It is increasingly difficult to be authentic nowadays. As babies and young children, you learn to become a mold of your parents, peer, society, culture and belief system. As a teenager you learn how to be like everyone else through social media, learning institutions, society leaders.
As an adult, you get fabricated into becoming your profession, being a carbon copy of your leader. You then pay it forward by educating the next generation through the same formula.
This kind of fabrication house of future leaders are worrying. Individualities are suppressed to mediocre. Being one of many, is the new norm.
Through some miraculous chance, some of us did not succumb to the pressure of the human automisation. These low yield, outliers are doing everything they can to survive, thrive and defend their true purpose of life. You become the crazy cow grazing flowers instead of grass just because it feeds your soul with purpose and bring joy to your being.
The price we pay for Authenticity:
Isolation
The more you show your real self off, the more the world rejects you. Maybe you don’t dress the same anymore, you don’t speak the same language, you don't take things as it is because ‘that’s the way it is’. Elon Musk, Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, to name a few, have walked this path before.
Proactive measures: find your own circle of trust and develop a support group. Choose to be around positive and constructive environment.
Acceptance Dilemma
It is not that easy to accept other people’s ideas and quirkiness. Learning not to take rejections personally is not easy. The acceptance dilemma is two folds:
- People don’t accept you for you.
- You don’t accept people for them.
Proactive measures: Both of these have to go. Acceptance and Authenticity are symbiosis in nature. Learn to accept others as who they are. They will in return, accept you.
Forever Troubled Waters
Authentic personality and leadership suffers from constant troubled waters. You need to be prepared to defend your ‘WHYs’ and challenge the norm most of the time. This can be draining in the long run and you might give up and succumb to normality.
Proactive measures: Be prepared to explain your motives and missions at all times. Showing them the bigger picture of your reasoning may remove fear and false conceptions. When it did not work, walk away and revisit the situation again another time when you are ready.
In summary, being authentic means you are staying true to your inner compass and leading life in your true form. When the external factors does not align with your inner compass (values), conflicts arises.
