If you’re like most people, you aren’t having the impact you wish you could be having in your relationships, personal or professional, and you aren’t fully enjoying and feeling inspired by the current level of authenticity and richness in your connections. You might even be surrounded by people, have an active social life, and STILL feel awkward, alone, or isolated. If you have a nagging sense that more is possible, but feel lost about how to create it, read on…
At The Integral Center we’ve distilled a set of relating and communication principles and practices we call Authentic Relating. Here are the top 9 results we hear, time and again, after over a decade of working with hundreds of individuals at our live trainings.
- Be liked for who you are. Most of us are familiar with the game of trying to be someone or something we’re not in the hopes of getting love or being liked. Inevitably, this game is unsatisfying. In the end you can’t create true connection by disconnecting from yourself. One of the deepest rewards you can experience is to be liked and loved just as you are.
- Enjoy more people, more easily. When we take the time to truly get to know someone, we can usually find something to enjoy about them. But this doesn’t always come easily. Often, our unexamined assumptions get in the way of our ability to connect. You can create connections in a relaxed and casual way, feeling just as curious in uncovering differences as you are in discovering commonalities. With a little time and skill, you can experience shared humanity in any relationship.
- Handle difficult conversations. These inevitably arise from unmet expectations, misunderstandings, and broken agreements. It’s easy to avoid having these conversations because we feel uncomfortable, expecting it to be hard. You can learn to handle these situations so effectively and consistently, you’ll easily dive into them when you need to!
- Create more impact. We want our communication to be understood, but sometimes it’s not. You can learn to come across more consistently and effectively. You’ll choose words with clarity, simplicity, and power. You’ll easily find out if you have shared understanding. You’ll be aware of your verbal, vocal, and bodily cues and consciously choose how you use them. And you’ll tune-in to subtle responses in others and make adjustments easily and rapidly.
- Build goodwill, trust, and influence. When we feel understood and respected by others—when they take care and attention to hear and respect any differences we have—we feel trust and goodwill. When you express clearly where you stand, and others know you understand and respect where they stand, they’ll respond more openly to your influence. This is the kind of influence you will feel good about having, free of any deception.
- Create deep and meaningful connections. You know those magic and surprising moments in the wee hours of the night, often under the influence, where things get real? We share our unspoken admiration for each other. We disclose those stories we save for only our closest confidants. We confess our trust and care for each other. You can make these conversations more likely, with more people, and without requiring late nights or altered states.
- Experience freedom from maintaining appearances. In our ever interconnected world it’s hard, if not impossible, to control the information about us available to others. Maintaining appearances is tiring. White lies pile up and before you know it there’s a little spin department using up more brain space keeping your stories straight. You can experience profound liberation when you relax open and embrace more of who you truly are, blemishes and all. You will experience freedom from fear that others will get dirt on you and use it against you.
- Update your perspectives. We survive and thrive by growing and adapting, yet it’s easy to hold tightly to our positions and become stubborn around our most cherished beliefs. When you rapidly understand perspectives radically different from your own, you will quickly sort through them finding where you can update your beliefs and have more confidence in your way of making sense of the world.
- Enjoy being yourself! There’s no cookie-cutter mold for Authenticity. As you learn to express yourself authentically, you’ll grow increasingly more comfortable in your own skin. You’ll develop your own style of self expression, you’ll communicate your preferences with ease, and you’ll create the kinds of experiences you enjoy having with others. You’ll like and enjoy being yourself, even more than you thought you could!
These are just a handful of reasons that we’ve tracked working with these practices over the years. But you need to try it for yourself to see what it can do for your life.
What’s the next step? We have several programs where you can dive-in and get started now.
In particular, I want you to check out our Aletheia Integral Relating program so you can learn even more about the dynamic, enlivening possibilities that come online once you begin fostering your relational intelligence.
Hope to connect with you there!
Michael Porcelli