Durf je zelf te zijn. De kracht en pijn van authenticiteit.

Authenticiteit is een van de hoekstenen van Personal Branding. Alleen dan komt je boodschap duurzaam geloofwaardig over. En ook dan lukt het goed om die unieke propositie te formuleren. Maar ja, makkelijke gezegd dan gedaan. Wat is authenticiteit dan wel precies. Een beetje eerlijk mens ziet in de psychologische spiegel toch ook zaken waar hij/zij minder trots op is. Wat moet je daar dan mee? En wat te doen met alle verleidingen die de hedendaagse maatschappij biedt om niet-authentiek te zijn.

Op de site van Psychology Today staat een aardig overzichtsartikel over authenticiteit onder de titel ‘Dare To Be Yourself’. Karen Wright geeft een overzicht van de actuele inzichten in de psychologie en filosofie over authenticiteit.

Een paar citaten:

[Authenticity is] also a cornerstone of mental health. Authenticity is correlated with many aspects of psychological well-being, including vitality, self-esteem, and coping skills. Acting in accordance with one’s core self—a trait called self-determination—is ranked by some experts as one of three basic psychological needs, along with competence and a sense of relatedness.
Authenticity (…) requires acting in ways congruent with your own values and needs, even at the risk of criticism or rejection. And it’s necessary for close relationships, because intimacy cannot develop without openness and honesty.

The philosophical question is, do we invent this authentic self?” says Portmann. “Or do we discover it?” Socrates believed we discover it; the existentialists say we invent it. “There isn’t a self to know,” decrees social psychologist Roy Baumeister of the University of Florida. Today’s psychologists no longer regard the self as a singular entity with a solid core. What they see instead is an array of often conflicting impressions, sensations, and behaviors. Our headspace is messier than we pretend, they say, and the search for authenticity is doomed if it’s aimed at tidying up the sense of self, restricting our identities to what we want to be or who we think we should be.

[A] reason we’re not always true to ourselves is that authenticity is not for the faint of heart. There is, Kernis and Goldman acknowledge, a “potential downside of authenticity.” Accurate self-knowledge can be painful. (…) “Jung says the first thing you should do is take a look at those things that are dark in you, the things that are problematical, that you don’t like,” says psychotherapist and former monk Thomas Moore, author of A Life at Work. “You have to be willing to look at things that don’t fit snugly into the image you have of what you would like to be.”

(…) Studies show that people with a sense of authenticity are highly realistic about their performance in everything from a game of touch football to managing the family business. They’re not defensive or blaming of others when they meet with less success than they wanted. (…) Eastern spiritual traditions have long furnished ways to glimpse the messiness of the self, and to view with detachment the vicissitudes of mind and emotion that roil human consciousness.