Making Authenticity Personal: Part 2

Well, hello, Cristina.

Hi, we have a couple of really cool episodes coming up. We took all the different definitions of authenticity We've asked our guests in the last couple of years and we've created a little medley of those, just in case anybody wants many different definitions of that. It wants to hear different way of looking at authenticity and pun intended, an authentic way of looking at authenticity from all different perspectives. You'll hear these in the next couple of episodes. It's divided into three parts and the authentic side of me did not check on the exact number of those parts before doing this recording.

This is our jokingly calling it our dictionary episode, because it's like one of those entries where it has four different definitions, except we have upwards of 50 or so, except there's a lot of different definitions in here.

Yes, it definitely is. You'll hear that in a few different parts. Just because nobody has to sit through 50 definitions in one sitting, we figured out Splitting it up may be a little more digestible.

Enjoy these definitions.

Enjoy.

You're most authentic when you're aligned with your values, when you're aligned with who you are as a person. I joked with you guys before we began, my birthday being on April Fool's Day, and at some point you have to be able to accept all these aspects of your life that this is who I am. The more you're aligned with that, both in body, mind and spirit, then that's where you reach that authenticity.

I think authenticity is just really honestly going from your honor and not being afraid of that, just showing up in a way that feels good to you, that honors who you are, and not feeling again like you have to make excuses for that right or qualified somehow. It's like this is me world, this is me right, Like it, love it, whatever. This is me, the better or worse, and I'm okay with that. I am okay with that.

I think it's just being true to yourself, which goes back to knowing what that is. You really have to take time to know who you are and what you want and then just stay true to that and if you do, you'll be a happier, more engaged person in all facets.

Love that and I agree and everybody wins.

Yeah, and the company gets better work out of you and regardless of what channel you come from, if you're more authentically who you are, too.

I think it means being conscious and choosing and being okay with who you are, because no one has the right answer. We all provide something unique to this world and so be okay with that, and we're all parts to a greater sum. So be yourself and do it by choice. If you realize you're unconscious hopefully not physically, literally unconscious, but just going through the motions stop.

Authenticity is, for me, is owning my own power, standing in my own and being able to love myself and not worrying about others' thinking and be fine who I am, then actually that needs to come from within and that, to me, is authenticity.

Well, if I had to define authenticity, it's the intentional ability to Be who you are and be who you are in an environment that could challenge that. It's because it's like it's easy for me to say just be who you are, but that's good, but it's when it's tested that becomes important. You've got somebody who has to step into the room and say you actually can't behave that way and you have to stand your ground and say, no, this is who I am, you know. And if you ask me to be somebody different, then I just can't do that, because if I'm not authentic, then I can't build trust, you know. And so, yeah, you have to be. It's an intentional like almost yeah, it's an intentional act of behaviors that resist challenge, challenging. You know people that challenge it. If I had to define it, yeah, I would say.

Authenticity for me is when your values your true core values, not what other people want you to care about, right, when your core values are activated through your words, your behaviors and your actions, when those two things are in alignment, you are truly living a life of authenticity.

Authenticity means that when you go to sleep at night, you know you've done right by yourself and the people who depend on you.

Yeah, I think authenticity is, in the simplest form, being your true self and, to go off of a lot of what we talked about not feeling like you need to put up a front and not putting up a front and not pretending and being torn down to whatever's left, which is the core values, as we discussed. But I think it's just, in the simplest form, being your true self and being okay with being your true self.

So, being authentic, the first step in that is being transparent as a company. We know transparency is key. It has to be If you wanna be a sustainable company. You have to show people the good and you have to show people the bad period. Yes, we still create waste. Yes, we still have some harmful things that happen. It's unfortunate, but again, we will partner with everybody else to help solve that problem, because we can't do it on our own. So, yeah, the first piece of authenticity I would say is the transparency piece, and we try to go as far as we can to put as much out there, whether that's how much waste we're producing or how much we're recycling. You know we keep a balanced equation. So we're not gonna give you all the good without giving you all the bad as well too, because it's still when you saw one problem, you create one of equal higher magnitude every single time. So the world will never be void of problems ever. There will never be a dirt. So, in keeping that mindset and that philosophy, that's our first piece of it, and then just staying true to ourselves and not deviating. There's a lot of hot buttons and touchy points in the world today where a bad Instagram post can sink your company. One opinion or one bad tweet can do a lot of damage. So we had to put our guiding principles in place first, and those are out there. We built philosophies for everything that we'd like to do, whether that's our design philosophy, our supplier philosophy, our management philosophy. All of those are written down in a. It's called our living constitution, which is our formal document that guides us and shows us where we're supposed to be going, how to make good decisions and why it's important. So we kind of we took that and said, all right, this is who we are, we're gonna stick to it. The mission will always be fluid. I believe Kind of being authentic with that is to keep reading the world. If something needs to change and we're better suited to provide that, then that's where we're gonna pivot to. We're gonna go ahead and take that. It might not always be housing, it might not always be climate change. I hope that we solve this problem quickly. We'll have to figure out something else there. See what other larger problem pops up for us to kind of tackle and that's. I think that's where we stand as a company, and then I kind of embodied that as well, being transparent with everybody, whether that's people, employees, the media, podcasts, anything like that. We're very open book about a lot of things, and here's our flaws, here's what's good, and this is what we're trying to work on, and the only thing we're aiming for is the best that we possibly can be, and I think that's all you can really do in life and ask others for is to do the same thing.

Being transparent. People are going to hold us to a higher standard with having the worst sustainable aspect on our company. Okay, you know they're gonna say, oh, they're not vegans, how is that sustainable? Or their cars aren't electric how are they sustainable? Or Sean lives in a 1600 square foot home how is that sustainable? Well, you know, we're not the only people living in these houses. You know we are decreasing our footprint by having several people under one roof. Or, you know, and just being transparent with the fact that we aren't perfect, you know, and like my dog is on a raw diet, I have to separate his food into Ziploc bags. Ziploc bags are an issue for me and I am a sustainability coordinator, you know. But on different aspects of my life, I'm way more sustainable. You know I'm not buying meat from the grocery store. I'm literally only harvesting it myself. And then, you know, staying true to yourself and your values, and you know your values how far are you willing to be in convenience With being sustainable? Because ultimately it's an inconvenience. It's not easy to be sustainable. It is not fast to be sustainable. You can't just stop at a fast food place and ask for the sustainable option of their number five. You know, maybe one day, but right now, it's still gonna come with a Styrofoam cup that's super-sized, you know. So it's just how far are you willing to be in convenience to stay true to those values? So you're gonna pack your snacks and take them with you. Are you going to pay a little bit extra for your flight to get the more sustainable airline you know? Are you going to add on the CO2 emission offset or those type of things? Yeah, and just understanding that there's going to be, there's going to be hiccups and accepting those hiccups.

Wow, I would say authenticity means being who we really are, who we already are, who we always have been, who we always are, because I believe it is constantly present and the opposite of all those things I talked about earlier of living in the veneer, trying to please other people. You know, I say when the ego wants to try to drive and get in the front seat, it's the opposite of authenticity. So I have to tell my ego like you know you always get us in a ditch, Like you're supposed to get in the back seat. Whenever you drive, we go up in a ditch, Like you know that, and so that's why I'm telling you, go in the back seat. You're really only good when there's absolute physical danger, and there's usually not a whole lot of absolute physical danger going around. So your job is to stay in the back seat and my job is to make sure you stay in the back seat. And so authenticity is keeping the ego in the back seat and like being, you know, understanding that it wants to try to drive, but usually it's not needed to get us anywhere except in a ditch. And authenticity is a lot of practicing being who we all are. It's connected love, light power, grace, ease, joy, compassion. That's who we all are authentically. So I think authenticity is being intentionally in harmony with who we all already are.

Authenticity to me means bringing your full self and be willing to be your full self even in the face of no agreement, and being able to navigate who you are, staying true to your values as a person and really coming to the table with a sense of that respect that we talked about, but also just always taking with you that sense of your values and showing up with your most authentic self present. And I think that authenticity is unique to each individual person, right, that's the cool part, is that? I mean, if you look at the banditry, it's kind of gnarly, right, you know, it's kind of like it's wily, it's freeform, it's got knots in it and it's got tangles in it and all of that. And authenticity is just its own unique expression. And when we respect that in ourselves and we bring that to the table, then we also give others permission to be their full self, and that, to me, is what authenticity means.

I think being authentic is really being fully aligned. When your mind and your heart are fully aligned and you're able to just be, I think it's kind of a state of your natural being where you're almost detached from you know, detached from anything outside, and where you're in a it's almost in a non-judgment zone where you could be kind of an objective observer because you're so aligned with your essence. You just are you and it's not always easy to be in that state of authenticity. At times you feel pulled and influenced to truly be able to be yourself and be the best you can be. I think, and allowing you know, going back to organization, allowing your voice to be authentic, takes an incredible leadership style. Right, you know of acceptance, but I think for the person itself to feel authentic is that level of self-love and self-acceptance where you just truly aligned in your mind and in your heart.

Well, authenticity, like I said, is very synonymous with purpose. It's just boldly being yourself. To me, it's not just doing the running man in the kitchen, it's doing running man in front of a group of 500 people and doing it poorly and having a blast doing it and loving every second of it. So authenticity is doing a terrible running man, no matter where you are.

Well, there's another one of those words that we use a lot and I think it's really interesting. So there's a friend of mine who talks about authenticity. Amy talks about it in the sense of you shouldn't bring your true, authentic self to work, meaning it's not a license to just to come in and be whoever you are, without regard for what that means to anybody else and things like that. So he kind of put it in a way of bringing your best self to work, and that means it's still yourself, you're still being authentic, but you're still being respectful of other people as well. Because his concern is again it's not like because then people will hold that as a defense. Well, I'm just being my authentic self. But I think the other side of that and being your best self a recent example for me is I was trying to talk to new clients because a lot of things I talked about are different, right, as you probably hear from today, and I'm pushing down below, I'm trying to change mindset a bit, and I was thinking, feeling like people weren't picking up on that as being something that they wanted to have conversations about or that they needed, and so I toned it down and I started being like how can I change what I talk to be about what people want to hear? And one of my many coaches, so to speak, or mentor, said to me you need to stop that. You need to be who you are and let that attract the people that want to be in that place with you, or maybe space with you. And it made a lot of difference, not just in that I could then truly be who I am and express what I think is important and be able to share the message about how I think we can change this, but it did work and the idea of then I started to have more conversations and more activity and now really being able to have the impact on a larger scale as well. So, to me, being authentic again, I think that we have to be there has to be some framing of that when we're in the workplace, but it's not letting go of the things that are important to us and important to who we are in the name of trying to make ourselves better for somebody else, like on someone else's terms. I don't know if I described that really well, but that's what authenticity means to me.

So for me, when you ask this question, I enjoy home cooking quite a bit and so, for some reason, what does authenticity mean to you? I just immediately thought of some of my favorite restaurants and they might say authentic Persian food. So when we see authentic in front of something, that means something to us. I think it might take some conversation to narrow it down and get it to its most reductive and simple, but it means from there, right, you make an assumption. If I saw authentic Persian food, I'm gonna think, all right, well, these people are Persians, they're from Iran, they've been in that place and they are bringing that place something I cannot access, that is unique to them. They are bringing it to me. So I think about my own home cooking, and I'm famous for taking recipes and I'm told they're good, and not by people who depend on me, so I'm gonna press that. And adding things, and this has taken years. Right, I could not have done this. My ex has been, and we're amicably divorced. I just so sorry for my first, probably five years of cooking. You know, that was just what I took on in the marriage, but oh, there were some really undone baked potatoes back in the day, so it's taken time for me to just try. You know what happens if I add paprika to this. You know what happens if I add a little bone broth. You know to this sauce. What if I replace mozzarella with parmesan? You know what happens if and so for me, authenticity means, I think, being curious and bringing something of myself, that is me, that nobody else has access to Me, from me. You know, and I guess that's what I would say authenticity is I mean, it's clearly three paragraphs, but yeah, it's a beautiful question. In fact, I think I'm gonna maybe incorporate it into my practice. So I think it's a lovely way to begin to think about oneself.

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