A question I’m sometimes confronted with is how to be authentic in different situations.

What appears in the conversation then is an astonishment that despite similar situations one may have different reactions. It seems to be confusing that one cannot stick to one type of behavior which then doesn’t feel authentic.

A source of this idea can be that one has only one self and needs to develop a knowledge of that self.

It is not clear how many selves we have nor if it is possible to only have one self.

What experience tells us is that we adapt to our context. Part of the context we adapt to is how we feel about ourselves in that situation, how we experience the situation itself, and how we feel we can relate to the others present. One could describe this as choosing who we want to be in that situation, or as taking up the role we’ve learned to use under such circumstances.

What we also know, is that most of us have an inner critic who judges our performance. It establishes a tension between the self we are using in the situation and the one who seeks to support us with his judgment.

It’s these tensions that make us doubt our ability to be authentic. A natural reaction to them may be to either follow the inner critic’s judgment and to search for ways to either exclude some types of behavior or to align them.

But it might also simply be necessary to develop some temperance and discover how this behavior may make sense to us in this situation. Or, how it has been perceived by others. As we discover the patterns of how we relate to others, we learn to know our selves better. And as we do, we also develop an ability to choose the change we are looking for. Learning then becomes the exploration of how to enable the change we have been looking for.

It’s lifelong learning because learning how to change and adapt to the situation, oneself and others never stops.