Unmasking Ourselves

To some extent, we’re all walking a tightrope every day, balancing work, life, and our relationships across each. It may sometimes feel like one big blur from work to life and back again, a dizzying daily performance of juggling this and that. To execute these performances, we've crafted particular personas—the dedicated worker, the cool parent, the fun friend.

We fluidly pull these personas over us like a magician plucking rabbits out of a hat. But our audiences may have a completely different show in mind. As discussed by psychologist Gillian Sandstrom in this Hidden Brain podcast, we all weave our unique versions of reality based on every day, sometimes fleeting moments, each of us trying to solve a puzzle with missing pieces.

With everyone putting on a performance, we might wonder if there’s any sincerity behind the act. After all, as media artist Karen Connell highlights in the TED Talk below, how others perceive us may be leagues apart from how we perceive ourselves, as if we’re all reading from different scripts.

Perhaps we ought simply to drop the act and instead really tune into our audiences. By conjuring tools like the SurePeople Relationship Advisor, we can give sincere attention to the people around us—their preferences and their needs. In doing so, we discover the hidden depths within these multi-faceted relationships.

Instead of aiming for the perfect performance, we should endeavor for authenticity, for being a genuine person to one another. Beneath our layers of woven pretense, we each have our distinctive needs, vulnerabilities, and strengths. We’re all human. We can allow ourselves to rewrite the script with an emphasis on sincerity and humanity.

We might just find a standing ovation awaiting us.

“Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.”
- Brené Brown