Authority without self-promotion

Society teaches you to announce yourself: to display confidence, honesty, leadership and a personal brand. But authority is poorly built by direct announcement — it accumulates out of repeated acts.

“I am a very honest person”, “I am a man of my word” and “quality comes first for me” work roughly like a sign saying “very clean kitchen” on a restaurant door. They prove no violation, but they do make you want to look inside.

The picture people form of you is assembled from repetitions: whether you keep agreements, how you behave when you are wrong, how you treat those with less power, whether you bend the rules in your own favour, whether you can be relied on, and whether your words match your actions.

So authority does not have to be constantly earned through separate demonstrations. It is enough not to trade it for convenience in small situations.

Constantly defending authority is just as useless. Someone who reacts painfully to every objection is demonstrating not the strength of his position but the high cost of maintaining it.

Self-descriptions are also useful in limited quantities. “I’m an introvert” can help explain a need for quiet. But it should not forbid you from speaking in public, meeting people, or one day enjoying a large gathering.

Beliefs, tastes and ways of living change. A declaration easily turns into a cage built to look consistent in front of an audience.

Better to say not:

That’s the sort of person I am.

But:

Usually I choose it this way.

This suits me at the moment.

In this situation what matters to me is the following.

You do not have to become a brand for people around you to understand who they are dealing with.

This is most obvious when hiring builders. One says he works conscientiously, that he has golden hands and that he answers for quality with his life. The other names a deadline, warns honestly that the deadline may slip, and a month after handover comes back to redo a skirting board the client had already forgotten about. The first is a statement, the second is data. The trouble is that the data arrive a month later while the choice has to be made today — which is why statements go on working.

A self-description is convenient because it requires no confirmation, and dangerous for the same reason. The more often a person says what he is like, the less room he has to act differently one day without losing face. The cage is usually built out of your own quotations.