Sharing Your Authentic Self

This guest blog is by life coach Dave James, (aka Dave The Coach - Tattooed Brummie & Chief Hug Officer). Dave is all about showing up authentically in his marketing, so I thought it would be fun to ask him to delve deeper into the topic.

When Emma asked me to write a guest blog for her website about authenticity I thought “how can I write the most authentic blog that helps the reader (aka you) to know what authenticity is and access it in the easiest way?”.

That’s a pretty reasonable question I think, but there was a moment of “ah, but if I tap into all of my personality for this, it may just be a lot of swearing”. And even that thought shows you just what a challenge it is to be authentic. Authenticity is hard. The advice online is simply to “be yourself” and while that is simple advice, it’s far from easy.

Each day we show up wearing masks, tweaking our behaviour and acting in accordance with many things:

The situation itself and how we view it.
Our experience to date.
Our biases.
What we want to get out of a situation.
The desire to be liked and accepted.

It’s a complex equation with lots of moving parts. And the work takes time.

So where do we begin?

As with most blogs, we’d better do a definition. Pull up a web browser, open your favourite search engine and ask it to define authenticity and it comes back with a lot of stuff. And when you sift through all the stuff about authentic art and documents, you can find things like this: “true to one's own personality, spirit, or character”. That’s from the Merrimen-Webster dictionary online BTW. To be honest, I like that. A lot.

Now I would consider myself someone that is authentic, but it wasn’t always that way.

Prior to my current career, I ran my own podiatry clinic in Worcestershire. I was bloody good at what I did, starting the clinic from zero patients, running it for eight years and then selling it.

There was, however, a turning point for me when I realised I wasn’t being authentic. My marketing was very professional – nice shirts, the right language and a very “medical veneer” all designed to support that professional image, but when patients would come to the clinic, I looked different.

When I say different, I mean less shirts and more tattoos, and while I was a total professional, there was a tension at that first physical meeting that felt incongruent and took some time to rebalance. To be honest I wanted to change that.

What did I do? I stopped trying to be perfect and I started talking more as me, bringing more and more of my values into play. And while that wasn’t the only thing I did, knowing my values, was one of the first places I started.

Values

Earlier in my career, I spent a fair amount of time in the NHS and when I left I wasn’t really sure why I did. I listened to my gut and I just knew it was time to go. The same was when I started to move into coaching – I knew it was time to sell my clinical business and try something different.

When I look back now, I can see how I made decisions in line with the values I hold deeply. My values are love, learning, freedom and fun – and they show up every day in all I do.

Your values are a bit like the lens through which you interpret the world. They are one of the most important things when it comes to being authentic, because if you don’t know your values in essence you don’t know who you are.

If you don’t know who you are, then how can you be yourself? Big question, right? One that I would strongly encourage you to answer (and I’m always happy to help with that…😉).

Perfection

Untangling all of this led me to a big realisation – I don’t have to be perfect. To create marketing material that was saying exactly the right thing, in exactly the right way and exactly the right time was exhausting. Plus running a business, seeing clients, etc… It is hard. If you run your own business then you get it.

Approaching this from the place of perfection takes a lot of time and I would argue it doesn’t bring the results that it promises. Moving from a place of “it has to be perfect” to “in this moment, that is good enough” was a huge release.

It’s possible you may have read that and had a heartsink moment. That feeling of not doing something perfectly. And that’s cool, because the feeling of doing something in a way that feels like less than you would like to do is hard.

My experience – and the experience with my clients - has been that if you are waiting to do something when it’s perfect, then the chances are it will never see the light of day. Removing that need to be perfect, took away one of the masks I was wearing. It meant I was out in the world more, doing the stuff I know can help others.

Control

Of course, that leads me to the last point I want to make… understanding that you can only control a few things and people won’t always like you. (Yeah, I know that’s two points, but they seemed to want to be together)

I spent a lot of time trying to be someone else. Trying to please and control what they thought of me, and I could see how that showed up in my marketing. That is not a great strategy and often resulted in disappointment, a loss of energy and a huge amount of guilt.

Taking a good look at what you can control helps with many cool things.

It gives you clear boundaries – “no” is a complete sentence (although “no thank you” is far nicer)
Knowing what is truly important to you – and aligns with your values.
It leads to you having a much better quality of mental health – I’m much happier being me.

So by working on these three areas – values, perfection and being clear on what you control – will help you to be more authentic. Not instantly and not without some work. And with many other things coming along for the ride.

The clients I work with make huge shifts towards being themselves, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t go back and revisit stuff as the layers lift, and new masks appear. That is part of the fun.

What I do know is that when you are authentic, life looks a whole lot better. Go and start the work and let me know how you get on.