In the simplest terms...we care about what others think of us. Sound familiar?
Therefore, we work hard to present ourselves to others in a way that matches how we want to be portrayed. According to McCornack (2009) we have two selves; our private self and our public self. Our private self is our inner self, composed of our self awareness, self-concept, and self-esteem. Our public self, on the other hand, is the side that we show to others and is what the rest of the world uses to judge us. To others, our public self is who we are and although the private and public selves should ideally be similar, sometimes we change our public self to emulate what we wish to be and how we wish others to see us.
One way that we present ourselves is by using various "faces". As McCornack says, our face is what we want others to see and is something we actively create and portray throughout our day--to--day interactions. Using our high school example again, say a girl wants to be considered popular. She may adopt the face of being outgoing and confident when around her fellow classmates. Your face can be absolutely anything you want it to be...as long as you make an active effort to stick to it.
However, if we choose to portray a certain face to others, our actions must be consistent with that persona. If our actions begin to contradict the face we are trying to portray, our entire public self comes into question. For example, imagine that someone attempts to wear the face of a"good student". They are respectful to their teachers and study hard in order to achieve good grades. However,if they were to get caught skipping classes one day, their face of being a good student would be threatened and people would wonder if this person was really the student they thought they were. I guess this is where the popular expression "saving face" comes into play. To continue to present ourselves in certain light, we have to avoid these contradicting actions and perform damage control if we unfortunately are caught in a contradiction.
Sometimes we may even unconsciously use various faces and present ourselves in different ways. I can remember my parents telling me when was about eleven years old that I acted like a completely different person when I was around my friends. Being eleven years old, I was just entering middle school which as we all know can be filled with pre-teens with attitude problems and ideas of being more grown up than they actually are. I was no different. My parents sat me down one day and told me that at home with them I was always respectful and got along relatively well with them. However, if I had friends over I would begin to do things and act like a different person. I would start talking back to them and ignoring things they would tell me to do. Thinking back on this story now as a 20 year old, I realize what I was doing was portraying a face of what thought was cool and presenting myself to my friends in this manner so they would in fact think I was cool. It is even more interesting that I had no idea at the time that I was doing this which begs the questions:
Can we possess multiple face and if so do we portray different "faces" when we are around certain people? How can we manage these different faces? Is it possible?
So whether you're a middle school girl striving to be cool or an adult who wants to be seen as a hard worker in his/her career, we all use various faces in order to manipulate our public selves to emulate the person we strive to be. The key thing is to remember that although it is natural to have two different selves, a private and a public, we must try to keep them similar without breaking who we are simply to be something we think we want to be. No matter how goofy or silly we may think we are, sometimes we simply need to be ourselves and present ourselves as such to others.
References:
McCornack, S. (2009). Reflect and relate: An introduction to interpersonal communication. Boston, MA:Bedford/St. Martin's.
