What is Authentic?
Our experience of life and the world around us is based exclusively on what we sense and our interpretation of those inputs.
There are no truly objective facts on which to base anything - everything we see, everything we feel, everything we know is based on our subjective interpretation of information fed to us by our senses.
In June 2000 I was first on the scene at a fatal motorbike accident. I knew clearly what I had seen and yet when I came to give evidence to the investigating policeman, who had constructed a view based on all of the witness's accounts, it differed from mine in most important details.
Understanding that there is no objective reality, there is no single truth, that no one is actually right is hugely liberating.
The world in which you live is your world the one constructed by your mind in order to make sense of what is going on outside it.
Our confidence in our interpretation is confused by events in our childhood, perceived pressure from others, social convention, marketing messages and chemical changes in our bodies.
Talking with colleagues, clients, friends, reading history or watching movies or dramas we constantly see how internal confusion leads to damaging misjudgement.
So how can we begin to trust ourselves?
It is easy to understand the way trust develops. Animal trainers call it positive reinforcement. An action or instruction is followed by a predictable response. A dog is instructed to sit, the dog sits, the instructor praises the dog. The dog learns that sitting when instructed results in praise.
However, much of our experience of life and therefore ourselves is not like that. Infancy, childhood, schooldays, jobs, politics, marketing are a continual series of disappointments. We learn that the world and crucially our interpretation of it is not predictable or trustworthy.
If the world we experience is exclusively about our interpretation of events and trust is about predictability of reaction, it follows that if we can ensure that at least our own reactions are predictable we can begin to trust ourselves.
The problem is that most of us are brought up to believe that others might have a more real interpretation of the world than we do. This results in our learning not to trust, or very often even listen to, our own instincts.
How many of us choose to eat food, go to parties, accept jobs or even marry while feeling a sense of unease but not listening to it or believing we can do anything about it?
It doesn't need to be like this.
We can decide to listen to our instincts, trust them and act on them. Being honest with ourselves seems hard to start with, we have years of conditioning to break, but once we make the leap it is harder still not to be.
Being honest with your self is about making every decision and choice consciously and explicitly - even if it seems hard, rather than allowing yourself to be swept along by events.
Once we start to be honest with ourselves, we start to be able to trust ourselves, which gives us more confidence in every situation. This is the confidence of authenticity.
Why Business?
Like it or not business is the currently the main driver of our society. Over the last thousand years we have been through phases of ascendancy for the religious, the martial and the political. During the 20th century business and capitalism took over as the most influential force in our society.
Over the same period as the practice of business matured it shed much of the idealism of Cadbury. Idealism was replaced with rationalism business became largely about profit and shareholder value.
"Professional" business people (too often men) came to believe that it was possible to make rational, as opposed to emotional, decisions. Emotion came to be suppressed under the blanket of research and data that is used to insure managers and leaders against the consequences of taking decisions.
In a society dominated by rationalists, idealists are marginalized through education, media, business, infrastructure and all of the other tools always deployed by defenders of an increasingly precarious status quo. Flat-Earthers, Creationists, Geo-centrists.
In an industrial society an ill-educated populace can be effectively exploited to perform mechanistic operations. Development creates a self-sustaining cycle where demand for better lifestyle creates demand for better education. This cycle creates an increasing tension as the demands of the work fail to live up to the expectations created by the education.
The paradigm shift occurs when the tension of the expectations exceeds the cohesion of the limitations.
As society becomes more affluent we move up Maslow's pyramid. Eventually we arrive at a point where enough of us recognise our need to understand and realise our own potential and it becomes clear that helping big corporations to become bigger and exploit better fails to deliver that for us.
At that point we discover the need for a new model for business. A model that delivers on our needs for self-actualisation. A model for business that is about our own true purpose. That, for me, is Authentic Business.
Offer:
Authentic Business Guides offer a comprehensive service to help individuals find and found their authentic business and to help existing authentic businesses flourish for more details contact neil@authenticbusiness.co.uk
Neil Crofts February 2002
Contact: neil@authenticbusiness.co.uk