Your ‘Authentic Self’ is Hogwash!

Pay attention to what I am about to say.

This post will rile some people. It will certainly contradict some of your beliefs. But it is the plain truth.

I hear a great deal these days in management thinking about how we somehow repress parts of ourselves at work.

We are urged to bring our ‘authentic self’ to work. Or our ‘true self.’ Or ‘all of who we are.’

I have news for you.

What you think is your ‘authentic self’ is fiction. It does not exist. It comes and it goes. It is ephemeral. It appears and disappears.

We know someone who volunteers at soup kitchens and campaigns to get the homeless off the streets by incarcerating them if necessary. Or someone who expresses sorrow at school mass shootings and opposes any legislation to block the sale of firearms.

We are ready to label them ‘hypocrites.’

We believe that there is one ‘true self’ that we have, and it is obscured by aberrations.

This is just not so.

Was Andrew Carnegie a tight-fisted tyrant who used violent and possibly illegal tactics to subjugate his employees and deny them living wages? Or was he a generous philanthropist who helped educate millions of children by funding more than one thousand libraries?

He was both.

We have many selves. As you pass through your day you spend time in different emotional domains. At one moment you are excited at the thought of the initiatives you are about to launch. And then a client cancels an order, and you are depressed because you don’t think you will make your numbers.

Neither one is your ‘true self.’

Your real self, your true self, is Pure Consciousness. Pure Awareness. It does not ever change.

As Shakespeare put it so well … “It looks on tempests and is not shaken. It is the star to every wandering bark, who’s worth’s unknown, though his height be taken.”

Meditate on this.

Peace!