Faking It

No, not like that, you fiends...

In 2013, I walked into the toilets at Richard Branson’s head offices in London and stood in a cubicle with my hands on my hips for two minutes.

A week before, I’d watched Amy Cuddy’s viral TED Talk where she revealed that standing like Wonder Woman—what she calls a “high power pose”—for a couple of minutes can radically alter how confident you feel which, in turn, can alter the trajectory of your life. I wanted to alter the trajectory of my life so badly that I’d applied for a job I knew nothing about. It was abundantly clear I was the wildcard candidate, making it into those offices through gritted will and a very lucky email to the right person at the right time. I held my power pose whilst the cubicles around me flushed and clattered as people who actually worked in the building got back to their jobs, and then I washed my hands and walked over to the reception desk to let them know I’d arrived.

I got the job.

***

I guess it was gumption, the thing that pushed me into spaces and places I wasn’t otherwise invited. Cuddy’s talk—and her wider work—explores how we can ‘fake it till we make it’ (so the saying goes), although her point is rather that we can fake it till we become it. It’s a catchy soundbite, and the research is certainly compelling, but I think the idea of ‘faking it’ is shorthand for something deeper that we’re all doing—using our imagination to bridge a gap between what we know and what we don’t.

When I started that job back in 2013, I cried every day for a month because I felt so out of my depth. This feeling disappeared, in time, because I slowly acquired the knowledge that bridged the gap between what I knew and what I didn’t. What helped was finding a red thread I could pull through, and for me that was storytelling. The overwhelming majority of knowledge economy jobs like mine can be boiled down to one thing: convincing people to do something. I learned very quickly that people are far more likely to understand and remember what you’re asking them to do if you share the information in a story.

Stories, particularly ones which use metaphors, are powerful tools for comprehension and alignment. In business innovation, which was the world I suddenly found myself in, being able to conjure a relatable image, even if it was fictitious, was the single best way to convince a CEO to put money behind something that didn’t exist. Anyone who’s good at innovation is basically delivering a series of metaphors which bridge the gap between what we know and what we don’t until we all firmly believe in the unknown. We’re all standing with our hands on our hips, faking it until we make it.

Perhaps surprisingly, this has some powerful applications in the context of home. Last weekend, we took the kids to the IKEA in central Copenhagen for a ‘fun morning out’ (lol) looking at rugs for the bedroom. Until that point, my husband and I had spent hours online trawling countless rug sellers from Sweden to Morocco, going back and forth on different options that would work for the space and colours, ranging from eye-wateringly expensive customised weaves (“because we deserve it!”) to bog-standard short-piles from the nearest big box provider. And then a friend came over for wine and as I was doing the grand tour of the new pad I heard myself say “yeah we’re gonna get a rug for under this bed at some point” when something snapped or clicked or otherwise unspooled from the place that was unable to bridge from known to unknown. I was so done with all the prevaricating that I just needed something, anything, underneath that bed to help me work out how to pull the room together. It’s easier to edit a story than to write one from scratch, after all. Twelve hours later, I was standing in the IKEA rug department.

We got the most neutral rug you could imagine. Off-white, medium pile. And because it was just a tad too big for the space, I customised it with a pair of kitchen scissors. You know what? It looks good! And it feels really nice underfoot when I step out in the mornings. The point is that getting it prompted a discussion about switching up the bedsheets, maybe even getting a colourful stripe or two, and I think that’s the answer we were actually looking for when we started on our rug quest. We’d gotten so fixated on the thing under our feet, we couldn’t address the rest of the room.

The rug in question (I made J lift the entire bed up so I could get it underneath)

After we’d sated the kids with meatballs, juice-boxes and a packet of Gifflar, we ventured back into the bowels of IKEA to get some fake plants for the bathroom. I’d never thought to have a fake plant in my home before, but there’s a ledge above the sink that’s crying out for something green and I don’t think I have the emotional or cognitive bandwidth for something else that needs looking after, so fake suddenly seemed like an appealing option. And you know what? They look good! It’s something to rest the eyes on in a sea of white tiles and cupboards whilst we work out what we’re going to do with the bathroom long-term. Bonus points that I cannot kill them, even if I tried.

Plant life. Or not, because they're fake!

Breaking the inertia on our interiors by deliberately forcing my hand on a few smaller items got me excited about bigger elements of our home renovation I’d otherwise lost the will to think about. I supposed I’d done the equivalent of standing with my hands on my hips at IKEA until I believed myself capable of making that leap. The confidence boost brought back to mind a little upcycling project involving my kids’ bookshelf I’d been mulling over a few months ago, and from there it was easier to imagine how I might tackle the utility room next.

People seem really divided on whether you should have temporary fixes for homes whilst you wait to make bigger spending decisions. I suppose the risk is that something temporary has an awfully strong chance of becoming permanent as you live your life around. But I would argue that there are some instances when we need to use temporary solutions as a way of triggering the deeper psychological response we need. Cuddy talks about how holding a pen in your teeth forces an artificial smile that triggers the same hormone responses as a real one—it gets us to the same place eventually. Plus, it’s far easier to appraise an interior design choice sitting in front of you than the one jumping around the lockbox of your mind.

It takes time for a new home to reflect the people it houses, and it’s inevitable that we get caught up in whether or not something is the ‘right’ choice when our identity feels like it’s on the line; sometimes it’s just easier to make no choice at all. If you find yourself in this situation, try to think of a temporary fix as acting like a metaphor—something to help you take that leap of imagination and picture the thing you can’t see yet.

From there, you get to write the rest of the story about your home. A little fakery until you make it.

Getting the rug home, Copenhagen-style