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Here’s career advice that you might have heard going into a job interview, networking opportunity, or even starting a new position: Be yourself. This sounds good. If you’re the advisee, it relieves the pressure to live up to someone else’s expectations. If you’re the adviser, it ingratiates you to the person by signaling trust and confidence in them. Everyone feels good. But this advice can be misunderstood and possibly dangerous if it’s misapplied.
That’s not to say that you should be phony either, and you certainly shouldn’t be dishonest about your professional background and misrepresent yourself.
The problem with only being yourself at work is that jobs, interviews, and exchanges of social capital require mutual benefit with others. Even if altruism is your true self, it’s difficult to only follow the advice to “Be yourself” and serve an institution and its students at the same time.
Authenticity, like happiness, is something that shouldn’t be pursued but rather something that ensues when fulfilling the agreements you make with yourself and others.
Promise or a Place To Hide
Entrepreneur and best-selling author Seth Godin says that people often use authenticity as a place to hide. If you try something that didn’t work, you can say you weren’t being authentic. And if you are successful, then that becomes your authentic self.
Success in job interviews — and throughout a career — comes from aligning who you are and what you value with the values and needs of employers. This matchmaking comes to bear through action, not good intentions and interpretations of “being.”
“Authenticity, for me, is doing what you promise, not ‘being who you are,'” Godin wrote on his blog. “That’s because ‘being’ is too amorphous and we are notoriously bad at judging that.”
Who’s Judging?
Having no reliable way to measure authenticity is something also observed by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, author of “Don’t Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead).” The best way is to ask people if they are authentic or measure what people find authentic about others.
“Research shows that we find others authentic when they have high emotional intelligence, because they’re really good at skilled self-presentation,” said Chamorro-Premuzic as a guest on the Something You Should Know podcast. “[Authentic people are] very good at strategically putting on a professional self, or harnessing their work or professional reputation in a way that is believable at times. Yes, it means paying attention to consistency between what you say and what to do, but mostly it has to do with actually being more ‘other’ oriented, focusing on being valuable to others, rather than unleashing your unfiltered or unedited self on others.”
As job seekers, you wouldn’t waltz into an interview and tell the search committee about how you need a new job because you’re afraid your spouse will leave you if you don’t start making more money or working better hours. That might be authentic, but it’s not an approach that shows your value to the audience.
“A job interview isn’t an invitation for you to show the real you or the full spectrum of your self-complexity to others,” Chamorro-Premuzic continued. “It is an invitation to demonstrate that you have the necessary social skills to understand social etiquette and display some pro-social tendencies. (…) The goal is to be yourself, but on a good day.”
Whole Self vs. Best Self
You’re probably a different person at home compared to the office, especially if authenticity is fulfilling promises, as Godin suggests. You also might be different at the start of a semester or on a day when your energy is zapped. Perhaps better advice would be to show your “best self” at a given moment, but even that can be complicated by interpretation, intention, and expectations.
You also can’t deny that you will bring your whole self to work. You want to work for an employer who understands and maybe even desires the complexities of the human condition of its workers. You are not just a brain and a set of hands — you have a heart that might change or be affected by all sorts of circumstances. Many of us identify with our feelings and intentions as our true selves, not our intellect or actions.
But as for advice, going into a high-stakes presentation that is transactional — such as a job interview or fulfilling the economic contract of “doing the work”– trying to be yourself or be authentic will divert you from your goal.
“When you tell me that it would be authentic for you to do x, y, or z, my first reaction is that nothing you do is truly authentic, it’s all part of a long-term strategy for how you’ll make an impact in the world,” Godin wrote.
So, what is good advice for job seekers? Here’s what Godin and Chamorro-Premuzic recommend:
Be Consistent
To be in service of your audience, think about what they desire. Employers want to hire the best candidate to do the work, not the realest or most relatable. They’re trying to detect a pattern of performance that will best predict a successful outcome for their institution.
If you’re in a job interview, this means providing accurate evidence and a track record of success that connects to the job description and aligns with the department’s priorities. If you’re starting a new position, it means consistently showing up in a way that is grounded on principle and motivated by fulfilling promises.
“[Authenticity] is a ticket to self-absorbed inconsistency, and I don’t think anybody we serve wants that,” Godin told Ferriss. “I think what they want is consistency. I think they want us to make a promise and keep it.”
Godin concluded on this blog post that “people can tell when you shift your story and your work in response to whatever is happening around you, and particularly when you say whatever you need to say to get through the next cycle. But consistency is easier to talk about and measure than authenticity is.”
Be Relevant
Regardless of whoever you are or whatever your best self is, you must position yourself to thrive in a professional context. If “who you are” is performing an outdated business practice or using a teaching technique that doesn’t relate to students, then that’s a sign that you must adapt or find a different job.
Even beyond technical skills, there’s emotional labor that requires people with certain personalities to do the work effectively. Identify what you do best and connect it to the job description and what the employer wants. You might want to bring your whole self to work, but there’s only so much that is relevant about you to the work that needs to be done.
“The notion that anybody, any employer or organization, is interested in us bringing our whole self or displaying all of these dimensions is just ludicrous,” Chamorro-Premuzic said. “Work, and any high-stakes interaction with others or social situation, is an invitation to display the relevant aspects of ourselves. And when you’re curating your reputation, you need to understand what aspects of yourself or personality people want to see.”
In Conclusion
The goal of a job search or professional interaction isn’t self-expression; it’s impact. “Be yourself” collapses a complex, strategic moment into a vague slogan that prioritizes comfort over effectiveness. A better approach is to be intentional: understand your audience, honor your commitments, and present the version of yourself that is most consistent and relevant to the work.
That doesn’t require abandoning your values or humanity. It requires channeling them with intention. Careers are built not on how honestly we emote in high-stakes moments, but on how reliably we deliver, how thoughtfully we adapt, and how clearly we show others the value we can create.
