BackOpinion: Why ‘be yourself’ may be bad advice
‘Be Yourself’ assumes there is one fixed self you have to discover and unleash on the world
PremiumLike Follow Your Passion, Be Yourself is well meaning, yet confusing advice millennials get all the time. Perhaps because we live in an age where even intelligence is artificial, the quest for authenticity is higher. We want to work for authentic companies, pursue projects with authentic colleagues, report to authentic managers and be with authentic friends.
Pretending to be someone you are not can be excruciatingly exhausting. More so, people can tell when someone is putting on a show. It is impossible to wear a mask for 12 hours a day, 5 days a week. Even if you manage, it is unlikely that your colleagues will trust you. Without trust, there is no cooperation and without cooperation, the entire premise of the modern, collaborative work environment falls apart.
Two Arizona-based professors, Jennifer Parth and Richard Kinnier, used content analysis from 90 American university commencement speeches delivered between 1990 and 2007. Not surprisingly, one of the most frequently used messages was: Be Yourself.
In a moving commencement speech at Clark College, Children’s Defense Fund founder, Marian Wright Edelman encouraged students to “listen to the sound of the genuine within yourself." Although Edelman ’s speech was riveting, I wasn’t sure if students would know what their true selves were.
Knowing yourself is hard work, especially when you are young. That’s the time no one listens to you, everyone has stray bits of advice and you feel the pressure to meet unreasonable expectations. Further, Be Yourself assumes that there is one fixed self that you have to discover and unleash upon the rest of the world. This is false because we have the tendency to underestimate the personal and contextual change we go through. Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck’s research on mindset has shown that believing that there is a fixed self can interfere with personal and professional growth.
That is why, instead of trying to be your fixed self all the time, you should consider micro-experiments that can help you know yourself and your leadership style. It obviously doesn’t mean that you show up to work as a different person each week. All I am saying is as long as you stick to your core values, it is worth tinkering with different strokes of authentic leadership.
But, believing in the tyranny of the fixed, authentic, unrestrained self can land you in trouble. Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs tinkered with radical honesty and spent a few weeks trying to be fully authentic. In this period, he frightened a five-year-old when she commented on his yellow teeth, told his mother-in-law that the birthday gift she sent was ridiculous, announced to his nanny that he would go on a date with her if he were single, and confessed to his wife that he often confused her with his sister. You can imagine how this experiment worked out for Jacobs. This is what he said after its culmination: “Deceit makes our world go round. Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse."
I disagree with Jacobs’ simplistic quote but I think his experiment helps us uncover nuances of authenticity . Adapting content to context is not equal to being less authentic or disingenuous. It simply shows you have the humility to experiment.
Wharton’s organizational psychologist Adam Grant explains that instead of searching for our inner selves and figuring out a way to express it, one should start with our outer selves. He suggests that we should pay attention to how we present ourselves to others, and then try to be the people we claim to be. How I wish politicians of today consider this.
Instead of obsessing over authenticity, one should recognize that knowing oneself is a tough task and focus on building a growth mindset that is hungry to learn and unlearn.
Millennial Matters recalibrates the skills needed to survive and find meaning in the workplace of tomorrow.
Utkarsh Amitabh is founder of Network Capital, a global peer mentoring community and a WEF Global Shaper.
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