How to develop authenticity

The key to being magnetically confident is to develop your authenticity, because the more authentic you are the more likely it is that people are going to engage with you. People recognise something beautiful in authenticity- awareness, humility, self acceptance and honesty. They know that with an authentic person there is no second guessing, they can simply enjoy someone’s company without wondering about an agenda, who they really are or needing to impress them because they know the only way to impress someone is to truly be yourself. This eliminates stress, creating ease for those individuals the confident person engages with which makes them even more magnetic. So how do you develop the authenticity to draw people closer to you on a daily basis? Here are my 10 steps to Developing Authenticity.

1. Pull apart your values.
From the time that you were young child you were taught values from your parents or your guardians, these values were their values they believed were important for you to learn to be a well rounded citizen, to have success and happiness in your life, the difference is you are now an adult so it's time you ask yourself: am I living my values? What are my values, Why do I value these things in life? Once you know what your values are and why you have them it's easier for you to live out of these values. When we live our values that's where authenticity shines because we have something called congruence.

2 Make sure your actions match your words.
Matching your actions with your words is being congruent. You must be able to see evidence of actions that shows off your values on a daily basis to consistently be the authentic person you desire. Do you have evidence that your actions match your words?

3 Spend equal time appreciating the positive and the negative of yourself.
Some people might call this appreciating your light and your shadow. We all have greatness and great faults but authenticity is not created by focusing just on our positives. Spend time figuring out how to appreciate the negative within you, how you can harness and how you can use it to teach you to bring our your light more often. You cannot turn your back on your dark side, as long as you do you will feel like you constantly have to hide yourself and it will stop you from being the best you can be so learn self acceptance. Understanding that you aren’t always going to be an amazing human being will help you when you receive criticism from others as it will remove how attacked you feel by igniting the truth within you instead of fear.

4. Make sure your beliefs and attitudes are your own.
Much like our values, we adopt our beliefs and our attitudes from our family but they're not necessarily the beliefs or attitudes that we as adults would like to live with. Without upgrading them we can stay in a childlike state well into adulthood. When we are authentic we challenge our beliefs and attitudes and we are comfortable with them being challenged on a regular basis by others because we own them as ours. When we talk about what we believe in we are not compelled to force our beliefs or attitudes on to others rather we just stay to ourselves and what matters to us. As high performers we also allow our beliefs and attitudes to be malleable, understanding that our experiences will shape them over our lifetime. We also own our faith or lack of it as one of our own choices.

5. Be boldly honest about your goals.
It's a really common practice for people to shrink themselves because they're worried about how being proud of their goals or their achievements would make them be viewed by other people but when we shrink ourselves we're not authentic so we need to be boldly honest about our goals and successes. If those goals are managing a Woolworths supermarket, running a cafe, having an international business or being a professional sports player or actress, own it! When you keep telling yourself that a goal you've got matters and that it's been planted in your heart for a reason, follow it, live it, enjoy the process of achieving it and embrace the journey achieving that goal will take you on.

6. Be accountable and responsible.
Accountability and responsibility is probably one of the hardest things for anybody to do because when we're accountable, we hold ourselves to account to when we haven't been responsible, when we haven't stepped up to the mark and filled the requirements of a role or position, whether that's being a family member who knew what we needed to do or whether that's being the boss of our own business. You have to actually take the time to acknowledge what you did well and what you need to improve on. When you can be honest to others around you about your progress this honesty becomes very attractive because it makes you vulnerable and highly relatable. Suddenly individuals do not see you as someone who is successful all the time but rather some who experiences many different things and isn’t afraid to share it all. The honesty unlocks an ability to work at a completely different level of performance as well because you demonstrate extreme ownership. Social media can be an incredibly powerful tool to help develop the accountability and responsibility you desire, why not use it?

7. Do things that make you, you.
You probably have very clear ideas about what makes you a happy person. To develop your authenticity you need to tap into this as many times as you possibly can because what makes you tick is part of your uniqueness. The more that you embrace it on a regular basis the more that you will feel attune to who you are and the more you will experience joy as a result. When you feel out of whack with yourself chances are its doing these things that make you, you that you have stopped doing it. Keep it up, they represent you at your core.

8. Wear clothing that showcases your personality.
Everybody is weird and wacky, what is fantastic about fashion is it allows us the opportunity to use our body as a canvas and showcase to other people what we're feeling, how confident we are and what our personality is through what we wear. It's amazing how many conversations start by people saying, ‘I love what you're wearing’ and yet what we're wearing is often an A clear example of who we are. With that said it’s important to be conscious about how the pieces of clothing we wear may indicate to us where our confidence level is at. Sometimes our fashion even shows what we wish to hide. Think about your current wardrobe is it proud of you or hoping to get you lost in a crowd? Why do you want it that way? How could you change it while still being true to yourself? The best fit for us is when our fashion and our personality collide and people start saying ‘that outfit is so you’ or ‘I understand why you wear bright colours you are always so happy, bubbly and energetic’- this are the gold statements that will really light you up and keep those authentic outfits on repeat.

9. Embrace the taboo.
This means embracing things that you would normally talk about, the things that society says should not be discussed, like sex and personal pleasure. If you are not talking about what makes you feel pleasure then you're not going experience it and you hiding a part of your identity for the sake of somebody else's comfort. The reality is we can still talk about taboo subjects without sharing personal details. You can and should be able to talk to male and female friends about what makes you feel good. It's really important to talk about that because we don't just say that we have 8 dimensions of health but we only talk about 7 because one of them might make people feel uncomfortable or feel like you're being rude, obnoxious or inappropriate in social settings, no! We have 8 dimensions of health and it's fine to talk about them! In fact when we talk about all our dimensions of health, every aspect gets better. If you're not talking about pleasure or sex then the question is how are you living authentically? The reality is you were thinking about it before I even typed number 9 and wrote about this topic, what is the point in hiding it? Avoiding conversations that impact you will lead you to avoid you (not to mention a tonne of joy).

10. Take a look at yourself.
So often people focus on the inside and they don't want to focus on the outside because focusing on the outside makes them feel uncomfortable because their body confidence isn't where they want it to be. However, to be authentic and to have that magnetic allure about yourself you have to embrace your body so you have to look at yourself. There was this exercise on the Internet a number of years ago where it encouraged individuals to do a workout naked and if you've ever tried it it is incredibly confronting because a lot of things wobble. Here’s the interesting thing though, when you work out naked you realise that your body can do everything you want it to despite what it looks like (except in the case of severe overweightedness or obesity). Working out completely starkers allows you to appreciate parts of you that perhaps you never have, increasing your self acceptance plus you get a good laugh too so why not hey?

The final way to to develop authenticity is not so much a tip but rather a commandment- do not develop authenticity or any of these areas of your life so anyone other than yourself. Working on yourself for the benefit of someone else will make it hard for you to consistently turn up for yourself. It’s not about anyone else other than you, be selfish commit to you for you. If you’d like more tips like these check out any of the titles below that we have made as complimentary gifts to our subscribers.