The Version of You Everyone Else Sees

They meet this version of you in conference rooms and conversations. On video calls. Over lunch. In the few minutes before a meeting begins. They encounter this person when you’re explaining something, listening to someone, disagreeing, deciding, waiting, or simply walking into a room. And then they carry that person with them after you leave.

The strange thing is, you don’t really know this version of yourself.

You know your intentions. You know when you’re nervous but trying not to show it. You know when you’re concentrating. You know when you’re trying to be helpful. You know what you meant by the comment you made.

Everyone else gets something different. They get your expression. Your tone. Whether you listened or interrupted. Whether you seemed interested. Whether you appeared comfortable or guarded. Whether you made them feel important or invisible.

And from those fragments, they construct you.

We tend to assume the person we intend to be and the person other people experience are roughly the same.

They aren’t always.

You can leave a meeting believing you were engaged and thoughtful. Someone else can leave the same meeting feeling you barely listened.

You remember concentrating on what they were saying. They remember you looking at your phone. You remember thinking carefully before responding. They remember the moment you interrupted.

You know what you intended. They experienced what you did. And those aren’t always the same thing.

Experience has an uncomfortable advantage over intention: it’s what people remember.

That’s what makes presence so interesting. It doesn’t exist entirely within us. Confidence matters because someone else experiences it. Attention matters because someone else feels heard. Approachability matters because someone else feels comfortable approaching.

Part of our presence belongs to the people around us.

One of the strangest things that happens during a headshot session is someone seeing an image and immediately saying, That doesn’t look like me.

Except it does.

Other people see that face all the time. The client doesn’t.

They primarily know themselves through a mirror, through internal experience, through selected photographs, and through an enormous amount of context unavailable to everyone else.

The camera creates an uncomfortable little confrontation:

Here is how you can appear from the outside.

And I wonder how often that same distance exists outside the photograph; in meetings, in leadership, in conversations, in the way we listen, in the way people feel after spending ten minutes with us.

We may never completely know the version of ourselves that lives in other people’s minds. But every once in a while, it may be worth asking a different question.

Not What was I trying to communicate?

But What might they have experienced?

You know yourself by what you mean. The world knows you by what it experiences.

We experience ourselves through intention. Other people experience us through behavior.