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I encourage people to bring all of who they are to any environment, and especially if you are serving clients — internal or external. You don’t know what it is about your authentic self that might connect to that other person. I’ve had people say to me over the years, “I love riding motorcycles, but I never let my colleagues know that, you know, I ride motorcycles.” Turned out one of their biggest clients was a motorcycle aficionado. And by sharing that she loved to ride motorcycles, she now became that client’s favorite person.
Right? So you don’t know what it is about yourself. You could be a dog lover. You could be a ballet lover. You could love the opera, but there’s something about who you are that allows you to connect with anybody.
I think the key to bringing all of you into any room is, number one, understand who you really are. And I don’t say that lightly because many of us are in fast-paced, dynamic, competitive environments where sometimes it’s a little challenging to stop and say, “Who am I today relative to who I was in 2012? Relative to who I was in 2017?” So know who you are, and we all evolve. So you might have been a morning person when you were in college, and now you might be a complete night owl because of how you have worked over the last twenty years. So number one, who are you?
Number two, understand that we’re all multifaceted. There’s not just one you. There’s an intellectual you. There’s an inquisitive you. There’s an argumentative you. We’re all multifaceted.
Now the third key to bringing all of you into any room is now you can relax. Now you can relax and bring all of you into the room, and you are now free to feel the energy in the room. You literally are free to feel the energy because you’re not preoccupied with trying to behave or speak in a way that you think is going to be impactful. And you get to decide in that moment — is it you the student, you the expert, you the power listener — that’s going to engage most impactfully with that one person on the other side of the conversation, fifteen people in the boardroom or three thousand people that are sitting in the auditorium?