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Presenting Your Self

Managing your self both online and off

Rick Welts is one of the most influential people in professional basketball.² He created the NBA All-Star Weekend and is cofounder of the women’s professional league, the WNBA. For years he served as the NBA’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, and he now is president of the Phoenix Suns. But throughout his entire sports career—40 years of ascension from ball boy to executive—he lived a self-described “shadow life,” publicly playing the role of a straight male, while privately being gay. The lowest point came when his longtime partner died and Welts couldn’t publicly acknowledge his loss. Instead, he took only two days off from work—telling colleagues that a friend had passed—and for months compartmentalized his grief. Finally, following his mother’s death, he decided to reconcile his public and private selves. In early 2011, he “came out” publicly. As Welts describes, “I want to pierce the silence that envelops the subject of being gay in men’s team sports. I want to mentor gays who harbor doubts about a sports career, whether on the court or in the front office. But most of all, I want to feel whole, authentic.”

In addition to our private selves, the composite of our self-awareness, self-concept, and self-esteem, each of us also has a public self—the self we present to others, the person we want others to see (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975). We actively create our public selves through our interpersonal communication and behavior.

In many encounters, our private and public selves mirror each other. At other times, they seem disconnected. In extreme instances, like that of Rick Welts, we may intentionally craft an inauthentic public self to hide something about our private self we don’t want others to know. But regardless of the nature of your private self, it is your public self that your friends, family members, and romantic partners hold dear. Most (if not all) of others’ impressions of you are based on their appraisals of your public self. Simply, people know and judge the “you” who communicates with them—not the “you” you keep inside. Thus, managing your public self is a crucial part of competent interpersonal communication.