The Price to Pay For Authenticity

For most of my life I was faking it. I was portraying a persona that I thought would either make me look good or at least wouldn’t make me look bad in front of my peer group.

See, the thing was, I was really insecure.

I had been bullied, I wasn’t popular at school and my self-esteem was pretty low as a teenager. So the strategy I employed was pretending that I was confident – the so-called faking it until you make it strategy. However, that also meant I didn’t feel as connected to other men. Since I wasn’t really communicating authentically, I wasn’t willing to be vulnerable because that looked like it could be dangerous and it could open me up to ridicule or hurt.

But I really wanted connected relationships. I think most people do. I think most men would prefer to have real honest connected conversations with other men, as opposed to surface-level conversations where all problems are solved by going to the pub for a pint. Though, there is a price to pay. The price to pay for me to have more connected conversations with other men was being vulnerable. The price to pay was sharing things about myself that might leave me open to ridicule or to being poked fun out.

When I started to do this I found that whilst it wasn’t appreciated by everyone, the kind of conversations I was having with people changed to being more personal, deeper and more open. I noticed that, as I was willing to be more vulnerable and more real, I found that the things I was thinking about and the things I really felt were often way more common amongst others than I had realised.

I used to think that I was the only person feeling insecure as a teenager, I thought I was the only person who lacked confidence when talking to members of the opposite sex. I thought I was the only one that was hard on myself or wasn’t always the best at time management or sometimes struggled in my relationship with my parents.

We are all way more similar than we realise and if we’re willing to pay the price of authenticity it’d open up a whole world of connected relationships that would be otherwise closed to us.

There’s a great interview I did a few years ago with Morten Hake for his podcast on this topic of authenticity, it’s called ‘No One Has Their Shit Together’. You can check it out below.