Integrate Versatility Into Your Evolving Authenticity
In your quest to be an Authentic as an entrepreneur or a creative there will be circumstances, obligations, and settings that will push you into a type of soft conformity that will make you feel like a fraud.
Because un-compromised, unchallenged, static authenticity is rarely achievable.
This means that you have to embrace tolerable drifts into temporary states of diminished authenticity.
You do this to stretch yourself into new un-sketched versions of yourself that may become integral to the next version of your Authentic Being.
Your journey on your own authenticity spectrum is a perpetual draft-in -progress. You will always be toggling back your authenticity at certain inflection points, only to toggle forward aggressively with the integration of new growth that comprises the next fullest representation of your Authentic Being in the world.
Certainty in a fixed, static Authentic version of your self is the death of your expanded consciousness. It is the death of your tenacious curiosity. It is the death of the expansion of your talent stack. It is the end of your knowledge acquisition. And it is a self-imposed cap on your wisdom development.
So, when you find your current Authentic self confronted with an environment that you do not align with, you must disarm your defenses and look for the net new attributes that the new environment, circumstances, social structure, or non-negotiable obligation can offer to the next best version of your Authentic self.
Leverage this discovery as you assert your new Authentic self.
And then do as Irish gangster Frank Costello advised in the film The Departed, and make your environment a product of you.
Your environment must bend to the reality of FAILURE RULE #2: Nothing Is Safe just as much as everything else in this unsafe world. But that doesn’t mean you can’t also work to make it bend more toward you.
You must finds ways to reasonably extend your imprint on your circumstances or they will unreasonably force their imprint on you.
This is how you maintain calibration with every necessary new iteration of your Authentic Being.
Entrepreneur, author, and founder of Dissident Cigar company, Joshua Coburn expresses it this way:
“If you don’t belong, make others belong to you.”
Joshua is talking about showing up in the world in such an authentic way that you cannot be bent into your environment, but rather that your environment bends toward you. And the more you project strength and confidence in your Being, the more your environment will attract itself to your way of Being. This naturally results in others bending their behavior in accordance with yours.
This is how Joshua asserted new versions of his Authentic self as he struggled past society’s judgment of him as a heavily tattooed and pierced kid living in rural Iowa in the nineties. It was this attitude that lifted him out of a moment of suicidal contemplation when he posed the following life-saving question to himself:
“If I can take responsibility for ending my life, why the fuck can’t I take responsibility for living my life?”
In that game-changing moment, Joshua decided to turn away from victimism. He decided to detach from the optics of failure. With a clear vision of his calling journey in his mind’s eye, he turned away from suicide and committed to taking responsibility for his life.
Since then, Joshua has lived his life in such a way to make others belong to him because he inherently knows that he doesn’t belong to, or fit in with, society.
He has written several books including Through the Eyes of an Abstract Mind and Shit That Needs Said So You Can Kick All The Ass. He’s gone on to found the Dissident Cigar company. Through his company Manners and Motivations, Joshua also speaks at schools and businesses on the topic of authenticity. His message focuses on ways to create cultures of kindness, inclusion, and success based on human connection.
Balancing healthy versatility—in an effort to become more multi-dimensional—with maintaining a consistent sense of your Authentic Being is difficult.
When I entered the corporate world in 2014 as a fintech banker I had to cover up my tattoos, muzzle myself from liberally swearing, lower my tone of voice, flatten my speaking cadence, and dial back my natural tendency to carry an aggressive presence. The Authentic Being that I manifested in my past entrepreneurial life as a purveyor of punk rock, micro loans, and gym memberships to bodybuilders and pro wrestlers wasn’t going to work in my new environment. I had to stretch myself and integrate new ways of Being into the broader width of my evolving Authentic self.
None of this felt natural, aligned with who I thought I was, or sustainable. But as I integrated new ways of Being, without losing my old ways of Being, I was able to emerge with an entirely new and expanded version of my Authentic Being that has proven to be much more powerful, interesting, and valuable to the world.
Retired Navy SEAL, entrepreneur, podcaster, and author, Jocko Willink has mastered this. He has vacillated between the dressed blues formality of military life, the black tee shirt clad aesthetic of his podcast output, and the corporate-serving mission of his consulting company.
Jocko is 100% Jocko in each one of these realms.
He is a multi-dimensional Authentic who knows how to integrate new challenges, environments, and ways of Being into the totality of the next best iteration of his Authentic self. Through all of this he indisputably makes each confronted environment a marked product of him.
KISS front man and author of ME, INC, Gene Simmons also knows how to straddle the nuanced duality of a multi-dimensional Authentic life. In his book ME, Inc, he writes about how he wore a suit and spoke proper academic English when he engaged in business on behalf of his band KISS—even as the suits on the other side of the table knew he was also the guy in the badass make up rocking out with pyrotechnics behind him singing about rock n rolling all night and partying every day. Both versions are fully Gene. And both versions fully integrate into his Authentic Being.
Don’t get stuck in a narrow, one-dimensional version of your Authentic Being.
Challenge yourself by charging forthrightly into strange and uncomfortable new environments and ways of Being.
Learn to integrate necessary versatility within the fluidity of your evolving
Authenticity.
Because FAILURE RULE #2 is true—Nothing Is Safe. Especially your fixed sense of your Authentic Being.
