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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It started off with these conversations, and then it very quickly escalated into formal excommunication, which is I had to move out of my apartment where I was living with another member of the church. I lost contact with my immediate family at the time. Thankfully, we've reconnected since then.
And I lost connections with pretty much every single person that I knew, including people I would consider family at that point.
It was really destabilizing and it was really, really painful. Some of these relationships have still not been repaired. I still feel them like open wounds of these people that I really cared for. And what I try to remember is they believe that they're doing the right thing. They think that you have to cut someone out of the group in order to maintain the functioning of the group.
And also in order to teach that person a lesson that if we release you out into the world, you'll sort of learn the world is wrong and you'll want to come back in. So slowly but surely, every person that I knew gave me a call and said, hey, you know, I'm sorry, but we can't we can't talk anymore.
Yeah. So this feeling we refer to as inauthenticity and inauthenticity has a couple of sources or variants. On the one hand, you can feel inauthentic because you don't know who you are. So you feel like yourself is somewhere separate. You feel disconnected from that true self and it feels inaccessible almost to you.
On the other hand, inauthenticity could also be, I know very well who I am and what I want to say in this moment, but for whatever reason, I'm choosing to deny that. I'm choosing to express myself in a way that's counter to that internal experience.
Yeah, I knew very clearly, or I felt at least that I knew who I was internally, or I had some sense of inner self, but I was not able to access that or bring that forward in the group.
Inauthenticity is a really taxing psychological experience. It can make you feel anxious. It can make you feel depressed. And it really separates you from being able to make genuine connections with other people because you're so concerned with how you're coming across and managing that impression that you're creating in the other person.
When sociologists talk about emotional labor, what they're referring to is this act of managing your impressions or the way you're coming across in these professional environments where we usually have norms about how to behave, norms about how to express yourself.
And these can even be formalized rules about the way you need to dress, the way you need to appear, and how you need to treat those people that you're interacting with. So that experience of having to manage how you're coming across at times when that is conflicting with your inner self requires some labor where the emotional labor term comes from.
It requires some effort on your part to sort of keep up appearances. One example that sociologists mentioned is the service with a smile. So customer service representatives have to appear cheery and open and agreeable to people that they're interacting with, even if they are having a bad day or they're tired or they're bored with the person they're talking to.
Exactly. Or at times you're required to be inauthentic. As someone who worked in restaurants, sometimes you are having a great conversation with someone. You are smiling because you're having a good day, but that's not always the case. We've seen a lot post-COVID of these videos of customer service representatives, essential workers, airline attendants that are having to deal with
people who are speaking to them in a way that's inappropriate or not respectful. And, you know, deep down, they must be hurting. They must be upset. But they have to maintain that air of professionalism, even under those high pressure situations.
She might have been rolling her eyes, looking at the clock, pretending to wash some cups underneath the, you know, far down at the other end of the bar to stay away from them so she doesn't get dragged into it. Yeah. Yeah. You really see everything working in restaurants.
Like many companies, IBM has what we call newcomer socialization, which is where they try and teach you about the organization's norms, the culture, help you understand the broader mission of the company. And as a consultant, that was particularly important because we would be going out to client site on behalf of IBM.
So they wanted us to have a clear sense of that organizational identity and be able to sort of bring that persona to our clients. So this came in the form of sort of how we looked, looking professional, being on time. You know, we even had everybody had the same ThinkPad computers. We had the same cell phones. You know, we were really well branded as IBMers.
At the same time, some of these, again, are just sort of internalized norms. So I'm a person that has visible tattoos and I was so concerned of anyone seeing my tattoos because surely this is against IBM's policy. And I asked a HR person, they said, oh, we have no policy about tattoos. Feel free to show them as long as, you know, the client thinks it's fine. We think it's great.
Exactly. As long as your shirt is ironed, you can show your tattoo.
Absolutely. And we're being lighthearted about it, but I don't want to ignore the fact that for some people, their authentic self could bring significant interpersonal costs. It can be a life or death matter to express some identities that people have. So sometimes that is a really serious thing that people manage where they keep parts of their personal self separate from their work self.
At the same time, that's a really...
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