September 10: Being Yourself, Not Someone Else
The Cost of Pretending to Be Someone Else
There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from spending your working day quietly editing yourself, perhaps changing the way you speak, holding back an opinion, pretending to be more confident than you feel, laughing along when something makes you uncomfortable, hiding an important part of your life, or carefully considering how much of your real personality is safe to bring into the room.
Sometimes it is obvious that we are doing it, but often it happens so gradually that we barely notice, because most of us have learned, at some point, to read a room, understand expectations and adapt to different situations, and there is nothing wrong with being thoughtful about how we communicate or learning how to work effectively with different people.
The difficulty comes when adapting becomes pretending because there is a difference between bringing your best self to work and feeling that you have to become somebody else to succeed there.
The invisible energy of being someone you're not
When we feel unable to be ourselves at work, it can take a surprising amount of energy to maintain the version of ourselves that we believe will be accepted.
We might carefully monitor what we say, worry about how something will be interpreted, avoid talking about our lives outside work, suppress parts of our personality, stay silent when we have something valuable to contribute, or constantly compare ourselves with the people around us and wonder whether we are somehow doing work life 'the right way'.
None of this necessarily means that a workplace is openly hostile or unwelcoming.
Sometimes it is simply the accumulation of small signals that tells us which behaviours are rewarded, which personalities seem to progress, whose voices are listened to and what we are expected to look or sound like if we want to be taken seriously.
And when we spend enough time receiving those messages, it can become surprisingly easy to believe that success requires us to fit a particular mould.
Professionalism shouldn't mean pretending
Being professional does not mean leaving your personality at the door. Of course, every workplace needs boundaries, respect and appropriate behaviour, and we all have a responsibility to communicate thoughtfully and work well with other people, but professionalism should not require us to erase the parts of ourselves that make us human.
You can be ambitious and kind, confident and still ask questions, serious about your career and have a sense of humour, you can disagree respectfully and you can have a different perspective.
What if we stopped asking, “How do I fit in?”
One of the most useful questions we can ask ourselves is not “How can I fit into this workplace?” but “What would help me feel that I genuinely belong here?”
There is an important difference.
Fitting in can sometimes mean changing yourself to match the environment around you, whereas belonging allows you to remain yourself while still feeling valued, respected and included.
That distinction matters because diverse workplaces do not benefit simply from having different people in the room; they benefit when those people feel able to contribute the different experiences, ideas and perspectives that they bring with them.
If everyone feels they need to behave in exactly the same way to be successful, we may have diversity on paper without experiencing the real value of inclusion.
We can all make work a little easier for someone else
Creating a workplace where people can be themselves is not solely the responsibility of HR, senior leadership or an EDI team, it happens in everyday interactions.
It is the manager who genuinely listens to an idea, the colleague who makes space for the quieter voice in the meeting, the team that does not assume everyone has the same family life, interests or experiences, the person who notices when somebody is being interrupted and brings the conversation back to them and the colleague who says, “I hadn't thought about it that way — tell me more.”
And perhaps most importantly, it is the culture we create when we stop treating difference as something that needs to be explained away and start seeing it as something that makes our workplaces stronger.
There is freedom in being yourself
Being authentic at work does not mean sharing everything about yourself with everyone, and it certainly does not mean behaving without considering other people. It means having the freedom to decide what you bring to work, rather than feeling that you have to constantly hide or reshape yourself simply to be accepted.
Not every workplace will immediately change, and not every environment will feel equally safe or inclusive, but recognising the difference between adapting and pretending can be a powerful starting point.
Because the goal is to create workplaces where people can be different and still belong.
When people no longer have to spend quite so much energy working out who they need to be, they have more energy available for contributing, creating, collaborating, learning and doing their best work.
The real opportunity is to build workplaces where people are allowed to be themselves and where being yourself is recognised as something that can add value.
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