A brief live-stream segment by TJ Walker discussing an Adam Grant column arguing that ‘just be yourself’ is often bad advice. Walker recounts examples of extreme authenticity gone wrong, endorses Grant’s preference for sincerity over blunt authenticity, and gives three practical public-speaking tips: focus sincerely on ideas, be appropriately natural, and prioritize audience comfort.
Chapters
Headline in today's New York Times, unless you're Oprah, be yourself is terrible advice. This is a column by Adam Grant, who is a well known speaker, expert, author, and soon to be TED Talker. He's discussing all the advice he's getting from people and they all tell him, just be yourself, be authentic, be yourself. And he concludes, that's terrible advice. And as an expert, he went to A.J. jacobs, the well known author who once wrote a book 10 years ago, where for an entire year he had to be completely himself, honest, authentic, open with everyone. And what he found was it was a complete disaster. He told a woman he worked with that he found her attractive and if he weren't married, he'd want to date her. Well, all that did was make her uncomfortable. He told a babysitter that he might like to date her. His wife was no longer around. Well, that was a disaster as well. So this idea that you just have to be authentic, tell everyone everything, be completely honest. No, we all have thoughts that are better off kept to ourselves. Now, what Grant pointed out and what he concluded, and I tend to agree, is that sincerity is more important than authenticity. You can't just be a complete, total fake and lie to people for lying sake. But you do have to focus on ideas you have and sincerely talk about them in a way that you believe will help people. And that I think is a good axiom. Because all of us have different ways of communicating at different times. How you communicate at a funeral with a friend is different than how you communicate at a football game or a rock concert. We all have different styles and we all have certain things we think that we don't necessarily want to tell the world because it would be so wildly offensive to them. They would hate our guts. And people who just constantly walk around, hey, I'm authentic. This is what I believe. You're an idiot, you're fat, you're ugly. They're really not helping themselves or their careers or anyone else. So Grant's advice that he's concluding that he's going to be using for his own TED talk and the advice I would share with you, three quick tips. Number one, sincerely focus on ideas. You have to help people in as authentic a way as possible, but not in ways that are just comfortable for you, that are going to be offensive to others. Number two, realize you want to be natural and relaxed, but you want to be relaxed in a way that's appropriate for the situation, not necessarily showing up in your pajamas because, hey, I like to be relaxed. And number three, it's about making your audience comfortable more so than yourself. So if you have to put on a tie because your audience is going to be uncomfortable with you knotting a tie, then do that. It's a small price to pay for you to do what you presumably set out to do when you're standing up to give a speech, actually communicate.
