The Man & His Music.

What the Mask Costs You

I've never really been a Springsteen fan. Not for lack of hits — Dancing in the Dark, Born in the U.S.A., Born to Run, Hungry Heart, the man's catalogue speaks for itself. His particular style just never quite landed with me. Bowie, Elvis, the Beach Boys — that was always more my register.

So it surprised me when I sat down to watch Springsteen on Broadway anyway. I'd heard he wove real storytelling in between the songs, and that was reason enough. Two and a half hours later, I understood why people couldn't stop talking about it.

No E Street Band. Just the man, a guitar, a piano, a harmonica, and — much later in the show — his wife Patti, joining him on stage. The stories ran as thick as the music. His childhood. His parents. Growing up along the Jersey Shore.

What actually stayed with me, though, wasn't any single story. It was how he told them. Searingly honest. Occasionally heartbreaking. A loose, unhurried rhythm to the delivery, carrying real emotion rather than performed emotion. This wasn't a polished stage routine. It was a man revisiting, apparently night after night, a genuinely difficult past — vulnerable and unguarded, in front of a paying audience.

Then the mood shifted. He talked about meeting Patti Scialfa, marrying her, and from there, about trust — how it depends entirely on letting someone else see as much of you as you can actually bear to reveal. Behind whichever mask you've built to manage the fear.

There was another moment, quieter, that landed just as hard. Talking about being rejected from the military draft on medical grounds, while so many young men his age were sent to Vietnam and didn't come home, he wondered aloud who was sent in his place.

"Who was it that was sent in my place. There was someone." — Bruce Springsteen

The man and his music. Watch it if you haven't. You won't come away disappointed.

There's a point to all this, obviously.

Trust runs on the same principle Springsteen described from that stage — it needs someone willing to be seen, mask and all, rather than only the polished version underneath it. It's a word thrown around constantly in estate agency, propped up by review platforms that promise a shortcut to it, as if a five-star average could substitute for actually being known. It can't. It was never that simple.

I once had a conversation with Christopher Watkin, who asked me a fairly direct question: what are the biggest fears and frustrations agents actually carry? My answer, without much hesitation, was the fear of not being good enough. The fear of letting the mask slip, even slightly. Of allowing a vendor to glimpse the actual person underneath — the character, the values, the convictions — and risk being turned down for it.

So the mask stays on. Safe behind the corporate name, behind the polished, rehearsed version of yourself. Which, ironically, makes it even harder for a vendor to choose you, let alone trust you — because every other agent in the room is hiding behind an identical mask, for the identical reason.

Every agency claims to be a relationship business. A people business. If that's genuinely true, make it true. Don't let it stay transactional in practice while claiming otherwise in the brochure.

The Brand Within helps with exactly that. It asks for vulnerability, though. Nerve. A willingness to be turned down, sometimes, by people who were never going to be the right fit anyway.

Not many agents are willing to pay that price. I'd like to think you are.

— The Brand Within

thebrandwithin.me

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Originally published on LinkedIn.