Stop Trying to Have an Authentic Self
Especially on social media
When I first heard that you should bring your whole self to work a few years ago, I knew it was a terrible idea. Have you ever been in a live customer service chat where the hospital billing guy tries to tell you about his weekend?
No one should bring their whole self anywhere. I don’t even want my wife to bring her whole self to our marriage. My whole self stays where it belongs, which is in print.
I got so upset about this I recently looked up who had this idea. It was someone named Mike Robbins, who is the author of Bring Your Whole Self to Work: How Vulnerability Unlocks Creativity, Connection, and Performance and the TEDx talk about the topic that has nearly 450,000 views.
This was incredibly surprising since Mike, last I saw him, was an incredibly nice, smart freshman baseball player in the dorm where I was a writing tutor, and where he fell out of a really high two story window onto the pavement right next to a bike rack. According to a doctor, he wasn’t paralyzed and was only out for one season because he was so drunk his body relaxed into the impact. When I sent him an email asking if I could mention him in this column, he responded by telling me about his two daughters, and how his minor league career with the Kansas City Royals ended with another…
