Who’s Behind Your Authentic Action?

Hi. It's Eva from Wild Authentic Xplore where we examine what it takes to live an authentic life so we can experience more confidence, purpose, impact, and ease. The better life that begins to emerge as we live more in keeping with who we really are.

Recently, we’ve been spending a fair amount of time here talking about the importance of WHAT we experience. Specifically, how to deepen our understanding of what we experience by taking in our full—what I call three-channel—experience. In other words, not immediately defaulting to our emotional experience, but instead, broadening our experience to include our physical sensations and our thoughts as well.

As we broaden the aperture to capture more of what we experience, we create a richer understanding of what we experience.

As we’ve noted before, this richer understanding is essential to an authentic life because every bit of information we register has the potential to not only clarify our true experience, but to guide our actions to create a more authentic way forward.

In our model of authenticity, Active Authenticity, understanding our experience in the richest terms possible is where an authentic life begins. If I were to draw an analogy for capturing our full experience, it's like stepping onto a playing field and absorbing everything we can about what’s going on BEFORE then deciding whether it’s best to punt, swing free, or take a walk (in softball terminology of course). Our experience in any given moment is like that first impression, or overview, of the field.

But knowing our experience, or our first impression, is just that, an impression. While the impression (our experience) may be the first thing we notice, acting on impressions is not enough for authentic action. We still have to consider the game plan when creating authentic actions, the game plan of who we are and what we want. Referencing the game plan allows us to take actions aligned with the game plan. Aligning our actions with who we are and what we want is the bedrock of authentic action taking.

Now, things get a bit more complicated because some of what we experience may be unrelated to our game plan (of who we are and what we want). For instance, you walk onto the field and notice your ex in the stands, and who are they sitting with anyway? And the pitcher looks like someone that struck you out three times last year, the way they size you up, and so looks dangerously formidable. These impressions may be part of your authentic experience as you step onto the field, but will factoring them into your action-taking help you create actions that reflect who you are and what you want?

While some impressions may have nothing to do with who we are and what we want, we still notice them. They’re part of the scene. Remnants of other experiences are always in the mix of what we experience.

If we don’t stop to evaluate our experience—so we can identify and account for these influences from the past—their influence might negatively affect what we currently experience and affect our subsequent actions. In other words, they can “throw us off our game.

I’ve used softball as an analogy because it can be easier to see this dynamic play out on a more neutral playing field. But let’s move away from softball and onto the relationship field where all of us can’t help but play.

For instance, let’s say I’m at a family gathering, and when my cousin shares an opinion, my first reaction is intense anger, and my experience—flushed face, tension in my gut, resentment, hurt, and the thought “I knew this was going to happen,”—is what I feel when she appears to side with something I find super offensive.

This is of course my in-the-moment experience, something like walking onto the playing field and absorbing impressions. And while my experience is an authentic one—is true for me—is what I feel an accurate expression of who I am, or does it perhaps more accurately reflect something else, something that may be exerting outsized influence on my current experience of things?

Maybe as I think more deeply about the situation, I see that her opinion touched off the many times I’ve been injured and sidelined for simply being who I am. Could the added pain and anger I feel right now have less to do with me and more to do with this history of rejection? Could my intense response be a function of the many times I’ve been passed over, the history of pain I carry as it relates to being overlooked simply for being who I am?

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Without acknowledging the influence of these negative events of the past, my current action is likely to reflect the hurt and pain caused by these past events, even as I’m sitting here thinking my action is a bold expression of who I am. Such an action would be a hybrid action, part expression of who I am, and part reaction to the continuing influence of past events. Maybe half and half, maybe 80-20, who knows.

I’m drawing out a concept that represents next-level work with our experience on the path of Active Authenticity. And this concept says that:

…our experience, however essential, is only the starting point, the raw material of an authentic life. Some of what we experience internally, and appears to be authentically ours, is not in fact ours, but rather lingering feelings that come from past events.

While these past events have clearly affected us, they are not us. Take a minute to take this in. This is a very important concept in our work together.

The lingering effect of events from the past can be the very thing pulling you out of authentic engagement with yourself and others.

It might be why you’re still “going sideways” even though you’re carefully acknowledging and acting on a richer understanding of your experience of things. Maybe you yearn for a healthy relationship but are so influenced by negative events from the past that you continue to choose partners that keep you cycling through old patterns.

Given that our current experience is more often cobbled together from both past and present events, the authentic life asks us to take a deeper look at our experience to understand its source. This is the work of True Sourcing on the path of Active Authenticity, or put another way, the work of uncovering the true source of our current experience. Is it you, the authentic you, or is it some negative event from the past that continues to impact your current experience of things?

While picking through our experience in this way may sound daunting, it’s actually an interesting and liberating bit of work. It's an invitation, as you’re able, to reflect on your life. And reflect on it, not as some abstract undertaking, but as an in-the-moment commitment to view your everyday moments and interactions through a present/past lens. Ask yourself, what is my current experience really about? Does it truly reflect who I am, or does it instead represent a past event casting shade on my current experience of things?

And when I say past event, I don't just mean significant and isolated traumas. I mean also the influence of persistent and corrosive biases; every time you received a message that suggested you didn’t matter, were not enough, or were inherently wrong.

Or, and this is a much more subtle version of the same thing, was it just “in the air” that to find happiness, merit consideration, or be successful you would need to chip away bits of you, or keep parts of you under wraps, or pretend you are not who you really are? And while subtle, these are still messages of exclusion, with the ability to undermine your confidence in who you are, your authentic self, in just the same way.

And because these subtle denunciations of who we are, ARE in fact subtle, and easy to internalize, they can be difficult to single out and identify as coming from a past event instead of being a true expression of who we are.

These internalized denunciations now speak with an inside voice though they once upon a time came from an outside one.

Which is why the next level work with our experience on the path of Active Authenticity has to do with differentiating the “voices” in our experience: the ones that express our authentic self vs. the ones that merely mimic the experience of some past negative event.

For those following along in my book Chasing the Wild Authentic, chapters two and three go into this subject at length. They share how to differentiate our present experience from the influence of pasts events, not only to protect our present from the distortions of the past, but as a set-up for taking more authentic actions.

Feel free to ask your questions about any of this in the comment thread below. Understanding your experience at this next level is all about freeing yourself from the past to be who you really are, your authentic self, in the present.