How To Be Authentic

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SUMMARY

• What does it mean to be authentic? Is there more to authenticity than just “being yourself?”
• Being authentic in business is important because it is becoming more difficult to sell inauthentically nowadays. Moreover, authenticity serves as a guide for taking your business in the right direction; it’s what determines your decision-making and baseline standards. It will also allow you to sell better and help you in other areas of your life.
• In order to be authentic, there are three versions of the self that we need to consider: the now self, the before self, and the later self.
• The now self is concerned with things like money in the bank and comfort. Mostly directed by fear, it is the decisions you are currently making and the short-term goals you have for your life right now. It is the version of you that tends to procrastinate in order to stay in your comfort zone.
• Many people have this idea that things would be better if they could be a different person. You are you, so you can’t be a different person, but you can improve certain things.
• Being authentic to the now self is all about honesty. Be honest by being more aware of what’s going on, including your financial situation. Don’t pretend to be something that you’re not, and be open, rather than reserved, about your current situation.
• A great example is Mel Robbins, who was able to get people on her side by being brutally honest about her life and sharing even the tough times and failures she has experienced.
• Be authentic by: (1) being honest with yourself, and (2) being open about how you aren’t a perfect person and how your service isn’t perfect. You will find that people will be drawn to you when you talk about both the good times and the bad times.
• The before self is about identity and the past. It is who you were in high school, who you were when you first got married, who you were early on in your relationship, etc.
• Being authentic to the before self is all about ownership. Owning who you used to be will shape not only how you interact with the world, but also how you market your business. You don’t have to be proud of something or think it was a good thing to own it.
• Most people who want to be authentic don’t take ownership of their before. This results in a persona that is missing a key ingredient: their actual identity, which is shaped in large part by what they’ve experienced up to this point.
• The later version of yourself is focused on goals, becoming, and the best-case scenario. Being authentic to the later self is all about hope.
• It is the appropriate application of all three selves that create the most authentic version of you, because you are simultaneously all three of these things. Therefore, honesty, ownership, and hope are your tools to becoming an authentic person and marketing your business with authenticity.
• It’s okay to do things badly, because the more you wait, the less authentic you are to yourself. And the less authentic you are to yourself, the less your self trusts you, and it becomes very easy to not believe yourself.
• Recommended reading: Atomic Habits by James Clear. 

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INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hey everybody, Mike Shreeve here. Today we’re going to be talking about how to be authentic. The reason that that matters, talking about being authentic, two things are happening right now. 

One, selling inauthentically is getting very difficult to do. 

And number two, when you build your business, you need to have some measurement, or some guide to take you in the right direction for what it is that you’re trying to do. 

In other words, what are you building this business around? Well, you’re building this business around yourself. Well what does that mean to build something around yourself? What decision making systems and what baseline standards can we set for ourselves if we don’t know what it means to be authentic?

Now I will say, I think most definitions of the word authentic are complete garbage, because really there’s a lot of people who make a lot of money trying to teach people how to be authentic. 

Well let me give you the short version of how to be authentic. 

You be yourself. 

So the problem isn’t the act of authenticity. Toss in some Mel Robbins-esc, five second rule courage, so just be yourself and have the courage to do so, and you understand the mechanism of being authentic. 

The problem is knowing the self. Knowing basically who we are trying to be authentic to. So that’s what we’re going to talk about. And this is going to help you sell better. This is also going to help you build a more authentic to you business. And hopefully it’ll help you in your life as well, because it’s all, business is life right, so it’s all the same.

3 Versions of Self

Now, I have noticed that there are three versions of the self that we need to consider before we just run out and start being something out in the marketplace. 

1. The Now Self

One is the now self. The now self is concerned with things like money in the bank. It’s concerned with comfort. And it’s mostly directed by fear. So let’s think about that for a second. The now self are the decisions that you’re making right now. It is the short term, immediate goals that you have for your life right now.

When you are thinking about making a video like this, to create content, to attract people, it is the conversation that you have in your mind, and I’ll just give you my example. I can’t quite figure out the lighting on these videos yet. Because I’m not good at lighting. So, I put this video off. I’m looking at the shadow of my arm on the page here, and I’m all worried … this is the now self. 

So being authentic to that is doing what I just did, and telling you that’s what’s going on. 

It’s the idea of money. Is this video going to make money? Am I doing the things that’s going to make money? It’s all the stuff. It’s the desire for comfort. 

So procrastination. A tendency to stay in your comfort zone, that’s all you.

There’s this really weird idea that somehow, if you could just be a different person, things would be better. 

What I’m telling you is that you can’t be a different person. You are you. You are the human that is you. You can improve certain things but you’re not going to ever get a transplant out of who you are currently into some new body and new experience. 

So authenticity to this now self is all about in my opinion, for now, for the now person, it’s all about honesty.

Now this is honesty in a variety of different ways. 

So, honesty in terms of the tool that you can use to be more aware of what’s going on. So my awareness of the resistance to do this video is because I know the lighting is off. It doesn’t look good. It doesn’t make me look great. I don’t have the right size marker for this. It’s probably hard to read. You can see the shadows going on. 

And my honesty to myself, to understand that that’s what’s going on, so that I can be aware of my desire for comfort and to avoid what might be the social, you know people being like, “Ah, the video doesn’t look good. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” 

And so in my mind, being aware of all of those conversations that are going on, my authenticity to myself is to expose those ideas to myself so that I can be aware.

Now the second piece of honesty here is to be honest … let me actually step back here for a second, this is the big one I wanted to talk about, honesty about money.

A lot of us, and I do include myself in this, we will forget to be critically honest with ourselves about our financial situations. I’ve done this many times in my business where expenses have continually crept up, but I wasn’t being honest about the scope creep in terms of the financial picture of the profit getting lower. 

Now, financially we’re doing fine. I’m totally doing better than I’ve ever done in my whole life, but I was being dishonest about what was actually happening. I was being dishonest about what team members are we adding? And are they actually contributing? And is this a good investment, or am I just being comfortable about myself and saying it’s a good investment? Because if I told myself it was a bad investment, then I’d have to deal with the fact that it’s a bad investment.

So the being authentic to the now self is really about being aware enough that this stuff is going on. 

The second piece of that is, and I see this so often with freelancers, is they will pretend to be something that they aren’t. They will say that they’re a bigger company than they are. They will overstate their expertise. 

I just did this recently. I hired this person. It was a complete waste of money. Total waste of money. I’m so upset at myself that I fell for it, even though I knew what was happening. I wasn’t honest with myself as it was happening because I thought to myself, exactly what I said, I didn’t want to deal with the fact that it was maybe not a good investment. 

So this person was talking about how they had helped all these different people, and were saying that they were bigger than they really were because they wanted to charge an exorbitant amount of money. 

Well it turns out that after I signed the contract, where I should’ve done this before I signed the contract, but after I signed the contract, I found out that most of those people did not attribute any of their success to this particular person and I found that out only afterwards.

So, part of honesty isn’t just having honest dealings with your fellow man, but part of honesty is saying, “Look, I’ve never done this before”, or for example, being honest about the fact that I don’t know how to set up video. Right? And just telling you guys, “Hey guys, I don’t know how to set up video. I’m using an Iphone and a tripod and this thing and you know, like some openness about your current situation, rather than a reservedness and trying to hide the truth.

You will find, you know that Mel Robbins was one of my favorite clients I’ve ever worked with in a hundred years, and will be for a hundred years more. Not that I’ve been around for a hundred years, I just don’t think she’ll ever top how much fun I had working with someone, and how much that effected me as a person, just being able to be around her.

One of the things that I loved about her is that in her content that she created, and I think why so many people were attracted to her, is that was so brutally open and honest. And I don’t think she viewed it as a selling process, and I don’t think that people who followed her saw it as a selling process, but she was selling people like crazy by being honest.

Now the word selling has a negative connotation. People think it’s a bad thing. But what she was doing was getting people on her side. She was able to be on the level with other fellow humans, and then when she would talk about what it was that she wanted to talk about, when she was introducing ideas, or pushing her book, or doing whatever it was that she was doing, she had already sold people on the idea of her by being more honest. And most of her honesty was about the tough times and the failure and the things that were going wrong.

So, how to be authentic, 

• one is you have to be honest with yourself. 
• And two, be honest and open about how you aren’t a perfect person, and how your service isn’t perfect, and how you aren’t the most experienced person, and I think what you will find is people will be very attracted to you and the contents you create and your daily emails and your daily podcasts, whatever it is, talk about the good times and the bad times. 

Now, so there’s the now person. Authenticity now. Then there is the … let’s do this one first here. 

2. The Before Self

This is the before person. The before person is really about identity, and we’ll talk about it here in a second. Identity and really the past. 

So these are both kind of the same thing. But the before person is who you were. Who were you in high school? Who were you when you first got married? Who were you early on in your relationship? And I think what is interesting about people trying to be authentic is they don’t honor or take ownership. 

So if the now person and being authentic to the now is all about honesty, the before person is all about ownership.

Let me give you an example. 

I was homeless. I have done the internal work, and have in the No Pants Project, shared this past of mine. The identity of who I used to be. The thing that occurred and owning that internally has then shaped, not only my, how I interact with the world, walking down the street and interacting with other people, but also how I market my business. 

I am authentically telling you, I was homeless at one point. I’ve been on food stamps before. I’m not proud of it. You don’t have to be proud of something to own it. You don’t have to even think it was a good thing to own it. I do not think being homeless was good. I don’t think anyone should be homeless. 

I remember one time somebody on Facebook was trolling one of our ads and saying that I’m somehow celebrating homelessness. I am not celebrating homelessness. I don’t want anyone to be homeless. I don’t think anybody should be homeless. 

Sure I learned some lessons, but I probably could have learned those lessons in a way less stressful, way less stripping, way than I did doing this.

So there’s that aspect of ownership. 

But then the other aspect of ownership is one where nobody ever finds out about it. It’s just the internal work that you do. 

So for example, taking ownership and looking at my life as to what are the steps I took to get into that situation? And doing the work of thinking through how I got there. Most people, in their desire to be authentic, don’t take ownership of their before. And so what happens is they’re trying to, which we’ll talk about later, they’re trying to create this identity, they’re trying to create this persona of authenticity, and they’re missing the key ingredient, which is your actual identity, which is shaped in large part by what you’ve experienced up to this point. 

So they’re basically trying to create something brand new with no base. 

They’re trying to take a trip somewhere and they don’t know where they are right now.

So part of the authenticity process is taking a look at the before person. 

Taking ownership of your identity, and understanding where you’re starting from, and understanding how that’s going to affect where you want to go, which is the later. 

3. The Later Self

So the later person is focused on goals. 

The later version of yourself is focused on becoming. 

And often times, the later version of any person’s self is best case scenario. And this is something that we don’t really talk about that often. But I don’t think anybody really, when they’re thinking about how can I be … what am I going to be like in the future, I don’t think people truly think through all the case scenarios that could potentially happen.

Now, obviously some people are more pessimistic about the future, but even then, I don’t think they fully understand all the case scenarios. So, when we’re thinking about authenticity and how do we live a more authentic life, and then how do we market our business more authentically, 

• we have the now, which is all about honesty. 
• We have the before, which is all about ownership. 
• The later is all about hope.

A goal in becoming someone and thinking about the best case scenario, is nothing more than what you hope things will be. Now, we’ll talk about later, but I want to make sure that we’re connecting how this all works in building authenticity. 

It is the appropriate application of all three selves that create the most authentic version of you. Because you are not any one of these things, you are simultaneously 24/7 all three of these things at once. Which means, honesty, ownership and hope are your tools to becoming an authentic person and marketing your business with authenticity.

Let me give you some examples for the later version of yourself or the future version of yourself. This video, right now, I’m making videos. I know that these videos are not good right now. I understand that the podcast that we do is decent, but it’s going to be, I hope it’s going to be so much unbelievably better in the future than it is right now. 

Therefore, my authenticity in authentically marketing my business is to start making the videos now, even though I know they’re imperfect.

The dishonoring of my later self. So to be inauthentic to my later self. 

In other words, to be inauthentic to my goals and dreams would be to suppress the beginning stages of this process. In other words, by not doing the videos, by not doing the podcast, by not doing the content, I am not hoping. I am not hoping. I am not honoring the goals that I might have in the future.

It’s like there’s a lot of reasons why I don’t teach people fiction. I love fiction. I don’t teach people fiction. There’s a lot of reasons. One of the reasons is because I find a lot of people who want to write fiction are really good at the now, and living in the now, and they’re really good at the before, so they identify themselves as writers because when they were in high school they wrote an essay and their teacher loved it and said they could be a writer. Right? They’re very good at honoring that. They’re very good at the now. They understand that they have fear and da da da da da da da da, but very few of them are willing to write bad work, and share it publicly, which in a lot of ways, is inauthentic. Because it is dishonoring. It is ignoring. It is not being true to the goals and dreams that they actually have.

You have to ignore, you have to push away, you have to eject the goals that you have.

So, if you want to be a six figure freelancer, but you are not doing the things required to be a six figure freelancer, even if you’re doing them badly, even if it means being uncomfortable, even if it means looking goofy like this, I’m sure in five years I’m going to look back on this video and probably laugh out loud, how bad the lighting was, why was I wearing that shirt, why is the audio so bad, why am I doing it with the whatever’s going on back there, the closet door’s open, I’m doing it in my home office. I’m not even doing it at the office downtown. 

But the more I wait, the less authentic I am, to myself. And I think you may have felt this before in your life, the less authentic you are with yourself, there’s almost like a mistrust of self that builds up.

And you begin to have these temporary sparks of energy, of like, I’m going to do this thing. But then you start to doubt yourself, it’s like, eh, you’re probably not going to do this thing. 

It’s sort of like maybe you buy a program and you get really excited about the program and then two or three days later you kind of jump to something else and you think, eh, you know what, never mind, that isn’t what I was going to do and you start to come up with all these excuses.

Of course there’s the Kelley Ann O’Connor emotional cycle of change, but there’s also this other thing that happens and it’s that the more inauthentic you are to yourself, the less your self trusts you. And so it’s very easy for you to not believe yourself. 

Your beliefs are based off of evidences that you find consistent in the world around you. 

There’s a really good book called Atomic Habits, he makes a really good point about his.

Basically, one of the ways to improve your habits, which a habit is more or less the default, go-to, system that your body and mind and spirit and all these sorts of things, use to deal with common problems that arise.

So for example, when you’re hungry, that’s a problem. If your habit is to go get junk food, that’s the system and solution that you’ve determined to solve that problem. Well, if all that’s true, and those habits are based off of your beliefs that you believe that’s the best system that you have, you need to change the belief. The way you change the beliefs is you change the evidence.

Now, instead of going out and trying to, and we’re totally on a side tangent here of habits, but instead of going out and trying to change your habits over night, he suggests just start to develop more and more evidence. 

So this is where, instead of flossing, like if you want to start to floss, instead of trying to floss all of your teeth all at once, and start that habit and floss twice a day, just literally, every night floss one tooth. 

What happens over time, is your mind begins to say, you’re kind of the person who flosses aren’t you? I see that you continually floss every day, and all of a sudden the habit of flossing becomes easier because now your doing one and two and three teeth, and then five teeth, and then ten teeth, and evidence builds up that you’re the kind of person who flosses their teeth.

Okay, so that was the long way around of me basically saying, the more you ignore moving towards your goals, even if you’re moving poorly towards them, but you’re moving towards them, the more that you do that, the more you allow hope to thrive in your life, the more evidence will accumulate and you will eventually develop the habit of authenticity around hope. 

In other words, the future version of yourself.

So let me give you a personal example. 

I know that these videos are not great. They’re not high production quality. The audio’s not great. The lighting’s weird. This is, I have horrible handwriting, I know all these things. I’m perfectly aware that this is not the best thing ever. However, what I am developing now is the evidence that I am the kind of person who cranks out really good video and audio content. 

Now that may not be true right now, but it will be true because I’m going to be sending this out to the YouTube’s and we’re going to be running it on Podcast. We’ll send it out to our email list.

And what’s going to happen is someone is going to be a kind person and say, “that was a great whatever. That was a great training Mike, thank you. I love these. I hope you keep doing them.”

That evidence will go into my subconscious, and I’ll continue to do them. 

And I will improve over time. I’ll learn how to do better lighting. I’ll learn how to do better audio. I’ll learn how to create better lessons that aren’t maybe 30 minutes long every single time, that the poor people have to sit through and listen to. But I would be inauthentic by avoiding this altogether, because I want the influence that comes from being really good at content like this.

So, that all plays into these other elements as well. Part of my ownership and owning my past is I have self image issues. From stuff that happened in my past. 

So I have to have ownership and be authentic about the way that I’m doing this. 

I’m not going to try and dress in a different way than I am. I have to dress the way that I’m going to dress. 

I have to be honest about my abilities and my skills and how does this play in and how much time can I devote to it. 

So the idea of how to be authentic is really an issue of figuring out the balance between the now self, the later self, and the before self.

And the way that you find that balance is not through sitting and thinking about it for 10 minutes, it’s about going out and doing stuff. And then in your journal, processing what you’ve learned through the action of being authentic. You don’t be authentic by thinking about being authentic. You be authentic by being authentic. In the act of being and becoming.

So, hopefully this sparked some ideas for you and your business on how you can more authentically sell. Obviously we talked a little bit about what you can talk about in authenticity. 

But also, if you love podcasts and don’t want to do video, or you love something and in the future self you see yourself with all this, whatever that is, be true to that. 

Don’t try and just jump onto somebody else’s bandwagon because that’s what they’re doing, be true to who you want to become. Look at the goals that you have and then look at where you are right now. And look at where you’ve come from and your identity. And then sort of figure out how to marry that altogether in your own business. 

So hopefully you’ve been able to get some ideas on how to use this to help to sell your business, but also, hopefully, you take this as an opportunity to learn some things about yourself because at the end of the day, business is nothing more than the consequences of what’s going on inside your mind. 

You cannot have a high functioning business and be a low functioning person. That just, unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

Okay my friends. That is it for this lesson. I hope that you enjoyed it. And again, next time, we might have different lighting. Next time we might have a different set up. Next time I’ll probably be in my office. Who knows? But it’s all part of the process of authenticity of just putting yourself out there, perfect or not. And iteration, iteration, iteration. 

Getting the evidence, developing the habits, and moving towards hope.

So that’s it my dear friends, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.