Nice little article on authenticity from Paul Sills of Carrington Sloane.
What to say, what to say?
Communication is “the imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium”.
Authentic can be defined as “of undisputed origin and not a copy; genuine; based on facts; accurate or reliable, worthy of trust, reliance or belief”.
So, how authentic is our communication?
Sadly the two words cannot often be used together in relation to what we hear or say.
Compare that with Gandhi. A reporter once asked his wife how it was possible for her husband to give such long public speeches without any notes or references. She responded that it was easy because for her husband what he thought, said and did were all the same; for normal people these are three separate things.
It seems that the more tools we have at our disposal for arms‑length communication, the less authentic we are. We lie when we fill in the online dating forms, we pride ourselves on how many Facebook friends we have, yet we still sit at home alone. We decry the cyber bullying faced by our children while at the same time manipulate our own public persona so that people we have no genuine connection with (only a cyber‑presence) will think more of us…