5 Hints to Harness the Real You
How much of the real you are you expressing in your role?
In my last blog I spoke about the need to articulate your story - who you are, what you hope for; your sense of purpose. In my second blog in the series, I want to touch on the question of authenticity - getting the balance right between your real Self and what’s expected of you in your professional capacity.
We are given and occupy a Role. It needn’t consume us. Yet many people seem to feel they must fully wear their Role, or shelter behind it, with barely a glimpse emerging of their true persona. As a consequence many people feel fake, or ‘imposters’, as though they are playing a part and not being genuinely themselves. A number of clients have said to me, “ I am a completely different person at home and at work.” This is exhausting and can have unintended consequences for ourselves and the people following us. Ironically to make the Role really live, and to be sustainable, it needs something of us in it.
I think of Self and Role as two moons which co-exist side by side. Our Self is our unique identity - the product of our character, family, ethnicity, beliefs, values, personality, preferences, purpose, education and professional background. By contrast role is a manifestation of a lot of things, many environmental. Formal authority, status, business outcomes, standards of conduct and capability, accountability, culture, delegations and relationships all shape Role.
If we allow our Self to be eclipsed by Role, then we can seem aloof and task focused, our humanity, emotional expressiveness and self-belief are dramatically reduced, along with our capacity to engender trust, engage and inspire others.
Conversely if Self eclipses Role, then we can seem like over-sharers, volatile, possibly narcissistic, unconscious or uncaring of role appropriateness, organisational requirements, our relationships or accountabilities.
Clearly either ‘eclipse’ will limit and drain a leader, and the people around them, over time.
The GENOS International model of emotionally intelligent leadership identifies authenticity as one of the six essential competencies for emotionally intelligent leadership. A healthy balance between Self and Role is key to our authenticity, confidence, energy, well-being, engagement and resilience. To be optimal and sustainable, one moon illuminates the other in a harmonious integration.
At Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership (IECL) we train coaches to manage the integration between their own persona and their role as a coach, and also work with coaching counterparts to reflect on this and how it might be helping or hindering their practice.
In my leadership development work, I challenge leaders to identify how much of their authentic selves they are bringing to their role and what it would mean if there was a more organic interplay between the two.
In Egypt last month, I was viscerally reminded of how ingrained is our human tendency to wear our role. Witness the statues and hieroglyphs from the early and middle kingdoms, which reveal the Pharaohs as deified beings, irrespective of their individual characteristics or imperfections.
Only one Pharaoh stood out as the exception to this rule, revealing his true self for posterity. He worked to develop Egypt and its people, letting his actions tell the story of his leadership; rather than the statuary or the rhetoric promoting him. In a very short reign he achieved a lot as a leader, despite having a deformity and a terminal disease.
For many of us today, we’ve not had any formal learning about how to balance Self and Role. We tend to model on the examples we’ve seen around us through our life journey.
So here are five hints to help you:
1. Practise Self-Awareness and Reflection: Raising our own awareness and reflecting are first steps in exploring the issue and recalibrating where and if we need to:
a. What am I seeing/ hearing?
b. So what – what does it mean/what’s my takeaway from it?
c. Now what – what will I do with it? (Tim Rolfe)
2. Ask Powerful Questions: You might like to ask yourself some deep (slightly existential) coaching questions.
• What’s your real purpose or intention as a leader? [BTW, this is not the business outcome you’re there to deliver or your agenda on any given day.]
• If you could inject just a little bit more of your Self to the Role, how might this help you build momentum and engagement around your intention?
• How much richer will your leadership narrative be, with more of the real you in it?
3. Use Your Horizontal Sphere of Influence: Check in with others (peers, direct reports, stakeholders) whom you trust. How do they experience the real, authentic you? How might they respond if you could integrate your Self more to the Role? How would this impact trust, connectedness, influence?
4. Make Incremental Change: What’s one thing you will embrace, learn to do differently if you’re really balancing Self and Role? What’s one thing you might let go or ‘hold lighter’?
5. Focus on Your Purpose: When you’re worried about whether you’re really up to playing the part (sorry - Role) or ‘feeling fake’ you might want to remember Seth Godin’s adage - time spent fretting about our status as impostors is time away from dancing with our fear, from leading and from doing work that matters.
I’d love to hear your insights and any other hints to help leaders create a richer integration between Self and Role.
Wishing you all a joyous and reflective Christmas and New Year. Make the most of the time out to think about how you're balancing your authentic self with your work role requirements.