I used to try to fake being perfect and without flaws.
That seemed to resonate with the people I didn’t want to work with (the ones who felt pressured by their company or their professional image to find someone “perfect” to work with), and drove away the people who I might have had a real, human relationship with. Real people want to interact with real people. The ones who don’t are living their lives under this enormous shroud of what’s “appropriate” and “businesslike”. I’m not interested in that shroud. It stinks. It hasn’t been laundered in ages.
More to the point, people living in that state don’t allow themselves to make mistakes in the pursuit of creative solutions — they spend their lives in fear of mistakes. In fear of flaws, in themselves and in others.
And you already know how I feel about fear.
So I don’t do that anymore. I try very hard to push my flaws out into the open. When I need to, I fake the faith that I’m doing the right thing (which, you could argue, is probably the same as having the faith that I’m doing the right thing). Then they’re out there; all that stuff I work through is out in the world for other people to see and understand and learn from.
But here’s the funny part about that kind of faking it: There’s a delicate balance to maintain in order for other people to feel safe around you.
People need to see your vulnerabilities to believe you’re real… but they also need to see that you believe in yourself, and that you’re capable of separating your stuff from everybody else’s stuff. Capable of dealing with your own issues — responsible for them.
Awhile back I read a book called The Ethical Slut, about non-monogamous relationship styles. (That means polyamory, in this case, and if you read any of my pre-Ideaschema blogging, you’ve probably come across it.) One of the crowning achievements of The Ethical Slut, at least as far as I’m concerned, was their explanation of the concept of separating my stuff from your stuff. One person interacting with another person needs to develop the skill of seeing what issues are their own responsibility to work through, and what issues are another person’s responsibility to work through. This is essential to the smooth operation of any relationship — romantic, familial, entrepreneurial or otherwise. (And when you’re juggling several relationships of any kind at once, the essential-ness get exponential fast.)
Also? It’s really hard.
It’s hard because we haven’t grown up with others insisting that we take responsibility for our own emotions and reactions and baggage. If you’re anything like me, you grew up learning to play twisted emotional games with the people around you. Passive aggression. Denial. Putting others down to raise ourselves up — tearing ourselves down. Unrealistic expectations. Our culture’s bizarre obsession with mind-reading. Self-negativity, any negativity. No boundaries, bad boundaries… the list goes on. Some of it we recognize. But mostly, we do these things without even knowing it — and then we turn around and judge the person next to us because they haven’t worked it out yet, either.
Many of us learned to deal with this more responsibly as we got older and discovered the havoc it wrought in our personal lives. (And for those of us who prefer to have real relationships with the people we work with, our professional lives, too!) Years ago I discovered The Usual Error, for instance, which was a fantastic starter course on dealing sanely with relationship (mis-)communication. But the very best concept I had to apply to sane interactions with other people was always the Your Stuff / My Stuff rule. And I still use it now, in my private life and in the way I interact with people in public.
I push my flaws out in the open, yes. I show people that I’m just as vulnerable as the next guy. But there’s a caveat, and it is this: If your vulnerabilities overpower your ability to get something done, you upset that delicate balance. If they appear to be running rampant, if lookers-on don’t see that you are taking responsibility for your stuff and keeping it from splooshing the audience… those lookers-on stop feeling comfortable. They stop feeling safe around you, because they already have their own stuff to take responsibility for. They don’t need more.
We’re all looking for that balance.
So yeah — I fake calm and collectedness when I need to. I work things out privately when I need to. I work them out publicly, sometimes, but I always try my best to make sure My Stuff isn’t spraying someone else’s personal space. And the whole point? I show people that I’m human, without becoming mired in my own frailty and ultimate imperfection.
I haven’t figured it all out yet. And it’s not a simple procedure. There isn’t a single maxim that you can memorize and suddenly have it down-pat. You can’t excise emotion from your life, and because meaning is messy, we sometimes get it wrong.
Well, that’s fine. So we keep trying, right?
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