About authenticity

2 minutes read

I don’t believe in “trying to be” authentic in sales and life. Instead, I believe in remaining authentic. We are all born authentic, but somehow we lose it along the way. The real question is how to remain authentic? I don’t have the answer, but I know how we lose our authenticity. Here is my explanation…

Our everyday life is full of distractions that slowly remove our authenticity…social dogmas, news, fashion, work…you name it. On top of it, we start to be pretentious, envying others, trying to show that we are always right, strong, and important… in short, we start wearing masks. A different mask each time. At the end, we collect and wear so many masks that we forget what our real face looks like. Therefore we refuse to be OK with ourselves. We always want to be someone else, be somewhere else with somebody else, doing something else… As a result, we create distance with our beloved ones; family, friends, and our values. Then we forget who we really are. This process is not necessarily linear or incremental. It can happen with ups and downs, back and forth so. 

 How to avoid it? I think instead of trying to avoid losing our authenticity, we can focus on conserving and feeding it by being perpetually curious about what we really love, spending time with people we truly care about, focusing on what really matters to us in life… …being less judgmental of others so that we can care less about other’s judgments of us. Those thoughts will help us stay on track even if sometimes we wear some masks… They will remind us to remove the mask at the end of the day. And one day, we will no more need any masks.

I want to finish with a definition of success that I read somewhere (I don’t remember where) …

“The true success in life is having no need to lie. Not because social, religious or ethical reasons; simply because you don’t need it.”

Remember, being a good salesperson includes being good in sales and being good as a person.