How to Stop being Inauthentic

There’s something funny about the way we talk about authenticity. We want to learn authenticity; we want to react authentically; authenticity is something we want to get. We treat being authentic as something we have, as opposed to something we are which can keep us from actually developing this trait, since we’re trying to attain something that, by definition, we already have.

If we define authenticity as simply being your true self, then we really shouldn’t have to look for it in the first place. If we’re looking for it, then we’ve already lost it. And that is what we can call the paradox of authenticity.

 If you’re trying to be authentic, you’re not being authentic. So how can we possibly learn to become more authentic? We have to start by understanding why authenticity is so important. It might seem obvious, but it’s not. After all, we live in a world that thrives on inauthenticity. Traditional jobs run on office politics, the news feeds on false information, celebrities pretend to be real people, brands curate fan pages, even our friends put on nice faces or say what we want to hear to keep us happy. We don’t need to belabor the point, but it’s important to realize how much of our lives are driven by bullshit, which is the lack of authenticity.

But if you think about the moments in your life that are meaningful—I mean truly meaningful—you will always find a degree of realness, of true authenticity. A heartfelt compliment, an honest job review, a great movie, an actually enjoyable first date: these all involve at least some degree of authenticity.

The reason we recognize authenticity is that we’re primed to respond to it. And we’re primed to respond to it authentically. In short, we know it when we see it. And it feels good. It feels true. It feels like something real, which is why it resonates so strongly with us. If we put up with a world that is so often inauthentic, it’s only because we’ve forgotten what real authenticity feels like. But that only makes us hungrier for it, which explains why a politician with even a hint of truth or a speaker who dares to be vulnerable has the power to inspire us.

And when they do—how special! We can probably count those moments on one hand. They’re extraordinary. We feel moved by authentic people, we feel attracted to them. Similarly, we feel attractive when we are being authentic, and when we connect with someone who is authentically engaging with our attractiveness. When we have a killer job interview or a truly special date, what we’re usually saying is that we encountered a moment of mutual authenticity.

Being authentic is also a lot easier. It’s tempting to forget, but being yourself—and being around other people who are themselves—is much easier than pretending, or falsifying, or putting on a social mask, which are common ways to cope with a world that feels false. In fact, it’s inauthenticity that makes pick-up lines, memorized openers and canned responses so attractive. These techniques seem easier, until we discover that they only go so far. They break down as soon as a relationship demands real authenticity, at which point we realize how much easier it would have been to just be ourselves.

So on multiple levels, we’re craving that realness: we want to be authentic, and we want to be around authenticity. The more we try to be something else—what our parents told us we should be, what our jobs demand us to be, what other people seem to think we should be—the more the desire to just be ourselves grows stronger.

If you need any more evidence for why this trait is so important, ask yourself whether you feel better being yourself or pretending otherwise. I think if we’re being honest, it always feels better to be authentic. If it ever feels better to be inauthentic, it’s only because we haven’t quite learned how to be ourselves.

So if authenticity is something we all want, but it’s impossible to have, since it’s something you are and not something you get, then authenticity must be impossible to teach, right?

As I like to say, teaching someone how to be authentic is like teaching someone to be taller. It might even be worse, because no one can fake being taller, but they can definitely fake being authentic. In fact, they do it all the time, as we just discussed.

So how can you learn to become more authentic? As we’ve already discovered, you can’t. That’s the trap. What you can do, however, is stop being inauthentic.

How? That’s where we’ll begin in the next post. Leave a comment. 

Jordan Harbinger -  The Art of Charm