Tag: Authenticity

Don’t Be Authentic

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Relationships, Success

Like choosing a character in a computer game based on their skills and characteristics, we get to choose our character by the choices we make every day, big and small.

Quite often, these choices are small, like miner course corrections that a pilot makes as the plane gets buffeted by winds and storms along the way to the planes destination. There are times in life, though, when we make what feel like life altering decisions. This can be in relationships, at work or where we choose to live, and many other areas in our lives.

One for me was when I worked in a coffee shop run by two businessmen, and they offered me a job with lots of money and travel prospects. I had just got married and was moving to another city. My gut told me that lots of travel opportunities would mean spending lots of time in hotels and not with my wife. I had to decide what was more important, money or time with my wife. I turned down the big money in favour of time with my wife.

I’m not mentioning this to say something about myself, I’m mentioning it to illustrate the kinds of decisions that become compass markers in the direction that our character takes. It might have worked out well if I had taken the job offer and I may not have been away from my wife all the time, but I went with my gut and I’m happy with the decision I made.

The point is that making decisions big and small tells us who we are. They mould our characters and sense of self. It is more important to be aligned with our character, to be ourselves than to aim to be authentic. Often, people will excuse bad behaviour by saying that they are being authentic. Hitting someone in the face because you are having a bad day is being authentic in the same way that a 2 year old is authentic. It is better to be true to yourself with the choices that you make. True to your principles and values, which comprise your character.

The Law Of Authenticity

The Pathway To Fulfilment

The fourth Law of Stratospheric Success for the book The Go-Giver is The Law of Authenticity.

“The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.”

The Go-Giver

Often in the world we see other people that we would like to be, people we envy or look up to. Often people use social media to present a better version of themselves, a more collated life. This has a lot to do with self esteem and comparing our lives with the lives that others present on social media that seem so much better than our lives because people only share the best bits.

The irony is that when we are more authentically ourselves we are the more likely to be successful. This is because when we live and act authentically we focus on what brings us joy and what we are naturally good at. When we are joyful and doing what we are naturally good at we thrive and achieve great things. People will also trust us more because we are being ourselves all the time. Trust is a big element of success, because we cannot be successful alone. And your authentic You is a gift to the world that you should not hide your awesomeness.

Be Unmistakably You

Happiness, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Doing something for the first time is scary, more so for some and less so for others, but it is still scary. So what we often do is settle for copying how it has been done before. We feel safe on this already trodden ground. But doing the same thing as others have done, or are doing, is rarely of significant use of our time; it does not often improve the lives of others, or ourselves.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak took the idea of using a mouse and being able to move things around on a computer screen and put an Apple personal computer that almost anyone can use into people’s homes, where before in order to use a computer you had to learn to code or use the keyboard to navigate through endless DOS menus by picking option 4, then option 23, and so on.

This changed the world. It is not that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were special people, it was that they pushed their thinking until they got to the boundary of what was deemed as possible and stepped beyond it, because it is beyond this boundary that things of use are created. If we do things as they have always been done we never find a better of doing them. I am not saying that you need to be a Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, what I am saying is that what they decided to do was a choice, a choice that we all have.

We often fear the embarrassment and the risk of going first, but those we hold up as exceptional did something new, whether it be Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or the painter Jackson Pollack or the author Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, they had not done what they did before they did it. They were unmistakably themselves, and what I am inviting you to do is to be unmistakably yourself. Not similar to those you wish to fit in with or different from the people around you that you disapprove of. It is to be unmistakably you.