Harness the Authenticity Unicorn and Unleash You
No one is you, and that is your superpower. ~Elyse Santilli
I spent the entirety of my childhood and young adult life trying to fight my way out of the vicious cycle of poverty. I grew up surrounded by addiction in all its forms, but I found a haven inside books and in school. When Beth and Harry opened their home to me the summer before my junior year of high school, the damage was done. I did inherit addiction. My addiction was perfectionism and achievement. At the time, it didn't seem like a big deal. I like to succeed. That is a good thing, right? I like to stay busy. I thrive in freneticism. I would not fully understand my addiction's harmful and damaging effects until years later.
Even though I don't remember this, Harry tells me stories about how I would push myself to the edge of complete fatigue. Between AP classes, working on the weekend, sports, and clubs, I would flop into bed sometimes at 2 or 3 am. There were days when the exhaustion was so overwhelming that I couldn't go to school. By the time I graduated high school with perfect grades and my scholarship to Texas A&M University, frankly, I was tired. I don't mean the kind of tiredness that makes you not want to get out of bed in the morning. My mind was tired. It was like I couldn't breathe. I was suffocating under my self-inflicted pressure.
So, I stopped trying.
Midway through my freshman year, I started going to parties nearly every night. Half the time, I was hungover and didn't make it to class. By the middle of my second semester, I was flunking two of my five classes. I was placed on academic probation, and by the end of the semester, it was clear I would lose my scholarship. Then I entered a dark room I'd never experienced before. Failure.
I've learned that in the consequential moments when we make decisions that change the trajectory of our lives, we rarely forget the details. During finals, at 3 am on a Wednesday, I was leaning on a pillow against my bed, desperately trying to cram four months of U.S. History lessons into a single night. There was no way I was passing that final exam. Then, my phone rang. My sister's voice was on the other end of the line calling me from Italy. She had been stationed at Aviano Air Base for over a year, and she had just found out she was pregnant with my niece, Jordan. I could tell she was scared. She was young and alone in a foreign country, and now she was going to have a baby. At that moment, I instinctively knew. I just knew. I had to get the hell out of College Station, Texas, and as far away from my past as possible. I was about to experience my first crescendo. I blurted out, "I'll come to Italy." The next day—after failing my history exam—I walked out of that dark room and straight into the passport office.
Embrace the Crescendo
Transformational experiences create identifying markers in personality development. Personality markers bear influence on how you live your life. Transformational experiences that shape you can happen in an instant, or they can build in intensity over time until the moment arrives when you must make a shift, despite the circumstances or potential outcomes. I call these moments crescendos. Crescendos arise when you have made enough minor, seemingly insignificant decisions that drive you off course. When you repeatedly face expectations that fall outside your values or purpose, each moment builds in intensity. Your internal compass screams that something is wrong and you need to reorient. During the build-up of these moments, you may feel like you are wading through quicksand. Sometimes you may feel like you are in a dark room with no windows and can’t find the light switch.
Embracing crescendos requires you to walk through fear and the unknown. Crescendos require Courage. Crescendos require you to give up control in exchange for faith. Pay attention to these moments and the decisions that follow them. When you summon the Courage to embrace a crescendo, you purposefully choose to move into discomfort and find your way back onto the path you were meant to travel. You reclaim Integrity that may have been lost along the way, and you move closer to Authenticity.
AUTHENTICITY IS HARD
Put simply, Authenticity is real, not imitation. Then why does living authentically feel out of reach for so many people? During a Leader-First (LF) Leadership workshop session, a participant said, “Authenticity is about as easy as chasing a damn unicorn!” I laugh out loud every time I think about that moment. I’m not sure anyone had ever summed it up so succinctly yet described the challenge of achieving it so thoroughly. Authenticity can feel mystical or idealistic. Brené Brown says, “The idea that we can choose authenticity makes most of us feel both hopeful and exhausted.”1 It certainly changes our awareness.
For me personally, as I’ve conscientiously moved toward living authentically, the exhaustion comes when I know I’m not showing up as my true self. The hope comes when I make progress toward weaving it into the fabric of my everyday life. Because Authenticity is an active choice, I integrated Brené’s description, “the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are,” into the LF Leadership model definition. This part reminds leaders that Authenticity is not a foregone conclusion and requires consistent focus. But I included one important addition. Daily practice only moves you closer to Authenticity when you embrace who you are by interpreting and owning your life experiences.
The Synergistic Relationship between Integrity and Authenticity
We are a reflection of our life experiences—the good ones and the hard ones. How our stories mold and guide us has less to do with whether the experiences are good or bad and more about how we interpret them. Recalling your stories, interpreting versus judging them against your current reality, and owning how they have shaped you are all important steps to strengthen your Integrity-baseline and move you closer to Authenticity. Independently, Authenticity and Integrity are formidable Leader Touchstones. Authentic leaders build purpose-driven organizations that operate beyond the bottom line. Leaders with Integrity stand up for what is right, even if that means standing alone or coming at a personal cost. But together, these touchstones have an irrefutable, synergistic relationship adept at untangling the most chaotic, toxic culture dimensions.
In 9 Leader Touchstones, I discuss how Integrity and Authenticity modify each other. I first explore Integrity since it is a foundational modifier to Authenticity. In fact, Integrity is the tool LF Leaders use to harness the ever-illusive Authenticity. On the other hand, by its standard definition, a person must not necessarily have Integrity to be authentic—think Adolph Hitler. Sadly, Hitler lived his manifesto, Mein Kampf, to the letter. But a life lived to brutalize and murder other human beings is no life of Integrity. Hitler is an extreme but not uncommon example.
For LF Leadership, we only explore Authenticity through the lens of Integrity. A person of Integrity is inherently authentic because Authenticity entails being true to who you are and what you believe. However, you can be true to who you are but not act with Integrity. For LF Leadership, this makes both touchstones necessary to reinforce healthy culture dimensions. Even though Integrity is not foundational to Authenticity, it augments how Authenticity shapes the organizational system by rooting it in morality. Establishing your Integrity-baseline makes Authenticity more accessible to you. Interpreting and owning your stories exhumes your deepest-held beliefs, values, and personal principles.2 By converting these to tangible tools, Integrity becomes the harness you need to seize the Authenticity unicorn.
Deprogramming Self-Image
When I think back to my crescendo during college, now I know that every step I had taken until that point was about pleasing someone besides myself. I was trying so hard to be the person I assumed everyone wanted and needed me to be that by the age of 20, I had already become a full-fledged imposter in my own life. I felt like I had to prove myself over and over again. It would take me decades—with lots of introspection and hard work—to deprogram the person I thought I was supposed to be and become the person I am today… the person I have actually been all along.
Every day, messages from our environment cunningly program us. Our experiences shape us. Our parents shape us. What we watch on television shapes us. What we read shapes us. It’s really easy to become the person the world tells us to be. Although programming is surface-level, without intervention, either from ourselves through growth in self-awareness or by others who give us meaningful feedback, it seeps deeper into our identity, surreptitiously constructing our new reality. Even to this day, I still work to interpret my history with the hope that it keeps moving me closer to Authenticity.
Having Integrity and living authentically are conscientious choices. It starts when you build self-awareness and then act on new knowledge about yourself. It’s not easy, and it takes consistent practice. When you live and lead with Integrity and Authenticity, you seek to understand and interpret your story. When you own it, you allow your most authentic self to be seen.
Living abroad in Italy opened my mind to a new way of life. I started the process of deprogramming my destructive self-image. Throughout the process, I unearthed some drivers of my unhealthy addiction to achievement and perfectionism. After my Italian fling, as I like to call it, I returned to Texas A&M and worked hard to win back my scholarship. I got my grades up and graduated with a 2.98. It certainly wasn’t what I envisioned when I started. Countless times I had imagined the day I would walk across the stage, top of my class. But when I started, I wasn’t attending college for myself or my future aspirations. I was going for everyone else who, I assumed, expected me to go. Instead, I walked proudly across that stage bunched in with about 1,700 other students as the first person in my family to graduate from college. It was also the first time I felt like I’d succeeded at something for myself. That was the more significant accomplishment.
Instead of staying at Texas A&M and pursuing master’s and doctorate degrees in Psychology (again, what I thought was expected of me), I took my bachelor’s degree in Psychology to Houston and got a job. Fourteen years later, I would earn my doctorate, but I did it on my terms, inspired by what I was starting to realize was my life’s purpose.
1. Brown, B. (2020). The gifts of imperfection. Random House.
2. George, B., & Sims, P. (2007). True North: Discover your authentic leadership. Jossey-Bass/John Wiley & Sons.
To learn more about 9 Leader Touchstones and get the book, visit our website: https://www.9-leader-touchstones.com/.
