5 Secrets Authentic Leaders Share

If you want to enhance your satisfaction with your life, developing your authentic connection with your daily life is a great place to start.  Although no one can be authentic by trying to be like someone else, there are some key characteristics that authentic leaders share. 

They are self-aware. 

When seventy five members of Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council were asked to recommend the most important capability for leaders to develop their answer was nearly unanimous: self-awareness. To ensure you are self-aware (of course, paradoxically, you won’t know it if you are not J), make time for reflection, ask for feedback, and most important, stay attuned to your physical experience of your daily life.  Your body is a very intelligent barometer of how you are doing.

They are integrated.

Mahatma Gandhi once said that “happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony”.  This is integration.   It takes some practice and some discipline.  Start by examining what you feel and what you want and then practice expressing your truth in your words and in your deeds. Strive to make them match; there is profound peace in this alignment.

They don’t compartmentalize.

Compartmentalization is defined as an unconscious psychological defense mechanism used to avoid the mental discomfort and anxiety caused by having competing values emotions or beliefs within one self. Compartmentalizing can be valuable when we are in crisis because it allows us to continue functioning.  Regrettably, if used over time, it also prevents us from processing our life experiences and benefiting from the valuable lessons of our successes and failures. Additionally, this lack of self-processing can leave us very vulnerable to our repressed feelings.

They navigate.

Accurate self-awareness is our best compass for navigating a successful and authentic life.  In my early adult life, I used to love the singer James Taylor.  So many important events during that stage of my journey were marked by JT songs, the soundtrack of my ventures into adulthood. One line in one of his songs has always stayed with me “Every now and then,  the things I lean on lose their meaning and I find myself careening into places where I should not let me go.”  I still hear those words in my head when I get “off-course”.  I think we all know where we should “not go”.  We should never stay too long in places that make our lives smaller by limiting or diminishing us.  An authentic leader has a finely tuned internal compass and they use it to actively navigate their choices.

They stay present and open to life lessons.

Bill George describes this best in his book on Authentic Leadership titled, True North. “Each day, as you are tested in the world, you yearn to look at yourself in the mirror and to respect the person you see and the life you have chosen to lead.  Some days will be better than others, but as long as you are true to who you are, you can cope with the most difficult circumstances that life presents”.

Authentic leaders recognize that they will not always get this right, and they know tomorrow is a new day filled with opportunity to do better.  They know they will do better because they are leading a conscious life that will never allow them to “un-know” what they learned today.  

P.S. Authenticity isn’t just for leaders….