The Complicated Task Of Being Yourself

Why being authentic is so hard, but rewarding

Let’s visit an important concept summed up beautifully by the author Brené Brown: Authenticity is not an excuse to over-share. Take a moment to think about your "favorite" over-sharer.  Maybe it’s a co-worker who spends twenty minutes per day hopping from desk to desk complaining about his stream of bad dates. Maybe it’s your boss, who hijacks at least a quarter of any meeting with a story about his politics or his lunch or whatever else pops into his stream-of-consciousness. These people’s over-sharing behaviors are annoying. They are also not doing anything other than seeking the approval of others for being unabashedly themselves. That approval-seeking behavior is the exact opposite of true authenticity.
 

Part of making peace with your authentic self is being extraordinarily self-aware. Self-awareness comes in two steps: the first is figuring out YOU, for all your strengths and weaknesses. The second is being courageous in that identity. Figuring out who you are might be easy. If that’s the case, you likely tend to live a fairly open life anyway, you don’t have the tendency to overshare, and people, generally, seem to think you’re okay. It won’t be a huge leap for you to figure out how to quit code switching from meeting to meeting, person to person. If that is the case, great! But maybe there is a part of your authentic self that you keep private for a specific reason. 

Maybe your authentic self could be met with hostility. Maybe your authentic self in no way aligns with your company’s values and mission. Maybe you are terrified that showing your true self in a meeting will get you fired. Maybe the idea of being exposed for who you really are brings you genuine fear. Maybe all of those fears are justified. But maybe they aren’t.

Regardless, you are making a choice between courage and comfort. More specifically, you're choosing between having the courage to be yourself in spite of the risks and the comfort of being the person that other people are sure to accept because it’s a role that they are familiar with and generally approve of. No matter what is holding you back from being YOU in any situation, if you’re choosing to be a less-true version of you, then you are choosing comfort.  And from a business perspective, one of the prices you pay for choosing this incessant shape shifting is that neither you nor the people you work with will ever know your full potential because it’s buried somewhere in version 37 of you.

At the same time, if you are ready to share the “real” you, be prepared to answer questions about it, because authenticity isn’t an immediate guarantee of acceptance. Just because you are showing your true self doesn’t mean everyone will automatically or immediately (or ever!) understand you, and while you don’t owe anyone an explanation of why you are who you are, you do need to have the self-awareness to know that your decision to be unreservedly you might raise an eyebrow or two.  

I’ve had bosses tell me that I would never get ahead if I didn’t dress up more for my daily work. Conference organizers have fretted that I wouldn’t be taken seriously if I didn’t look as formal everyone else in the room. I even got sent back to a break room to ‘dress up’ by one employer who was terrified that a customer would take me less seriously in handling his or her business because I was wearing a hooded sweatshirt on “casual” Friday. Apparently, I had made it “too casual” Friday. And without fail, before I speak or teach a class or write an article (or a book), people who see me assume that being in jeans means I’m less competent or unworthy of being taken seriously. There is, in most parts of the business world outside of the tech industry, a very conscious bias about people who dress casually for work. But this “casual” aspect of me is part of my identity. If I were to be forced to wear a suit to each of my presentations or classes or meetings, my physical and mental discomfort would quite significantly impact my ability to do a good job. 

“Sure,” you might be thinking. “That’s easy for you to say. You worked in tech!” And you’re right about that. It’s one of the reasons I chose to pursue my career in tech and not in financial services, for example. The dress code in almost every company outside of tech was a deal-breaker because it would force me to put on an appearance that didn’t represent me. That doesn’t mean I can’t or won’t or shouldn’t compromise, but I do it sparingly. It also doesn’t mean that there aren’t prices to pay. I don’t accept offers to speak at events if I have to dress up too much because I couldn’t imagine talking about my career - spent largely in jeans - while wearing a suit. It’s not who I am. I work in and around tech companies because they, like me, value output and impact much more than presentation or pomp and circumstance. We’ve always been a good match like that. I don’t expect that everyone will accept this line of thinking. It just means being honest with myself about and being okay with the trade-offs when or if I compromise.

Figuring out who you are, being okay with who you are, and then putting into practice the delicate work of being authentically you is not easy work, nor is it necessarily meant to be. Each and every day, both personally and professionally, you will be met with challenges to living authentically. It might seem nearly impossible to change from corporate chameleon to authentic contributor, but the return on the investment into yourself is clear: Shedding your multiple personalities is going to save you a ton of time and energy, and make you a better employee. It’s also going to make you a better human.
 

Mike Rognlien is the founder of Multiple Hats Management, a consultancy focused on building leadership at every level of an organization. Before starting his own company, Mike was one of the founding members of the L&D team at Facebook, where he spent 6.5 years building all things learning -- Onboarding, manager development, hard conversations, and, in partnership with COO Sheryl Sandberg, the company's Managing Unconscious Bias training. He is the author of This Is Now Your Company. Connect Mike Rognlien