One way that I look at authenticity is ‘following your heart’. I think that we act differently in different contexts. Often we feel quite authentic around our close friends and our mum. But for me I use a whole different language and topics etc for both of them. ( although I must concede I feel more myself around close friends).

In a work context there are things you often do and do say…depending on how close you are with that colleague.

I think that when we are authentic we tune into our emotions. When we are in a healthy emotional state, I feel that we have a softer awareness and our cognitive skills and emotional intuition is I guess ‘softened’ and more integrated. From this place we can act both intelligently and intuitively and for me at least I feel there is more space to respond. And instead of ‘thinking’ of the right response, or over riding my intuition with what I think others will ‘like’ which often ends up coming off as fake or a$$ kissing as someone said’.

To have a strong intelligent intuition however it may require experience to inform this. But I think that part of being intelligently intuitive is also having humility. For me personally in this authentic state (which is often fleeting) my mind feels ‘lubricated’ and answers come to me, rather then a need to construct what I think is going to be the ‘right answer’.

This is a tough one because I feel different kinds of authenticities depending on the context. I guess a goal is to bring that deep authentic self on an emotional level through the contexts, although appropriate behaviour for each context may be different there is still that core self that relates to life in an authentic way, that isn’t neccesarily highly related to the content that is appropriate for that situation.

Im going to leave this message unfiltered. I bet there are going to be many parts that people disagree with, because as I am writing I am finding many exceptions and many different examples where things aren’t necessarily the case. So it is clearly a complex topic!

One thing I will leave you with is that when we are in a mindful/present state and engaged with our experience this deactivates the self-referential processing areas in the brain (medial prefrontal cortex). And when we engage in self-refential processing the lateral areas become less active the the medial areas more active. I wouldn’t be surprised is inauthenticity is related to high levels of self-referential processing for longer periods of time. When we are engaged with our experience ‘mindful’ we are not thinking of ourself from the outside. We are….essentially one? and this doesn’t errode our cognitive competency to say a thoughtful sentence rather than a harsh one. But we are not engaging in an inauthentic ‘impression management’. There is probably a time for impression management as functions are essentially adaptive but when we live a lifestyle of impression management an self-referntial processing I think that this would be correlated with superficial inauthenticity.