Fake It 'til You Make it: On a Dangerous Leadership Platitude and the Way Through.

Once when I heard a senior leader announce to his team, “fake it ‘til you make it,” I thought to myself this is a dangerous edge to walk.?

Every human being I’ve ever authentically met, myself included, admits one way or another they’ve built a significant part of their life on a compensation. In other words, they got to wherever they are by faking it. They achieved success by selling themselves out in some very costly way.?

Yet often faking it doesn’t stop when you make it. It stops when you have a significant enough breakdown or failure that reveals to you there is no other way forward than to confront the source of inauthenticity, its related compensatory behavior, and the impact its had on you. These moments can be world altering and totally re-empowering.?

Compensation & Consequences

By compensation I mean a way of my being that is covering for something I have said I’m not. Like I’m covering for not being good enough by being perfect; for not being smart enough by making sure I have it right; for not being capable enough by making sure I know how to; for not being strong enough by being tough; for not being pretty enough by fixing myself; for not being rich enough by showing what I have; for not being valued enough by waiting on others, and on and on, etc. etc..?

The paradox of being “not X” is that “not being” something isn’t a way of being at all. At any point in our lives we said we are, “not X,” we essentially create some aspect of our being as a house of cards.?A totally false self that can never be fulfilled, because I can never be enough of whatever I am not.

Principle: Not being X is not a way of being.

The consequences of compensatory behavior distances us in our relationship with ourselves and others. It limits our ability to lead and negates our willingness to be led. Often at the source of compensation is distrust in ourselves, in others, and in the world. With distrust and limits on who and what we can trust, possibilities for creating are limited and the requirement to control becomes too important.?

It costs us precious time and energy in our lives to hide and be hidden behind an image of who we are that we falsely believe can control, whilst the true human being we are that is not seen and disintegrated by walled off pain and acceptance of compensating behaviors. This is the tragedy of a growing number of senior leaders who confessed to me their success comes at the cost of projecting and protecting their image. It’s been me a thousand times.?

“Blind to the transparency of our actions, we confuse the image we want to project with the being we want to bring forth.”

- Humberto Maturana, The Tree of Knowledge

Compensation as a Protective Strategy

The source of any compensation is some past experience that was so painful that we developed a behavioral strategy to make sense of it or to avoid it in the future.

I’ve found again and again in working on myself and with others that the source of compensation is pain from early life. Usually this pain is from early in childhood (and often pre-verbal) and at the time it was so overwhelming that we hid from it, and then hid that we hid it.?

Seventy percent of adults experienced “Big T” trauma in childhood (forms of abuse, parental mental health conditions, severe injury or medical condition, divorce, death of immediate family member, etc). The resulting pain couldn’t be experienced and processed at the time given the stage of development. Thus, a compensating behavior emerged in that moment as a way of protecting ourselves, and the compensating behavior persisted usually unconsciously (and often through a lifetime) as part of our personality.?

I was totally blind and often in denial for many years of the pain in my life, of the pain I carried for my parents and ancestors, and of the compensatory behavior I developed to keep that pain away. My developmental environment was silently one of benign neglect of the body, emotions, voice and values which are fundamental to being human. Embodied disconnection was complicated when an attack on me as a 5 year old child left me with a severe eye wound and hidden neurological impact. Already sensitive before the attack, I became even more so and developed strategies to get my needs met in a developmentally difficult environment.?

The behaviors inherited and self created by a 5 year old were also compensating for parental weaknesses and cultural mythology. My parents could not totally and completely feel and express themselves authentically. My grandparents less so. They were all self critical failures in their own words. Thus, I had to be successful, to make my parents proud of their sacrifices, to have more, do more, receive the respect and recognition my ancestors could never have, and on and on. I had to be valued, needed, indispensable. And I could never lose it. To have any chance of being that, starting in childhood I had to hide the parts of myself that were not that. These inner parts have soft voices that grow louder over the years if they are not released to speak with authenticity. The more “not X” I make myself, the more limited and controlled by invisible external forces my being becomes.?

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” Carl Jung

Career Volatility as the Catalyst of Self Transformation

When my career decisions brought about geographic relocation, switching industries and changing companies, my compensatory behavior and related inauthenticity created a false self that I could no longer trust because so many ways of being were off limits (including healthy anger, sadness to confront a loss or ending, etc). Numbed out, I lost the power to sense in new environments. The environments I entered were rife with covert inauthenticity, distrust, manipulation and coercion, especially in times of stress in my personal assessment. I could see the false self I created was selling out my true self in its desire to be liked, valued, and successful despite those wants and behaviors being totally dysfunctional and inappropriate to the situations.?

In my personal tragic experience, seemingly every area of life gets impacted when career breakdowns and failures are at stake.?

Along with career turmoil, health always suffers. Marriage, family, and community involvement can get marginalized. The domain of job or career when conflated with money, power, relationships, dignity, and increasingly even spirituality (ie, my career is my purpose) takes on much greater significance. A career breakdown becomes a breakdown across many domains and concerns, threatening? identity, self esteem and values.?

The degree of discomfort and pain we experience in our careers can be a powerful catalyst for self transformation when we declare the intent to change. All of these domains can be reconstructed in alignment with the authenticity of our being, without the fragmentation that comes from compensating behavior.

Resolving Inauthenticity & Living True

It’s difficult to confront career failures alone, which is often what one must do in a culture and era of individualism where tribal identity has been built around company brands. There are many self help gurus, experts that carve the human being up into parts and with modalities, and peddlers of motivational speak and simple answers. Fortunately, I found a way through with more than a few dark nights of the soul and several powerful teachers. I was guided to look at any and all ways I’m compensating and work from a commitment to be fully authentic and living true in every moment.?

Principle: High-Performance is a function of low tolerance.??

I discovered gradually over time I can honestly face in more breadth and depth the ways in which I was and still am compensating, I’ve become curious about much more of what I think, say and do. I get delighted when I notice shifts in my body that affect thoughts, and exercise the capacity for grounding in present moment truth. I call this kind of detective work the archaeology of the soul and mastery of the lived experience. The soul wishes to move beyond projecting an image to total and complete self expression from a place of higher self interest and towards true self fulfillment. The mastery of lived experience discerns the past based memories of the body from the present perceptions of the inhabited space, and what belongs to oneself from what one picks up in social interactions.?

With more digging I emerged with new kinds of embodied awareness, greater availability to emotion, and increased network of connections between my interior world of feeling and thoughts, and a more useful map distinguishing past experiences from present to inform intentional ways of being in the moment.??

Creating an Environment of Diversity of Wisdom?

The environment we work in creates the context for what we notice and experience. Transmuting compensatory behaviors and living authentically is not cheap or easy. Yet the cost of outdated models of human behavior may be even more costly as the potential for real greatness is compromised by compression to mean behavior, and the power of wonder and imagination are clipped by the concern for fitting in with false coherence of beliefs and behavior.?

Humans are messy and the best of us develop through our sometimes quirky strengths and anomalous experiences and practices. Rarely does any great player in the art of sports resemble a model of greatness. Compensation limits what people are willing to notice and examine in reflecting on their own behavior in situations, on the relationship with others, and on what they see in their environment. When any view is off limits, there will be projection and distortion of reality. Distortion of reality keeps game play and performance to low levels.

Many leaders I’ve worked with speak publicly of the importance of authenticity, yet privately confess they along with their cultures fail to embody anything like it. Even those who are most authentic have compromised their personal values and ethics in moments of truth to the politics of organizational forces. Any environment has not only these political dimensions and unspoken norms, but also explicit and measured leadership rubrics and performance assessments that constrain behavior to what a model of success looks like in the company.?

People exist in relationships. There is no being without being with others. Only when we are in an authentic relationship with ourselves and others can we achieve the highest levels of self actualization, and the commitment to something greater than ourselves and performance therein that is only available to us in that state of being. Only when the others we are with constitute a plurality through this kind of diversity do we discover the challenges and benefits offered in diversity of ways of being that are distinct from ordinary knowledge and skills.

The work we do at MissionB can be difficult on ourselves in the moment when we reveal unconscious ways of being that had been neatly concealed. We eat our dog food so to speak. Yet with revelation comes renewed freedom and power, and the capacity to offer more of ourselves to others while inviting others to be more of themselves with us. In the wake of revelation new powers are discovered that are won through confronting and resolving situations that offer us real embodied wisdom, not the kind of wisdom taught by others in books, courses and podcasts.

We guide leaders and teams in clearing away the past and in inventing new futures for people and organizations sourced from inspiration, not compensation.??

Join us at any upcoming Future, Purpose & Alignment Roundtable where we will explore Getting the Past Out of Your Future, and creating a pathway to being and working in true alignment.??

Register here .??