The “Just Right” Skill of Self-Disclosure (opinion)

No one taught me how to be vulnerable or share my story. In fact, as a psychiatrist I was taught the opposite: Be a blank slate. Don’t distract from a patient’s stories. Don’t even have pictures of your family or friends in your office. It isn’t about you.

But that mindset never felt right to me. It felt inauthentic, forced and completely inconsistent with the kind of safe space I wanted to create. I didn’t want to cross boundaries or take over a therapy session, but I also never felt good being blank. I knew there had to be a balance or a better way.

So, I started to look for models of something different, keeping my eyes open and paying attention around me. What people drew me to them as mentors? Who were the best bosses? What made some lectures memorable? What made my personal therapist feel trustworthy and safe?

The answer, overwhelmingly, was their humanity. I knew something about them, not as friends, but as people, which was much more than I had been taught was OK. And it didn’t make them worse at their jobs. It made them better.

While I learned about self-disclosure the classic physician way of “see one, do one, teach one,” I now know it’s a skill you can learn, with experts who study it. One of them is Leslie John, the James E. Burke Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and author of the recent book Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. I spoke with her about how we, as faculty and leaders in higher education, can use disclosure more effectively in service of students, our teams and even ourselves.

Disclosing Starts With Listening

When students or team members are most stressed, our instinct is often to jump right into fixing things. John says that’s exactly the wrong move. Instead, she recommends asking questions and letting the other person lead. She feels our mindset should be “I want to understand the whole of you so that I can help you.”

Know Your Why

For faculty, there is often tension between wanting to be liked and wanting to be respected. If you feel moved to disclose something to a student, John says, “The No. 1 thing we can think of is ‘What’s your why? What’s your reason for possibly disclosing?’”

In short, the goal of revealing should not be to get support, praise or approval from the student. It should be to help them. For example, let’s say a student approaches you about exam stress and you feel compelled to tell them you also struggled with testing in college. That small disclosure can be effective and important, if, as John explains, the point is to help them feel less alone and remind them college is survivable.

“If you take two seconds to think, ‘Oh, that’s my why,’ it is really transformational in helping you to accomplish whatever that goal is, which is usually student-serving,” John says.

To that end, John suggests looking for points of similarity that could help students. So, for example, if a student comes to see you because they’re nervous about public speaking, “reflect back to how it was for you in college. If you also shared such nerves, you can reveal that. That will help them (and since you’re high status, it won’t diminish you).”

Context Matters—and So Does Power

At first glance, disclosure may seem less useful in a lecture, where there is little reciprocity. But John says it can still be highly effective, and she discloses often in that setting. She notes, “People learn better with stories than they do with boring PowerPoint slides of facts … My goal in disclosing is not because I want to feel better … or because I need therapy … it makes my teaching more effective.” Context also matters in that John would not share as much with a student in a one-off meeting as she would with someone she works with regularly.

Power, yours and the recipients, is critical to take into account as well. Early in her career, John worried that talking about her kids might undermine her credibility. She notes that concern is especially valid for those climbing status ladders, particularly women and minorities. As you grow in academia, John recommends focusing on “modeling your competence in a warm way.”

You might also consider ways to be transparent without being vulnerable. As John explains, “Transparency is explaining your thought process, basically saying what’s going on in your head … how your mind works. Vulnerability, on the other hand, is sharing sensitive thoughts and feelings.” That distinction is important, as you don’t always need to share something deeply personal to be human.

Disclosing Can Increase Trust and Reciprocity

Sharing something personal with a student or colleague can increase trust. John explains that when you share something appropriate and a little deeper than usual, you are taking a social risk. In doing so, you are saying implicitly to the other person that you trust them, because “I wouldn’t be telling you this if I didn’t trust you to not make a fool out of me.” That can lead the other person to trust you back and share more honestly in turn.

John calls the first share a “catalyst confession.” It opens the door to the kind of reciprocal honesty that allows you to actually help someone. As she puts it, “They need to open up to you in order for you to help them.”

Importantly, though, trust is not built simply by saying, “You can trust me.” John points to studies she did where students were asked sensitive questions (e.g., about sexual health history). On one version, they received a confidentiality assurance. In another, they did not. Perhaps surprisingly, people were more forthcoming without the assurance. As John explains, “We need to be shown that the person is trustworthy, not told.”

Revealing Is a Skill, One You Have to Try and Fail

Like me (and many of us!), John was never formally taught how or when to disclose. But she believes it is a skill you can learn. She explains, “Like any skill, the way you get better at it is by practicing and experimenting and self-reflection.”

You don’t really know your boundaries, or comfort level, until you test them. That means sometimes oversharing, feeling awkward and learning from it. John says, “If you never feel like you’ve crossed a line, if you never feel like you overshared, if you never felt like, ‘Ooh, that was a little undermining,’ you’re not sharing enough.” She emphasizes that we don’t need help knowing how to share too little: We are well-versed in that. But we need help learning where our “too much” begins. When we find that limit and find our balance, John says, that is something to celebrate.   

Ask for Feedback, and Take Time to Reflect

We can also ask for feedback from people we trust. Don’t ask a student, but ask a close friend or spouse to observe you in a social setting. Ask them, “Was that awkward?” or “Do you think I went too far?” and talk it through. As John says, “What I have learned is that nine times out of 10, it’s not too much.”

John also suggests cultivating self-awareness through self-audits. Because of omission bias, John notes, “We beat ourselves up for the regrettable things we did … the stupid things we said … and we don’t … blame ourselves enough for the good things we should have said that we didn’t say.” To counter that bias, she recommends training yourself to notice both. John keeps a tally sheet, a disclosure audit, with columns for things said and unsaid. “It’s not to say we should always dish everything,” she says. “It’s to notice things more.”

Self-Disclosure Isn’t One and Done

John says people often treat revealing as a “zero-sum, one-shot game,” when instead “effective self-disclosure, effective revealing is a campaign.”

For example, a student might share something difficult, and you don’t know what to say in the moment, so you start by simply listening. Maybe you follow up later, or maybe you refer them to the right additional resource. Or, on your team, you might say something in a meeting that, even as a joke, feels like a little too much. You are not doomed to ruminate about the situation forever.  Instead, as John notes, you can go see that person later and check in. That follow-up is part of becoming skilled at disclosing, too.

Ultimately, we can’t figure out the just right method of self-disclosure without practice. We need to try it out in different settings, across different power dynamics and sometimes by oversharing and feeling that “I shouldn’t have said that” hangover. Don’t worry, though, Goldilocks had to learn that way, too.