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Principles Under Pressure
TAIU
A principle only counts on the day it costs something.
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Tool 14 · Develop yourself
What remains when there is nobody to notice, approve or expect anything?
A guided 20 to 30 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. Not a test of whether you are a good person. An investigation into which of your versions is useful and which one is costing you.
If nobody could ever know you had done it, would you still want to do it?
The answer does not prove anything by itself. But it is usually worth understanding.
Different in different rooms is not the same as dishonest. Nothing needs changing is a legitimate result here.
What you'll look at
- 01The last stretch of time nobody needed anything from you
- 02Something you keep doing that nobody will ever know about
- 03Something you stop doing the moment nobody is watching
- 04A version of you that only certain people see
A note from Mark
Most of us have more than one version of ourselves, and I have never thought that was a problem.
I behave differently with my son than I do in a boardroom. Differently with old friends than with somebody I have just met. That does not make one of those versions fake. It makes me a person who has learned what different rooms need.
What actually interests me is what happens when nobody needs anything from you and there is no one there to approve, criticise, reward or notice. What do you choose then. What disappears. What becomes easier. What do you keep doing even though nobody will ever know. And the one that usually tells you most, which parts of you only seem to exist when somebody is watching.
Read my full view ↓
I do not think the objective is perfect consistency. That sounds attractive and is not how people work. The objective is to understand which of the differences are useful and which ones are costing you something.
Sometimes the private version deserves more room. Sometimes the public version represents standards you actually chose and should protect. And sometimes, once you look properly, there is no contradiction worth the name.
What you'll get
This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.
01
What stays when nobody is watching
02
What disappears, and why
03
What the difference costs you
04
What, if anything, to change
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02What changes when nobody is watching
- 03What stays
- 04What disappears
- 05The evidence
- 06The public and private gap
- 07What appears to be driving it
- 08The rival explanation
- 09Where this may have come from
- 10What the difference is costing you
- 11What deserves protecting
- 12The credible alternative
- 13What, if anything, should change
- 14What remains unresolved
- 15Where this goes next
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.
This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.
The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
What now?
01 · Save it
What actually changes when the audience is removed, from evidence rather than self-description.
02 · Test it
Do one thing that matters to you without telling anybody, and see whether it still feels worth doing a week later.
See more ↓
Before you decide anything is wrong
If the exercise found that the public version is expensive, the useful step is usually not consistency. It is finding one place where you are not required to be anybody in particular.
If it found nothing much to change, take that seriously. Coherence across contexts is more common than the internet allows, and it does not need improving.
What I would do
- 01
Start with a real unobserved stretch of time rather than with a description of your character. Character produces a polished answer and a Tuesday evening does not.
- 02
Separate what survives without an audience from what disappears. Both are findings, and most people only look at the second.
- 03
Before calling anything a performance, ask what it would cost to stop. Some of it is discipline you would keep anyway.
- 04
Assume privacy is legitimate until something you described suggests otherwise.
- 05
Work out whether the difference is costing you anything at all. Quite often it is not.
Test it
- 01
Name something you would still pursue if nobody could ever know you had achieved it. If nothing comes, that is worth sitting with rather than fixing.
- 02
Write down what you did with the last free evening you had. Compare it with how you would have described that evening to a colleague.
- 03
Take a standard you keep in public and ask whether you would keep it alone in a hotel room in another country. The answer tells you whose standard it is.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is that the private version is the real one and the public version is a performance. Sometimes that survives. Often it does not. The private self is not the truer self, it is simply the less constrained one. The public version may represent standards you deliberately chose and would defend. What looks like laziness at home may be the only genuine recovery in your week. What looks like confidence at work may be a capability rather than a deception. And the least dramatic reading is often the right one: the contradiction is real but far narrower than you thought, or the problem is not authenticity at all but exhaustion from maintaining too many roles with nowhere to put any of them down.
Think about this
- The last time nobody needed anything from you, and what you did with it.
- Something you keep doing that nobody will ever know about.
- Something that stops the moment there is nobody to see it.
- The version of you that only appears when particular people are in the room.
- Whether being the public version gives you energy or takes it.
Take this to Ask Mark
You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →Want to go further?
READ · BOOK
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Erving Goffman
Read the first eighty pages. If the exercise concluded you are performing something, he will stop you treating that as a character flaw and start you asking what the performance is for.
Read more ↗
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READ · BOOK
Why We Do What We Do
Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste
Worth it if the exercise found that something you care about only feels worthwhile once somebody notices. He explains the mechanism without making you feel corrupt for it.
Read more ↗
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Next tool
Your principles
If it found a standard you keep when nobody is checking
Before you start
Reading, if you would rather understand the question first.
Further thinking
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Erving Goffman
Why We Do What We Do
Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste
A theory of social comparison processes
Leon Festinger
See the thinking ↓
Book
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Erving Goffman
Goffman watched ordinary social life the way somebody watches a play, and found that all of us run a front stage and a back stage. The front is not a lie. It is the working version of ourselves that a situation requires. Reading him takes most of the moral charge out of the question, and leaves a far better one behind: which of your performances is worth the effort it costs.
Book
Why We Do What We Do
Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste
The readable account of self-determination theory, written by the man who spent forty years testing it. The finding that matters here is that rewards and approval reliably change why people do things, and that behaviour which survives without either is telling you something the rest is not. It gives you a usable test rather than a feeling.
Article
A theory of social comparison processes
Leon Festinger
The original paper, and still the clearest. Festinger's claim is that in the absence of an objective measure we evaluate ourselves against whoever is nearby, and we choose people close enough to us for the comparison to sting. It explains a great deal about why private ambition and public ambition often turn out to be different things, without reducing everything you want to envy.
Article
Social facilitation and the audience effect
Robert Zajonc and the research that followed
Zajonc showed that the mere presence of others improves performance on things we already do well and worsens performance on things we are still learning. It is one of the most replicated effects in social psychology, and it means the difference between your watched self and your unwatched self is partly physiology rather than character. Useful before you accuse yourself of anything.