THAT'S MEN:People like us more when we drop the facade, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
I KNEW A MAN quite some time ago who was loud, brash and pushy. He would steamroll over you with gusto if you were a work colleague.
People saw him as a bit of a bully but, after observing him for a time I wasn’t so sure. I felt a sense of desperation behind all that bravado.
He put himself forward as a no-nonsense type who was not easy to impress. Yet something about him convinced me that he himself had a desperate need to impress and that this need fuelled his bravado.
This didn’t necessarily make him easier to deal with – despite his insecurities, he was pretty good at launching torpedoes at other people’s ideas.
I met him with his wife, years later, after he retired. I had met her before. She had a big heart but she was the genuine article in the no-nonsense department.
In other words, the man who desperately wanted to impress had married a woman who was entirely unimpressed by the bravado he employed on others.
When I met them after he retired, he seemed somehow a more authentic, genuine, likeable human being. His audience now was not his work colleagues but a wife who loved him – she stuck with him, so I suppose she must have – but who was definitely not in the market for his attempts to impress.
Because she could see through the façade, he had no choice but to be himself and as a result was a much more potentially likeable person.
I wish I could say I went off with a warm glow after meeting him, but I actually found the whole thing disturbing. The transition from loudmouth pain in the ass to warm human being felt weird to me.
Had he always been his genuine self, I and others would have liked him.
The tragedy here is that the front he put up to make us like him actually made us dislike him.
And my point is? My point is that people will usually like us more when we drop the façade when, in the words of Prof Brené Brown, who studies shame and vulnerability at the University of Houston, we come out from behind the “20-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it’s the thing that’s really preventing us from being seen . . . ”
Read more on her thoughts at http://bit.ly/droptheshield.
(By the way, the couple in question have passed on to their eternal reward.)
LAST WEEK I wrote about teens and college students lowering the tone of the BlackBerry, which used to be a status symbol in the executive rat race.
I had no idea at the time that the use of BlackBerry messaging would become a talked-about feature of the London riots.
I’m not in the habit of feeling sorry for big corporations but the BlackBerry marketing department must be in a knot of despair over it all (nothing, I know, to the despair of those who have lost homes, businesses or loved ones to the mayhem).
Blaming technology seems to be a human trait. In the 1960s, the arrival of the transistor radio (that is, a radio small and light enough to carry around) was thought to herald the breakdown of civilisation. My school once sent a classroom of us on a retreat where a spooky cleric would burst into boys’ bedrooms to catch (he claimed) anyone who might be listening to one of those evil devices.
More recently, the camera phone was thought to mean the end of everything, as perverted people – men, I suppose – would go around photographing other people in gyms and swimming pools.
Well, those particular gizmos are still with us and, while civilisation hasn’t covered itself in glory in the meantime, nobody blames transistor radios or camera phones any more. So take heart BlackBerry – 50 years from now, it will all be forgotten.
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is accredited as a counsellor by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Livingis published by Veritas. His mindfulness newsletter is free by e-mail