5 Key Teachings: THE PERSON YOU MEAN TO BE, by Dolly Chugh

I read psychologist and Stern Business School professor Dolly Chugh’s book The Person You Mean to Be years ago, but I find myself referring back to it constantly. I'm specifically drawn to the way Chugh describes our moral identity—"I'm a good person, damnit"—as something we desperately want granted to us, regardless of our legitimate claims on that title. In fact, studies show that we will even PAY to be told that we are good. In real life, this translates to wanting cookies of affirmation for all our good deeds, and constant affirmation that people are notating how kind, nice, moral we are. I'm all for trying to be good people, but am intensely curious about the chasm that can develop between how we actually show up in the world and how we want to be perceived as showing up. Because often we focus on the latter and don't really worry about the former. You can hear my conversation with Dolly on the podcast right here.

5 KEY TEACHINGS:

1. We crave affirmation of our “moral identity,” more than we actually crave being good people.

Here’s Chugh: “When we are unsure of whether an important identity has been granted by others, our craving for affirmation becomes more intense and urgent. Psychologists call this a moment of self-threat—our identity is being challenged or dismissed. Just as moments of physical threat trigger a hyperfocus on self-preservation, moments of psychological self-threat do the same. If I value being seen as a do-gooder, then I feel self-threat when people judge me as a greedy person, based on stereotypes on my resume.”

Later, she adds:

“Most of us have what psychologist Karl Aquino and Amerius Reed call a central ‘moral identity.’ Moral identity is a measure of whether I care about being a good person, not whether I am a good person. Their research reveals that most of us want to feel like good people. This is an identity we claim and want granted.”

And finally:

“While none of us are good all the time, and some of us are far from good a lot of the time, we still see ourselves as good. How do we sustain this view of ourselves? We hold a faulty assumption that our behavior pivots around our ethical standards and our moral values. That is not how our minds actually work. Our behavior pivots around our identity.”

2. We often use words like “divisive” to describe behavior that makes us uncomfortable or asks us to change.