The American writer, Kurt Vonnegut, famously wrote, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
We all have experienced the rightness of the first half of this sentence, if not the last: taking a deep, quaking breath, then striding in and making a kiss-ass presentation as if we had all the confidence in the world, for example, when we actually feel as if we're on stage giving the performance of a lifetime. Walking through a room packed with suits while wearing Gap jeans and a polo shirt, and exuding such presence that the suits get out of the way. A million other examples.
From the other side, though, there are times - not just times, but whole swatches of our lives - in which we absolutely believe we are a certain way when in fact we are not.
Can this affect more than our eventual self-esteem if we ever get a clue? You bet it can.
Remember the guy you worked for one summer, who was all laughing and hearty and back-slapping and 'how's the little wife doing, and the kids' but who had, at full volume, berated one employee over a broken screwdriver, summarily fired another as he ran in the door late from having delivered his child to school when the bus broke down, and always believed the first version he heard of any complaint - especially from his two or three pet employees - and would never accept a word from the other side? And yet this man truly saw himself as a good guy and a great boss. Your view, and that of all the other workers, except for the pets, was radically different.
Harold, a supervisor in a baking shop, was once approached by Isabel, a long-time worker, who - quietly and hesitantly - told him she had found a position in the office and would be moving upstairs in two weeks. Harold, who liked this employee very much, opened his mouth to say something joking and hearty like "Abandoning us for the big time!" or "Tired of flour in your shoes?" or something of that sort, but happened to notice the other workers, all standing nearby watching with worried, even frightened faces. Good for Harold - he stopped the words before they came, did a rapid mental check of himself, really looked at all those faces, and especially Isabel's, and said instead, quietly and with real feeling, "That's great news, Isabel. We'll miss you, but you'll do a terrific job upstairs. Congratulations."
The entire staff let out a huge sigh. Isabel hugged Harold, and then Harold was left alone with his thoughts, which were many and disturbing.
"How come they don't know I like them?" Harold thought. "Why don't they know that I want to see them promoted? What's wrong with those people, anyway?"
But then Harold did a very smart, very difficult, thing. He looked not at his employees but at himself and thought, "If I were Isabel, why would I have been so worried about telling me this? If I were one of the other workers, why would I have feared for her?" And finally, "What is it actually like to work for me? If I weren't me, would I like myself as a boss? Would I trust me? Would I do my best for me?"
He went into his little office and closed the door, and thought. Then he found this, a list of things that 'good' bosses believe, and 'bad' ones don't.
This entire list seemed written for him alone, from the first item which says, "I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me" to the final, devastating,"Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it."
I would like to say that Harold came out of that office a changed man. Perhaps he did. But what about the rest of us? And what about Vonnegut? What about the precious, time-honored rule of "kiss up, kick down?"
Harold suspects that Kurt was right, and was wrong. After all, you in jeans and a polo in the room full of suits is real, and it's all in how you present yourself to that room. The backslapping, ranting jerk, on the other hand, saw his own reality far differently than anyone else did.
Maybe there is no easy reconciliation between these thoughts. But that's why they pay you the big bucks, isn't it?
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