Erica Bailey
speaker
177 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Erica Bailey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And it's really a shame because they miss how complex each person is and the value that you bring both from people's own perspectives, but also your competence and warmth and everything else that you could bring to your company. So it's the company that's really missing out, I would say.
It becomes complicated to the extent that you perceive maybe boundaries or conflictions between these identities. So researchers call this self-concept complexity. So we all have lots of aspects of ourselves. Some pieces feel like they fit together, or they're really overlapping, and others feel really far apart.
And part of what authenticity can emerge from is where you make sense of those identities or the narrative that you tell about how they got you to where you are now. So even if these identities might feel far apart, what I'm hearing from the listener is there's some logic to how she created her life now.
And there's some path that she feels that she's followed that has allowed her to express these various identities in different ways. And I think, what a rich tapestry to connect with other people on. What a way to surprise people about something that you wouldn't have expected. And maybe that will allow them to share something that they have that's unexpected.
And then how does that inform how we see our sense of self and our identity and our ability to grow? It's all about that way that we think about our overlapping senses of self and how different situations pull these things out of us.
some research about this topic that the listener might find interesting is about code switching so this is where people speak slightly differently or express themselves differently when they're in different cultural frames so for example with different people that can be confusing to outsiders who see inconsistency so you speak like that with these people and then when you're with me you speak differently and that i don't know what to make of that
And a very simple intervention in this paper is just to say, well, I have different cultural identities. And this is a part of me. And now welcome to my backstage, where I'm going to tell you more about who I am that's going to help you make sense of this. And most people understand what it's like to have multiple identities.
And it could even be a creativity exercise for another person to connect with you to realize, oh, yeah, I actually, I guess I do sometimes talk about football with this one person. And then I talk about mathematics with someone else.
Absolutely. And I think you're getting a sense for why authenticity is such a fun topic to study and so complicated because these questions, you know, it sounds really good to just be your true self or bring your true self to work or, yeah, be you.
And then the second you start to realize, oh, that you is really complicated sometimes or maybe the you doesn't fit in this environment in quite the right way. which I think most people don't feel like there's that perfect fit. It starts to get much more complex of a question.
Again, I would sort of go back to this idea, and I have some empirical data that shows this, that people's perceptions of whether someone is authentic
are all over the place the judgments that i make about one person's authenticity are almost completely different than the judgments that someone else makes of the same person even if we sort of know that person together in the same social group and in that same research i looked at outcomes of well-being and what i found is like other people's ratings of your authenticity really don't relate to your well-being it's really the sense of authenticity that you have is really important for your own well-being
So going around and trying to convince other people that you're being authentic, maybe it would work for one person at a time, but trying to convince everybody in your workplace that you're authentic. No, I'm really authentic. No, I really mean this. So this is how I am.
That to some extent can be a way to connect with other people, but it's really difficult to convince people that you're being authentic, especially if they have it in their heads that they're not gonna try to understand you or they're not gonna take your perspective or they're gonna view you through a stereotypical lens.
And so what I usually tell people is authenticity is worth pursuing for its own sake, for you, for your well-being in places where you feel that you can be authentic safely. What other people think about you, that's their business.
And I think all I can say is create healthy distance between other people's perceptions of you and your authentic pursuits to discover who you are and to find places where you can bring that forward.
Well, it sounds like she has a book to write that I want to read. That's also close to my heart. My advisor is blind and always talking to her about her sense of self and how she's viewed in the world and how she experienced going to grad school in the 90s, for example, is just completely different than the way that I've experienced the world.
And it's so fascinating to understand people who experience the world differently than you do. So I would love to read her book should she ever write it. I'm kind of a funny academic where I mostly read fiction books, and I kind of don't read academic-y self-help books, even though they might be very helpful. I would say the one academic book that I'll recommend is a classic.
It's Irving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. A lot of these ideas about society as a social performance, about people with stigmatized identities where other people would judge them or make
inferences about them because of a visible or invisible identity are really something that he thought about in the 60s but in terms of books like fiction books i feel are a really great place to explore narratives by being in someone else's head you get to experience the world through someone else in a safe environment you know sitting on your couch but you're fighting dragons or you're uh
Showing 41–60 of 177 · page 3 of 9
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