The Mask Fits Until it Doesn't

On authenticity and who gets to show up as themselves

I was recently told by a good friend that I completely buried my own story and personality behind generic statements on my own website. And I couldn’t help but agree. I felt some form of pressure to show up a certain way.

There is a version of consulting that feels like a performance. We all know it. The solo practitioner who always refers to “we” in client meetings. The consultant who crams industry vocabulary shortly before a client call in order to sound fluent and display industry expertise.

It’s understandable. There is a real fear underneath it. A lot of people fear that they must present themselves a certain way in order to be taken serious. The harder the times, the thicker the mask. A lot of professionals worry that who they actually are, with the gaps in their knowledge and the genuine questions they haven't answered yet, might not be enough. That clients are buying a finished product, not a curious person who will figure it out alongside them.

But just as my friend pointed out, people will notice. Clients feel the performance. It creates a subtle, but somewhat notable, distance. And that makes the work that much harder.

The best experiences I’ve had on projects and in jobs always included some form of openness about what I knew, what I didn’t, and how I actually work. Sometimes it was initially uncomfortable, but it was just basic honesty. And almost without exception it created a sense of trust, helped build a relationship. Suddenly where I questioned myself, my collaborators questioned their own assumptions. And that’s where the magic happens.

This shows up even more clearly when you're doing research. Whether it’s in interviews, observational work in the field, usability tests, or co-creative session, participants have a finely tuned radar for when someone is just going through the motions.

I once worked on a project in the automotive space. While I drive an old Westfalia Vanagon that requires quite a bit of upkeep, I honestly don’t know much about cars. I was never the guy to talk about the horsepower of this car or the liters of that engine. The old van has long been my dream car for the kind of experiences it allows me to have and the atmosphere that emanates from it. Yet by week 3 of our research, I was genuinely excited to talk to shop technicians about performance tires and torque, which cars were the most fun to work on, or the journeys of how they built out their expansive tool collections. I didn’t just try to build rapport. I just got pulled in, like a kid learning a new game. Because when you're sitting with someone who cares deeply about something and you let yourself actually listen, curiosity tends to follow on its own.

Over the course of my career, in different roles, projects, industries, countries, I have always noticed that when I crossed the threshold from professional interest to genuine immersion, what people shared with me changed. I got anecdotes and learnings that I didn’t even think to ask about. People stopped giving me the tidy version. They gave me the complicated one, the raw one, the real one. The one with the contradictions and the workarounds and the things that have always bothered them but nobody ever asked about. It was so much fun.

This curiosity also connects to something I think is often underrated about coming in as an outsider. When I moved to the US I often allowed myself to ask seemingly naive questions. About things people probably took for granted. Why is it this way? Why are we doing it that way? Later, as a consultant, I took a similar approach. I asked the questions that somebody who has been in the industry for longer wouldn’t even think to ask. I asked questions that lived in the vicinity of the infamous “we’ve always done it this way” type of situations. But you can only ask these with any credibility if you're actually being yourself. If you're performing expertise you don't have, you can't also claim the outsider's permission to not know things. Authenticity lets you be the person who genuinely doesn't know, and that's often exactly the person the room needs.

Let me add something incredibly important here.

It is much easier to write and talk about authenticity and showing up as your true self for me. It’s low-cost for me, because as a white male my core identity does not register as threatening or uncomfortable in most professional rooms. I don't have to calculate how much of myself is safe to bring in.

That freedom is not universal. And I think it's important to name that clearly.

For a lot of professionals — people of color, women, LGBTQ+ professionals, neurodivergent folks, people with accents or names that get mispronounced in kickoff calls — authenticity carries a real tax. Where me being direct might be interpreted as confidence, it may be read as aggression from someone else. Where I may be afforded to use casual honesty and it lets me build rapport, some people are faced with prejudice as less qualified or too different.

What this means for me is: if you have the privilege of low-cost authenticity, use it to open the doors for others. Lower the temperature for others in the room. Model the kind of openness that makes it safe for others to be themselves, too. Notice when someone else is paying that extra tax that you are not burdened with, and ask what you can do about the room rather than the person. (This is very much an ongoing learning process for me. Please seek more experienced counsel on this topic in particular.)

Now, what can all of this look like in practice you ask? Maybe drop the “we” if it’s just you. Own your not-knowing. It’s often your most useful asset. Let real curiosity drive your research questions, not just your discussion guide. And be honest about how you actually work, because clients who are a bad fit for the real you will be a bad fit for your work too.

Authenticity isn’t softness or naivety. It’s a choice. It’s character. And yes, sometimes it’s also a privilege.

The best consulting relationships I’ve been a part of always felt like real conversations between people who truly show up and are present. It was not about vendor and client, expert, stakeholder, consultant, decision-maker. It was about people trying to figure something out together and create something they deemed meaningful.

Now, as the opening anecdote showed, I still have some work to do there myself. Maybe this makes you think about areas where you are not (yet) showing up as yourself?