Fake till you make it at work is only half right - Who should you be at work?
Updated: 2 days ago
There's a specific moment a lot of capable people hit at work. Nothing dramatic. Just a quiet, slightly sick realization on an ordinary Tuesday: the way this place runs, the way decisions get made, the way people get treated when nobody important is watching — none of it sits right with you. And once you notice it, you can't un-notice it.
The next thought is usually worse than the first one. If I keep showing up here, smiling in the right meetings, saying the right things, am I lying? Have I just become one of those people who fakes it?
That second thought deserves a real answer, not a shrug. So let's take the cliché itself apart: fake it till you make it. It's not one idea. It's two completely different mechanisms wearing the same five words, and only one of them does what it promises.
Fake it till you make it - The half that's actually true
Long before anyone put it on a TED stage, psychologists were studying something close to it under far less catchy names: self-perception theory, cognitive dissonance, what occupational researchers later called deep acting. The finding holds up well. When you deliberately act from a role — show up decisive when you don't feel certain yet, speak calmly in a tense room, carry yourself like someone competent you're still growing into — your own mind takes the behavior as evidence and starts updating the belief to match it. You're not pretending. You're rehearsing a version of yourself that's real, just not finished. Keep doing it with intention, and the gap between the act and the actual person closes. That's not faking. That's just how people grow into things, including themselves.
Fake it till you make it - The half that quietly wrecks you
Same five words, completely different engine. Gritting your teeth through a smile you don't feel. Nodding along in a meeting whose values you privately can't stand. Performing at nine in the morning enthusiasm that you do not have, will not have, and already know you won't have by lunch.
Researchers call this surface acting, and the data on it isn't subtle: people who do it regularly report more fatigue, more dread, and a much stronger urge to quit than people doing the first kind. Same instruction, opposite result. The difference was never about willpower. It's about whether you're updating something real or just holding a mask in place with your hands.
The most famous experiment that got this exactly backwards
If you want proof that even very smart people can fall for the wrong half, there's a cautionary tale built right into the phrase's own history. In 2010, a study claimed that standing like a superhero for two minutes — chin up, hands on hips, the so-called power pose — measurably changed your hormones and your confidence. It turned into one of the most watched TED talks ever recorded, with a tagline that could've been lifted off a motivational poster: don't just fake it till you make it, fake it till you become it.
Then other labs tried to reproduce it. Bigger samples, tighter methods. The effect mostly evaporated. One of the original researchers eventually said, in public, that she no longer believed the hormone findings were real. The most quoted, most viral piece of "evidence" for fake it till you make it turned out to be a lesson in how fast a good story can outrun good data, not proof that the idea works. The cliché survived. Its most famous receipt didn't.
Why this matters more than it looks
This is where it connects back to that sick Tuesday-morning feeling. A sociologist named Erving Goffman worked all this out decades ago, with none of the newer research to back him up: human beings have always run on two settings, a front-of-house version of themselves for whoever's watching, and a back-of-house version for when nobody is. You don't accuse yourself of lying because you don't talk to your grandmother the way you talk to your closest friend. You just understand, instinctively, that different rooms call for different versions of true. Work is one more room. A more demanding one, with worse lighting and your income attached to the performance, but not a different category of human behavior. You've been doing this your whole life. Work just made you self-conscious about it.
Newer research backs this in a way that should feel like relief rather than a trick. For a long time, "authenticity" got treated like a fixed thing you either honor or betray, as if there's one true you and any version that flexes for context is a faker copy. That idea has been quietly retired. Authenticity behaves more like a state than a fixed trait. It shows up differently depending on the room, and the version of you running a hard client call can be just as genuinely you as the version laughing too loud at a birthday dinner. There's even a name for the specific skill of doing this well: coming across as genuine while deliberately adjusting how you show up for the situation. Not the opposite of authentic. A more grown-up version of it.
There's a smaller, messier strand of research worth a mention too, mostly because it's decent insurance. Some work on what's called self-complexity suggests that people who keep a few clearly separate self-aspects — the professional one, the parent one, the friend one, whatever applies to you — tend to take a hit in one area without it flooding every other part of life. The evidence is genuinely mixed and nobody should oversell it. But the basic shape of the idea matches common sense: a professional self with clear edges gives a bad day somewhere to land that isn't your entire identity.
The actual question, the one that matters
All of this adds up to one practical thing worth asking yourself, instead of jumping straight to I need to quit or I need to bury this forever. Is the company genuinely asking you to do something that violates a non-negotiable part of who you are: lie, harm someone, abandon something you'd never forgive yourself for abandoning? That's real, and it deserves a real exit plan, not a pep talk.
Or have you simply never built a professional version of yourself solid enough to hold this role without it leaking into the rest of you? That second one is far more common than people expect, and it's fixable in a way the first one isn't. Most of the time, once that professional self gets built on purpose, instead of improvised under pressure five minutes before a meeting you're dreading, the friction drops on its own. Not because you became a different person. Because you stopped asking the one version of yourself that exists to do every job in your life at once.
So: fake it till you make it. Only half right, like most advice that gets famous enough to land on a mug. One half is a decent description of how people actually grow: act deliberately, let the belief catch up. The other half is a recipe for finishing every week running on empty, smiling at people you'd rather not. The job was never asking you to choose between being real and being professional. It was asking you to build the second one with some intention, instead of running it as a permanent improv act you never rehearsed.
Relax. You're human. You've got more than one true version of yourself, and that's not a flaw in your character. It's just making use of multiple tools.
Stefania Codarcea is a leadership coach for managers and leaders navigating the moments their experience hasn't fully prepared them for. Her 20+ years in live, complex operations are a priceless resource in helping clients find their genuine professional self in any work environment.
If you want to go deeper than the headline version, here's where this comes from:
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) — the original frontstage and backstage idea.
Arlie Hochschild's - The Managed Heart (1983) — the book that coined surface acting and deep acting. Work on emotional labor, including later research linking surface acting to fatigue, depletion, and turnover intention.
and Leon Festinger's work on cognitive dissonance — the older science behind why deliberately acting a role can genuinely shift belief over time.
Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy, and Andy Yap's original 2010 power-posing study,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797610383437
Free PDF: https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/dana_carney/power.poses.PS.2010.pdf
The 2015 replication attempt by Eva Ranehill and colleagues that found no hormonal or behavioral effect:
Dana Carney's public statement that she no longer believes the original power-pose effect is real:
A 2024 review in Nature Reviews Psychology on the science of authenticity (Sedikides & Schlegel):
A 2024 paper in Organization Science on "strategic authenticity" (Pillemer):
Patricia Linville's self-complexity research (1987) on multiple self-aspects as a possible stress buffer — genuinely debated in the field, included here as a plausible extra, not settled fact.
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