At work you are composed. At home you are supposed to be vulnerable. In meetings you are confident. On social media you are doing well.

Most people learn to perform each of these so consistently that the line between the role and the person underneath gets blurry.

This is not always a problem. Sometimes the composed version at work is genuinely useful.

The issue starts when the performance runs even in the rooms where nobody asked for it. When you cannot tell any more which version is actually you.

Authenticity does not mean saying everything you think, or bringing your full personal self into every professional room. It means knowing what is true for you, even in moments you choose not to say it out loud.

A few questions worth sitting with:

Who are you when nobody is watching?
What do you actually feel, separate from what you have learned to show?
What have you gone quiet on in order to belong?

The answers are not always comfortable. But knowing them is where most people start feeling like themselves again.

Who are you when nobody is watching?

Angira Chakravorty Dasgupta

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There is 1 thing I have never been able to teach in a session.

I can tell within few minutes what a team is actually carrying.