Does fear of being a hypocrite prevent you from making a bigger impact?

What happens when the expectations attached to your profession start to follow you home? In this article, I’m exploring the fear of being judged as a hypocrite, and how it can lead us to hold ourselves to unrealistic standards simply because of the work we do. Drawing on my own experiences in business improvement, corporate sustainability and coaching, I’m looking at the difference between genuinely living your values, meeting professional standards and putting yourself on a pedestal that no human being could realistically stay on.

Fear of judgement is often cited as one of the main things holding us back from doing the things we want to do. And it’s a deeply human instinct. The desire to win social approval is embedded deep within the most ancient parts of our brains.

I’ve been thinking about a particular type of judgement this week: being judged as hypocritical. And I’ve been reflecting on the impact this has on us personally and on the impact we make professionally, with some professions seemingly more vulnerable to this.

As I reflect back on my career, I’ve got stuck into a few different professions. I was a business improvement specialist, then later a corporate sustainability leader. And now I’m a professional coach. In all of these roles, as with so many others, there’s an element of having a specialism at work which somehow bleeds out into how you live your life, and the expectations and standards other people have of you.

When your job follows you home

Take business improvement.

By day, I was advising operations managers on how to make their processes more efficient, how to make their staff more productive. And this seeped out into my personal life. Friends would make jokes in restaurants that I could probably see process improvements everywhere.

And when I was supposed to be resting, I’d often find myself with a little voice at the back of my head telling me I could be doing things more efficiently or productively. Shouldn’t I be ‘walking the talk’?

And then there was working in corporate sustainability, where every day I’d be identifying changes my colleagues could make to improve the sustainability of our company. We’d be talking about transportation, what we eat, what we wear, how we invest our money. And I found myself feeling a need to ‘walk the talk’ again.

Over time, I gradually made more and more lifestyle switches to more sustainable options. Many of these were simple, and easy to do. But some were enormously expensive, like retrofitting a heat pump and new heating system in a leaky old 1970s house. And others undeniably had an impact on my wellbeing, like avoiding foreign holidays for many years.

As I look back on this, I wonder how much of this was genuinely driven by a desire to ‘live my values’ and how much was an effort to avoid being judged a hypocrite.

When I reflect on what was going on internally when I was making these choices, that ‘inner judge’ was definitely shouting pretty loudly, telling me I couldn’t be a ‘proper’ sustainability professional if I had a gas boiler at home.

The pressure of ‘walking the talk’

And whilst I’d suggest that many professional people are held up to a high standard in their area of specialism (we expect teachers to be good with kids all the time, and accountants to be great at numbers), the sustainability profession is also vulnerable to this.

And it can get exhausting, being held to a high standard of climate purism, both from yourself and from others around you.

I was at an event recently where a sustainable stylist was on stage. She was talking inspirationally about ‘wearing your values’ and provided us a perfect example of what she meant, dressed in a beautiful, polished outfit comprised of customised charity shop finds. It was wonderful. But something hit me when someone in the audience put their hand up and said, “Does this mean I can’t shop at Primark anymore?”

It’s one thing to aspire to ‘wear your values’, and use your expertise about your specialism or profession to guide your thinking. It’s quite another to turn that into black and white rules, or high standards of what ‘perfection’ looks like, which you then hold yourself accountable to.

That feels like a recipe for inner turmoil and exhaustion.

When the expectations follow you into a new career

And whilst I’ve escaped the highest expectations of climate purism now I don’t work on the ‘front line’ of sustainability, I still try to ‘wear my values’ and do my best in this area (or perhaps it provides a good excuse for my out-of-control Vinted habit).

But I do still feel this in my newer profession: that of coach.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably read some of my other articles or content too. Where I talk about the value of journaling, of taking care of your habits, of regulating your emotions, amongst other things. And when you write about this stuff, and work with clients every day on these things, it’s easy to get into the trap of thinking you have to role model this stuff perfectly.

Do I journal every day? No.

Might you spot me in the pub on a Friday night after three glasses of rosé? Yes.

Do I shop in Primark? Occasionally.

Do I lose my temper and shout at my kids? I’m afraid so.

When fear of hypocrisy holds us back

So, why’s all this so important?

Firstly, it can be exhausting to live up to unrealistic standards of perfection.

But also, this fear of being considered a hypocrite can hold us back. It can stop us from sharing our ideas, outlining solutions that might help people, holding back from giving advice or support.

And that feels like a shame. Because none of us need to be perfect practitioners of the things we believe in before we can contribute something useful.

I think there are two questions to consider here.

1. What standards are you holding yourself to?

The first is from the perspective of each of us in our own profession or specialism.

What standards or expectations do you hold yourself accountable to, simply because of the job you do? Which of these are basic professional standards? Which of these are where you are truly living out your values? And which of these are the result of some unacceptably high pedestal you’ve put yourself on? Things you’re doing because of fear of being judged a hypocrite?

Let me challenge you to work that through.

What’s a ‘given’, what do you enjoy doing, and where are you taking it too far?

2. What standards are you holding other people to?

Secondly, think about the pedestal you put others on.

Know someone who works in sustainability? Let’s give them a free pass on using the wrong bin occasionally. Let’s make it alright if they eat a burger for lunch or take a long-haul flight for their holiday. They’re doing all they can during their working hours to make our planet a better place. Let’s not make them feel guilty for eating a steak occasionally.

And this extends to all sorts of professions and areas of expertise. Someone who works in a bank? They might not be able to explain how your pension works, and that’s OK. A doctor or nurse who skips their exercise class or smokes the occasional cigarette? Let’s give them a break.

So let’s take people down off the pedestals we put them on because of their job title, and just bring everyone back to normal expectations of decent human beings and meeting professional standards.

Because I don’t think we need to ‘walk the talk’ perfectly to be able to make a real impact.

💛What might you say, do or share if you stopped worrying about whether you were perfectly living the thing you were talking about?