The first structure we must reclaim if we want to consciously create our lives.
Authenticity is the structure through which we stop building our lives around other people’s opinions and truths, and begin building from our own.
When our internal reference point is other people’s opinions, expectations, approval, definitions of success, values, or truth, our life can gradually become organized around an external architecture.
I lived this story almost my entire life, being at the mercy of other people’s opinions and truths. I would often find myself asking:
- “What will they think?”
- “What should I do?”
- “What do I have to do, to be accepted, to belong?”
- “What is the right way?”
- “What am I supposed to be?”
And eventually something subtle happens:
You lose contact with the internal signal that tells you who you really are, what you actually value, and how you can fully realize your potential.
When you’re disconnected from yourself, you can end up creating things that are disconnected from your deepest values.
You might:
- sell things you don’t believe in
- pursue opportunities you don’t care about
- imitate someone else’s business model
- create what you think people want rather than what you uniquely see
- underprice yourself because you don’t recognize the value
- overstate yourself because you don’t trust the value
- give too much away because receiving feels wrong.
Authenticity is the structure of living from your own truth.
Authenticity is also not just plainly “being yourself”, it’s more refined, it’s about reducing the distance between what lights you on fire and the life you actually want to live; making it one and the same.
Much like work and play being one and the same, like some say.
It’s aligning:
- what you say you value, and what lights that passion within you
- what your life actually demonstrates
- and how you unify the internal and the external cohesively
And when you’re living according to someone else’s structure of life, you’re optimizing inside a reality that isn’t something you truly freely chose.
You chose it perhaps because you believed that’s what you were supposed to do.
You chose it perhaps because it was the smart option, or because you saw that’s how you belonged to the tribe, to your family, or to others.
You chose it perhaps because that’s how you learned you were worthy or valuable.
Or, you chose it to simply make a means to an end to live a stable life (but not necessarily a happy life), this was me for a long time.
Authenticity, is having the Agency to choose something that’s truly ours regardless of external expectations, or fears, or conditioning for belonging.
For much of my life, I didn’t realize how much of my life was being organized around other people’s opinions and truths.
I thought I was making “my own” choices.
But increasingly, I can see that many of those choices were being made inside structures I had inherited. Or, inside the structure for “survival”.
- What would they think?
- What’s expected of me?
- What was the “right” thing to do?
I believe this is the first structure we have to learn to see if we want to consciously create our lives, 👉 Authenticity.
Not as a personality trait.
Not as permission to do whatever we want.
But as the gradual liberation of our internal compass from the voices that have taught us not to trust it.
What might become possible if we stopped building our life around what other people think is possible for us? I would say, we strengthen our own Agency of Choice.
The freedom to choose.
The freedom to question.
The freedom to decide what deserves our time, energy, attention and devotion.
The freedom to begin building from the inside out.
Authenticity is not a destination, it is an internal structure we relearn to reclaim.
Authenticity is the Doorway to our Own Wealth Creation
Authenticity isn’t just about feeling better or living more freely.
It is foundational to what we are capable of creating.
Because how can we consciously create a life of wealth if we are unconsciously building a life around someone else’s definition of what is valuable?
We’re trying to create value according to an external reference point.
- What does the market want?
- What will people like?
- What should I sell?
- What will make me successful?
- What does everyone else seem to be doing?
You can certainly make money that way.
But you are essentially borrowing someone else’s definition of value.
And this way of wealth creation is often capped, AND as I often like to put it – it’s the matter-to-matter type of creation… which comes with all kinds of survival-mindsets and limitations.
Authenticity changes the starting point.
Expansive wealth (or as I like to put it circulating spiritual wealth) is wealth created when authentic value becomes exchangeable value.
Your authenticity isn’t valuable merely because you feel authentic.
It becomes economically powerful when the thing that is genuinely yours can be translated into something that genuinely matters to someone else.
Because authenticity isn’t merely about knowing yourself.
It allows you to enter an exchange without distorting either yourself or the other person.
Wealth is what happens when value can move.
So, I leave you with this lasting statement: your wealth potential may be hiding inside the value you have yet to fully express.
Tell me, with a note in the comments, does this make sense to you?
Doesn’t this resonate with you?
And, where do you feel stuck when it comes to this topic?
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