4 Tips to be more authentic

All too often, people are taught to exert effort to identify and pursue a career based on standardized test scores and external guidance that tell you what is best or right for you. Sound familliar? Maybe you have gone down this road and something about your current focus does nto feel right? 

What if from before birth, you are on a collision course with what matters to the Soul? What if authenticity is about recognizing what drives you, understanding emotional blocks and mental filters that prevent you from seeing?  Consider five tips to be more authentic:

1) Get to the root

The true meaning of authenticity is in its Latin root, which means "author".  Thus, being "authentic" is not being honest about who you are, but rather, about being conscious you author-create your life. Authenticity is both active and creative process. It's not about revealing something, but building a vision of you.

2) Align with the soul

As you do some soul searching and better understand yourself, you may, like many people, realize, your current career is not congruent with who you are (your values, passions and core). Only you know if you earn money via a livelihood, vocation, or an unconscious habit to get by.

3) Share intimate revelations 

Life is a mirror.  The more intimate you get with yourself and share about yourself, the more comfortable you are with intimacy and transparency.  As you join the dots of childhood events that shape your character and share these, you show integrity, own the process and integrate the soul lessons that enable you to move into an expanded version of you. Love is not about a relationship.  Love is relating.  It is an ongoing phenomenon, a verb not a noun.  To relate is insecure and relationship is a security.  The flow of revelations is like pure water.

4) Be

When you are fully authentic, you never have to go through the process of revealing who you are. True authenticity doesn't require you to tell anyone else what your values are, because everyone will be able to see your values in the way you live your life. When you are fully authentic you don't reveal your chosen values, you become them – you live them.

What if you could not hide anything?

Notice what happens at the prospect of knowing everything about you is exposed.  The mind and ego urge you to protect who you think you are.  You are conditioned to internalize opinions and beliefs about yourself.  This is the intellectual vision, all the ways you adopt labels, emotions and psychological constructs. This vision of you feels wounded, fearful and wants protection.  Softness is viewed by ego as weakness, felt as vulnerability. The ego goes to great lengths to keep you from seeing through it. 

As you begin to feel less of a need to hide anything, motivations fall away. Its as if you let go of the cultural conditioning and personal will to do, have and become. Internally, you experience a transition, a shift of focus. This need for references spontaneously vanishes and leaves you speechless.  You feel lighter and at a loss for what is next.

Imagine complete transparency.  Open the heart to a richness of expanding visions. Notice why you deny what soul knows.  You begin to see as the deepest part of you is seeing.  This is intimacy.  Touching it or catching glimpses is not the same as being it. 

"Eyes so transparent that through them the soul is seen." -Theophile Gautier