An Authentic Life

An Authentic Life

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou cans’t not be false to any man.
—Shakespeare, Hamlet.


Much is made of the word “Authentic”; it peppers our discussions and journals. Much like the word “love”, it is thrown around and tossed into conversations so that its purer, perfect meaning is diminished by its overuse. Here we will look at what it might mean to live an authentic life.

An Authentic life is one where we live according to the needs of our inner being, rather than the demands of society or our early conditioning. That is not to say that if we are leading a life that accords to societal norms we cannot be leading an authentic life. The critical distinguishing feature is having an understanding and awareness of what is driving our behaviour, rather simply conforming to the received wisdom of society.

Such behaviour may therefore accord with cultural norms, but for the reason that those norms appear on consideration to be appropriate, rather than blindly, simply because they happen to be the current norms. Such authenticity is a positive outcome of examined and informed motivation rather than a negative outcome of rejection of the expectations of others.

Living true to one’s self does not therefore mean we do not consider or take account of others and their expectations. If we accept as human beings we are innately built with a moral compass and an ethical barometer, being true to ourselves will necessarily require being considerate to the interests and feelings of others. There are challenges and difficulties associated with this; it is problematic to really understand what is driving our behaviour; cultural norms or core beliefs.
How do we reconcile being true to our core beliefs when to do so would be upsetting and/or offensive to others?

Andre Gide the 20th century French novelist wrote:

“It is better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not”

“Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - and thus make yourself indispensable”.


Much is written about the need to be authentic in a working environment, legions of books are written on “Authentic Leadership” A quick search on Google will reveal hundreds upon hundreds of such books as well as consultants offering transformational experiential courses and interventions on Authenticity

If we stop for a moment, and start from a different place. Authentic leadership? What do these gurus mean by that? Presumably there is something we should indentify as inauthentic leadership, and authentic leadership would be the opposite of that. Well what would that look like?
If the opposite of a statement is so clearly absurd, the statement itself can hardly be considered to be insightful, or set us on a path of learning or discovery.

So where does that take us, we have a circular definition; the definition of leadership must mean in part to be authentic. Can you be a leader without being authentic? I will seek to demonstrate-No. Well at least you cannot be a leader of people without being authentic.

You can manage, direct, mandate, persuade but you will not lead.

What do leaders do that managers do not? How do we capture that essence? Leaders have the ability to consistently move themselves and others to action because they deeply understand the invisible forces that shape us all. They have an ability to connect with people, in all dimensions of the human existence, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually they are capable of balancing each of these as the situation dictates, but they are always sensitive to each of these.

Why is this so important? Fundamentally each of us need to be value and appreciated for who we are, and not what we do. We have a basic need to be recognized and appreciated. Psychologists have recognized that for a complete human existence we each need; Recognition, Stimulation and Structure. (There are of course other crucially important things, such as love) Effective leaders have an intuitive understanding of these three needs.

Recognition

To be valued for who we are. So many mangers and organizations make the mistake of valuing people by reference to what they do solely, what their output is. We are not what we produce, what we deliver, that is not the essence of our being, it is part of us and certainly needs to be measured evaluated and recognized. Regrettably too many organizations stop there.

The longer this goes on the more people will define their perceived worth to the organization solely by reference to their output. This is a problem because we all have a deep fundamental need to be appreciated for who we are. If we are spending upwards of 8 hours a day in an environment, which does not pay attention to this deep, need, we cannot make a real connection with the organization, there no sense of affiliation. Our personal characteristics that distinguish us from others are not being seen and appreciated. We become indistinguishable from anyone else who delivers the same output, and so we are not being recognized.

Put another way we have a real need to be seen as and treated as individuals- Leaders have the capability to do this.

This is particularly important when leaders are setting about the business of building a team. Will Schutz observed “ the way I make a group is not to try to make them into a group but to help everyone become more like they want to be”

That requires huge bravery and courage, in a demanding world of short-term targets and performance metrics, where there remains a huge amount of management and decision making to be done. But without this Bravery a group will not be created. There is countless research on high performing teams which all point in the same direction; the whole will only become more than the sum of the parts, if each part is nurtured appropriately so that eventually the parts nurture and develop each other.

A leaders role here is to create the environment for that to happen, She will have chosen the people with the talent and capability, whether they recognize yet themselves.

Stimulation

We all need stimulation, Intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. Can a leader provide a work environment, which can deliver on all three dimensions? Is it really the role of employers to deliver this depth? Well let’s ask the question in a different way. All employers want motivated, dedicated and committed employees. They all want to retain their talent. You only need to pick up a business magazine to see how big a deal it is to major corporations. They all spend millions of pounds a year on external consultants a year seeking to address this. So if that is their aim, the question is not “Can a leader deliver on all three dimensions?” The question is “why would she think she can deliver on what she and the company want without doing so?”

Structure

Structure and stability are similarly a basic human need. The need for security, safety and consistency run deep in us all.
This does require subjective judgment. Too much stifles creativity and recognition as mentioned above. Too little will create uncertainly and anxiety for all, irrespective of the level of personal confidence. Without a structure people find it difficult to develop a sense of affiliation.
A leader will need to be hugely flexible in her approach to this. This is not a painting by numbers exercise. It requires subtlety, tact and a massive amount of sensitivity to the situation, the people involved and the issue at hand. All people will need differing levels structure, and all people will require different levels of structure as their personal circumstances change. Individual’s structural requirements change constantly and a leader will need to be sensitive to this, not indulgent of it, but aware of it so as to maximize the contribution of each individual.

A leader therefore needs to understand these three basic individual needs and pay constant attention to them.

So we return to the opening question, why do this require a leader to be authentic? And consequently why is authentic leadership a tautology?

Each of the component parts of RSS will fail if the leader is not telling the truth, or more precisely being true to herself.

Or to put it another way, why is it not possible to fake these things or spin them in a way that makes them seem sincere and genuine? Perhaps it is in the short term, but not in the long term. All of us have the unconscious ability to sense these things; an antenna for inconsistency, genuineness and openness makes us feel comfortable.

“I find you likeable if I like myself in your presence, if you create an atmosphere within which I like myself”-Will Shutz.

Certain people are trained to read body language in real detail and interpret that language. We all have this ability, it is innate in us. We may not have the full language or be able to fully articulate it. But we feel inconsistencies between voice and body, language and tone, facial expressions and spoken word.
We are often shown this on television when politicians are presenting. An expert in the studio interprets the unspoken messages. This rarely surprises us, it is confirmatory of what we already sensed.

So people will feel our lack of authenticity even if they don’t know they do (for more on this see Blink-Malcolm Gladwell and various by Paul Ekman)

And also according to Schutz people will feel our openness and authenticity as we create an environment in which they like themselves.

So, in conclusion people will notice whether we are authentic or not. If we are not it is impossible for them to feel recognized by us for who they are, only for what they do.
We may be able to stimulate them intellectually, but not emotionally or spiritually. I think it is a basic truth that we cannot make meaningful emotional connections with others without being true.

Although a lot of structure may be seen as supportive scaffolding to the overall aim, the fundamentals of knowing how each of us fit in to the aims of the organization is crucial to the capacity to generate affiliation. Similar to recognition, people’s inconsistency antenna will feel this if it is not true

So we now come to what I think is the hard bit. How do we do it?

If we assume that most people in a leadership position don’t deliberately knowingly lie to their people (a reasonable if not totally true assumption)
Why is that we have such a paucity of good leaders?

I think there are a number of interesting factors at play here:

1 Too often leaders tell people what they think they want to hear
2 More interestingly Leaders don’t really deeply know what they believe or what their own values are.
3 There is often a lack of personal values which even if people don’t have the same values, they can at least recognize that the individual is personally consistent.


All of these will undermine authenticity. In summary a great leader will need to have

1 A very high degree of self awareness
2 A clearly understood set of personal values
3 The courage to live by those and the humility to accept that on occasion she will fall below that standard.
4 An ability to create an atmosphere in which people can be who they want to be.
5 Critically and not yet discussed see themselves as serving the people they are leading and not the other way around.


A rarely appreciated part of developing self-awareness is to understand that it involves hearing messages from your body. (Schutz) That is something that very few people have developed to ability to do. Our body is sending these messages all the time, we need to quieten our mind and listen to these messages.

A slight digression: we seem to separate sensory/physical pleasures from cerebral/intellectual pleasures. Treating these as distinct and different, responding to and understood by different parts of us. This separation is artificial and does not properly represent how we truly function. Joy, happiness, sadness and anger are all full human emotions to be felt and understood by our whole being. Who has not on reading a poem (a non physical activity)
been moved to tears or to feel sadness or joy in the pit of their stomach?

There is a whole subject here, which I may write about separately.



Attempting to be someone you are not will eventually lead to misery and possibly worse, it may make you rich financially along the way but it will not bring fulfilment.

This is why a lot of books on Leadership are useless. It is not a skill or competence that can be learnt from a book anymore than you can learn how to love from a book.

We know that love is an emotional state (I shall resist the temptation to write on this subject for fear disappearing down a rabbit hole never to return!); we also understand that it has an intellectual and spiritual element to it to. It is the same with Leadership we know it has an intellectual element but recognize less the emotional and spiritual aspects.

People around you will know, even if you don’t, whether you are being authentic. You may believe what you are saying is a true reflection of what you really believe. But it may not be and so often is not. Our core beliefs are so often obscured from ourselves. Confused by societal norms and expectations, our learned behaviour from our surroundings our peers and mentors. Clichéd definitions abound of great leaders, which we then believe we need to imitate.

So until we have a deep understanding of who we are and what we believe, we are in no position to lead others. So destroy all your leadership books and cancel all your courses on leadership and instead, look inward and discover who you are.


“The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates said that at his trial for heresy.
He was on trial for encouraging his students to challenge the accepted beliefs of the time and think for themselves. The sentence was death but Socrates had the option of suggesting an alternative punishment. He could have chosen life in prison or exile, and would likely have avoided death. But Socrates believed that these alternatives would rob him of the only thing that made life useful: Examining the world around him and discussing how to make the world a better place. Without his “examined life” there was no point in living. So he suggested that Athens reward him for his service to society. The result, of course, is that they had no alternative and were forced to vote for a punishment of death.

Luckily, we don’t have to choose between an examined life and death. But the sad thing is, most people avoid leading an examined life. It’s not that they don’t have time or make time. They actively avoid examining their lives.
Those aspiring to be leaders will need to examine their lives if they are to be successful.
I would suggest that we would all benefit from examining our lives more deeply but that is for another day.

When we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behaviour to our internal standards and values. We become self-conscious as objective evaluators of ourselves. Various emotional states are intensified by self-awareness. People are more likely to align their behaviour with their standards when made self-aware. People will be negatively affected if they don’t live up to their personal standards. Various environmental cues and situations can induce awareness of the self, such as mirrors, an audience, or being videotaped or recorded.

It is the inconsistency between behaviour and internal values that causes confusion to other people and also, but not as readily seen, sets up an internal level of stress understood by the body but not always the mind.

So if you are a leader of people, know thy self. If you are being lead, and you don’t believe what you are being told, trust your instincts, you will be right.