Erica Bailey
Appearances
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Yeah, I knew very clearly, or I felt at least that I knew who I was internally, or I had some sense of inner self, but I was not able to access that or bring that forward in the group.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Inauthenticity is a really taxing psychological experience. It can make you feel anxious. It can make you feel depressed. And it really separates you from being able to make genuine connections with other people because you're so concerned with how you're coming across and managing that impression that you're creating in the other person.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
When sociologists talk about emotional labor, what they're referring to is this act of managing your impressions or the way you're coming across in these professional environments where we usually have norms about how to behave, norms about how to express yourself.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And these can even be formalized rules about the way you need to dress, the way you need to appear, and how you need to treat those people that you're interacting with. So that experience of having to manage how you're coming across at times when that is conflicting with your inner self requires some labor where the emotional labor term comes from.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
It requires some effort on your part to sort of keep up appearances. One example that sociologists mentioned is the service with a smile. So customer service representatives have to appear cheery and open and agreeable to people that they're interacting with, even if they are having a bad day or they're tired or they're bored with the person they're talking to.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Exactly. Or at times you're required to be inauthentic. As someone who worked in restaurants, sometimes you are having a great conversation with someone. You are smiling because you're having a good day, but that's not always the case. We've seen a lot post-COVID of these videos of customer service representatives, essential workers, airline attendants that are having to deal with
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
people who are speaking to them in a way that's inappropriate or not respectful. And, you know, deep down, they must be hurting. They must be upset. But they have to maintain that air of professionalism, even under those high pressure situations.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
She might have been rolling her eyes, looking at the clock, pretending to wash some cups underneath the, you know, far down at the other end of the bar to stay away from them so she doesn't get dragged into it. Yeah. Yeah. You really see everything working in restaurants.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Like many companies, IBM has what we call newcomer socialization, which is where they try and teach you about the organization's norms, the culture, help you understand the broader mission of the company. And as a consultant, that was particularly important because we would be going out to client site on behalf of IBM.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
So they wanted us to have a clear sense of that organizational identity and be able to sort of bring that persona to our clients. So this came in the form of sort of how we looked, looking professional, being on time. You know, we even had everybody had the same ThinkPad computers. We had the same cell phones. You know, we were really well branded as IBMers.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
At the same time, some of these, again, are just sort of internalized norms. So I'm a person that has visible tattoos and I was so concerned of anyone seeing my tattoos because surely this is against IBM's policy. And I asked a HR person, they said, oh, we have no policy about tattoos. Feel free to show them as long as, you know, the client thinks it's fine. We think it's great.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Exactly. As long as your shirt is ironed, you can show your tattoo.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Absolutely. And we're being lighthearted about it, but I don't want to ignore the fact that for some people, their authentic self could bring significant interpersonal costs. It can be a life or death matter to express some identities that people have. So sometimes that is a really serious thing that people manage where they keep parts of their personal self separate from their work self.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
difficult psychological experience for that person and what I usually tell people is that's the job of the manager to think about maybe how to create an environment that's more welcoming or open or accepting of different identities different individuals who are coming into a space where they might look the same as everyone else but they're carrying something internal that that we can't all see.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
This research followed what I think is a real intuitive idea, which is we all have a personal and professional self. Most of us don't behave in the workplace identically to the way we behave at home. So you can think about these two circles of two selves. And the researchers thought about the way that we think of those disparate circles as integrated or segmented.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
So they're either overlapping, they're coherent, they make sense together, or they're really far apart.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And what happens when those two identities are really far apart, when your work self is very different and segmented from your home self, is that you can pick and choose that, you know, at work I can be unethical, immoral, I can lie, which is what the experimenters looked at, because it's not diagnostic of my real self, my core self, the person I am at home.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And that separation allows people who see themselves as otherwise moral to engage in immoral behavior.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Or on the other hand, some people become so invested and so their identity becomes such a part of their work identity that the only thing that matters to them are these work successes or achieving something at work or climbing the corporate ladder and sort of what happens, how they treat their friends, their family members, people outside of the workplace are irrelevant to sort of where that source of self-esteem comes from.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Ellen DeGeneres, like many social figures, looms sort of large in people's minds. We all felt or most people who watched her show felt like we knew her or felt like we understand this person. She presented sort of this image of someone that's kind, someone that's very easygoing, lighthearted. and very authentic.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Well, from these reports, what we've heard is that she could be very different to the people that were working with her directly and create an environment where they did not feel that she was really accepting and open the way she was presenting herself to the world.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Authenticity is linked to greater subjective well-being. So this is feeling like you're satisfied with your life and also feeling positive affect or happiness and good feelings. So authenticity is really predictive of having that view of your life that things are going well. It's also related to feeling like you have meaning in your life and having better satisfaction with your relationships.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And in some of my work, we've also tried to extend that into the workplace to find how authenticity relates to the way you engage with your work tasks.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
So feeling authentic at work or feeling like you can be your authentic self at work also helps you focus on the tasks at hand because you're not taking up so much mental space or engaging in that emotional labor about how you're coming across or how is everyone thinking of me in this meeting? You can really just be present and engaged with your work tasks as they come.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Yeah, we'd be happy to. So this was co-first authored work with Sandra Motz at Columbia Business School. And we were interested not just in whether social media is good or bad for well-being. We were really interested in for whom is social media good or bad in terms of their well-being?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And are there decisions that people are making with how they engage with these tools that differentially impact well-being? how that tool use relates to themselves or their view of themselves. So what we looked at is over 10,000 Facebook users. We compared their self-rated personality, so what we call their self-view, with the way they express themselves on Facebook.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And what we found is sort of that distance between the way you see yourself and the way you were expressing yourself on social media was correlated with subjective well-being, such that if you're closer in terms of your self-view and your online persona, you had higher well-being.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Exactly. You know, there's this there's this phenomenon where people will gaze upon their own social media page and sort of like look at this version of their life they've created. And that can be a really dissonant experience if that's really different than your day to day or your emotional experience.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
What you're describing is this experience of state authenticity or those moments where you feel really aligned and connected with your core self. One moment that is really small from my own life, but that I go back to often was a time in high school where we were driving around with my friends in the car. It was a sunny day. The windows were down.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Music was playing and we were all singing at the top of our lungs. And that moment felt so authentic because, you know, I was so happy. You know, being a kid, you feel free for the first time when you're in a car. There's no adults around you. And I was experiencing that connection with my friends over this music and song and really feeling like this is where I belong in this moment.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Moments like this can help clue us into how authenticity is so fun and also sort of complicated. Right. So I ask a lot of people to tell me about these moments in their lives. And people will mention things like the birth of a child. And it's a moment where you feel really authentic, really connected. But of course, your identity has just changed dramatically.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
You know, you've now got a new identity, you know, being a father, being a mother, being a parent. Right. And yet you still feel very authentic, like this is now what my life is. This was how it was supposed to be. And that helps clue us into how this true self, this inner self can constantly evolve and change.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
My advisor or one of my advisors, Adam Galinsky, has this work about disinhibition and how things like being anonymous online, being able to pass a message anonymously to someone else or having a drink can help us feel free from these social constraints to express how we really feel. Unfortunately, on social media, sometimes that comes across really negatively.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
But sometimes having that moment with someone else where you're sharing a glass of wine and you feel like, oh, yeah, maybe these concerns I had about how this conversation would go were in my head and I can sort of relax into the moment and be really present with this person that I'm talking to.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Thinking our way into authenticity or trying to maybe just look inwards to find that core central self that's really going to make us happy is challenging because, you know, social psychologists would say, if you look inwards, there's not really anything there. What you have is like almost a mess of data. You have all these impulses.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
You have all these decisions that you've made, some of which you're proud of, some of which you're not, some of which you are proud of in the moment. And now you've come to regret. And so turning inwards, you are left to try and sort out or try to understand sometimes really conflicting bits of data about who you are.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And so what I often recommend to people is instead of focusing too much internally where things like self-criticism or self-doubt or social comparison can come into play, sometimes it helps to look outwardly and think about those situations where you really felt authentic. Hmm. as clues for who you are. You can also think about trying on different identities.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Like maybe I don't know if I like playing pickleball, for example, that's my new identity. And so you have to try it and you can feel in that moment, pay attention to how that moment makes you feel. Does it make you feel alive? Does it make you feel connected with who you are? And if it doesn't, no harm, no foul. Now you've learned something important from that situation.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Exactly. It's like a way to learn more about yourself, become more aware of who you are through reflecting on these experiences or through going out and having those experiences and bringing back self-knowledge into that internal experience.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
The first day of class, my teaching assistant wasn't able to be there. So sort of my lifeline, my comfort person was not there. I just had like a binder with all my notes and sweaty palms. And I felt very inadequate to be the one standing in front of the room.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
But what I did in the moment was that sort of fake it till you make it where I stood on my two feet, said good morning to the class and thought about what value I could provide for them in the moment.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
So even though I was incredibly nervous, even though I was sweating, even though my voice was probably shaking at the time, I tried to approach them with sincerity, with openness and allowed that experience to maybe feel uncomfortable, but approach it in a way that, you know, I am competent and I can do this.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
So this was a small religious group in central Ohio. It was related through my parents and people that they knew. It had all of the earmarks, I would say, of what you would consider a cult in terms of being a very high control group, having really strict ideologies, and a lot of isolation from people who are not part of the group.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And it's only after, you know, that first lecture, left first lecture and a half where I realized, actually, I really like this. This is really engaging. This is really interesting. And they brought me amazing research ideas and examples that I can bring back into my other identity as a researcher.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Absolutely. I learned that teaching is a huge part of my identity. It's something I find really rewarding and really valuable, and I appreciate and look forward to that time in the classroom with my students.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Well, Sheena Angar is my advisor, so I got to spend a lot of time with her. And together with Paul Ingram, who's another professor at Columbia, they walked students through this exercise, which is a values exercise.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And what this helps you do is iterate through a set of values until you feel like you've identified sort of your core values and you understand, like, what's the most important value to you? What's your second and third most important value?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
What they found is that having students remind themselves of these values before giving a presentation led them to come across as more authentic to the audience. It was that ability to remember the core values that one has to remember that, you know, I'm not just here to give a meeting. I'm here to maybe help someone achieve something with their business.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
I may be here to help motivate my employees to take the next step or to take that risk. And reminding themselves of those values actually helped those speeches seem more authentic to the audience.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
One thing I've found in a couple of studies is sometimes we are stuck really up here in our heads and we forget that we sort of need to bring people in to our backstage. We need to explain ourselves more than we think we do. We have all these internal motivations and feelings and evaluations that are going on behind the scenes. And we think they're so perceptible to those around us.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
But of course, they're not. You know, they're locked up inside our minds. And it can help to identify your values, your motives, why you're doing the things you're doing and to articulate those to other people. It helps them make sense of what they're seeing in terms of, oh, that's how they really feel behind the scenes.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
So this paper started with this question that a lot of authenticity researchers have, which is we sort of all agreed that authenticity is a good thing. But how do we get there? What's the steps that we need to take to experience more authenticity in our lives? And what they theorize is that this idea of self-compassion can help people feel more authentic.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
So self-compassion is having kindness towards yourself. It's also about recognizing that we're all human and part of being human is being imperfect and making mistakes and having the ability to reflect on those mistakes with sort of composure and awareness with acceptance.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And what they found is that self-compassion, people who have higher traits of compassion experience greater trait authenticity, but also experimentally inducing self-compassion or having people engage in reflection exercises with more or less compassion predicted how authentic they were in that moment.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And part of why that happens, which I love from this paper, is it's associated with an increased optimism. So when we feel like we can approach our mistakes with kindness and with acceptance, we also feel like maybe I can do that tomorrow. And maybe if I make a mistake tomorrow, I can have this same mindset of kindness towards myself and the belief in future growth.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
It started off sort of smaller or a little bit distanced from us. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so a couple hours away. It gradually increased to become an incredibly central part of my life. It was a place we would spend hours and hours every week. with people from the community in the church itself. And by the time I was 19, 20, I was kind of all in.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And that can help me feel authentic in these moments, even when reflecting on something that in hindsight we wish we would have done differently.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Exactly. It can even help you recognize that those are parts of who you are and think about ways to make progress towards them instead of using those aspects as a way to punish yourself or to feel badly about what you could have done or how you should be.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
One example from my own life is I struggle with anxiety. It's something that was absolutely exacerbated with grad school and the pandemic and the many historical experiences that we're all living through.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Part of what has helped me with recognizing I have anxiety is obviously being in therapy, but coming to understand where those anxious thoughts come from has helped me have compassion for that side of myself.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
So when I'm ruminating over these experiences or having nightmares about how my first day of class is going to go, I can recognize that that's my body's way of trying to prepare me for those situations, trying to walk through the worst case scenario so that when it happens, you know, I won't be so surprised.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And of course, that's really not effective and I never feel prepared for those experiences. But recognizing the source of that and where it comes from has helped me approach that side of myself with more kindness and acceptance and has even sort of lessened its impact on my daily life.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Exactly. One example is I get anxious when I first wake up in the morning and, you know, I'll feel really anxious when I'm in my kitchen making my coffee. And what I sort of tell my body is like, I know that you feel like there's a tiger in the room, but there's not a tiger in the room.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
I'm just making my coffee and, you know, we're going to get through this coffee and then we're going to approach our day with some calm and just kind of take it one step at a time.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Absolutely. And recognizing where that comes from and sort of where its bases are irrational can help me take it less seriously almost. That's part of where the idea that there's a tiger in the room makes me feel better is my body's having a really strong reaction that's sort of divorced from reality. And to the extent I can maybe poke fun at it or lessen its impact, I can almost embrace it and it
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
feels less serious. It feels less all consuming and it's still a part of myself, but it's one I can approach with more grace.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
I was living full time with people from the group. I was evangelizing on behalf of the group. And it really kind of took up my whole identity.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
People often talk about conversations, especially with friends or close others, as a way to feel more authentic or moments where they really felt like themselves. Part of why that happens, I think, is people give you the space to explore those feelings, to talk about them in more detail. And they'll often ask questions or have you look at that problem from a new angle.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
With respect to anxiety, you know, when I talk to other people who have anxieties and they tell me the things they're anxious about, it seems like, why would I be anxious about that? And having that reaction to their anxiety makes me realize, oh, my anxiety is also probably a little silly. Like this is probably an irrational fear that I have.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And it almost helps you look at your own anxiety or your own troubles in a different way.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Almost entirely, my social community was this group itself. They really discouraged having outside relationships and really told you or taught you both implicitly and explicitly that this should be your whole life, that this message that they had was so important, it was worth sort of forsaking any outside connections that might distract you from what the group was really about.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Most people are drawn to a group like this, I think, because we are incredibly curious and maybe a little insecure about what is this life all about? What am I all about? What's my purpose? What's my meaning in life? And we're looking for someone who could help provide those answers for us. And the group provided a really appealing idea that we have all of the answers.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And if you just stick with us, we'll tell you them. We'll help inform your path. We'll help show you, you know, your ideal path. And even better than just your ideal path, this is the path that God has ordained for you. And that's a really appealing message that can help reduce some of these concerns about what does it all mean.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
On the one hand, it was incredibly challenging to feel that I had differing beliefs to the people around me and that voicing those beliefs could get me in trouble or get me sanctioned or at least have a stern talking to. At the same time, I really desperately wanted them to approve me and to accept me and to value me in the group.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And so I was willing to sort of not say what I was really thinking or hide those beliefs in exchange for maintaining these relationships that I valued so much.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
There were lots of ways that you would be sort of disciplined, quote unquote, and usually it would be, you know, you're discussed and the church leader would mention something that happened in a sermon. So you're sort of, you know that he's talking about you. You feel that shame that everyone must know that you made the wrong choice.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Or you had really intense one-on-one conversations where you were reprimanded and told that what you had done was out of alignment. It wasn't the right path. It wasn't the godly path. And frustratingly, those individual conversations could happen at any time. And sort of one thing that you did one day could be right. And that could be the spiritual choice.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And then another day, it would be the wrong choice. And so you're always kind of questioning which decisions were right and which decisions were supported. And those who were sort of in the know would just know the right answers. And what I know now is that was a way to sort of control our behaviors. You never felt like you really were settled or secure. You always were looking for guidance.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Yeah, I felt very adrift in terms of what the right thing to do is. Because I had sort of disconnected from school, from my peers who maybe were going to colleges or applying to college at the same time, I almost didn't know the right steps to take.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And ultimately felt this pressure to follow along with the path that the church had outlined for us, which was to take a year to invest heavily in my faith and to try and bring new people into the group and do that instead of going to college, which was sort of the worldly choice.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
So even though I always was very bookish, I was very nerdy, I was very inquisitive, I always really wanted to go to college, it was sort of implicitly discouraged that that was sort of the lesser path that was the earthly, worldly path.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
I moved to a small town with a group of people from the church, and we sort of set up a satellite group in that town. And we went around talking to people about the message of the group and trying to recruit people into our group.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
What really shook my whole sort of belief system is we had a death in my family. My niece passed away. And it was one of those experiences that sort of jolts you awake. It's really nice to have these ideas that the church gave us about how special we are, how powerful we were, how logically our life path would unfold.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And then when this happened, it felt like one of those moments where I looked around to realize, you know, I'd been holding on to sand and I had nothing. And these stories that I had been told about myself, about the world, about the way my life would unfold were not accurate or they were empty.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And that moment is really when I started to feel like I had to really voice those questions and concerns. And I had to start saying, actually, I don't think I agree with what they just told my sister after her daughter passed. I don't actually agree with maybe these other stances that are more about how we treat other people. Maybe it's okay to have friends who are not part of the group.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Maybe it's okay to think differently about the world and the purpose of life and how people outside the group should be valued and appreciated. That moment was fairly dramatic and things kind of happened quickly after that. I started to voice my unhappiness with the way the situation was handled, with the way we were treated.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And that also kind of brought up all these feelings I'd been holding in about things I disagreed with policy-wise, things I disagreed with, the way we even talked about other people of similar religious faiths. It was sort of a cascading experience that just really snowballed really quickly from that point.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Yeah, it was, you know, these rules about church attendance and things like that, they're never formalized. They weren't written down anywhere. But of course, we had really deeply believed them. I had internalized them. And one morning, I just decided I don't want to go to Sunday service. I want to hang out with a non-religious person. I want to just go to a movie and have a bowl of popcorn.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
You know, I'm 20 years old. And... That felt like very small. I'm sure, you know, no one in the movie theater would have thought I was doing anything brave. But to me, it was a first step towards reclaiming my autonomy and realizing that, you know, maybe it's okay to have the desire to go see a movie and to just follow that desire.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Yeah. So they were not a fan of what I was doing. They were not a fan of the things I was saying. The way that that was communicated was in a couple of one-on-one meetings and then the people really closest to me trying to implore me to sort of step back, to change my behavior, to sort of come back into the fold.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
At that point, I felt that that had been so severed that it almost felt like I couldn't come back. It felt like I was living in a totally different reality now from these people. And I couldn't sit in the same rooms that I was in before. So
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
It started off with these conversations, and then it very quickly escalated into formal excommunication, which is I had to move out of my apartment where I was living with another member of the church. I lost contact with my immediate family at the time. Thankfully, we've reconnected since then.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And I lost connections with pretty much every single person that I knew, including people I would consider family at that point.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
It was really destabilizing and it was really, really painful. Some of these relationships have still not been repaired. I still feel them like open wounds of these people that I really cared for. And what I try to remember is they believe that they're doing the right thing. They think that you have to cut someone out of the group in order to maintain the functioning of the group.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
And also in order to teach that person a lesson that if we release you out into the world, you'll sort of learn the world is wrong and you'll want to come back in. So slowly but surely, every person that I knew gave me a call and said, hey, you know, I'm sorry, but we can't we can't talk anymore.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
Yeah. So this feeling we refer to as inauthenticity and inauthenticity has a couple of sources or variants. On the one hand, you can feel inauthentic because you don't know who you are. So you feel like yourself is somewhere separate. You feel disconnected from that true self and it feels inaccessible almost to you.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself
On the other hand, inauthenticity could also be, I know very well who I am and what I want to say in this moment, but for whatever reason, I'm choosing to deny that. I'm choosing to express myself in a way that's counter to that internal experience.
Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Oh, thanks so much for having me again. It's so good to see you.
Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
So I had just had my very first paper accepted. And that's a huge accomplishment as a PhD student. You're obsessed with getting a certain number of publications. In my mind, this is one step towards my dream job. You usually share these papers or these announcements with people, other academics. This used to be a space on Twitter. We called it Academic Twitter.
Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Now I think we're sort of migrating to different platforms. But usually you'll have an announcement. This is the paper I just published. This is who I worked on it with. And it can be a sort of self-promotional impression management self-expression. And I felt that drive to tell everyone how amazing I was that I had just gotten this paper accepted.
Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
But what I thought would be even better is to sort of poke fun at the whole idea, right, that we're constantly trying to show other people this badge of our worth that we get externally. And so I tweeted, I just had my first paper accepted, and I'm happy to report that my self-esteem is now perfect and everything that's broken in me is fixed.
Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And as you can imagine, that kind of went viral in its own way, because I was poking fun at this idea that, of course, we want to share our accomplishments with other people. But at the end of the day, we're still here living with ourselves. I kind of didn't feel any different two days later after that paper got accepted.
Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Yeah, part of the pressure of social media that is so maladaptive and harmful for people is this pressure to always be sharing positive things and to only see the positive things that are going on in everyone else's life. This also happens at academic conferences.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
I go to talk after talk of an amazing paper and then an amazing experiment and a crazy keynote speech that's summarizing someone's entire career. And that pressure that can make you feel like everyone is living this perfect, glamorous life because you don't see all the messy details that went into what people are going through or the steps that it took for them to get to where they are.
Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And sometimes sharing that information can be really powerful, especially from people who you think have really figured it out.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
So I try and do this with PhD applicants or people that want to work in my lab is to explain, you know, I look a certain way to you and let me show you how much consternation there was to get to this point and how much of it is messiness and figuring it out and luck and chance. And that's as much a part of successes as hard work and timing and effort.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
It's an aspect of life beyond social media. It's something we feel in many social contexts. It's almost a quintessential feature of being human. It's balancing this need for impression management concerns with wanting to share with people who you really are on the inside Maybe your deeper insecurities and criticisms. And what we want to try and find is the right balance between those things.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
So you talked about people showing their failure resumes. Sometimes I have to look at my own success resume, my actual resume, to remind myself that as much as these stories of grandeur are not true, so too are sort of the overdue criticisms that we kind of put on ourselves. So there's a balance between
Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
being aware of your shortcomings and how you can grow and the messiness of being human, as podcasters like to say, with kind of being aware of your growth and the potential that you have.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
In a job interview, I would say that's a classic experience where people tend to feel very inauthentic. And I think those pressures are normalized because we expect that in a job interview, it's only self-promotional or a networking context is something where people feel that they really cannot be authentic. And sometimes what I like to do is just name that pressure.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
It can help relieve that for all of us involved. If I'm at a networking event, to tell someone i know this is awkward but we're here to meet strategically this is not like a normal social setting and just by saying that somehow it relaxes the impression management concerns that we have
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Buland is, I'm going to hire him to work on this paper together. I think this sense of freedom is related to autonomy or the ability that you have, the sense that you have that you're making deliberate choices of your own free will. He also mentions this sense of frictionlessness or feeling like there's not that external pressure.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And that's what I was getting in that moment in the car from my friends. I could sing with my not amazing Adele-like voice. And we're all laughing. We're all doing this together. So I felt that I could share some part of myself without having to worry how I was coming across. So that's absolutely part of it.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
One thing I found in my research is it tends, authenticity also tends to emerge in these social environments where we feel very safe or connected to other people. We are social animals. We really feed on each other and we really desire to share our inner world with other people. So other people can be an important conduit towards feeling more like yourself.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
I think of authenticity as really this important alignment between your inner sense of self and how you're expressing yourself in the world. And when I think about how that's experienced in different cultures, the end product to me that end authenticity is the same, but it's that content of either the self aspects that are really salient or the situations that make you feel really authentic.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Those might differ depending on cultural norms or backgrounds or experiences. So, for example, the listener mentioned cultures that are maybe more individualistic versus a culture that's more collectivistic.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And in an individualistic culture, maybe these moments where you feel like I've really found myself, I've really expressed myself, I've reached the pinnacle of self-individualization, that moment might make you feel really authentic. And for someone in a more collectivistic culture, interdependent culture,
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
social harmony or moments where they feel really embedded in their social group or that there's a high level of social positivity among all of us in the room, maybe that's a moment that draws out this experience of authenticity. So it gets us to the same place, but maybe different pathways to get there.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Another important cultural belief is about how we think about the self as something that's really fixed or stable versus something that's really fluid and evolving. And so that can also be a predictor or a moderator on the situations that people feel the most authentic in or the types of self aspects that they relate the most to.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
It could be for the individual. It also might not be. One thing we know from research is people do tend to take their own cultural lens and apply it to whether they think you're being authentic. So if you're someone who's living in a culture that's very different than your own, people often might be confused about why you're doing what you're doing.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Or if you're not as emotional when we're in a highly emotional situation, people might be curious about that emotionality that they're used to seeing in other people. So there is a sense of cultural matching, but it typically happens on the perceiver side when people are trying to make sense of why you're doing what you're doing.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
I feel for Jennifer. I really hope she can find a new environment that helps her feel more comfortable. I have felt this absolutely as a woman in academia, as a younger professor. There are some people who you just cannot tap into that sense of self. You can't relax or be comfortable.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And it's so frustrating to know that you have more than you're able to surface in those moments and in those environments. It's really a shame and it's a struggle because work is such an ever present part of our lives. It's a huge part of our time and our energy and for a lot of people where we get a lot of meaning.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
If I was going to give Jennifer advice, I would say try to find buddies or allies at work for whom she feels that she can be herself. and find those moments to sort of relieve that tension and see if there are ways that they can team up. Maybe in these meetings, she needs to look at a friendly face or a smile, or even after the meeting, decompress and talk to someone about how she came across.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Did you hear what that person said? Did you hear this other person repeating what I just said? And that made me feel like, did they even hear me? Did they even see me? The other thing I would recommend is there is a narrative that I hear a little bit in what Jennifer is saying that other people, on the one hand, are waiting for her to fail.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And at the other hand, maybe they could benefit from her being her authentic self. And I would sort of interrogate those narratives. Most people want other people to be authentic. And most people don't think about other people that much. And that kind of always makes me feel a little bit better. Like most people you're talking to are really wrapped up in their own heads.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
They're thinking about whether they're being authentic, whether you think they're competent, whether you think they're intelligent.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And kind of the moment you realize most people are not thinking about you at all, maybe that will help her feel some of this freedom and autonomy to express herself authentically and take a risk and see, you know, are people excited when she steps forward or does she face that backlash that she's expecting? And then how can she recover?
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
I love taking cues from your environment to learn more about yourself. It might tell you the people you don't want around you. It might tell you that you don't like this job that much or maybe that you're just new at your job and you need some time to sort of relax and acclimate.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
I do think it's important to pay attention to when she can find authenticity at work and what are the features of that situation. Maybe she can approach those situations or tailor her existing job to fit that. We also know from the research that that kind of environment is ultimately not going to be productive for her manager or her team.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
It sounds like it's not a place where there's high psychological safety, where people feel that they can take risks. So to the extent she could maybe surface this with her manager or her leader and say, you know, I have a lot more to give and you're not maximizing on my potential. What can we do?
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
How can we break down these barriers that are either perceived but still feel very real or maybe are really real and preventing not just me, but likely other people at the table from sharing what could be really valuable for the company?
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
It's such a great question. It's very layered and complex. And I have some research that I'm working on that I would love to talk to her about. But it's going to be about a couple of years before that gets through the peer review process.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
But she's absolutely right that there are these norms about professionalism and this idea of what researchers call the ideal worker stereotype that are basically built around highly competent white male techie workers that sort of have dominated the professional workplace. And those are difficult for many people to live up to.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
I think even people who sort of fit that prototype feel that they might not always be the ideal worker. And these pressures can really, really limit our ability to feel authentic, to feel safe with the people that are around us. And I think that
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
From some of the researchers that I know, these boundaries between our personal and professional lives can be really important for people to stay safe, to protect their mental well-being, to engage in self-care. I don't think everyone has to be authentic all the time. And for some people, that can be a life or death decision with whom they share certain identities that they have.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And for others, it becomes a barrier that people see you with a visible identity, like your race or ethnicity, your age, your gender, visible disabilities, and they make assumptions about you.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And it's really a shame because they miss how complex each person is and the value that you bring both from people's own perspectives, but also your competence and warmth and everything else that you could bring to your company. So it's the company that's really missing out, I would say.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
It becomes complicated to the extent that you perceive maybe boundaries or conflictions between these identities. So researchers call this self-concept complexity. So we all have lots of aspects of ourselves. Some pieces feel like they fit together, or they're really overlapping, and others feel really far apart.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And part of what authenticity can emerge from is where you make sense of those identities or the narrative that you tell about how they got you to where you are now. So even if these identities might feel far apart, what I'm hearing from the listener is there's some logic to how she created her life now.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And there's some path that she feels that she's followed that has allowed her to express these various identities in different ways. And I think, what a rich tapestry to connect with other people on. What a way to surprise people about something that you wouldn't have expected. And maybe that will allow them to share something that they have that's unexpected.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And then how does that inform how we see our sense of self and our identity and our ability to grow? It's all about that way that we think about our overlapping senses of self and how different situations pull these things out of us.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
some research about this topic that the listener might find interesting is about code switching so this is where people speak slightly differently or express themselves differently when they're in different cultural frames so for example with different people that can be confusing to outsiders who see inconsistency so you speak like that with these people and then when you're with me you speak differently and that i don't know what to make of that
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And a very simple intervention in this paper is just to say, well, I have different cultural identities. And this is a part of me. And now welcome to my backstage, where I'm going to tell you more about who I am that's going to help you make sense of this. And most people understand what it's like to have multiple identities.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And it could even be a creativity exercise for another person to connect with you to realize, oh, yeah, I actually, I guess I do sometimes talk about football with this one person. And then I talk about mathematics with someone else.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Absolutely. And I think you're getting a sense for why authenticity is such a fun topic to study and so complicated because these questions, you know, it sounds really good to just be your true self or bring your true self to work or, yeah, be you.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And then the second you start to realize, oh, that you is really complicated sometimes or maybe the you doesn't fit in this environment in quite the right way. which I think most people don't feel like there's that perfect fit. It starts to get much more complex of a question.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Again, I would sort of go back to this idea, and I have some empirical data that shows this, that people's perceptions of whether someone is authentic
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
are all over the place the judgments that i make about one person's authenticity are almost completely different than the judgments that someone else makes of the same person even if we sort of know that person together in the same social group and in that same research i looked at outcomes of well-being and what i found is like other people's ratings of your authenticity really don't relate to your well-being it's really the sense of authenticity that you have is really important for your own well-being
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
So going around and trying to convince other people that you're being authentic, maybe it would work for one person at a time, but trying to convince everybody in your workplace that you're authentic. No, I'm really authentic. No, I really mean this. So this is how I am.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
That to some extent can be a way to connect with other people, but it's really difficult to convince people that you're being authentic, especially if they have it in their heads that they're not gonna try to understand you or they're not gonna take your perspective or they're gonna view you through a stereotypical lens.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And so what I usually tell people is authenticity is worth pursuing for its own sake, for you, for your well-being in places where you feel that you can be authentic safely. What other people think about you, that's their business.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And I think all I can say is create healthy distance between other people's perceptions of you and your authentic pursuits to discover who you are and to find places where you can bring that forward.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Well, it sounds like she has a book to write that I want to read. That's also close to my heart. My advisor is blind and always talking to her about her sense of self and how she's viewed in the world and how she experienced going to grad school in the 90s, for example, is just completely different than the way that I've experienced the world.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And it's so fascinating to understand people who experience the world differently than you do. So I would love to read her book should she ever write it. I'm kind of a funny academic where I mostly read fiction books, and I kind of don't read academic-y self-help books, even though they might be very helpful. I would say the one academic book that I'll recommend is a classic.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
It's Irving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. A lot of these ideas about society as a social performance, about people with stigmatized identities where other people would judge them or make
Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
inferences about them because of a visible or invisible identity are really something that he thought about in the 60s but in terms of books like fiction books i feel are a really great place to explore narratives by being in someone else's head you get to experience the world through someone else in a safe environment you know sitting on your couch but you're fighting dragons or you're uh
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
you know, in the 1960s in Poland and you're experiencing the world through another person's lens. And I've really found that books help you kind of pick up who you are and look at it from different angles and think, oh, I would have never realized that that's how someone else experiences the world.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
So some books that I jotted down that are about this self-exploration and communicating yourself with others is All the Light We Cannot See, which is incredible, very timely. The other two books I really like are The Safe Keep.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
which is about sort of someone who grew up in a very particular type of household who finds it really difficult to connect with other people until like sort of a rambunctious woman comes into her life and destroys all these nice boundaries that she set up for herself. And through the process, she learns a lot more about who she is, both literally her history, but also who she could be.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And then the last book is called The Power. The Power is about what would happen if gender roles were sort of flipped And what parts of our gender are sort of core to who we are and really important and predictive and what parts are just sort of society's story that it's told about who you are in your place and how you view other people.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And I think all three of those books helped me look at aspects of my own identity in a new way and think about Who really am I? And sort of how do I relate to these different aspects of the self? So that's part of why I love fiction books. And I'll come back with some good academic e-books for you next time.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Absolutely. It's a dizzying feeling to kind of come out of that world that has a very strong narrative about who you are and where you're going. And, you know, it's like to this day, the idea, oh, I could just go to France tomorrow. Like there's no one to ask, right? You could just do it. There's no sort of set plan for my life. I make that plan. And that's empowering and also scary.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Like, I hope I figure it out. I hope I make the right choices. What I found is you figure it out by doing, not as much by thinking. It's really hard to know what's going to give you purpose and meaning or what you're going to find fulfilling before you actually do it. So there's some experimentation that you can do to learn more.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
what gives you meaning, what matters, what helps you find a sense of authenticity in your daily life. And then I also try and be realistic that almost anything I do, I'm going to get annoyed with it. There's going to be a day where I'm like, I do not want to do this dream job that I worked so hard for. I think that's common. People adapt really quickly to their environments, both good and bad.
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
And so there's not a day where you reach the pinnacle of who you are and you're happy forever. And that kind of can help take the edge off these difficult days where you think, I should feel happier, right? Or I just got tenure. I just got to this point in my career. I should kind of finally feel something that I thought was there. And It's just still you.
Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
It's still that sense of who you've been all along that's kind of still with you and you have to make peace with that. The other piece of advice that I love is from Tig Notaro, and she talks about the joy of the phrase, nothing matters, and how it can be really sad to be like, oh, nothing matters.
Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
You know, at the end of the day, maybe my job is super fulfilling, but what's going to be left of it in 100 years? But there's also something so freeing about that, that, you know what? Nothing matters. I made a mistake at work. My life will go on. You know, I write expensive PDFs for a living. And that's funny. Like, that's...
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Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
It is very rewarding for me, but at the end of the day, you know, it is silly. In hindsight, my great grandparents who were farmers would look at what I'm doing and say, what is this bright screen you're tapping into all day long?
Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
So I think it's healthy to have some sense of like life is partially meaningless and partially deeply infused with meaning that we bring it and that we give to it and that we give to our relationships along the way.
Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Great talking to you.