Why ‘Be Yourself’ is bad career advice

Be Yourself is a 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 has never been 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, five 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. Unsurprisingly, one of the most frequently used messages was ‘Be Yourself’. A whopping 48 per cent of speakers referenced it in some form.

Knowing yourself is hard work, especially when you are young. That’s the time when 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 categorically false because we have the tendency to underestimate the personal and contextual change we go through. In fact, 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 that as long as you stick to your core values, it is worth tinkering with different strokes of authentic leadership.

In today’s interconnected, global work environments, we have to negotiate with all kinds of people on a daily basis. It is unreasonable to expect everyone to adapt to our style just because we feel the need to express without restraint. Authenticity does not mean insensitivity and doesn’t give us the licence to be brash.

Believing in the tyranny of the fixed, authentic, unrestrained self can also land you in serious trouble. Esquire’s 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 girl when she commented on his yellow teeth, told his mother-in-law that the birthday gift she sent was ridiculous, announced to a 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 the culmination of the experiment—‘Deceit makes our world go round. Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.’

I completely disagree with Jacobs’ simplistic quote but I think his experiment helps us uncover nuances of authenticity and efficacy. Adapting content to context is not equal to being less authentic or disingenuous. It simply shows you have the humility to experiment.

Instead of obsessing over authenticity, one should recognise that knowing oneself is a tough task and focus on building a growth mindset that is hungry to learn and unlearn.

(Excerpted from The Seductive Illusion of Hard Work by Utkarsh Amitabh, published by SAGE Publications India.)