Welcome to Season 2 of the Origination Point Podcast! In this episode, Bill de la Cruz dives deep into the topic of personal change and what it means to be authentic. If you are a new listener, be sure to check out our past episodes from season one!

Follow Bill on social media:

Twitter: @BillDeLaC
Instagram: @BillDeLaC
Facebook: Bill De La Cruz

If you enjoyed the podcast, please like, share, and subscribe!

— Support this podcast:
https://anchor.fm/origination-point-podcast/support

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

Origination Point Podcast

Welcome to season two. Last season, we talked a lot about transitions and moving into new spaces of living and being. I was going through a lot of personal changes that challenged me to use all of the practices that I share through my teaching and facilitation. I think it’s a lot easier to suggest to someone else to use the practices than sometimes it is for me to use them.

As a facilitator and trainer in personal change, I have found that it’s easier to coach and counsel others in the strategies sometimes than using them myself. Through this transition and change process I was involved in, I had to dig deep and use many of the skills of self-awareness, deep listening, and communication. To be able to move and keep myself fully engaged in the changes I was going through.

I had a lot of opportunities to practice and I did better on some days than others. I always did my best, knowing that on any given day, my best would look different. That’s from the book, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, who talks about one of the agreements is always to do your best. Knowing that, depending on how you feel, your best is going to look different on any given day.

While we’re still going to talk about transition and change, because I think every day is an opportunity to engage in a transitional process, I’m going to add something around authenticity. We have 10 episodes on season 1. If you haven’t read those, read those. If you enjoy this content, subscribe, share it with your friends and colleagues. My goal is to get 1 million subscribers. Any help and support you can provide to meet that goal would be very much appreciated.

As I said, this season, we’re going to jump right in and talk about transition connected to authenticity. I think we’re always in flux and we’re constantly moving from one transition to another each day. I want to expand on that and talk about what does it mean to be authentic in the world? Authentically showing up, authentically being myself, authentically being in my purpose. When we think of the word authentic, it evokes this image of something pure or unadulterated. Something authenticated is something of value from a cultural perspective. You’ve authenticated a piece of art or an image. When we authenticate something, it has value.

We’re not going to necessarily talk about the authentication of a human being as somebody giving that person value, as much as we’re going to talk about being authentic and what’s the value of me being authentic in my own being. Some of the questions we’re going to talk about are, what does it mean to be authentic? How do you know you’re being authentic? What role does fear, insecurities, bias, judgments, and stereotypes play in impacting authentic conversations and interactions? What does it mean to be your most authentic self?

Before we jump into our content, I want to tell you the goal of the show. Our goal is to start a conscious social movement meant to counter all of the hate, division, and fear we are experiencing in our world. We want to create a conversation between and among people. To start a dialogue about what it takes to remove the divisiveness and the crazy ways that we see each other judged and stereotyped.

At any time through the show, if you’re moved to talk about something or you get emotionally charged about something that’s said, turn it off, reflect on it, find somebody to talk to about what you’re feeling and what you’re thinking. If you get emotionally charged or angry because you disagree or maybe you don’t understand, it would be very easy to say, “I’m not going to read this anymore because he’s wrong. I don’t agree with what’s being said.” It’s simple to do that because all you have to do is hit delete. The more challenging step is how do I sit in the emotional discomfort of what I’m feeling, own it, and see if I can find the origination point of those feelings.

Remember, the origination point is the point of healing and understanding. It is to think about, “How do I sit through something that I may not agree with to see if there’s something for me to learn?” If we’re going to create a more humane world, we all have to stop being a victim. We have to take ownership of ourselves, our actions and our interactions and begin to create a different perspective for how we see each other.

 

The feelings are real. An emotionally charged or recharged stimulated feeling is connected to something that was experienced in the past. They’re real feelings, it was a real experience, and it’s being emotionally charged in the present and is an indicator of more work or more awareness that needs to be done. Being authentic to me means that I’m present and able to accept my impact in whatever interaction I’m having.

That’s not always easy because sometimes the impact that I’m having is not what I want to do because it may hurt somebody. It may have a detrimental effect on somebody or on something that I’m doing. If I’m being authentic, I have to take ownership of everything that happens in my life. As I’ve said on this show, it was challenging when I was younger. I know that I created a lot of hurt and pain in my relationships.

What Is Being Authentic?

My goal in my life now is to think about and be more aware of how I’m impacting people and how authentic I am in that awareness and that ownership. When we look at the word authentic, Merriam-Webster defines it as a quality of being genuine and worthy of belief. Hence, the person who is completely trustworthy is deemed to be authentic. Yet to be genuine requires a certain transparency whereby others can witness the unfiltered personality without any masking.

I think the biggest challenge is, can I have an unfiltered personality without any masking? In the work of othering and belonging, some of those outcomes are that we’re always masking parts of ourselves throughout our whole day. For many of us, the only time we have our masks off is when we’re at home. Depending on the relationships we have with the people in our home, we may not fully have our masks off, even at home.

For everyone out there, you have to decide, from an authentic perspective, how unfiltered you can be in a place of home, community, and work. For me, being authentic means finding my voice and getting past my fears of what people might think. I have to be really honest and say that that is part of my objective in this show.

Being authentic means finding your voice and getting past the fear of what people might think. Share on X

I’m tired of living in a space where I’m more concerned with what people will think of me over speaking my truth. I’m tired of working in spaces where a leader may say, “If something’s off, let us know.” When that happens, they have it come back in an unfair manner from an assessment perspective or retribution or somebody using my own words against me.

For me personally, growing up in the space of abuse where I was hit and given the narrative that I was not worthy and would not be successful, it makes sense that I don’t feel comfortable sharing my truth. It makes sense, but it doesn’t excuse me at this point in my life from saying, “That’s the reason why I’m still going to behave that way.”

While my voice was shut down as a child by somebody else, as I grew into an adult, I learned to shut myself down even after I left home. Once I was away from that person or that environment, the impetus on change was then up to me because that person and environment are no longer a part of my life. I think many of us are concerned with what others will think about us to the point that we don’t speak up.

We don’t want to be fired, unfriended, judged, shamed, blamed, and looked at as the problem. In America now, the ways that we treat each other, we run the risk of any of those things just by speaking our truth. We are concerned with what others think of us. As such, we might disguise and manipulate parts of ourselves to better assure that others aren’t judgmental.

The reality is that people are always judging. It’s impossible not to be judged or to judge each other. In the world we live in, it’s filled with self-judgment. We judge ourselves probably more critically than others judge us. Through those judgments, then we create stereotypes about each other. Through stereotypes, we create these behaviors towards each other.

To be authentic means that we need to have genuine sharing in the present moment. Acting not in assumptions and making up stories about each other in the present moment. Being present to what’s happening. Looking at each other through a lens of, “Who is this person that’s in front of me?” If we’re unconscious, our thoughts can conspire with us in a tangle of excuses as to why we can’t do something.

From my perspective, that’s the core of inauthenticity. Our words and actions become disguised from the original intent because we’re masking them, and then we subvert our genuine selves. Our genuine self is hidden under all these masks we created to protect ourselves. Being authentic is a delicate balance between being present, being aware of our past experiences, and sharing our truth without demeaning and denigrating another person’s truth.

Being authentic is a delicate balance between being present, being aware of our past experiences, and sharing our truth without demeaning and denigrating another person's truth. Share on X

This devolving from our more genuine self typically begins in childhood as we encounter emotional challenges. As I shared with you, experiencing abuse, disappointment, fear, or devaluing causes us to alter our personalities as we cope with these wounds. For me, as a youngster in the first half of my life, my coping was to mask all of those feelings. When I mask all of my feelings of hurt and pain, I also masked all of those feelings that would allow me to be compassionate, accepting, and empathy.

I adapted as a child, yet over my lifetime, they fully became masked, distancing me from a more actualized or more authentic sense of myself. At a certain point, I have to realize that I have the ability to shift my narrative and to heal those wounds so that I can become more of a compassionate and feeling person.

Think about times when you had to alter yourself to fit into the culture of home, work and community. How did you act? What was the original narrative? How did that narrative show up in behavior and treatment of yourself and others? I altered my whole way of being, and then I lived as a victim by saying, “It’s because I was abused. It’s because my parents were divorced. It’s because I didn’t have good relationships in my family.”

I used it as an excuse to then treat others from that same perspective of me, and then basically, I took my abusive nature that was put upon me and, in many ways, put that upon other people. A lot of my work has been how do I think about myself in a way that allows me to forgive myself for how I’ve treated others and for how I have allowed myself to slip into this victim mentality. More and more, I’m able to step out of that, be really conscious and more authentic than I was. I don’t know if I’m as authentic as I want to be.

Being Genuine Is Devalued In Our Culture

I was reading an article in Psychology Today by an author named Mel Schwartz who was talking about authenticity. He shared this. He said, “Much of the problem lies in the fact that being genuine is devalued in our culture. While success, achievement, and avoiding criticism is highly prized, our prevailing cultural imperative does little to value authenticity.”

“This goal appears nowhere in the curriculum of our education. If our primary education provided coursework that taught us how to achieve emotional intelligence and the skillset of genuine communication, we might realign our priorities accordingly. The competitive spirit honors the winners, not the most sincere.”

“Within that motif, there is a belief that being authentic may impede success, yet one need not preclude the other. If you untether yourself from insecurity and fear, you can set the stage for a self-empowered life, freeing yourself from the tribulations of worrying about what others think of you and boldens you to be genuine. Easier said than done.”

We all think about, “What are other people going to think of me if I do this, say this, or act like this?” We’ve been socialized to even believe that that’s the way that we should be living. In some way, it’s more important about how we’re seen versus how we see ourselves. It holds back our ability to be genuine and to be real. For much of my life, I bought into that.

I think my authentic self for the first half of my life was not a part of who I was. Although, people would’ve interacted with me and said, “That really is him. He is quite a jerk.” When you think about how insecurity and fear inhibit our ability to be authentic. For me, that means that I have to look at what is it that creates my own insecurities. What is it that I’m afraid of?

It goes back to these things we’re socialized to. I don’t want people to think I’m a bad person. When I do, I get emotionally charged. An emotional charge or a trigger for me is indicative of some internal work that I have to do. When I get emotionally charged and the emotional charge is basically, I’m interacting with somebody, and all of a sudden, I get emotional. I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach, I start to sweat, my hands start to clench. For some reason, I start to judge and stereotype. Those are all connected to an emotional charge.

When I was younger, I never owned those triggers. When I got emotionally charged when I was younger, my question would be, “What’s wrong with that person?” I would judge them and say, “They’re such a jerk.” As I got older and I started doing my own work, when I get triggered in an interaction, my questions revolve more around, “What is it about me that’s experiencing you like this?”

I want to take ownership of how I’m feeling. I don’t want to divorce myself from the fact that I’m engaged with another person. I don’t want to blame them for my feelings, especially if they’re completely unaware of what’s happening. That’s just as challenging as anything because that means that I have to own my own emotional experiences.

Positional Conversations And Interspace Perspective

I have to realize that I don’t have to use fear and intimidation as a way to be right, even though that’s what I learned to do when I was younger. What I’ve realized through my mediation work and my work in my own anger is that there’s very little conversation that we can have from the place of, “I’m right and you’re wrong or I’m good and you’re bad.” These are called positional conversations.

Positional conversations move one person to defend and the other person to justify. In the end, both people shut down. A defend-justified conversation is always a lose-lose conversation because for one person to win, the other person has to lose. What I think we need to do to have a more humane world is to start operating from an interspace perspective.

 

Talking about what is in the best interest of our shared humanity to remove the divisive structures that we are operating in that are taking a personal and emotional toll on many people. Coupled with that, I believe that leadership sets the standard within the community, school, workplace, business, country, or political climate.

People at lower levels within your organization will see how the leaders act over time and how that behavior is rewarded and then adapt to those behaviors. We live in hierarchy, so the top leaders set the standard. If you’re below those leaders anywhere, you have to flex with the culture that the top leaders profess, even if you may not believe that those are the best behaviors.

You can choose to be authentic and speak your truth and run the risk of being alienated, being asked to leave, getting fired, or being in some way ostracized. If you speak out in the climate nowadays, you run the risk of all of those things happening to you. We are living in very positional times. If we are unaware, we will destroy relationships at the same time that we blame the other person for what happened, their beliefs, and the misunderstandings.

If my belief is authentic and we argue whose perspective is correct, we both lose. If we’re arguing over who is right and who is wrong, we both lose. When I talk about leadership sets the standard, I’m talking about high levels of leadership in any type of environment. Whether it’d be a university president, CEO of a company, president, senators, leaders from a political perspective, leadership sets the standard.

What happens over time is those behaviors permeate the entire organizational culture. What I believe we’re seeing in America now are behaviors that are akin to people can say anything that they want without any repercussions. There’s very little accountability. That style of behavior has fully permeated our schools, communities, workplaces, churches and we’re all being impacted by them.

I want to be clear. To me, this is not a political conversation that says that one party or group is better than the other because I look at bad behavior and just call it bad behavior. I see things being said and people being treated from all realms of our society that I wouldn’t want my children to emulate. I think we all have to think about what our role is in perpetuating or disrupting this culture of fear, this socialization of fear that we now live in.

Have you ever unfriended somebody on social media because you did not like their point of view? I have. Did you ever have a face-to-face conversation with you to share your perspectives or get an understanding? In some cases, I did. In other cases, I didn’t. I just would delete them or unfriend them because we could do that. Before the computer age, when we had a challenge with somebody that we had to interact with, we were almost forced to have a conversation with them or completely ignore them.

Now, we can delete and unfriend them, and I am blown away by how frequently that happens when people just say, “I’m unfriending this person.” The things we say to each other through electronics are shocking in so many ways. I’ve seen it both on the community level, in my workplace, and in my home. Somehow, we have to correct these approaches and behavior because we are truly living in a time where we’re being socialized to live in fear.

Fear of each other is based on so many levels and categories. The people who are defining us and dividing us based on fear in some ways are benefiting from that division. We all have to take ownership of this. As long as we’re divided and as long as we’re fighting with each other, we’ll never come together to have the power to move social change.

As long as we're divided and fighting with each other, we'll never come together to have the power to move social change. Share on X

I have met committed leaders and ordinary people over the years who are fully committed to being more open, self-aware, and kind. Yet many of them live in working climates that do not reward the level of relationships required to be authentic. I spend a lot of time in the education sector. For the most part, the educational community is assessed through a culture of test scores.

Test scores are the litmus test to success. More and more research is showing the importance of relationships, vulnerability, and authenticity in creating school cultures that are vibrant and equitable and provide outcomes for all students in both academics and social-emotional learning. Yet, that is the most archaic system. For some reason, the school system is one of those businesses that make change so slowly that the negative impacts are seen for years in our communities.

In fact, most schools and businesses are reactionary when it comes to understanding the importance of relationships and treating people with dignity when some negative press comes out about someone getting mistreated or about culturally appropriating somebody else. All of a sudden, that university, school district, or business comes forward and talks about everything that they want to do. Yet nothing was being done prior to this issue that came up.

In most cases, a reactionary approach creates an intervention that is not going to last. When Starbucks had their issues of the folks who were asked to leave one of their coffee shops, they did training for all of their employees on one day without follow up. Nothing’s going to come of that. A university that prints something or has an incident happen on campus that apologizes and doesn’t continue to do the work of changing the system isn’t going to be effective.

This idea that we’re going to change people and make them be nicer to each other doesn’t get to the root of what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is a systemic structure built in this country’s design that says some people are more valued than others. It is okay to denigrate those people who are less valued.

All of this is designed around this idea of normal, which is based on a White heterosexual perspective. We need to start talking about that. We need to start being aware that this blame game is demeaning and will never allow us to build bridges and will continue to be divisive. Coupled with a culture that has no accountability, it allows people to have behaviors that no one holds them accountable to.

When people get away with it over and over, it starts to message that this is acceptable behavior. It’s okay to treat each other as we’re seen in our society. The divide in our political climate has been a part of politics for many years. Now, it’s more visual and more hurtful. In my past experience in politics, at both the local and state level, there’s always been an effort to divide communities of color.

As some politicians said to me, as long as those communities of color are fighting with each other, they won’t have time to build a strong enough coalition to drive change. That was a prevailing value among some politicians. That division is within groups of people. Even within white groups, you have people who are better than others.

Within racial groups, ethnic groups, gender groups, age groups and generational groups, everyone’s being labeled and denigrated in today’s America. From that lens, how does anyone show up authentically in the space of fear where we’re always having to watch our backs? I can no longer live this way. That’s why I’ve decided to continue to do this work, find my voice, and be authentic regardless of what happens. This is not the world I want for my kids and our grandkids.

What has happened to the spirit of collaboration and understanding? It’s almost like there’s no middle ground anymore. We’ve become such extremists in so many ways that if you’re somewhere in the middle, there’s something wrong with you. You’re either on my side or you’re against me. That’s not the way it’s always been.

We have a lot of work to do. I’ve been studying and facilitating with leaders at all levels all over the country for the past twenty years. I’ve watched how leaders, people, and followers adapt to the culture of their environment. We adapt to fit in, keep our job, lessen conflict, and not be looked at poorly. That is not going to serve us anymore.

We have to start to think about our role in moving the dial away from being extreme and somewhere into being collaborative and accepting other people’s perspectives. If I’m authentic and honest, I would say that the behaviors and outcomes of some of our most influential leaders in this country at the political, business, university, and churches are similar to a lose-lose conversation. Those leaders are putting people in positions of having to justify or defend themselves.

 

When we are put in positions to justify or defend ourselves, the outcome is always going to be lose-lose because one person’s going to be saying, “No, I’m not.” The other person’s going to be saying, “Yes, you are.” When we are socialized to be afraid, we stop compromising, collaborating, working together, and trying to find the middle.

It’s because we are in a “protect myself frame of mind. I know that somebody’s going to take something that I say and use it against me. Somehow, somewhere, we have to realize that this fight or flight mode of where we go into when we’re operating from fear is not going to get us where we need to go. That is if you want to have a world that’s less divided and a world that’s more collaborative and more compassionate.

As we think about this socialization of fear, it’s completely counterintuitive to being able to show up in spaces as an authentic person. We’re always wondering about who’s going to take something that we say and use it against us. We’re all perpetuating this culture by how we interact, don’t interact, delete each other, and unfriend each other, so we have a lot of work to do.

What is the answer to disrupt a society that is rooted in fear, division, and inauthentic interactions? For everybody reading, the personal work that you have to do is different based on your own experiences and frame of reference. Overall though, we have to be willing to work outside of our comfort zone because this is not a comfort zone conversation. It will challenge us. It will emotionally charge us. We have to be willing to hear perspectives that we may not agree with, and that’s challenging to do.

How To Live A More Authentic Life

Here are some steps to living a more authentic life. Give each other grace, as everyone is in their own process. I love this quote. It says, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Nobody knows what anybody’s bringing into the workplace, our communities, church, and wherever we gather. I have found that I could ask everybody in a room to tell me about something that’s challenging in their personal life, their friend’s life, or their extended family’s life. Everybody could find something that’s challenging them. An absence of a culture of vulnerability and a culture of authenticity, most people aren’t going to share that with other people in the workplace, even in church or their community groups. It’s because there’s a lack of vulnerability-based trust.

Stop being loyal to an old version of yourself. To make these changes in my life, I had to get rid of that old version of myself that I had been loyal to for half of my life because it was comfortable, easy and allowed me to move through life without having to be responsible for anything. I had to get rid of old versions of myself, which meant that I had to, in some cases, give up people who were part of that old version. If you’re not willing to give something up, then this is going to be a difficult process for you. Think about what you’re willing to give up.

 

Changing your life means changing your lifestyle. I had to change my whole lifestyle with this change that I’m living in now. I had to do things differently. I had to stop completely doing some of the things that I’ve done. I had to create new behaviors, new patterns, and new levels of accountability. Really thinking about what it is about your lifestyle, the choices that you’re making that need to shift. Being compassionate, honest, and open will turn people more than being judgmental, stereotyping, and treating people demeaning and denigrating them.

How do we get back to seeing the good in each other? How do we get back to being vulnerable and being able to share parts of ourselves with each other? Being present. It means that I’m in the moment with you, interacting with you versus interacting with you based on the assumptions and the stories I am making up about you based on how I’m judging or stereotyping you. This change is going to require a lot of personal work from all of us. We have to decide what it is that we’re willing to do.

Removing labels. Stop seeing each other as a label and get to know each other as a person. We are more than those labels and we have to be able to not allow other people to define who we are and to label us. Listen to respond and not to react. Most of us in conversations with each other listen to say something. In many cases, we’re already thinking about what we want to say before that other person’s done talking. We’re reactionary. A reactionary conversation is more about me versus the speaker. If I’m more responsive, ask questions, and get more clarity, then that’s more about the other person. Are you more reactive or are you more responsive?

All of these take conversations. Here’s what I’d like you to do. After you finish reading this, take an action step. Do something that will drive you closer to your own authentic self, your own authentic voice, and your own authentic behaviors. Find somebody to talk to about what came up for you while you were reading this. What did you think about? What did you feel?

This work is about practice. It’s not perfection. Creating a daily practice that you can do for a minute, a day, a week, a month, knowing that one day you may do well at it and the next day you may do poorly at it. The nice thing about life is that we’ll have another day to practice for many of us. I say that because I never know what tomorrow’s going to bring. I always hope that I wake up with another day to practice and know that that’s not always the case.

We all can change our own narrative. I believe there are more people on the planet who want a more humane world. Those voices are being overshadowed by the voices of dissent and division. We all have to step up. I truly believe there are more people who want to live in a collaborative world that compromises part of it, and that is more loving and kind than people who want to be in a place of division.

Instead of complaining about what other people are doing, put that energy into making personal changes to create the world you want. Realizing that there are no shortcuts to this work and you can’t do this work from your comfort zone. Step out. Step into your learning zone. Step out of your comfort zone. Be more authentic. Take one step that will drive you deeper into your more authentic self.

I want to thank you for reading. If you enjoy this content, please subscribe. Share it with your friends and colleagues around the world. My goal is to get 1 million subscribers, so any help and support you can provide to meet that goal would be very much appreciated. We are going to continue this show around authenticity and I will be starting to do some interviews of folks who are in their own transitions in living their most authentic lives.

If you want to communicate with us, you can hit us up on our website at DelaCruzSolutions.com. Twitter and Instagram @BillDeLaC. Let us know what you think. Let us know of topics that you’d like to see, that you’d like to read about. Continue busting bias and to be more authentic. Continue to own your impact on the world. Thank you for making the world a better place.

 

Important Links

• The Four Agreements
• Twitter – @BillDeLaC
• Instagram – @BillDeLaC
• Bill de la Cruz – Facebook
• https://Anchor.fm/origination-point-podcast/support