How to be authentic and hopeful
How to be authentic and hopeful. At the same time. Authenticity is one of the most common words on social media, spoken about all the time. It is used frequently. In fact, any blog post or content online that contains authenticity, generally gets more viewing than most content out there.
Why? Because people want to be authentic, they want to be true to themselves, they want to know how to do this. But how do we have the balance between being authentic and having great hope for our future and what we can achieve? It's a question that has been asked to me by many people before because we know that people who want to be natural leaders and maximize their potential will want to be entrepreneurs and to change the face of the world or have a positive impact on the masses, or even just those that they care deeply about.
We know that they set up vision boards, they set up plans, they have these grand ideas about where they want their life to go, so when does authenticity then become a little bit far fetched? Well in reality, authenticity is not far fetched. It's not far fetched at all. The reality is that, for us to want to be able to achieve a goal, we need to have a mission, we need to have a purpose for why we are doing it. And we need to plan to achieve things that are above our basic reach.
So in other words, if I'm earning say $1,000 a week, fairly basic salary. If I'm earning $1,000 a week and I say I want to earn $20 more by selling stuff online. Okay, to be affiliate tangible things for people anywhere across the globe right except for countries most western countries that should be tangible. So, I'm going to earn $1,000 a week, and I'm going to earn an extra $20 by selling things online, that's going to help with savings. Now that goal is incredibly simple, 20 extra dollars per week that's 80 bucks.
In a month, most people have things in their house that cost a lot more than $20 for example. And they could therefore make more than 20 bucks, it's incredibly achievable for people to declutter their homes and make 80 bucks per month. And I speak with this experience because I've made over $6,000 on Facebook marketplace in a pretty short space of time. So, how people can achieve is by creating visions that are actually grand. Like, I want to actually earn an extra $200, per month. So that means, I want to have at the very least, $50 per week. So you are more than doubling the 20 bucks goal per week that you're earning by selling things in your house that you no longer need or by pet sitting, or by helping somebody else, mowing their lawns or something like that doing these side jobs to increase your savings.
Now a couple of things that come from this first of all $200 is going to give you more to save. That's going to help your savings much better. You're going to be more motivated because the goal is bigger, and it's a little bit harder to achieve. And you're going to be more driven by the final outcome of what you get. As a reward for sticking to your savings because $200 saved up over, say, a year of doing this is decent money.
You can go on a holiday with that, for example. Now some people will create a vision board for this, you know they'll put up $200. They'll have a picture of the pile of cash and all this other stuff or have these other even grand gestures about how many people are going to be coming into their business team. How many holidays, they're going to have, they're going to book them in.
They're going to tell people what they're going to do, so that their affirmations are something that happens. And then people around them start whispering, saying things like honor really gnarly that that's possible because right now I see where you're at. And I don't think that's actually honest for you. But here's the thing, being authentic means you are connected to yourself and your capabilities.
It means you are connected to what you have the ability to achieve. It means you're connected to who you are as an individual. So when people are setting these visions and these goals, they know whether they have the up and go to actually make that extra $200 per month, or to get another team of 10 people. They know whether they have the drive to do it. They know whether their why or their, their reasoning behind it is big enough to drive the motivation for that thing to happen.
So, it's very disconnected for people to suggest that an authentic person or a confident person who's trying to achieve something that supposedly seems out of that realm of possibility is far fetched or hopeful. And suddenly no more authentic identity, like authenticity is at a point in time. But authentically confident people are consistently working on themselves. And this is what people who aren't confident in authentic donors, don't get.
They don't get that to consistently Be confident and authentic. You are consistently working on your mindset, you're consistently working on your self talk, you're consistently working on doing meditation and journaling, consistently working on getting work-life balance, you're consistently working on learning different things. It is not unrealistic for someone who's never had a team before to know how to have a team of 10 people in six month's time, because that person understands that they have the capacity to learn.
It is only far fetched and ridiculous and far too hopeful and inauthentic for someone who doesn't know themselves and someone who doesn't have the awareness of their capability and their abilities to learn and fill the gaps in the information. Older information deficit in that time. So it's important that people create goals that are realistic fast, they've got to be SMART - they've got to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time framed.
And we are often reflecting all the time as leaders, as authentic people, as achievers. We are wanting to achieve that goal. We are always checking to see, based on what has happened today and we're going to achieve that goal tomorrow. And we don't think so. We change a timeline. And we have that flexibility.
People think that having flexibility of the mind to change a timeline means that we aren't successful. No it's not, it means we have the very version of success. We don't change the timeline. And we could have simply changed it by a couple of days but because we didn't have flexibility in the mind we didn't. And now we found a timeline.
We have found ourselves, we haven't found our capabilities, we found ourselves through having a poor mindset. Confident, authentic people don't do this because they aren't worried about the timeframe. You'll notice that people who are confident and authentic set goals, and maybe they won't achieve them by the exact date all the time, but they will achieve them.
And people will say things to them like you know what you're one of the people out there that always achieves the goals. And it's so great to see because not many people do. You might not always do it on the very day. But you do always do it. You always stick to it for yourself.
And you always follow through. I want people to think about that, I want you to read that, to let that sink into your mind. Because yes, if you're authentic you're accountable, and you got to get stuff done. But you only slide into the hopeful stage, if you haven't done SMART goals. If you haven't been realistic about what you can do if you have a lack of awareness about who you are.
If you aren't prepared to put in the effort to learn what you don't already know to achieve the things that you want to achieve. So there's a big difference between authenticity and being too hopeful authenticity and confidence does not mean we give up on having great visions or grand gestures, big goals for life and how we can impact people, things or markets for example, it means the opposite. It means we actually have the guts, the determination, the persistence, the resilience to chase those things and to go after them.
And often, that persistence won't be understood by other people but it doesn't need to be, often those big goals might be understood by other people but it doesn't need to be either. And we need to remember that. So if you're reading this, and people are saying to you while you're really being true to yourself or you're just creating a far fetched goal, making it hard on yourself to achieve it. Well, two things. First of all, maybe check if your SMART goal isn't really realistic because maybe there's some truth in what someone's saying to you.
And it's worthwhile taking a couple of minutes to reflect on it. Before you get your back up about it, the second thing is, it's your goal. If you can do the work to make sure that whatever gap you have between where you are now and where you need to be can be filled, so that you can achieve a goal, there's nothing that's gonna stop you. Literally nothing.
And you need to remember that, to show people that you are authentic, confident, and not merely hopeful or waiting for something to land in your lap, you show them through action. And you do it Diane, and Diane. And what happens is that that action silences the critics. It really does.
