The Courage to Be Seen Trying

On being seen: there is no back row in an eight.

Nowhere to hide in an eight

An eight is the most public place I know. Eight rowers sit in a line, each looking at the back in front of them. The coxswain sits in the stern facing all of us, close enough to read every face. Every blade goes into the water where the whole boat can feel it. If one oar is late, the hull says so.

I have a left side that has been weaker since a stroke at ten. I went on to row competitively anyway. A weaker side does not hide in a boat. The oar on that side is the record, stroke after stroke, in front of seven people and a coxswain. What you cannot do is row it in private.

Imagine, as a constructed scene, a missed catch in the middle of the boat. Everyone hears it: the hull checks, the set drops, the coxswain says one quiet word. Nobody stops rowing. The mistake is public, and so is the recovery on the next stroke.

Rowing has a face for this. Flat. Nothing on it at the start, nothing at the finish, nothing when the lineup goes up. In an earlier field report I named the cost: holding a feeling down costs watts. The flat face is not the same as calm. It is effort spent on not being seen.

I also write under a name that is not the one I was born with. Orion Quin is a pen name, and I have never hidden whose it is. My reading is that a pen name you are open about hides nothing. It lets the work walk in a half step ahead of the man, and then the man follows it in.

Imagine, as a constructed scene, a few rooms where the same thing happens. A designer who will not show the draft until it is finished, so it is never shown. A student who knows the answer and keeps her hand down. A musician on the fortieth take of a song that was good on the third.

None of them are afraid of failing, exactly. They are afraid of being seen trying. Trying is visible caring, and visible caring can be judged. The fear of being seen trying is often the fear that someone will mistake our unfinished work for our finished worth.

None of them lacks standards, either. A high bar is not the problem. The trouble starts when fear holds the bar: fear of mistakes, doubt, and the sense that other people demand perfection. Researchers call that perfectionistic concerns, and it is the part that hides the draft.

What the watchers actually see

The research on this fear says two things at once. We overestimate how closely we are watched. And the way we hold our own standards decides whether being watched makes us better or wears us down.

The spotlight is dimmer than it feels. In 2000, Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky had Cornell students put on a Barry Manilow T-shirt and walk into a room of peers. Asked afterward, the wearers guessed that about half the room had noticed the shirt. About a quarter had. They called it the spotlight effect. These are small student samples in short lab sessions, so I treat it as a reliable lean, not a fixed ratio.

Our nerves are less visible than we think. The companion finding is the illusion of transparency: the belief that people can read our inner state off our face. In Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich's 2003 study of impromptu speeches, as one review summarizes it, speakers believed their nervousness showed more than it did, and telling them so eased the effect. It is one lab speech to a stranger, but it matches what every coxswain knows. The flat face is mostly for us.

Others judge our exposure more kindly than we do. Anna Bruk, Sabine Scholl and Herbert Bless ran seven studies in 2018 on what they called the beautiful mess effect. Admitting a mistake, confessing love first, asking for help: people rated their own vulnerability as weaker and less admirable than the same act by someone else, which they saw as closer to courage. Most of the studies used imagined scenes, so it describes how we imagine being seen, not how a real room responds.

Perfectionism has two faces. Joachim Stoeber and Kathleen Otto reviewed 35 studies in 2006 and separated perfectionistic strivings, high personal standards, from perfectionistic concerns: fear of mistakes, doubt about one's actions, and the sense that others demand perfection. With concerns held low, strivings went mostly with good things. The authors warned that the evidence was largely cross-sectional, so they would not yet call strivings adaptive.

The burnout data sharpen the split. Andrew Hill and Thomas Curran pooled 43 studies and 9,838 people in 2016. Strivings had small negative or no links with burnout. Concerns had medium-to-large positive links, and in some cases looked worse at work. These are correlations, so they cannot say which comes first.

Fear builds its own excuses. Psychologists call it self-handicapping: choosing something you expect to hurt your own performance before you try. In sport, Erik Hofseth and colleagues studied 589 elite youth soccer players in 2015. Shame-prone players self-handicapped more, guilt-prone players less, with a weak link through that path to skill level. One cross-sectional sample, so a direction, not a verdict.

Expected judgment can shrink the work. Teresa Amabile's studies found that students who expected expert evaluation of a collage or a poem made less creative work than those who did not; in a 1984 pair of studies, being merely watched had only a weak effect that fell short of significance, while expecting to be graded was consistently strong. Small samples of undergraduate women, but the point is precise: it is the verdict we brace for, not the eyes in the room.

That is the difference this piece turns on. Being observed is someone seeing what you do. Being judged is someone deciding what it says about you. The body reacts to both the same way at first, with the same heat in the face. But they are different events. A coxswain watching your oar is observing. A selection list is judging. Most of the eyes in most rooms are the first kind, and we treat them as the second.

The spotlight effect does not mean nobody judges us. Sometimes they do. The trouble is treating every possible judgment as a verdict on who we are.

Two ways to hold a high bar

Read it by the arrow: the bar runs left to right and stays where it is, the burnout link climbs with the fear of judgment, so the move worth practicing is downward, not leftward.

A high standard asks something of our work. Shame asks something of our worth. Confusing the two can make every attempt feel like a trial of the person attempting it. Excellence does not require self-condemnation.

What the fear is guarding

The fear of being seen trying is not stupid. It guards something real. The trouble is the price, usually paid later and somewhere else. This is my reading of the research above, not a diagnosis.

The same sweater every day

As Daniel James Brown tells it in The Boys in the Boat, Joe Rantz came to the University of Washington from a childhood that taught him to show nobody anything.

In Brown's telling, he wore the same worn sweater to practice day after day, and the better-off boys teased him for it, as summaries of Brown's sixth chapter record. He closed himself off. I read that as protective self-reliance: if you need no one, no one can leave. That stance can harden into isolation, where nobody sees the effort and nobody can help with it. Brown's pages cannot tell us Joe's motives, and I do not claim to know them.

In Brown's account, the boatbuilder George Pocock saw it and urged Joe to trust the other boys. Joe did, slowly, and not by becoming someone else. What changed was that he stopped spending himself on hiding it.

In Berlin in 1936 he sat in the seven seat, and the crew won by six-tenths of a second. Brown's book is a story told with hindsight, not a study. Still, nobody in an eight is unseen. Joe's whole boat could feel his oar. He won anyway, with them, as himself.

Being seen is not the same as disclosing everything. The courage here is letting your effort show to the people who share the work. Choosing who sees what is part of it.

Rightful space

Mussar, the Jewish practice of character, has a word for what Joe found. Anavah, humility, is not shrinking. Alan Morinis defines it, in one teaching sheet's summary, as "occupying your rightful space." Not more: the perfectionist's verdict that every flaw is a catastrophe is a kind of self-importance. Not less: hiding the draft, the oar, the song, is taking up less room than you were given. It is also the courage to be visible without demanding admiration: you show the work, and you let the room think what it thinks.

The Desert Fathers tell of Abba Moses, called to a meeting of monks to judge a brother's fault. In the saying, he arrived with a leaking sack of sand on his shoulder. Asked why, he said his own sins were running out behind him, unseen, and he had come to judge another's. I read it as the spotlight effect from the other side. The people watching you are carrying their own sacks. Most are too busy with the sand to study yours.

Leonard Cohen wrote a whole song around giving up the wait for a flawless offering; in his telling, the broken place is exactly where something better comes through. None of these traditions confirms the research. They rhyme with it. Orion Quin does not stand above anyone, rather with them. That is the rightful space I am trying to hold: in the boat, at the same level, oar visible.

Where SportsFlow fits

This piece is about choosing when to be seen, and SportsFlow, the platform I build at sportsflow.ai, is built around the same choice. Almost nothing an athlete reports reaches a coach unless the athlete shares it, and a share can be taken back. The point is not secrecy. It is that the athlete decides which eyes are observing and which, if any, are judging.

One of the monthly measures is Self-kindness. It carries no body weighting at all, because no wearable can measure it honestly. Some things about a person can only be told by the person, when they are ready to tell them.

Still not enlightened, Orion