Being authentic: A guide to coming unstuck.

Recently the flow of my business slowed down.   The things I had done that attracted clients suddenly stopped working.  I kept plugging away, but it felt frustrating to me. What had once come easily, just stopped.  What had changed?

It took me a while to realise that this stuckness in business wasn’t, in fact, a business problem.  It was a reflection of stuckness in a different area of my life.   How could my business, the energetic representation of my purpose, flow easily – when I was blocked in my personal life?   How could my business be authentic when I wasn’t being authentic?

The first step was to identify the blockage, and the next step was to take action to shift it.  The problem was that I wasn’t being 100% honest about how I had changed inside over the previous year.   I was scared of rejection if I started talking about the spiritual dimension to me with people who hadn’t previously seen that side of me before.  I was being unfair to those around me.  I was upset that they didn’t understand me, but wasn’t giving them the chance to understand! I was also judging how I thought they would react without knowing for sure.

No-one wakes up one morning and decides that they are going to suddenly become inauthentic. (Unless they are con-artist of course).  I don’t think any of us enjoy being inauthentic.  But somehow it can creep up on you, little by little – a fudge here, a distortion there, until you realised there is a huge gap between who you feel you are, and who you are perceived to be!   And that gap can seem insurmountable. How on earth do you come out as you?

In addition while we are being inauthentic by not expressing ourselves fully – we also don’t allow others to be authentic because they are not getting all the information they need to have an open relationship with you.  Hiding who you are closes doors every day to allowing us to experience ourselves fully just as we are.  It reduces our self-confidence.  We stop believing that we are worth knowing deep down and make ourselves small.

So, I’ve started taking action to open up and reveal myself more.  This is a process not a final destination.   It can happen calmly and gently – there’s no need for soap-opera level histrionics!  The first thing I did was work through my feelings about being rejected.  Could I cope if those closest to me rejected the true me?   If they did, would I be ok with that?  Would I prefer to be in an inauthentic relationship, or be authentic with no relationship at all?  I went for a long walk and did a lot of deep breathing until I felt comfortable with the idea that it was better to take the risk than carry on as I was.

The next two things I did were symbolic.  I put a link to my blog on my Facebook account, giving my friends a chance to access my thoughts and the chance to defriend me if they wanted!   I also put my real photo up onto facebook.  Before I’d always hidden behind a swirly image of me dancing. Time to come out from the shadows!  That old photo had been put up years before when I was much shyer – it no longer reflected who I am today.

After that, the next step was to open up a conversation about how I changed recently with the people close to me.  Nothing heavy, simply an expression of some of the conflict I had felt and the areas where I think I have changed without going into huge amounts of detail.

These actions, whilst small, shifted a large amount of energy already.  I feel brighter, happier, more productive, more willing to communicate, my writing has freed up again.  As a bonus, I didn’t need to plan beyond the first few actions.  Once I had done those, the next step came as an inspiration.  It’s a good one, full of win-win solutions.  I’m really excited about the possibility it offers and I’ll be blogging about it soon.

So where are you feeling stuck?
If you’ve tried everything to shift that blockage with no success, now is the time to see what it is reflecting.

• Maybe you are stuck in attracting a good relationship, and that’s because you are being inauthentic at work.
• Maybe you are stuck in losing weight, because your house with stuffed to the brim with clutter that you need to shift.
• Maybe you are struggling with attracting good health, because you are not maintaining healthy boundaries with the people in your life.
• Maybe you are stuck at connecting with your spiritual self, because you are not honouring your spiritual nature in your daily life.

Stop take a deep breath.   Can you see the connection between the results in one area and the blockage in another?  They might not have a literal connection, but they will have an energetic resonance.  The next step is to take some action to unblock this area of life.  You can take symbolic action which will shift a little bit of the energy.   But for real results, you have to take some real action and start a conversation with someone about improving your relationship.  You might need to blow the whistle on an inauthentic work practice.  You might have to pull out a junk drawer and find a home for all those bits and pieces or throw them away.  What ever it is, it will involve action of some kind and not just wishing it away.

It might be scary.   I can’t promise that you won’t be rejected. But being authentic simply feels better and helps make those energetic shifts that will transform your life and your results.

I wish you lots of fun with making those transformations