The World Needs More You
We all inhabit some kind of personality when we’re online, and probably at work too.
It’s about fitting in, and making it clear who we are.
But if you’re not being the true you — your authentic self — it can be exhausting. And you may find there are cracks in the surface that allow people to tell when you’re not being yourself.
Authenticity isn’t about being someone else.
It’s about being the best version of yourself.
Did you ever take the time to step back and wonder about the various personas you meet online? They could be long-lost friends, writers you admire, or people in your social network whom you may have never met before.
Because of the ubiquity of online content—whether on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or elsewhere—we have an impression of what success looks like, as if a 15-second staged and edited video could tell the full story.
But what do you really know about them?
How many of these folks are truly themselves when they’re online? I mean, how many are perhaps bolder in their assertions or less cautious with the language they use because of the less personal nature of the medium?
We spend a lot of time talking about authenticity as one of the tenets of social media — how businesses, brands and the people behind them need to be seen as real. Inevitably, the masses will sniff out a fraud.
I worked for an executive whose authentic and genuine nature were the hallmark if his leadership. It’s strange (and a little sad) that it was unique and different, but it made him stand out.
When one of his lieutenants — who was anything but authentic — started to ape that behavior, it stood out to me, but for the wrong reasons. The mimicked authenticity was completely inauthentic.
Why? Because it wasn’t heartfelt.
In 1953, e.e. cummings wrote about expressing authenticity as a poet:
“A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
Living With Yourself
Authenticity is more of a state of being rather than a skill — it's something that has to be part of your personality rather than taught as a course.
Authenticity represents who we are, not what we do. It’s easy to obscure both who we are and what we do when we use jargon to address our audience, because we’re following a corporate protocol, keeping up some outdated tradition, or just trying to sound smart.
Speaking to your customers, team members, or other stakeholders like a real human being is underappreciated and underused.
Isn’t it liberating to just be yourself? To be comfortable with who you are, and to show up that way, every day?
In order to be comfortable with yourself, you first need to truly know who you are.
Edgar Guest wrote about this in his poem “Myself”:
I have to live with myself and so
I want to be fit for myself to know.
I want to be able as days go by,
always to look myself straight in the eye…
I want to go out with my head erect
I want to deserve all men’s respect;
but here in the struggle for fame and wealth|
I want to be able to like myself.
I don’t want to look at myself and know that
I am… bluff and empty show.
I never can hide myself from me;
I see what others may never see;
I know what others may never know,
I never can fool myself and so,
whatever happens I want to be
self respecting and conscience free.
How we decide to show up will determine how we feel about ourselves, and as an extension, how we then treat other people.
When you don’t know who you are or what you stand for — take Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example — you’ll be adrift at sea, buffeted by the prevailing winds and currents of the day.
Max Chafkin at Bloomberg writes:
One of the things that makes Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg something of a comic figure in the tech world is that there’s no one in Silicon Valley—and maybe no other domain, save Hollywood—who’s as invested in conveying authenticity while also being so nakedly inauthentic. Zuckerberg is an Instagram hashtag come to life–an uber-nerd in the middle of an alpha rebrand, who somehow can’t help but come off as hopelessly, incurably beta. In his announcement on Tuesday about a set of changes at Facebook and Instagram, he managed to simultaneously kowtow to a onetime political adversary while explicitly aping the actions of an entrepreneur who’s spent a good part of the past two years threatening to beat him up.
Can you imagine trying to live with yourself like that?
The True You
Think for a moment about the people who work with you. Are you giving them the ability to be themselves at work? To express their ideas, to be comfortable with who they are?
We post job descriptions that call for people who show initiative. But when they do, perhaps pursuing an unconventional idea at your company, are they castigated or rewarded?
When we say we’re okay with failure, but then we penalize those who fail, what does that do to those who would be authentic in their approach to solutions?
And what about you? Do you have the ability to be your true self at work?
Perhaps you’re afraid of people discovering something about you—some personality flaw or lack of ability. You’re not alone. We’re all flawed. And the only people without impostor syndrome are actual impostors.
The leaders I admire most are those who are consistently themselves (i.e., authentic) whether they’re in front of a camera, a crowd, a boardroom, or an individual in an elevator.
When a leader shows how they’re comfortable in their own skin and treats people with dignity and respect, is curious, has integrity, is patient and kind, and the dozens of other timeless leadership qualities, we trust them.
And as we know, trust is the foundation of leadership.
Why not be yourself? Give people a chance to see and trust the real you.
That’s what it means to be authentic — because to be anything else simply wouldn’t be true.
There’s so much to learn,