How do we achieve success and satisfaction? In personal life, in relationships, in career, elsewhere? The answers are of course many and varied, but the authentic person has one clear answer: it starts within.
Life progresses with progress of self-knowing
Our thoughts are what guides or directs our actions. Out thoughts can “lead us into battle” or into addressing challenges, and can call us out of it. How we perceive a world around us is the foundation for what we do. How we understand things determines our ways and paths that we take. If you want your life to have different results, make questions for yourself, learn, mend your internal world, and the changes will them come automatically.
When it starts within, what we want to focus on, are our believes, our convictions, our values, perceptions, intentions, and so on. And for an authentic person, that is where growth and development really iniciate. Where the essence happens. When I really understand myself and areas of my life, then I can realise them and this realisation is only a natural and easy progression. Self-knowledge, which is essentially the development of authenticity, is thus the red thread of the progress of life in any field.
Self-exploration
The most basic, or even the most fundamental explanation of authenticity is that it is the mastery of inner experience. Emergence of an authentic way or style of living happens through a process of self-exploration. For some this may be a bit more abstract, more theoretical (introspection and self-reflection are also related terms and skills, for example), but it is simply about reflecting on oneself, on different events in life, about asking what is important to us in life, about observing how we react mentally and emotionally to different situations, and so on (for example, an account that I have seen says that an authentic person spends a lifetime answering the simple question “Who am I?“). The essential result we are pursuing is not to change ourselves, but above all to be as aware of ourselves as possible.
Self-awareness and enlightened living
Carl Gustav Jung is a well-known psychologist who has worked extensively on the subject of what (today) authenticity encompasses. His famous quote goes like this: I am not what has happened to me, but what I have chosen to be. Growing up, we learn and adopt many habits from our environment, and also thoughts or reflections, about ourselves and the world around us. Some of these can be useful or do us a favour in life, others can be burdensome or limiting. The essence of conscious living (we could also use the term enlightened living) is to be aware of who we are and how we act. It is not about letting things happen to us, but about becoming what we want to be.
C.G. Jung’s message gives the essence of what is meant by the terms personal growth and personal development. The word growth means to increase in quantity or scope, while development means to change in content. It usually makes sense to people to want to become more aware of and in control of our professional or working process. We therefore educate ourselves about our work in order to acquire knowledge that will guide us in our work. Similarly, personal growth and development is about acquiring knowledge about different areas of life. When we learn about relationships, we want to move in this area from casual relationships (i.e. unconscious, the way the environment has taught us relationships should be) to conscious relationships, or the kind of relationships we want to have.
Self-fulfilment motive
In this post, I add a third keyword to self-exploration and self-awareness: self-fulfilment. It is probably clear by now that the motto “just be who you are” is not really very accurate or says very little about authenticity. The path to authenticity necessarily leads through a process of self-exploration and the creation of self-awareness, which can be seen as a kind of cornerstone of everything. It is only when we begin to really know and understand ourselves well that we can build a life that truly suits us. This is how we arrive at the point we call self-fulfilment.
Self-fulfilment is the main motivation and source of energy to work towards authenticity. For us personally, it means that we have separated between what we want to be and what we should want to be. It means that we have given weight to our own values and worldviews, which we may have previously hidden, and have begun to pursue and realise them (this contributes greatly to an important sense of ‘perceived self-worth’). It also means that we are becoming what we personally believe to be the best version of ourselves. The pursuit of this outcome (whether we call it self-fulfilment or authenticity) triggers many positive feelings in us that are relatively lasting. Feelings of satisfaction, motivation, a sense of achievement and optimism, or confidence in positive change achieved in the right way (sustained, sincere, unforced and unplayed) are the subject of the study of so-called positive psychology, which also includes the topic of authenticity.
Conclusion
Authenticity is a way or style of life. It is not a single thought or action, but a holistic way of thinking and acting. There are neither completely authentic nor completely inauthentic individuals. It is a choice on the one hand, and a process on the other, in which there is a lot of learning and personal growth and development. Because it never exists perfectly, it is not a goal, but a daily way of acting that continuously serves or rewards us with meaningful positive feelings.
Paradim 