“When I speak with someone, I like to get past his persona
and speak to the person behind it.”
~ a friend of mine said this this week
ps This is becoming quote week!
7 thoughts on “Past the Persona”
Comments are closed.
Senia Maymin, Ph.D. – Brave Job Search
Senior Leaders: Get a new job *before* you get laid off
“When I speak with someone, I like to get past his persona
and speak to the person behind it.”
~ a friend of mine said this this week
ps This is becoming quote week!
Comments are closed.
Yeah, I know what he means! I’d like that too, but I can really only talk honestly to people via electronic communications: chat, e-mail, that sorta stuff. I suppose I’m a coward but I’m shy in face-to-face comms and hide it with lots of jokes. On the phone I’m a little better but I still prefer chat and e-mail. It’s no surprise then that I met my husband in a newsgroup and we fell in love after a long e-mail correspondence :)
Grim.
Hey grimo1re, I think there’s nothing wrong with that! After all — you met him, you communicated well, and probably still do. that’s all that counts.
Lila,
I know what you mean, but I really would like to be able to communicate honestly, dropping my persona, in face-to-face communications. Well not with everybody….but sometimes. I suppose I could rework that quote to something like ““I would like to speak to someone so that I get past my persona and show the person behind it.â€
grimo1re
That’s a cool quote…I like doing that too, figuring out what’s really going on behind the facade, if there is one.
Grimo1re, that’s really the trick, isn’t it? A few years ago I had the thought that there were things that “secretly pleased me”…that is, things that I really liked but thought that they maybe weren’t very accessible to the general population. Thinking of that in the context of this thread, I wonder if getting out from my facade was starting to share those things. Not everyone gets it, but people respond to them nevertheless. At least, the RIGHT people do, and I guess I don’t care so much about the people who don’t as I used to. I’m lucky to have a critical mass of friends that like me for who I am, and that gives me a lot of strength when learning to drop my own facade.
Grim, Lila, Dave,
I like what you guys are saying.
Grim, you’re kind of getting inside the quote and seeing if it applies to you! Like the song “Turn!Turn!Turn!”, there’s a time for dropping the persona and a time for having a persona. Like Lila suggests, you don’t need to drop your persona all the time.
And, at the same time, like Dave suggests, sometimes there are such wonderful surprises that come out of dropping the persona. It can be fun to try.
You know what’s most interesting to me, Grim? Since you’re thinking about it, I bet you unconsciously do frequently drop your persona. I often find when people think about some aspect of themselves that they want to change, that just by thinking about it, often the change starts to happen in places where people least expect it.
Senia,
“I often find when people think about some aspect of themselves that they want to change, that just by thinking about it, often the change starts to happen in places where people least expect it.”
That is so cool, I was just thinking about this the other day. I have a colleague, who’s actually becoming a friend, and he’s so nonjudgmental and positive that I find myself trying to be more like him. Nothing like a good example to try and change for the better, eh? So yeah, I was thinking that I should be a bit less quick to jump to conclusions and judgments about people and I found myself indeed being more like that the other day!