Usable Insight – How to Be Authentic
Before you can be authentic, you must be grateful;
before you can be grateful, you must be forgiving;
before you can be forgiving, you will need to
start focusing on what you have and become a better person
and stop focusing on what you don’t and stay a bitter person.
President Obama seems to me to be one of the most authentic Presidents we have had in some time (okay cynics, have at me). I think he gets much of it from being grateful to his mother and his grandparents for their sacrifices and their dedication to him. They appeared to focus on what they had instead of dwelling on what they didn’t and I think President Obama took that into his marrow and wants to “pay it forward.”
It seems to me that when you dwell on what is missing in your life or your personality, you spend much of your energy filling that deficiency or as the Beatles sang: “fixing a hole where the rain (i.e. pain) gets in.” You can’t be totally present when a piece of you is absent and you’re looking to fill it. To make matters worse, you need to hide that, or else others will discover that you really don’t care about them. That’s because you fear if they realized that, they would be even more reluctant to give to you and that would only make the hole bigger and make you more absent than present and even less authentic.
UPCOMING EVENTS PLEASE GET THE WORD OUT:
May 19 – Get set for the launch of my friend, Keith Ferrazzi’s new book, Who’s Got Your Back? Get on board for a signing near you. Find out about his FREE RESOURCES.
May 20 – Catch one of the best webinars you will ever see in Crucial Conversations with Joseph Grenny at 2 PM EST through the Center for Great Management.
Tags: Add new tag, authentic, authenticity, beatles, mark goulston, president obama
March 11th, 2010 at 6:20 am
Hello! Your post () does so well that I would like to translate it into French, publish on my french blog and link to you. You have something against it? Regards