Todd Dewett: The value of authenticity

- So I'm thinking about an incident that happened in my last career as a professor that's pretty interesting. I was sitting in my office one day, trying to prep for class, I had maybe 10 minutes to go, and the telephone rang. It was my mother, and you know how you can hear something in their voice if you know someone really well? Well, I could tell she wanted to tell me something, and I'm in a hurry, I've got to go to class. I'm not ready for a conversation about things. And then she says, "Well, I have a lump on my throat." and you just stop, and you almost lose your breath. And it's hard to describe if you've never been through it. And then I asked her, of course, "Okay, how big is this?" I'm holding the phone, and it's feeling oddly heavy. And she said, "Well, it's big as a baseball." I almost dropped the phone, as I tried to process that. And I said, "Why haven't you told me?" She said, "Well, you're busy, I don't want to bother you." I said, "Okay, what have you been doing about this?" She said, "Well, I've got a strategy", I said, "What is it?" "Well, I've been praying." And I said, "It's a great plan, but we're going to "add some doctors to the mix." And we had a useful conversation, and then I had to rush to class. And I walked down the hall, I walked in, and I resolved to not talk about that difficult thing. I just started teaching. So I'm standing there, in front of a class, about 30 M.B.A. students, and I'm trying to act like everything is just fine, when of course, it feels like the world is collapsing around me, but I didn't want to show that on the outside. I'm going to keep it in, I kept telling myself. It doesn't need to ruin this class. That's what I thought it would do, and then I felt the emotions, and they rose. It was anger, it was confusion, it was sadness, and I started to question, can I keep this inside? So I kept talking about whatever was in that textbook, until, well, I couldn't do that anymore because in a literal sense, I was at capacity. And those emotions poured out of me, and I started to cry, and to tell them quickly why. And once I did that, there was no internal dialogue, it was as if I was being controlled, frankly, by something outside of me, I was just a vessel. And I stared at the floor and dripped for what felt like a week, even though it was probably just a minute. The thought process was gone. But then somehow, it was back, and when it came back, it said, "Stop crying, look up, and get back "to being a professor", and so I did that. I wiped it, and I looked up. I looked around the room, and saw 30 M.B.A. students crying their eyes out. Very awkward, wonderful, strange moment. And I didn't know what to do, but I did know I felt like a failure. Somehow I wasn't being emotionally intelligent, or in control, that's what I thought. I didn't like that feeling. So I went ahead and acted like it didn't happen, and I lectured, like a good professor, and when I was done, I just left, and I didn't talk about it with them. I didn't talk about anything, which I always do. I just left so I could process. Mom lasted for about two months after that call, and you know what, strangely it was a fun, full of laughter two months, I love sharing that. But I wasn't sure at the moment what the lesson really was. Fast forward about two years, I'm standing onstage in St. Louis giving a speech to a corporate audience. About a thousand people in the room. And it's going great, we're having fun, we're laughing, we're learning, I'm really enjoying myself. And then I got to a story that I really enjoy sharing about my father, and something that he taught me during his journey with cancer. I'm having fun, I love this story, and then I spot something I've seen before, the woman in the blue dress. In this case, it was her. She started thinking about someone, and she started crying, and I watched that, and I've seen that before. Two or three others around her also started to cry. It's an interesting thing to watch, but something unique just happened when they started crying, that vibe jumped up on stage, hit me. I'm on stage, comfortable, in control, and yet, for the first time in public, I felt emotions welling up in me. I had yet to go and cry, but I felt it almost ready to happen, and then I did not want to look at her and reciprocate tears. I did not want to stand in front of an audience of a thousand people and fall apart. I felt the first tear welling up in my eye, and I flashed back to that classroom, and I said to myself, "I'm not going to do a repeat performance. "No way, I'm done crying in public." Ran across stage, found some people in the audience who were awesome, non-criers. And I just start talking to them, and I got control. And somehow, I don't know why, and I don't care, in my brain, how I thought about what happened in the classroom changed completely. I realized that though difficult, it was not a failure. It wasn't, it was a difficult, but positive, vulnerable, authentic thing. And once I somehow realized that is was positive far more than negative, it just felt good. A burden lifted, and standing there on that stage, I felt different, I wanted to use it, and you know what I did, I walked back across that stage intentionally and I found that awesome woman in her blue suit, and I looked at her. She seemed happy I was back, and just talked to her as if we were the only two people in the building. And this time, as the emotions jumped around and hit me in the face, I didn't resist, and because it's easy to do, I'm thinking about my dad, and I cried a little bit. And I didn't censor at all, I just looked at her and finished the story. And when I was done, I looked around at that room full of a thousand people and at least 600 were crying right along with us. Strange and wonderful day, that day I saw the longest line of people I've ever seen to say thanks, offer their story, big applause, the likes of which I'd never seen, and I know that it's because of the way I delivered, not the content per se, but because I was honest, raw, unfiltered, authentic in a way that they loved. I think we crave that, and don't do it nearly enough. And a couple things popped into my brain that are obvious. One, emotional intelligence is so important, but you can never let it also make you censor positive emotions they way we should censor a lot of negative emotions. That's an important part of being vulnerable, and authentic, and you need that at work. Second thing I thought of is, you know what, there's a really wide array of interesting, positive emotions we censor that we probably shouldn't. A feeling of gratitude, awe, love. In measured amounts, we should bring them to work because that makes us far more than a professional, that makes us human. And I'm pretty grateful my mother taught me that.