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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Appearances
My advisor or one of my advisors, Adam Galinsky, has this work about disinhibition and how things like being anonymous online, being able to pass a message anonymously to someone else or having a drink can help us feel free from these social constraints to express how we really feel. Unfortunately, on social media, sometimes that comes across really negatively.
But sometimes having that moment with someone else where you're sharing a glass of wine and you feel like, oh, yeah, maybe these concerns I had about how this conversation would go were in my head and I can sort of relax into the moment and be really present with this person that I'm talking to.
Thinking our way into authenticity or trying to maybe just look inwards to find that core central self that's really going to make us happy is challenging because, you know, social psychologists would say, if you look inwards, there's not really anything there. What you have is like almost a mess of data. You have all these impulses.
You have all these decisions that you've made, some of which you're proud of, some of which you're not, some of which you are proud of in the moment. And now you've come to regret. And so turning inwards, you are left to try and sort out or try to understand sometimes really conflicting bits of data about who you are.
And so what I often recommend to people is instead of focusing too much internally where things like self-criticism or self-doubt or social comparison can come into play, sometimes it helps to look outwardly and think about those situations where you really felt authentic. Hmm. as clues for who you are. You can also think about trying on different identities.
Like maybe I don't know if I like playing pickleball, for example, that's my new identity. And so you have to try it and you can feel in that moment, pay attention to how that moment makes you feel. Does it make you feel alive? Does it make you feel connected with who you are? And if it doesn't, no harm, no foul. Now you've learned something important from that situation.
Exactly. It's like a way to learn more about yourself, become more aware of who you are through reflecting on these experiences or through going out and having those experiences and bringing back self-knowledge into that internal experience.
The first day of class, my teaching assistant wasn't able to be there. So sort of my lifeline, my comfort person was not there. I just had like a binder with all my notes and sweaty palms. And I felt very inadequate to be the one standing in front of the room.
But what I did in the moment was that sort of fake it till you make it where I stood on my two feet, said good morning to the class and thought about what value I could provide for them in the moment.
So even though I was incredibly nervous, even though I was sweating, even though my voice was probably shaking at the time, I tried to approach them with sincerity, with openness and allowed that experience to maybe feel uncomfortable, but approach it in a way that, you know, I am competent and I can do this.
And it's only after, you know, that first lecture, left first lecture and a half where I realized, actually, I really like this. This is really engaging. This is really interesting. And they brought me amazing research ideas and examples that I can bring back into my other identity as a researcher.
Absolutely. I learned that teaching is a huge part of my identity. It's something I find really rewarding and really valuable, and I appreciate and look forward to that time in the classroom with my students.
Well, Sheena Angar is my advisor, so I got to spend a lot of time with her. And together with Paul Ingram, who's another professor at Columbia, they walked students through this exercise, which is a values exercise.
And what this helps you do is iterate through a set of values until you feel like you've identified sort of your core values and you understand, like, what's the most important value to you? What's your second and third most important value?
What they found is that having students remind themselves of these values before giving a presentation led them to come across as more authentic to the audience. It was that ability to remember the core values that one has to remember that, you know, I'm not just here to give a meeting. I'm here to maybe help someone achieve something with their business.
I may be here to help motivate my employees to take the next step or to take that risk. And reminding themselves of those values actually helped those speeches seem more authentic to the audience.
One thing I've found in a couple of studies is sometimes we are stuck really up here in our heads and we forget that we sort of need to bring people in to our backstage. We need to explain ourselves more than we think we do. We have all these internal motivations and feelings and evaluations that are going on behind the scenes. And we think they're so perceptible to those around us.
But of course, they're not. You know, they're locked up inside our minds. And it can help to identify your values, your motives, why you're doing the things you're doing and to articulate those to other people. It helps them make sense of what they're seeing in terms of, oh, that's how they really feel behind the scenes.
So this paper started with this question that a lot of authenticity researchers have, which is we sort of all agreed that authenticity is a good thing. But how do we get there? What's the steps that we need to take to experience more authenticity in our lives? And what they theorize is that this idea of self-compassion can help people feel more authentic.
So self-compassion is having kindness towards yourself. It's also about recognizing that we're all human and part of being human is being imperfect and making mistakes and having the ability to reflect on those mistakes with sort of composure and awareness with acceptance.
Showing 141–160 of 177 · page 8 of 9
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