Read the Room, Would You?

How our misguided attempts at authenticity can result in lazy, ineffective ways of interacting with others.

To this day, I struggle to beat the allegations: Miriam, you’re just too quiet. The volume of my voice has been a point of insecurity ever since my very first speech, at eight years old, in my 4-H club’s monthly meeting. Somewhere between then and now, I reached a point where I avoided taking responsibility for improvement. How did I excuse away the blame? “I’m naturally soft-spoken; I’m just being my authentic self.”

Have you ever used this excuse before? Often, we are well-intentioned: we’ve been taught by our culture that authenticity is the highest good, and authenticity means, well, we should just do or be or feel or say whatever we want. Right?

One of the tricky things about authenticity is sometimes we don’t actually know who we are. And, if we don’t know who we are, how on earth can we know if we’re being true to who that is? Our tendency as humans is to change our minds and be whatever we feel like being in the given moment, and we just love the path of least resistance.

The other tricky thing about authenticity is how blurred the line becomes between being genuine and simply lacking the discipline to read the room and best serve the people in that room. You see, my generation has become so obsessed with authenticity we’ve turned it into a permission slip for insensitivity and outright selfishness.

Back to my battle with my quiet voice. When I would debate my ag teacher about how “it’s just who I am! Stop trying to change who I am”, I failed to understand what it truly meant for me to be genuine. My voice isn’t my identity; yet, the spirit behind the quiet voice—my general inner sense of calm, my desire to listen more than be heard, my mission to make even a powerful speech seem like a conversation with a friend—that is the deeper piece of who I am. And, if the people I’m talking to literally cannot hear the words I’m speaking, what’s the point of all those other things? I’m not being authentic, I’m being lazy. The same could be true for those with the opposite problem of being too loud. Maybe you have a critical message to share and you care about the people in the room, but if your delivery is obnoxious, folks are likely going to tune you out, anyway.

I’ve found that authenticity has become twisted in definition, referring to the above ideas of simply doing whatever you want and trying to call it a good thing. I think the good intention behind the idea is better summed up as being genuine. It’s true, we don’t want to put on a fake front, trying to be some manufactured version of ourselves to try to fit in or be cool; instead, the goal is not to be a shapeshifter, but a well-rounded person who recognizes it’s entirely good and right to behave differently around our 2-year-old niece than our 62-year-old state senator, to use different language around our customers in a meeting than with our friends over drinks.

This isn’t just about giving speeches and having conversations. It’s about working on a team, sending an email, picking your outfit for tomorrow, and talking to your husband. Some applications:

• Maybe your team at work is being indecisive about how to move forward, and time is running out. If you’re not naturally the most decisive but you’re the first to see that a decision just needs to be made and so you start to take charge, you’re not being inauthentic, you’re stepping up.

• You found out you got charged double what you expected from an online order, and your first idea is to send an angry email with some powerfully-placed expletives; if you choose to send a polite message, giving the vendor the benefit of the doubt, you’re not being inauthentic, you’re just being kind. (And, in my very recent real-life experience, this was actually incredibly effective anyway.)

• I love a good pair of bright-colored striped flare jeans, but I wear basic blue jeans with my polo when I head out for the work day to meet with customers. I’m not failing to be true to myself, I’m just not choosing a fit that would detract from what I’m trying to accomplish.

When we pursue the end goal of serving others well and working effectively with the people around us, we’ll find that being genuine is both the hardest thing and the easiest thing to do. It’s hard because it often requires us pausing for a moment instead of blurting out whatever it is we feel like saying, but it’s easy because we don’t have to try to be someone else; we simply have to choose to be thoughtful. And trust me, I doubt you’ll be criticized for inauthenticity if you’re known as the most thoughtful person in the room.

---

Journal Prompt of the Week

When is the most recent time you’ve failed to read the room in the name of authenticity? How did it affect your relationship with those people?