Hello Reader,

Welcome to the conversation.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that verification meant approval. A blue checkmark. A credential. A title. A track record clean enough to display. We built entire identities around being confirmed: by institutions, by audiences, by algorithms that decided we were real enough to matter.

And yet.

• LinkedIn created a verification system to fight fake profiles. The checkmarks appeared. The scams continued.
• CLEAR scans your iris at the airport to confirm you are you. They also verify your LinkedIn identity. The apparatus grows more sophisticated, and the question does not go away.
• Some of the most-watched channels on YouTube were never made by human hands.

So what does it mean to be verified now? I think it means something entirely different than we have been told.

“ I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become. — Carl Jung

From My Chair to Yours

I want to tell you about the worst public moment of my fifteen-year-old self's life. Well, one of them.

It was an end-of-year celebration. The kind with tablecloths and parents dressed up and kids trying to act like they weren't terrified. I had a role. Something official. And part of that role was introducing my family. My parents were there. Gene and Sue. Two perfectly pronounceable names I had said out loud approximately ten thousand times.

I stood at the microphone. I opened my mouth.

And I introduced them as Seen and Jue.

Seen. And. Jue.

Not Gene. Not Sue. Seen and Jue, as though I had never met these people before in my life and was simply guessing at the sounds their names might make.

The room did what rooms do. My family did what families do, which is to say, they told that story at every available opportunity for the next four decades.

I was fifteen. I was absolutely certain I would never recover. I'm telling you this forty years later, which I think counts as evidence.

Here is what I know now that I did not know then: that moment didn't disqualify me. It certified me. Not as someone who had it together. As someone who was unmistakably, irreversibly, wonderfully human.

And I've been thinking lately about how much of my professional life I've spent trying to sand that down. To lead with the framework and the credentials and the carefully chosen title. To be verified in the ways the world recognizes.

I'm done with that particular project. My new title is Verified Human. And the certification process, it turns out, was already complete.

The Lens

One of the things that keeps us stuck in Depletion is the energy it costs to appear undepleted.

The managing. The polishing. The careful curation of a self that looks like it has things handled. We perform our competence, our certainty, our togetherness and the performance itself drains us. It's a loop: we feel depleted, so we hide it, and hiding it costs us the very energy we're trying to protect.

Verified Human is what becomes possible when we stop performing.

Not as a destination. Not a plaque you earn at the end of enough inner work. More like a decision you make in a given moment to stop spending energy on the gap between who you are and who you're pretending to be. Some days that's easy. Other days you introduce your parents as Seen and Jue and stand there in the wreckage wondering how you got here.

Both days count.

Stephen Colbert has spoken about what it means to live your humanity to the fullest. Not as aspiration, but as acceptance. The fullness includes the embarrassment. The joy. The uncertainty. The pain. The grief. The days when you forget names you've known for years in front of your entire high-school.

What I've come to believe is that the move toward fulfillment almost always begins with something being released. And one of the first things worth releasing is the performance of not being human.

In a world full of manufactured certainty, that might be the most radical thing any of us can do.

Reflection

• Where in your life are you still performing verification? Seeking confirmation that you're credentialed enough, polished enough, recovered enough to be taken seriously?
• What would it cost you (and what would it free) to lead with your Seen and Jue story instead?
• And here's the one I'm sitting with: What if the moment you most want to hide is the one that most makes you real?

Until we see each other again, I hope you have a powerful day.

-Joanna

Joanna Douglas
Conscious Leadership Coach, Speaker, Teacher Founder of Enneagram Ensight