Why is Authenticity Important?

Everything will line up perfectly when knowing and living the truth becomes more important than looking good. -Alan Cohen

How much are other people’s opinions affecting your understanding of ‘who you are’ and ‘where you should be’ in life?

The answer: more than we can imagine.

And the antidote: *Authenticity!*

Let’s keep it real… Being authentic isn’t always easy.

Advertising, mass-media, Hollywood and the big corporations which control these things are persistently attacking us with unrealistic, unattainable, and unhealthy ideals of what it means to be normal and successful. In large part, this is how they make their money.

What’s the problem with this? Well, one of the major problems is that these ideals don’t just affect our spending habits – they affect our attitudes, social interactions, and our perceptions of ‘who we are’ and ‘where we should be’ in life.

If that didn’t make things hard enough, we face familial pressures to live up to our parents’ expectations of who THEY want us to be. But those expectations often aren’t relevant in today’s world. Plus, this is OUR life to live, not theirs. And sometimes it’s not easy to say “I love you, but don’t want to live your life” without it sounding like “go screw yourself!”

There’s more. But we’ll save the topic of gender norms and those social constructions for another blog post. The point is…

There’s a lot of pressure on us to be someone other than ourselves.

You’ve listened to me say over and over again that authenticity wins big points in life. On a planet with over 7 billion people (WTF!), and a job market that doesn’t give a damn about your college diploma, what’s gonna make you stand out and above the rest of the world?

–>AUTHENTICITY!

It’s not all that matters, but it’s a big part. Plus, you “being yourself” also comes with the added benefit of feeling really good about yourself. Hellooooo integrity!

In this video, I elaborate on why I value authenticity so much, and why that may be a good idea for you too.

Watch the video to learn:

• Why authenticity is so important
• What to focus on when you’re hesitant to be yourself
• How to be authentic in everyday situations
• Which types of questions to ask
• How sending a heartbroken dude a can of Bustelo coffee can save you five grand on a new design for your website

Ladies grab your tissues and gender conforming fellahs hold it together. You might get a little teary eyed as I share how I dealt with a heartbreak of mine.

If you feel ready to take it there, enjoy the video. 🙂

On Purpose,
-Jacob!

PS: Very excited to have interviewed Alan Cohen (see quote above!) last Friday for the A Roadmp for Young Adults virtual-conference coming in early 2013! (And I’m interviewing Heidi Grant Halverson today!! :))

Here’s a chance to be authentic:

1. What’s your number one challenge when it comes to being authentic?

2. What’s one time in your life when you’ve been authentic and it paid off?

Post your answers in the comments below.

Here’s An Exercise:

Next time you’re talking to someone one-on-one, ask them how they’re feeling. They may give you some superficial canned response. Don’t take the bait!

Say, “No, what are you *actually* feeling right now.” That’ll give them a chance to be authentic with you! It’s a good start to a potentially great connection.

Props to people mentioned in this flick:

• Phil Drolet
• Mike Bridgman

What Am I Actually Saying?

I want to backtrack to a conversation I had yesterday on the phone with my buddy Phil from The Feel Good Lifestyle. He was about to give a presentation on blogging and he said: “If you could rewind two years to when you started Sensophy, what would be the thing that you would tell people that you didn’t know then that you now know?”

So I thought about it for a little while and I went on, I did some philosophizing and intellectualizing… So what did I come up with? Well, beyond all that goodness I came up with this: It’s about authenticity. I think there’s like 50,000 blogs that get started every day. So what’s going to differentiate you and me from the 49,998 other inspiring bloggers? Well, the thing is: Who you are!

As far as I see it it’s about becoming an extraordinary person and then documenting that. In other words: The theory alone is not going to set you apart from other people, but it’s how true you can be to who you are, embody the theory and then be really authentic and transparent in sharing that.

Let me give you an example of how that played out in my life and in Sensophy. In the beginning of 2011 I was heartbroken. I had just broken up with my girl and I wasn’t feeling so great. And a question that I was facing internally was: “How do I write a blog about living an extraordinary life, when the last year of my life was such a high quality and then starts to slowly decline?” So am I still legitimate, am I still eligible or verified or certified to write the blog?

What I did was this: I shared what I was going through and I talked about my heartbreak on my blog. About the same time I got a phone call from one of the Sensophy viewers. I just got on the phone with the dude, I started talking to him and one thing let to another. And I didn’t really know what he did (for a living), but he said he liked good coffee. So I send the dude a can of coffee as a surprise. He lived in Pennsylvania or something and I just surprised him and sent him a can of coffee.

It turns out that he was also going through a heartbreak at this point in his life, he saw that I was going through the same so he reached out to me. And this is how the whole interaction started.

Now here’s what’s incredible: About 3-5 months later I was looking for Sensophy to get redesigned and the dude turned out to be a designer. So this guy completely redesigned Sensophy absolutely for free. That probably would have cost me something like 5 grand, but because of my authenticity he did it for free. Because I shared the shit I was going through and he was able to relate to that, we connected on a core level. That would have never happened if I would have just said “Let me pretend it’s all good, I’m Jacob from New York, I got it all figured out, no problem.” But because I was being authentic I really connected with this dude, he believed in what I believed in and he knew I was real.

I ended up flying him out to Hawaii on frequent flyer points for free to finish up the design of Sensophy. And we spent ten days in Hawaii kicking it, wrapping it up and that’s the design that you see on the site right now. So that’s all coming from me being authentic and vulnerable at a time when I normally would have secluded myself and stayed isolated. But I said “Fuck that!” I’m going to be me, I’m going to be real. That’s the short story about that.

So a couple things to keep in mind: One is that we really want to be authentic. Because if we’re not authentic and we don’t express who we are, we will never be able to create the life that we want. We can’t create a life that’s true to us if we’re not true to ourselves and true to people. That’s a key thing.

The other thing I want you to keep in mind is this. Ask yourself: How do I shift from focussing on validation (which I think people focus on a lot of times when they go out, they go out to a bar, they go to the beer garden or they’re talking to girls or talking to a perspective networking opportunity…) and instead, focus on connecting with people. The key is: Forget validation. Forget “What is this person going to think of me? Are they going to approve of me?” and instead focus on: “Can I connect with this person? Can I tap into their core? What are they feeling? What are you feeling right now?” Try to communicate from a core place. So again: Focus on connection not validation. 

I’m doing a ton of interviews right now working on the “A Roadmap for Young Adults” virtual conference. I’m connecting with people who scare me. These people are high level people.

And the thing that I come back to is: It’s not about them validating me, it’s about me connecting with them about things that I care about. And it’s about being authentic. So that’s why authenticity is the approach to take. Be real, be yourself and in that moment remember to connect from the core.

—

So, did you think about it?

1. What’s your number one challenge when it comes to being authentic?

2. What’s one time in your life when you’ve been authentic and it paid off?

Answer below! 🙂