It was a Tuesday in October 2019. I was sitting in a glass-walled conference room in Chicago’s West Loop, sweating through a button-down shirt that cost way too much money. My client, a VP at a logistics firm who looked like he hadn’t slept since the Bush administration, asked me a direct question about a data discrepancy in our monthly report. I knew exactly why the numbers were off—I’d messed up a filter in the dashboard the night before—but my “professional” brain took over. I spent four minutes using words like ‘synergy,’ ‘data-integrity protocols,’ and ‘iterative auditing’ to say absolutely nothing. I looked polished. I sounded like a textbook. And I could see him losing interest in real-time. He didn’t trust a word I said because I sounded like a machine programmed to avoid blame.
That was the moment I realized that professionalism, at least the way we’re taught it in those soul-crushing HR seminars, is a total scam. It’s a defense mechanism. We spend so much energy trying to look like we have our lives together that we forget to actually do the work. Or worse, we become so boring that nobody wants to work with us anyway.
That one Tuesday in Chicago where I almost puked
I remember walking out of that meeting and feeling like a fraud. Not because I made a mistake on the dashboard—everyone makes mistakes—but because I was too scared to just say, “Hey, I messed up the filter. I’ll have it fixed by 3 PM.” Instead, I chose the ‘professional’ route of obfuscation. I thought that by being a polished persona, I was protecting my reputation. In reality, I was just being a coward. The VP didn’t want a perfect account manager; he wanted a human he could rely on. Humans make mistakes. Polished personas make excuses.
I’ve spent ten years working in ‘general’ business roles—ops, account management, a bit of project stuff—and the most successful people I know are the ones who are slightly messy. They’re the ones who mention their kid is screaming in the background on a Zoom call or admit they have no idea what a specific acronym means. They don’t hide behind a wall of jargon. They just… exist. And for some reason, we’ve been told that’s a bad thing. We’ve been told that to be taken seriously, we have to strip away everything that makes us interesting. It’s exhausting. It’s fake. It’s a waste of time.
Professionalism is actually just a lack of confidence
I used to think that being professional meant having a clean desk, a crisp suit, and a vocabulary that would make a dictionary blush. I was completely wrong. Real professionalism is just competence paired with honesty. Everything else is just theater. (And usually bad theater at that, like a high school production of Death of a Salesman where the lead actor keeps forgetting his lines.)
When you lean into a corporate persona, you’re basically saying, “I don’t think my actual personality is good enough to get the job done.” You’re hiding. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. You’re building a wall between yourself and the people you’re supposed to be collaborating with. And you know what happens when you build walls? People stop talking to you. They start sending you those ‘professional’ emails back, and suddenly you’re both trapped in a cycle of polite, meaningless nonsense while the actual project goes off the rails.
Professionalism is a suit of armor made of cardboard: it looks sturdy from a distance, but it falls apart the second things get actually difficult.
I know people will disagree with this. There are plenty of folks in middle management who live for the ‘professional’ standard. They love the rules. They love the dress codes. But honestly? I think most of those people are just terrified that if they stop acting like robots, someone will notice they don’t actually contribute much value. Harsh? Maybe. But I’ve sat through enough ‘alignment sessions’ to know that the person talking the most about ‘best practices’ is usually the person doing the least amount of actual work. Total lie.
The 14-week “unprofessional” email experiment
A few years ago, I got bored and decided to track how people responded to different versions of my personality. I spent 14 weeks tracking my outbound emails—642 emails in total—and categorized them by “Tone.” I had the “Polished Persona” (Best regards, I hope this finds you well, etc.) and the “Real Person” (Hey, here’s the stuff you asked for, sorry for the delay).
- Polished Persona: 31% response rate. Average response time: 6.2 hours.
- Real Person: 54% response rate. Average response time: 2.4 hours.
- The “Oops” Follow-up: 72% response rate when I admitted I forgot to attach the file in the first email.
People respond to people. They don’t respond to templates. When I started writing emails like I was talking to a friend—without the slang, obviously, I’m not an idiot—everything got easier. I stopped wasting time trying to find the perfect synonym for “help” and just asked for help. The results were immediate. My clients started opening up more. They started telling me what was actually bothering them about our projects, rather than giving me the ‘professional’ filtered version. We actually started solving problems instead of just discussing them.
Why I refuse to use Monday.com (and why you shouldn’t either)
This is a bit of a tangent, but it fits the theme of over-engineered ‘professional’ tools. I absolutely loathe Monday.com. I know everyone loves it, and it’s the ‘gold standard’ for project management or whatever, but I refuse to recommend it to anyone. It’s the software equivalent of a ‘polished persona.’ It’s so colorful and organized and filled with little animations that it makes you feel like you’re being productive, but you’re actually just moving colored boxes around. It’s performative work. It’s the digital version of wearing a tie to a remote meeting.
I’ve used it for three different projects at two different companies, and every single time, the team spent more time updating the ‘board’ than actually doing the tasks. It forces this rigid, professionalized structure onto things that are naturally messy. Give me a simple Google Doc or a physical notebook any day. At least those don’t pretend to be more than they are. Anyway, back to the point.
The uncomfortable part about boundaries
Here is the take that usually gets me into trouble with the LinkedIn crowd: If you can’t swear in front of your boss, you probably shouldn’t work there. I’m not saying you should be dropping f-bombs every five minutes like a sailor on shore leave, but there’s a level of comfort that comes with being able to say, “This situation is a total mess,” without worrying about your ‘professionalism’ rating.
Corporate jargon is the white noise of a dying office. It’s what we use when we’re too scared to be honest. When we say we’re “pivoting our strategy to align with market shifts,” we usually mean “we tried something, it didn’t work, and now we’re scrambling.” Why can’t we just say that? Vulnerability is a power move. When you’re the first person in the room to say, “I’m actually really confused by this,” you give everyone else permission to stop pretending too. It’s the fastest way to get to the truth.
I might be wrong about this. Maybe in some industries—like heart surgery or nuclear physics—you really do need that cold, detached professionalism. I wouldn’t want my surgeon cracking jokes about their messy divorce while I’m under the knife. But for the rest of us? For the 90% of us sitting in offices or working from our kitchen tables? The mask is just getting in the way. It’s making us miserable and it’s making our work worse.
I’ve started being more “unprofessional” lately. I tell people when I’m tired. I admit when I don’t have the answer. I use emojis in Slack even when I’m talking to the CEO. And you know what? My career hasn’t imploded. If anything, I’ve gotten more raises and better opportunities in the last two years than I did in the previous eight combined. People want to work with humans. They’re tired of the robots.
So, next time you’re about to send an email that sounds like it was written by a committee of lawyers, maybe just… don’t? Try being a person instead. It’s a lot less work.
I still wonder though—at what point does being “real” just become another type of performance? Are we all just going to start faking vulnerability now because we heard it’s good for our KPIs? I hope not. That sounds even more exhausting than the old way.
Stop overthinking your “brand.” Just do the work and be a decent human. That’s it.