The phenomenon known as the Michelangelo effect is becoming increasingly important in understanding what determines happiness, confidence and career success.
5-minute read. – 100% written by humans.
The people we share our lives with are like mirrors reflecting the way in which we see ourselves and the stories that we create for ourselves. But these mirrors are often imperfect and distorted. There is increasing evidence that the most effective people either through strategies or through their instincts, shape what is reflected back at them or eliminate unhelpful mirrors altogether.
A moment of vulnerability
Sophie is in her mid 50s but still projects a freshness which one senses hasn’t changed much since her teenage years. She is the Chief People Officer of a technology-led engineering firm and successful by most people’s criteria. At a recent Threshold leadership workshop, Sophie shared a moment of vulnerability with her senior colleagues.
This followed an exercise in which colleagues share with one another one of life’s “10 moments.” Often a turning point in life, a ten-moment is a time etched in the memory for all the right reasons. The sense of safety and “elevation” that comes with the process of sharing these often creates a deeper climate of honesty among colleagues in the room.
Sophie – we have changed some of the details of her story including her name – shared that her career success had often felt oddly joyless, generally accompanied by a gnawing sense of self-doubt and imposter syndrome.
Her turning point came when a colleague with whom she had shared a mutual crush and a growing sense of connectedness, arrived at her door. Proclaiming that she needed to be cheered up, he suggested that she should go and pack her bag and grab her toothbrush and passport. (She had confided in him that she’d booked a week off in which she envisaged spending alone at home.) He took her to Aix-en-Provence in southern France; a town where she had lived as a student and last felt truly herself.
Changing a significant life mirror
Sophie had just come out of a difficult and unsatisfying marriage. Her new relationship made her feel like a completely different person. This wasn’t because of the way in which she saw her new partner, nor because of the way in which he saw her. It was because of the way in which he encouraged her to see herself. The transformation had come about through changing a significant life mirror.
The Michelangelo effect
This is also known as the Michelangelo effect. When the Renaissance sculptor was asked about his inspiration in creating his statue of David, he allegedly replied that he simply chipped away at everything that wasn’t David. The implication is that the ideal state to which the artist aspires already exists innately within the granite. The role of the artist is simply to remove everything that obscures it in order to liberate what is already there.
Dr. Madoka Kamishiro from Goldsmiths, University of London, speaking on the BBC’s All in the Mind, puts it like this:
“Just like the stone, we humans too have this inner beauty lying within us: what we call the ideal self, the person we aspire to become. Just like the stone we often need other people to help chip away at these other layers, to help unearth the inner beauty and ideal self and to become the best self that we can become.”
Stories about ourselves give us coherence
The stories that we create about ourselves help us to make sense of our lives and give us coherence. Nonetheless those stories are created to a large degree by what others reflect back towards us and they are not always helpful. It seems that we humans have such a strong drive for coherence that rather than forego it, we will even choose a story that is detrimental. What others appear to think of us plays a powerful role in this. In the psychologist’s jargon, this is known as “the socially constructed self.”
In the words of Professor Dan McAdams, Department Chair of Clinical Psychology and Personality Psychology at Northwestern University:
‘The stories we construct to make sense of our lives are fundamentally about our struggle to reconcile who we imagine we were, are and might be in our heads and bodies, with who we might be in the social contexts of family, community, the workplace, ethnicity, religion, gender, social class and culture writ large. The self comes to terms with society through narrative identity.’
Reflecting the best version of yourself
Our Michelangelos don’t just see us as we are. They see us as we might potentially be. If you are around someone who reflects the best version of yourself, you more readily internalize that story and it manifests in the way in which you think feel and act. It’s a continuous virtual loop. It’s not about distortion; it’s about reflecting the potential that’s alreadythere.
For better or worse, what others think of us matters more than we typically realize. If you are a confident comedian, you may go for that hangdog or deadpan look, but the chances are you spent your early life around people who found you funny. If you see yourself as intelligent, interesting, or attractive, it’s highly probable that you have spent a lot of time around people who see – or a significant person who sees – you in a similar way.
The stories we internalize about ourselves
Stories matter. Research shows that juveniles who are identified as being at risk of becoming involved with crime, but who create a new narrative for themselves—often by volunteering and surrounding themselves with people who see their true potential—are much more likely to escape this destiny. Sadly, those who are unable or unwilling to create these alternative surroundings, or alternative stories about themselves fare much worse.
The Michelangelo effect and leadership development
We frequently work with leaders who are still carrying narratives about themselves that were reflected in unhelpful life mirrors. Sometimes they stretch back to school or early family life.
Who were you in the home? The diligent one? The conscientious one? The wild one? The Joker? Perhaps one of the most insidious of all – the one who “isn’t academic?”
Conversely, how many lives have been transformed because a single teacher happened to hold up an alternative life mirror to the child?
The Michelangelo effect, along with the increasing evidence that supports it has significant implications for the way in which organisations approach leadership development. Leaders need to know that they can only grow and understand and reach maturity in the context of their relationship with other people. Learning and growth comes not from studying leadership theories but through a more profound understanding of the dynamics that create our socially constructed selves.
Re-editing your story
Awareness of our social mirrors enables us better to take control of them in both our personal and our professional lives. The most powerful way to change our socially constructed story about ourselves is to do things that more readily fit with our new preferred story. The principle is that it’s far more effective to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting. Behaviour change precedes changes in attitudes and beliefs, not the other way around. Think of those young people who chose to get involved with community volunteering and in so doing disrupted the socially constructed story about themselves.
This is what the psychologist Dr. Timothy Wilson, author of Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, calls “story editing.”
Oh, and the first thing we can do is to spend less time with those soul-sapping distorters and more time with our Michelangelos!
To find out how we can help leaders in your organisation to be more impactful, influential and persuasive visit www.threshold.co.uk
