Who Are You, Really?, page 6
Substantial research indicates that high self-monitors tend to do well in several areas of life, but not so well in others. One area of strength for high self-monitors is work. If you are an adaptable sort, a high self-monitor, you are more likely than the low self-monitors you know to get promoted and assume leadership positions. You do well, in part, because you can play diverse roles that bridge different groups and alliances. But there’s a downside for your organization: Unlike low self-monitors who are more strongly committed to their workplaces, you are more likely to bolt if a more congenial offer presents itself.43 As you might imagine, this relative lack of commitment has consequences for the other major domain of life pursuit—your relationships. High self-monitors, relative to low, have less stable relationships.44
But—and here I am going to turn a number of old “be yourself” maxims on their heads—neither high nor low self-monitors are any more or less authentic than the other.
Mark Snyder, the originator of self-monitoring theory, has suggested that low self-monitors are principled, while high self-monitors are pragmatic. I think this is partially right. Are you a low self-monitor? Then you seek clarity about who you are and what you value. This clearly is a principled approach to your life. But it is also pragmatic; it prevents you from having to constantly decide who you ought to be in this situation or that role, freeing you to get on with the projects and aspirations you value. Are you a high self-monitor? Then your focus is on the practical demands of living in a complex world. This includes having to get along with different people with different expectations and rising to diverse occasions as needed. That, clearly, is pragmatic. But I think there is also a principled side to being a high self-monitor. You may value friendship or harmony, or being attentive to the needs of others. And if your clear presentation of a unified self gets lost in the process, that is fine with you—in fact, all the better.
Of course, the most likely answer is that you don’t come down clearly on one side or the other. You are attuned to your self-presentation in some contexts and oblivious to it in others. In fact, our research finds that self-monitoring is not fixed, like a biogenic trait, but dynamic, like a free trait. You use it when it’s helpful in pursuing your personal projects.45
Viewing the vagaries of behavior this way is important. Not only does it help us better understand our fellow (confusing) humans, but it encourages us to look differently at authenticity itself. If consistency is not always the only moral path, and if inconsistent behavior can be both principled and pragmatic, then authenticity is not a singular thing. In fact, there are alternative ways of being authentic, and these are not fixed traits of people but flexible strategies for engaging with ourselves and the world.
Three Ways of Doing Authenticity
There are three fundamental ways in which we can answer the authenticity question, the “Who are you, really?” probe, corresponding to the different sources of personality—biogenic, sociogenic, and idiogenic—with which we are already familiar.
Biogenic Authenticity: Doing What Comes Naturally
One way in which you can be authentic is to show fidelity to your biogenic self—the self that is determined by your physical makeup. Imagine, for example, right now that your phone rings with an invitation to a neighborhood party next weekend. What is your immediate, unscripted gut-feel? Is it delight because you love parties, or apprehension because you find them invariably draining? If you act on the basis of your first-nature preferences, you are showing biogenic authenticity—fidelity to your natural self. If asked, you justify your decision to go or to stay home by saying that you do what comes naturally. You’re genuine; you don’t fake it. You love parties, or you hate parties, but the “you” who is doing the loving or hating is the authentic you. This is classic low self-monitoring.
Biogenic first-nature preferences are intimately related to our relatively stable traits. The open and extraverted individual is likely to have a spontaneous “Let’s go!” response to the invitation. The neurotic, introverted person will almost reflexively say, “Ah, sorry, no—I’m busy that night” (perhaps adding, sotto voce, “and for the next seven years”).
Sociogenic Authenticity: Doing One’s Duty
But when it comes to going to the party, you might also show fidelity to the sociogenic demands that arise from the cultural norms and situations that shape your daily behavior. Irrespective of your personality traits, your decision to decline or accept the invitation may depend on whether you are, say, a member of an ultraconservative religious group that looks at parties as frivolous. Or you may be on the executive committee of the neighborhood association, and it is, after all, a neighborhood event. Without thinking, you decide on the basis of what you ought to do according to social convention, not necessarily what you want to do. It is entirely possible that what you desire and what you believe to be required may be in harmony, in which case your action is doubly determined.
Beyond the scale of the neighborhood, our identities can be scripted by cultural conventions expressed in the media or in literature. This notion is called the Quixotic Principle, introduced to the field of psychology in 1994 by none other than Ted Sarbin. It holds that scripts or templates in our culture tell us how to behave and how to comport ourselves in our daily lives. These rules of conduct are powerful and pervasive. The most poignant example of this influence was Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’s compelling character, a simple man from La Mancha who, entranced by tales of the knights-errant of an earlier time, set out in search of great deeds and knightly virtue. He took his social scripts and templates from an earlier era. That his pursuits were sheer folly to those with whom he came in contact was of no consequence to him. In his mind, he was doing his duty.
Idiogenic Authenticity: The Deeper You
Let’s return to the party: You walk in the door and spot one of your neighbors, Diego, who is there with his wife, Emily. For the past month you have run into Diego, always with Emily, at several social events. Given his conviviality and engagement at these functions, you assume he must be a rather extraverted person. When it comes to parties, you assume, Diego is a natural.
But it may well be that Diego is not a natural in the biogenic sense; in fact, he is extremely introverted and prefers to keep to himself and avoid the challenge of social situations. And there may not be any particular sociogenic norm that impels him to go to every major social event that month. In fact, both Diego and Emily are overworked associates at a firm that demands sixty-hour workweeks and total, unswerving devotion. There is no cultural expectation that coerces them to such extensive social engagement—quite the opposite. So for Diego, it is neither in his first nor second nature to party so heartily.
But his actions that month may well be an aspect of his third nature—the core personal projects of Diego’s life. Emily is terminally ill, but she and Diego have decided not to let anyone but their closest family members know this. Her symptoms will progress rapidly, but at this point, she is still able to carry out routine activities and even some of the things she adores—like meeting with neighbors and catching up on things that matter to them. She loves parties—indeed, she lives for them.
For Diego, the most important project on the planet is “be there for Emily” and nothing will stop his commitment to this project. If it means that he needs to go against his first nature, fine. If it interferes with his work schedule and he lets down his firm, fine. Sometimes one pursuit claims our whole concentration and allegiance. The impending death of a loved one can certainly concentrate the mind.
So is Diego being inauthentic? I don’t think so. He is pushing against his biogenic traits, ignoring the sociogenic pressures of his life, and showing utter fidelity to his core project.
When we see the complete social-ecological picture of who we are, it becomes clear that we can have multiple authenticities. And it’s natural for some of those authenticities to conflict. This does not mean we are adrift in a world of moral relativism but simply that there is more than one way of being a good person—and, crucially, of becoming a better person. It is by acknowledging all of our selves and adaptively weighing and rebalancing them that we can be truly authentic. Then we can best understand who we are and how best to engage our complex lives with integrity.
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Well-Doing: The Sustainable Pursuit of Core Projects
In the end, we return to two pivotal questions: Who are you? and How are you doing? The first concerns your identity and personality; the second, whether your life is going well. And we’ve concluded that each of these is intimately related to the personal projects you are pursuing.
In this final chapter, I want to focus on how we can do something about our current lives and our future prospects. Our well-being may arise out of forces over which we have little control, such as our biogenic traits and our social environments. But here I want to focus on how we can improve the quality of our lives. I call this well-doing. Well-doing is the process by which we can create flourishing in our lives by sustainably pursuing our core personal projects.
Core Projects: The Source of What Matters to Us
All personal projects matter, but not all personal projects matter equally. Take another look at your list of personal projects. Maybe it includes “empty the dishwasher” alongside “complete the marathon,” or “don’t dominate the office karaoke party” right next to “look for a better job.” Some of these projects are more transitory and peripheral to your sense of who you are. Others are core and self-defining.
Core projects are those that affect all your other projects. To determine whether each of your projects is core or peripheral, ask yourself this question: What impact would it have on your other projects if this project were to succeed or fail? If a core project succeeds everything else goes well for you; if it doesn’t, your whole system can collapse.
Another important question to ask in determining which projects are core is whether you are open to changing them, or even giving them up. When your core projects are challenged, you will resist changing them, often with astonishing resolve. Take, for example, “train for my next marathon.” If this project disappears, it may or may not implicate change in a runner’s other projects. They may be essentially independent of running. But what if running the marathon is intimately and extensively linked with the rest of the runner’s projects—keeping healthy, feeling a sense of accomplishment, looking good, having control over one’s life. Each of those articulated or tacit projects may, on probing, be linked to running. The runner’s whole sense of self may be wrapped around the identity of being a marathoner. It plays a vital role in the sense of who she is and how her life is progressing. But this kind of core project pursuit creates some vulnerability. What if there is an accident? She’s running along smoothly and elegantly one morning when suddenly a pothole appears, a twist, a fall, and in an instant her ankle is broken right along with her heart.
Having core projects is why you get up in the morning. They bring meaning and significance and direction to our lives and, ultimately, define who we are. Indeed, Bernard Williams, a philosopher who has thought deeply about this subject, has speculated that without such projects in our lives we may be inclined to wonder if it is worth carrying on at all. Fortunately, even when our most cherished projects are derailed or demolished, we have the capacity to rebuild our lives with new projects and commitments, and facing the day becomes inviting again.46
Internal Sustainability of Project Pursuit
What are your core projects? Examine the list you created and identify those that are most central to your personal project system—those that are interlinked with your other projects. You may not have been consciously aware of their centrality until you began to question what would happen if they disappeared from your life. In many respects, a core project is the most self-defining of your projects, the one that is your trademark, your most singular pursuit—the one that defines who you are for you. What internal factors might help you keep that project alive, or the absence of which might lead to it being abandoned or grow stale? The following are a few important ones to keep in mind.
Biogenic alignment: Aligning your core projects with your biogenic traits increases their sustainability. A quiet, introverted person pursuing a core project of “continue writing my poetry” is more likely to sustain that project than if he is aspiring to “run for political office.” A person low in conscientiousness is not as likely to sustain a project of “complete my PhD” as one who is conscientious. Despite a burning resolve to liberate his people, a highly neurotic individual may find the struggle so oppressively arduous that he simply can’t sustain it for a protracted period. Which isn’t to say that you should only engage in those projects that are consistent with your biogenic traits—indeed, our discussion of free traits expressly encourages you to step out of your comfort zone to advance concerns that matter to you. But in terms of long-term pursuit, it means that the path will be smoother and the costs less onerous if there is broad agreement between your traits and the projects you are undertaking.
Make them public: A powerful way of enhancing the likelihood of our projects progressing well is the commitment that we make to them. Project commitment has two faces. Inwardly, we can devote ourselves to a course of action, which leads us to give it priority and invest it with a deeper sense of meaning. But commitment also has an outer face: When we pledge to a project and other people are aware of this, it is far more likely to succeed. By making your core projects known to others, especially your partners and loved ones, you help bring into play their support and encouragement.
Interestingly, men and women differ over which projects they find easy to make visible to others. Men, for example, find that when they make stressful projects visible, their projects become vulnerable, whereas women show the reverse pattern—publicizing stressful projects makes them less vulnerable. It could be that, for men, revealing stressful projects conveys weakness, at least in their eyes; for women, it serves to stimulate support from others.
Reframe your goals: Remember George Kelly and the psychology of personal constructs? Kelly believed that our personal constructs—the conceptual goggles through which we view the world—provide a way of ordering our lives. But while personal constructs are our frames for structuring our days, they can also be the cages we lock ourselves in by perseverating in the way we look at the world. In short, the way you construe your personal projects may have a significant impact on whether their pursuit is sustainable. For example, if you listed some version of the personal project “lose weight,” you are not alone. It is the most frequently listed project we see in our research. However, construing the project in those terms is associated with less long-term success than if it were phrased “enjoy myself at the gym.”47 Reframing your personal projects by slightly changing the way you phrase them boosts their sustainability, helping you reach your goal.
Strategic Imbalance: Prioritizing What We Do When
There is much written about the need for work-life balance as a way of minimizing the stress of multiple demands. But sometimes balance is not possible—the demands of your professional life call for a sustained period of action. Or a child’s sickness simply can’t be ignored. In both cases you give priority to a project that comes with a sense of urgency and importance that requires you to be strategically unbalanced. Your other projects, neglected for the moment, can return to the forefront at a later time.
External Sustainability of Project Pursuit
Whereas internal sustainability refers to our ability to control our motivation and commitment to our core projects, we also require external sustainability of those pursuits. This involves managing our everyday contexts or social ecologies, which include not only the physical environments around us but also other individuals and institutions. Consider the following sampling of the ways in which we can cultivate our surroundings, from our personal networks to our local communities and larger societies. Each of these can influence whether our core projects are sustainable. And each of these can be changed.
Micro-Level: Nurturing Our Nurturers
We have seen how the emotional support of others is critical to project success, so it is important that we establish the conditions that will sustain the support. Sometimes while pursuing our core projects we are so vigilantly aware of the barriers we need to overcome and the self-motivation we need to keep up the pursuit that we forget to acknowledge those who have been supporting us all along. And once more, the support from others may be something you don’t recognize until it is withdrawn. Whether it is a formal gratitude letter or a more informal and subtle “Thanks, I couldn’t do this without you,” giving value to those who bolster our core pursuits is fundamental to our sustaining them.
Middle-Level: Shaping Our Personal Contexts
As we have seen, the daily contexts of our lives can facilitate or frustrate project pursuit and subvert the possibility of living a flourishing life. There is no more gripping example than the current refugee crisis and its horrifying impact on the lives of those displaced and desperate to live better lives. However, even in trying circumstances, middle-level contexts—the local communities we’re a part of—can be creatively changed.
