To live authentically, recognize the external and internal pressures that beckon you to participate in life artificially. When you reflect on early influences, make the unconscious conscious, and practice pausing before engaging you come more fully into your authentic self. Many influences diminish your ability to participate in life honestly. These micro self-betrayals, detected within the truest part of your being, tell you when you are deviating from your authentic expressions and paths. Making choices that reduce these compromises, helps you to develop inner wealth and live a more authentic life.
Challenges Presented by Outside Expectations and Measures
By the time a child reaches adolescence, they have already been bombarded with messages to conform to certain expectations about how they should look, behave, care for their health, and what they should value. Without guidance and role models that help them fine-tune their inner worlds their innate ability to connect with their rapidly evolving sense of self is confused and compromised.
The energy of “untruth” about who they are, how they should be or what they should do can lead to self-doubt, anxiety, and chronic distraction.
In large part, this is because most adults have not developed the skill set to manage these influences themselves. Cultivating an ability to understand your underlying motivations and developing inner qualities aligned with your values, is counter to these outside influences. This is hard to do when you are looking outward for validation versus inwardly.
Reflect on the Influences of Early Childhood Experiences
I had a grandmother who had very clear likes and dislikes. She was a master of passive-aggressive tactics to shape the behavior of others toward her will. Usually, this consisted of choosing a child to celebrate while mocking another in front of them.
One day when I was about 5 she forced a dress over my head after I refused to wear one. I kicked her during the process. After that, no matter how I tried to win her over, I was perpetually on the naughty list. I’d listen to her say how bad, dirty, and strange I was to my sisters, parents, and extended family. I decided she was right and wrote her a note that I signed to match her expectations.
Early Childhood Experiences Can Compromise Our Ability to Live Authentically
The refusal to wear the dress and the kick in response to my grandmother’s boundary violation was an authentic part of my young expression. It was as real as it gets. I learned quickly that certain parts of me did not make others happy, in fact certain things about me seemed to make others cruel. It was the beginning of what became years of self betrayal and abandonment of my authentic self. This primed me for many worse emotional and physical boundary violations, from many different people I was supposed to trust.
Understand How Underlying Motivations Influence How to Live Authentically
Generally, under the surface, people wish to avoid the unpleasant (criticism, disappointment, harm) and attain something desirable (praise, love, reward). For the people pleaser, constant readjustment to the needs and energies of others leads to a pronounced disconnection from this awareness.
We’re not ourselves when we’re triggered – we become who we think we need to be to SURVIVE. And when we’re constantly being triggered, our identity can start to slip away– because our personality and values are constantly getting hijacked by fight-or-flight reflexes.
Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
Living authentically can be downright terrifying when one’s nervous system is screaming that it isn’t safe to do so. Discovering underlying motivations is the key to learning about what remains to be healed.
Fear Driven Responses
For some, becoming a chameleon was once a way to survive in a toxic family or relationship. The need to have some control over the unpredictability of the outside environment is rooted in fear. Over time, the lines between what others want or need become blurred and indistinguishable from one’s own. Being and doing what others desire assures at least an illusionary sense of security. In this scenario, it makes sense how one’s authenticity is lost.
Motivations to Achieve an Expected Result or Response
For those with unrealistically high expectations for themselves and heightened anxiety, negative comparisons to others lead to unconscious motivations to morph oneself into forms that are deemed more desirable or acceptable. Many teens and young adults struggle to align with their authentic expressions as they face an onslaught of disingenuous images and messages. Social media has people of all ages following trends, making relationship and lifestyle decisions based on pop psychology, and working to achieve false measures that have little true value.
When motivations are to achieve an expected result or response, such as;
- to be liked or not criticized,
- to be included or not seen as different
- to achieve some false sense of power or material gains
These underlying motives will compromise your authentic expressions.
Making the Unconscious Conscious
Exploring motivations needn’t be a questioning of one’s character. Simply becoming more aware of the real motivating influences behind a goal, a presentation or a response will help you to align more with your authentic self. Unconscious motivations are part of each person’s unique human experience. Explore ways to make the unconscious conscious and you’ll be on track to discovering how to live authentically and get more satisfaction out of life.
To Live Authentically Become Aware of any Mismatch in Frequency
A “frequency” is the energy of thought, emotion, and intent we emit or detect from people and situations. Incongruous frequencies are a mismatch of these energies and can spark a visceral feeling that tells us something is off. It may be a response to an erroneous claim, an expectation, or an awareness that what someone is saying is counter to how they actually feel, think, or believe. Sometimes the mismatch is within ourselves. It may be felt or noticed after a compromise has been made.
Just maybe, the reason so many people struggle with anxiety is not a chemical imbalance or something within them that needs correction but a detection of mismatched frequency! Everyone has a higher part of them that says when something feels bogus.
Most people have enough going on in their heads without being pulled into the world of outside agendas that vie for their attention to consume, pick a side, or entertain fear-based distraction. It takes practice, patience, and adherence to “the high road” to be present enough each day to come from a place grounded within your authenticity. When lured into a situation or interaction that beckons you to quantify yourself based on false measures of your worth or phony credentialing that respects only a small part of your being… that squirrely feeling you feel is the truer part of yourself that knows you better.
You,” he said, “are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.
Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls
There were many times when situations or conversations felt so false and foreign to my values, focus, or true self that it was as if I was an alien, alone in my experiences. I’d shut down the parts I knew would be misunderstood by most and punishable by some. After much healing, I’d laugh to myself because I knew a mismatch in frequency meant that things were gonna get weird (or I was going to get weird, as I awkwardly tried to hold space or ‘relate’).
How to Participate Honestly: Approaches to Live Authentically
Learn to connect to that part of yourself that knows you. Befriend and align with it. When you show up uncompromisingly from this space you’ll see the world more clearly. This may be contrary to existing wiring toward worry, negative comparison, or fear of not being enough or doing things perfectly. Early experiences that bring forth feelings of shame set the stage for interacting with the world in survival mode.
These primitive reactions tell your nervous system ‘Get it right, or die!’ Functioning under these neural conditions prevents honest participation with the world and is not how to live authentically.
I stopped thinking the way other people think a long time ago.
You gotta think like YOU think.
Rocky Balboa
Breathe, pause, and reflect often about “What is driving my responses?” Seek to know and understand yourself more, so that your engagement with others comes from the higher part of you. How people perceive you is less important. Be seen for how you are instead of how you feel others would like you to be.
In time, old wiring becomes extinct. As your inner wealth grows, you become less attached to outside outcomes. Increasingly you become liberated from the fears of how the outside world will respond to who you are. Why? Because you know who you are. You accept your past. All of it! All the hard, shameful stuff and the amazing, beautiful, messy journey it took to love, respect, and accept yourself unconditionally.
When You Practice the “Pause”, You Live Authentically
Slowing it down;
- Helps with Discernment
- Leads to greater self-trust, knowing that your motivations are pure
- Helps you to honor your true feelings and be less reactive
- Allows you to see situations and people more clearly
- Increases your ability to release attachments to specific outcomes
Coming into the fullness of your authentic self is fed by your self-compassion and self-care. Be gentle with yourself as you develop skill grounding, pausing, and reflecting. In time, you will feel less personalization when others react from their perceptions. Your life decisions and habits will increasingly be aligned with your values in part because you are showing up knowing yourself.
Live Authentically: Build Your Inner Wealth
Mainstream elevates and esteems the enhancement of your physical appearance and the acquisition of status symbols and displays of wealth. External “wealth” is pushed front and center. None of these things by itself is necessarily inauthentic, yet the acquisition of external wealth often masks a person’s ability to connect with value beyond the superficial. Conscious care of your body and mind and regular connection with your higher self will bring forth wealth from the inside out.
Inner Wealth is the Real Riches
There comes a point at which you literally can’t be anyone other than who you are. It doesn’t look like what you’d expect. That one-of-a-kind grain of sand you are in its fullest expression carries all the stuff that you felt you needed to leave behind. It holds a well of untapped creative energy. Your grounded connection within, humbly tied to the greater divine thread of all that is, will guide and direct your life. Maintaining and nurturing this link helps us collect the joy bits of this lifetime!
Unlike any magic pill or elixir, developing your inner wealth is a path that eases your nervous system. Here you fulfill yourself not through material pursuits, nor any force of will, but from honoring your highest knowing of what is ‘right’… congruent, in all situations with all people. Do whatever you must to stay there!
At 70 years old if I could give my younger self one piece of advice, it would be to use the words ‘fuck off’ much more frequently.
Helen Mirren
The high road will ruffle some feathers. It requires that you not remold yourself to make others comfortable by thinking or behaving as they wish.
No, I do not need a yearly check-up or a flu shot.
I’m uninterested in gossip, influencers, or anything ‘trending’.
If your character is questionable, if there is a track record of incongruency between what you say and do you don’t get my vote. The lesser evil is no longer an option.
Gradually you come to trust that you’ll know when and with whom it’s safe to reveal more of “your real”. Your authentic frequency will repel some, but it will also align you with those with pure intentions and similar authentic energy. Vulnerability in this space is healing and the practice of living authentically is organically reinforcing.
Recognize when you are baited into compromise, practice ‘the pause’, and keep showing up honestly. Doing so lights the way to the yeses that hold value to you. Live authentically and your inner wealth will grow, bringing great rewards to this lifetime.
To learn about services that will support your intentions to Live Authentically, please visit my Coaching Services or Metaphysical Services (Spiritual Tools 101) pages. For additional reading on this topic, I encourage you to read Places of Power: Live as an Authentic Example and Be a Humility Leader! Show up Authentically.
If you’re interested in supportive services to assist you with creating a living environment that will support intentional living, please visit me here: Estelle Bonaceto. Wishing you much growth, healing, and empowerment, as your honest participation in all you do brings greater inner wealth to your life.
