The External Mind

Wait, where did everybody go?

The Importance of Being the 'Real You' in Social Settings

I do believe people can sense 'realness'. By 'sensing', I mean that they can subconsciously pick up on certain cues (your tone, your hesitation, the words you choose or don't choose, the subsequent or preceding actions you take/took etc).

Our 'conscious' mind is just a tiny sliver on top of a whole system. It doesn't possess the power to run all our complex tasks or functions smooth and elegantly. Our unconscious mind mostly performs these tasks. It dedicates our whole life learning and running the processes in the background we're hardly aware of. Tasks like walking, driving, playing instruments etc. become 'second nature' at a certain point. You don't think about them anymore. You just 'do them'. Being consciously aware might even interfere with performing these tasks smoothly and elegantly.

This is what I also think differentiates professional actors from amateurs or non actors. I think that to a certain extent, actors believe what they're saying, and are immersed in their roles. Whereas normal individuals just say the lines, and make the faces they think fits the emotion (bad). So the trick is to convince your unconscious mind, that it really believes what you want it to believe (good luck with that, it's not easy)

What I also believe is mostly delegated to our unconscious mind are certain social cues. I don't believe you can consciously project them with much success. They seem to be too refined, too numerous to consciously perform with much success. Things need to be 'just right', or the whole thing feels 'off', That's why people seem to sense that your confidence, compliment or smile is fake. People can 'sense' when you don't actually believe what you're saying, or are performing. They are aware of all of this even if it's not consciously.

There should be congruence between what you say and what you believe. That's why it's important to be your 'true self'. Like Carl Rogers said, every person has an inner organismic valuing system. Something that fundamentally steers us to actualize our full potential. We often suppress it, to 'fit in'. But once we listen to ourselves more, and express ourselves genuinely, we'll believe what we are saying. And there will be congruence between what we say and who we are. There will be no doubt that people will actually believe that we believe what we are saying. Will that actually make people listen to us more, and have confidence in us? Probably not. It's not that simple. But once you actually believe what you are saying and doing, it becomes a lot easier confincing others too.

Goodluck.

Interesting readings 📚:

The Concept of the Fully Functioning Person by Carl Rogers,