Personas and Their Role in Personal Growth
Occasionally we all resort to hiding who we are. In a professional environment it may be that we use the word “fuck” a lot less and act very much strait-laced in our interactions before retreating to hip-hop or metal in our cars. Maybe when interacting with your neighbors you give off the air of being the typical next door friendly person with a smile and a wave, even though you just want to get your mail and retreat back inside. Ultimately, there are times when it is ok to put on a façade and then there are times when you are doing a disservice to yourself or even causing long-lasting damage to your authentic self. It is important to examine the differences in this self-serving behavior because while one may be self-affirming, the other is self-destructive. Assuming a new persona can elevate or eliminate who you truly are.
To elaborate a bit on what a persona is, think about superheroes, Bruce Wayne is Batman, Clark Kent is Superman and being the nerd I am, I could go on and on about who these people are and who their personas are. However, these people all assume a new mantle when they put on their superhero suit and take charge of their lives, their cities, or their worlds when they assume their persona. Famously, Beyonce had a persona that enabled her to be more comfortable in her own skin and with her performances so much so that it led to multiple articles about it. She utilized her alter ego to help her grow mentally and emotionally until the day that she essentially became that persona and was able to just be herself when she walked onstage. That is self-affirming and elevated her. She was already a huge presence in the world but embracing this side of her allowed her to grow and feel confident and comfortable in her own skin. It allowed her to move from a younger version of herself to a more mature comfortable being in her own skin adult with all of the complexity contained therein.
Another example of adopting personas is what professional wrestling refers to as “gimmicks”. Each wrestler has to find the gimmick that allows them to connect with the audience in a way that feels genuine and authentic. This often is an amplification or a response to one of their natural character traits, based on if they are trying to play the role of the good (face) or bad (heel) persona. Finding the right gimmick elevates a wrestler from a person who is working regularly to a superstar oftentimes. They may have great skills working in the ring and great skills using the microphone, but once they find the exact right persona they can go from “The Ringmaster” (if you don’t know wrestling, you probably don’t know who that is) to Stone Cold Steve Austin (you likely know who that is). The same person, the same skills, but a different persona makes all the difference in the world. I could list 10 other performers who went through a similar transformation, but you may or may not know them, although arguably The Rock falls in the same category, but he has not transcended the wrestling world so much, some people may not even know that he was a wrestler before he became a movie star.
Many people struggle to feel comfortable in their own skin, so it is important that we also touch on why a persona can be a damaging thing for so many. Often, when individuals grow up as people-pleasers it inhibits their ability to be truly authentic and genuine with others. They are always hiding behind a persona depending on the people they are around. They will have a friend group persona, a family persona, a work persona, and while there may be similarities across all of these, none of them are who these people actually are. They compartmentalize their lives and assume these roles in other people’s lives always trying to be “the right person” rather than themselves. The longer they play in these roles, the less and less of them is present in these interactions. When they feel accepted, they diminish themselves further feeling an affirmation that their true self is not someone that would be accepted here. Over time, they are a shell of who they were and don’t really have their own opinions and are incapable of being someone that isn’t a reflection of what someone else wants or expects. This is a worst-case scenario of how a persona can go awry for sure, but it is a reality that is why we have to be careful with adopting personas.
The best way to utilize a new persona for yourself, is to figure out where there are boundaries in your life needing addressed. Where do you feel you are lacking confidence that you can make a change? For many, the easiest place to make changes is work. It’s even easier when we are entering a new job or a new role at the same organization. There is enough separation at work from our personal lives typically, and there is the “work persona” everyone has to adopt where we only share an appropriate amount of who we are that makes this one of the easiest places to start making changes to ourselves. Focusing on the goals you have for work and focusing on the things that can help you reach those goals as well as the things that detract from those are a great tool in setting our persona for work. If we need to feel confidence in our role, and if we need to minimize some of the interoffice chatter that may make us seem like less of a leader, then we begin there. We decide that office gossip, or the catching up on something that was on television the night before are not conversations we will have at work anymore. So, we set a boundary there and instead utilize that time to focus on preparing for a presentation or meeting. This reminds us that we deserve the role we are in, we are professional, and we are focused on getting the results we need. Adding that extra time to prepare means we feel less nervous and can feel more confident and ready for the meeting or presentation. We have adopted a persona of focus, effort, and preparedness, even though that may not be the thing we want to be doing. We have bought into ourselves and our worth and value within our role and subsequently make a good impression on both those above us and at the same level. People will notice these changes and buy into us in ways that encourage us to continue to do that work on ourselves and for ourselves. We then can begin to apply this confidence to anything in our lives and focus on building our persona in other areas we struggle with. We aren’t tearing ourselves down or changing who we are, but rather we are building the pieces of ourselves we need to in order to make our lives the best they can be.