Being Authentic Will Change Your Life

8-10 minute read

I went to a concert yesterday with my sister (29.08.24).

It was a small, fun, and beautiful concert in Reykjavík, Iceland. Everyone was sitting, because there were chairs. But when the music started I couldn’t help but bop my head and move because I wanted to. It was dance music after all.

Everyone was dead motionless.

Me and my sister went on to dance the whole time (in the back not to disturb anyone) and we had the time of our lives. Meanwhile, every single person there didn’t want to break the norm even though they were in a fucking concert. If there’s any place to stand up and dance, it’s there.

I couldn’t help but feel that if we started to vibe and dance in the front row of chairs, people would feel comfortable doing it too because someone else was already doing it.

When you start to pay attention to your authenticity, you can see authenticity around you, and with it inauthenticity. Of course, this example is big-picture and illustrates a societal problem. Everybody is afraid of being themselves, including you.

And it’s because of social conditioning.

Understanding authenticity and breaking the habit of being inauthentic is the goal of this letter. It helped me immensely and I hope it’ll help you as well.

When you first come into this world you are, of course, unapologetically yourself. You don’t know any better. Over time you start learning from everyone around you, your environment.

The environment around you trains you to respond and act in a manner approved by society and groups within society. If your environment (the people around you) are inauthentic, you also start to develop inauthenticity.

Practically everyone around you is inauthentic.

What that means is you start to hide parts of your identity that aren’t accepted by groups of people in your society (friends, family, etc.) or society at large. As I said before, this is called social conditioning.

Some expressions of social conditioning cover:

1. Education

2. Employment

3. Family Life

4. Nationalism

5. Pop Culture

Social conditioning affects a really large part of your life.

But I don’t like to call this phenomenon social conditioning.

I like to call it fearful living.

You are living afraid. You live in your head, you get used to massive amounts of anxiety. You bury your true self beneath limiting beliefs, conditioning, and fears.

I used to work at a kindergarten and school. You could feel how the youngest kids were unaffected by social constraints and didn’t care if they looked or behaved a certain way. As soon as they turned 8, 9, or 10 years old they started to hide their self-identity. You could see the anxiety in their eyes when they wanted to do something but felt like it wasn’t accepted.

Imagine what your adult brain is used to now if you’re already being inauthentic at such a young age.

Now, if we want to know how to be authentic we have to understand authenticity through and through.

The Two Types of Authenticity

The two types of authenticity are:

1. Self authenticity

2. Social authenticity

These work hand-to-hand to create your true authenticity. You can’t be truly self-authentic if you aren’t socially authentic and vice versa.

Before we begin I have to warn you though.

There’s a curse in knowing.

Luckily for you, it’s a good curse. If you read this then you have to act. Otherwise, you’re going to be worse off because you know you could be working on your authenticity but you aren’t.

So… you have to improve your life.

Social Authenticity

This is the social aspect of your authenticity. How you interact with people and if it correlates with the person you truly are.

To be inauthentic socially is to put your wrong self out there. The consequences are that people who you attract in life are going to be attracted to the fake you.

Now, this is how it feels to be inauthentic socially:

In everyday life, you constantly feel like you’re being watched. Like someone is looking at you and judging your every move. It’s pretty tiring. This feeling is most predominant when you’re outside because you don’t know who’s watching. Your mind plagues you with opinions and judgments about yourself, internally and externally, because the mind has been conditioned to.

I speak from experience. I used to feel like this all the time. Especially in high school, I was self-conscious 99% of the time in my first year. This self-judgment was especially bad if I didn’t have my “best” clothes on and I feared that somebody would judge me for my appearance. It creates immense anxiety and stress that only makes you more miserable.

Why do we accept feeling this way?

Your social-authenticity is shaped by your social circle and how you treat people and how you are treated. Approval plays a big part in shaping it though.

The reason you aren’t socially authentic has got to do with so many factors. The main one is this particular notion: Somewhere deep inside you feel like what people offer you, can have true and lasting value. That what they offer is so meaningful and amazing that you need it. This can be material (like money), but more often than not it’s more abstract… you crave approval or validation (it’s mostly the same thing). This feeling resides in your subconscious, which is why the conscious mind (your thoughts & feelings) has a hard time understanding.

Everyone who isn’t truly socially authentic needs to understand this notion. You need to understand this.

Approval is a big trap.

You are chasing mere stimulation and excitement. The only approval you should value is your approval. True fulfillment comes from within. Sounds abstract, but it’s simple. Fulfillment and lasting joy come from learning about yourself, doing what you’re most passionate about, and doing what your intuition tells you to do. And so, you need to practice self-validation. You might be wondering then, how do I do that?

We will conclude with practical exercises at the end of this letter so keep on reading my friend.

Self-Authenticity

Your self-authenticity is shaped by the choices you make throughout your life and if they align with your true self.

Desire plays a big part in shaping it. Everywhere you look, there are new desires to be had. From news, ads, your friends, your family, and that one guy on the internet.

Desires are created every single day of your life for you to chase like a lab rat.

• A new house

• A better, more fancier car

• This workout plan to get in shape fast

• That new flavor of whatever-the-fuck

This list goes on and on and on and on.

Chasing these shallow desires will always make you unfulfilled. They’ll make you feel like shit and they will not, in any case, bring you true happiness.

You can tell if a desire is shallow or right for you with your intuition. If you listen deeply to what your deep self wants you will find out (more on that in the practical section). Another way to tell if a desire is shallow is if you achieve a certain desire, do you feel hollow and empty inside?

I’m not perfect and I chase shallow desires sometimes like everyone else, but I’d like to think that I’ve gotten further than most people in minimizing it.

I used to eat a lot of candy but they always made me feel shallow inside. I cut most of it out and used to eat it just for special occasions and still the feeling persisted. I completely stopped eating candy and of course, I stopped feeling empty.

Lastly, there are costs to being the real you. You might get dumped, disregarded from friendships, fired from your job, etc. But the costs of being inauthentic are far greater.

Practical Applications

These exercises and ways of thinking have helped me a lot on my journey to become more authentic. It’s a lot simpler than you think.

1. Sit down for 1-2 hours with nothing but a piece of paper and a pencil. During these hours write down everything that you want in life. What will probably happen is that first, you get the desires on paper that are projected on you every day from external sources. But the longer you go on, the deeper into your consciousness you go. It wasn’t until desire number 50 that I got into what I truly wanted in this life. Now you know what matters and you can be truly self-authentic.

2. Notice yourself when you're succumbing to being a people pleaser or just not being yourself. Start to exercise awareness in situations that occur, in which you are being fake. This is about remembering to be authentic and it’s crucial for your growth.

3. Ask yourself these questions and contemplate them: If everybody in the world loved you, would you be more fulfilled than you already are? If you became the richest man on earth would it make you more fulfilled? Is someone else’s opinion of you going to make you more fulfilled? If you stopped caring what other people thought, including your family and friends, what would you do differently?

As you can probably see, the action steps are more abstract and contemplative, and that’s because being authentic is just about digging deep, understanding your true values, and then acting from these values.

Hope this letter helped.

If you want personalized action steps, plans, systems, and overall guidance book a 1-on-1 call with me.

Here’s the link: https://calendly.com/kleermind_/1-on-1-test-call

Thank you for reading :)

Check out my other letters: https://kleermind.beehiiv.com/