one hand, or be a phoney corporate robot on the other … and I have heard many professionals say variations of this (“That’s me, it’s the way I am, sorry but you have to live with it …”) … but this isn’t the choice, because the “self” is more complex than that one top layer.

I think of it as three Matryoshka dolls … (for simplicity I only think of three layers, but I have seen models with many more).

For example, if I am busy trying to write something, I don’t much like being disturbed. If my child brings me their latest drawing of a dog, say, I can be authentic and snap at them (“don’t disturb me!”) and can give honest feedback on their drawing (“it’s rubbish!”) but despite the authenticity of these behaviours, I don’t do them. Instead I reach into my reserve of patience and smile and remember that it’s more important for me to be a good parent than be an unsuccessful writer, and so I say “that’s a brilliant picture of a … a … a … a dog, yes, I was about to say that … I love it!”

I am controlling my superficial responses and am instead tapping into my deeper value of wanting to build our relationship and build their confidence and creativity.

This is also authentic, but it has the bonus that my remembering self – future me – will look back with a little nod of satisfaction because the impact I had was more congruent with the impact I wanted to have.

I like to think of this as skilful authenticity.

This is taken from Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones who used the phrase “Be yourself – more – with skill” when talking about leadership in their book “Why Should Anyone be Led by You?”

In other words, being authentic is not the end goal, it’s the starting place based on your self-awareness of what is good about you – and important to you – and useful in the professional context, that you want to keep and use as your foundation. That’s the “be yourself” bit, then you have to make the most of your strengths and talents with courage and conviction (“more”), and then build on this cleverly and carefully to become more effective (“with skill”).

In a BBC article by Professor Sir Cary Cooper and Stefan Stern make a similar point about self development and the myth of authenticity being some sort of skeleton key to boundless success:

… when you step up to a new role, just being yourself may not be enough. You have to grow and improve. Authenticity could be an excuse for laziness. Don’t be fake but equally don’t limit yourself to one way of operating. You may have to experiment with new ways of working to find the right way to excel …

This is also an essential prerequisite to personal growth: a realistic understanding of your self, no excuses, but no false modesty either; realistic (about the good and the bad), honest, and constructive.

Loretta Malandro, says this (from her book Fearless Leadership):

When you can truly understand how others experience your behaviour, without defending or judging, you can then have the ability to produce a breakthrough … Everything starts with your self-awareness.

But … we can’t entirely be a shapeshifter, morphing into the most useful human form for each circumstance, there needs to be something authentic at our core, and this is where the skill comes in.

We need to be authentic to that inner Matryoshka self (the stuff we really care about) and then learn to skilfully use the best bits of our personality for the context (the middle layer), those parts of us that will be the most useful to serve the deeper self in that moment.

If we can get this right, this is being ourselves, being authentic, but with skill.

We’re not trying to be someone else, we’re trying to be our best selves to have the impact we want to have.

Or, as Taylor Swift might one day say:

Make the most of yourself ... for that is all there is of you

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

This post, and many more, is available on my personal blog.