Fake thriving: Gen Z, get to know the real person behind the social media posts!

My networking and interpersonal skills coaching sessions called "Connect, Relate & Thrive"? have been popular among seasoned professionals who need to get ahead yet feel rusty on the relationships-making front, but also among those who are just stepping into the professional world, i.e. the Gen Z crowd.

Asha (fake name!) is a typical Gen Zedder - ambitious, practical and technology-driven. She is also prone to conflating the online personas with flesh and blood people.

"It's depressive. I thought LinkedIn was different from other social media and that people act more professionally here, like, they are more real. But it's always 'I'm delighted to have achieved' this and 'I'm thrilled to be sharing' that. As a junior, I feel I have very little to share along these lines, and it makes me feel inadequate!". She adds, "Honestly, I'd struggle to want to connect to people who just talk about their achievements all the time."

"You can glean information about someone from their online posts, but no way it is a reflection of how well they are actually doing at life. Think about it, very few of us posts about our failures and our disappointments, for most part this stays behind closed doors. People are cautious to appear as "failures", and so we are all guilty in perpetuating the myth that our lifes are beds of roses. We never get a wholesome picture from an online persona, Asha. And that is why learning to relate to people, our professional connections, on a deeper level, ideally meeting with them face to face, means so much."

The fallacy of the perpetual string of the social media "I'm thrilled to announce..."s is what makes even the sanest of us reconsider our personal achievements and professional successes. These hard-won battles just don't seem to cut it anymore!

So spare a thought then for the young Gen Zedders - the oldest are just hitting their late twenties - that have grown up being constantly bombarded with the rosy lives of their peers (and, frankly, everyone in the Universe, it seems at times), as displayed on the social networks.

The professional lives are no different. But enough already! This is the time for us to face that "fake thriving"?. Professional journeys are non-linear. We need to start talking about our pain, own up to our mistakes and be candid about the failures that we have experienced. See it as our investment into good mental health of future generations!

I have realised the importance of this when I opened up about my out-of-the-blue, no-business-case-presented redundancy. You can listen to the Commerce Meets Law podcast here: https://lnkd.in/eUJCKesw .

And the best way to understand what's really happening in people's lives (fake thriving? aside) is to form real, authentic relationships around us. This is the only surefire way to learn how your connections are really doing, what's happening in their lives, what pains them and what gives them joy.

I am not the one for merely proclaiming good ideas, so my contribution to bringing in more balance to the string of posts on awards and achievements on LinkedIn is by teaching the vital skills needed for connecting with others. These are learnable skills, very few of us are born with them, but once we have invested in them - prepare to be blown away by the transformative effect the new, genuine relatioships have on your life. Give it a go. And of course, get in touch with me in you want to know more.

"All that social media is doing now is making me feel more anxious", admits Asha. "I feel inadequate and ultimately not in control. I feel let down by all of this fake thriving!" (she clearly liked my newly coined term...!).

I hear her. I am a lawyer, a UCL course lead, a speaker and a coach but I still sooo relate to Asha's feelings. I often feel inadequate too, despite all those things!

And so I offer the best response that I could think of at that moment. No, I say, we are in control. If we choose to think that we are, then we are. It's called human spirit - the only thing that is always and reliably there - in happy times and in difficult times, too.

Here's the power of human spirit incapsulated in one little poem called Invictus, written by William Ernest Henley in a hospital bed in 1875.

This is one of my favourite poetic verses of all times, from Invictus:

"It matters not how strait the gate,

??????How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

??????I am the captain of my soul."