In our facilitation training we make a big deal of finding your authentic style – you don’t have to pretend to be someone else! Authenticity even gets a whole domain to itself in our facilitation assessment. We believe that to be really useful to someone else (whether we are consultants, managers, caring professionals etc) there needs to be some congruence between our values, how we live our lives and how we try to help others. Working for that alignment requires feedback, awareness, honesty and, probably, time.

I like the work of Mike Robbins on authenticity , see this Huffington Post article for example.

Also, this YouTube clip is a great TEDx video of Mike – don’t worry about the wobbly footage (you will learn to ignore it or can just listen in and look at something else). There are a number of powerful stories to make you laugh, and maybe cry, that illustrate his points – and not a PowerPoint slide in sight. Listen out for his iceberg ‘icebreaker’.

Tags: behaviour