Welcome back. It's episode 167 and today we are looking at the relationship between authenticity and belonging. So my intention here is to really overview these two human needs and highlight where there may be an opposition with one another. Because if you're anything like me, you may have felt a tension between these two.
Now my aim is that by talking through these ideas of authenticity and belonging and layering in a few psychological models on adult development, that hopefully it will raise your self-awareness. The tension or dynamic between these two needs was highlighted to me recently when I was reading the brand new book, It's great, by the way, The Myth of Normal by Dr. Gaber Matei and Hassan Daniel Matei. They talk a lot about the attachment needs of humans and how important that initial attachment relationship is to our survival, which is why it drives so much of our behavior.
They also highlighted the tension between attachment, which from a coaching lens and looking more at adult behavior, I'm framing here as belonging, and the call towards claiming our authenticity. Basically, if authenticity means you might be ousted from the group, then you can see how all too often people are going to choose belonging and stuff their own needs or desires deep down. And that's what we're talking about today. How our need for belonging, for love, for attachment and approval from others can be a driving force in muting our own inner voices.
So stay tuned as we pull this apart that much more. Welcome to Here to Thrive. I'm your host, Kate Snowwise. This is a podcast for people who are ready to steep up and live a happier life.
It's for those of us who are dedicated to understanding ourselves and getting the best that we can out of this thing called life. It's a mix of psychology and modern spiritual thought, always with a focus on practical advice so that you can take it back and apply it to your own life. I don't believe we're here to merely survive. I truly believe we're here to thrive.
So let's get going. So let's start with authenticity. What does it actually mean to be authentic? Because this word totally gets bandied around.
And especially, I think, in coaching circles or if you follow coaches on the internet, authenticity is kind of like the buzzword or what lots of people kind of refer to when we're talking about living a good life. I've used this quote before on the podcast, but I think it's a really good one that helps put it in perspective, at least for me. So Bronnie Weir, she is an Australian hospice nurse, and she wrote a book about her observations of the top regrets of the dying. The first regret she reports, and I quote, is, I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
Authenticity, to me, is all about being true to ourselves. I've also heard this referred to as being led by an internal compass, following your own North Star, or tuning into that inner GPS that helps you know if you're going in the right direction. I also think it aligns really well with, when we're layering in psychological models, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And when we look at the higher levels of what is typically shown as a pyramid, although Maslow himself didn't depict it that way, make note, the need of self-actualization, and in some later models, self-transcendence as well, are at the top.
Authenticity aligns fairly well with some of the concepts of self-actualization, which, as Maslow puts it, is seen as kind of a higher level human need. Now, self-actualization is about living up to one's potential and stretching ourselves towards growth and personal fulfillment. Now, I would argue that growth doesn't always need to be in terms of climbing or external achievement, as many people may conceive of it, but it can be about growing even more towards one's true self or authentic self, and that is where we find that sense of fulfillment. Super importantly, Maslow actually splits his need hierarchy into two, and he talked about growth needs and deficiency needs, or D needs.
This is really important because self-actualization, where I believe authenticity sits, is a higher level growth need. And the premise is that our basic needs have to be satisfied before we can really reach up and claim these higher needs. He spoke about the importance of integration between these needs and being whole, and as I said, rather than depicting it as this sort of ladder that we need to climb up, the idea is that all of our needs need to be met, and it's more of a fluid process in terms of becoming a whole person. A little bit of a digression, but when I was doing some research for this episode, I came across this quote, which was from a Scientific American article, which will be listed in the show notes, from Carl Rogers, who was a humanistic, I can't make sure if he was a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but he was one of the fathers of humanistic psychology, and he's quoted as saying that he believed that one of the loneliest states of all is not the loneliness of social relationships, but the loneliness that comes from an almost complete separation from one's own experience.
The idea that we can be disconnected from ourselves and how that is a unique type of loneliness that we feel deeply, that's authenticity. It's the split from honoring our deepest needs. And again, this speaks to that tension between authenticity and belonging. I think an important point here to note is that in order to live an authentic life, we need to be deeply self-aware.
We need to have that self-knowledge of what matters to us in order to be able to live in alignment with that. You have to know yourself in order to be able to live an authentic life. I can remember when I was feeling really disconnected from myself when I first moved to the U.S., so it was like 10 years ago almost, and I was sitting in my son's room, and he was a little toddler at the time, and I was thinking really, really hard about what mattered to me. Ultimately, I was starting to define my values.
Now, you can find values less online. I do have a card store exercise that I do with my clients, which is also on the Here to Thrive website. That's heretothrive.com. But it isn't so much about just choosing a couple of words and being like, cool, those are my values down here.
It's really about the reflection on what these words mean to you and how you want to align your behaviors with these values. How do you want to show up in the world and live a values-based life? This is crucial in the one-on-one work I do with clients, and I believe it is a foundation stone of living authentically. As I say, my coaching programs, they all start with what I call generating self-knowledge and awareness.
So coming back to my story and when I felt the most lost and disconnected or disoriented, disconnected from myself, some of the questions I was toying around with that might be useful to ask yourself are, and they're not rocket science, but it's about spending the time to reflect. What matters to me? What do I want to stand for and orient my life around? Or what do I believe are the ingredients of a great and happy life?
I encourage you to consider those questions. What matters to me? What do I want to stand for and orient my life around? And what do I believe are the ingredients of a great and happy life?
Again, I'll put them in the show notes. Because that will tell you so much about your authentic needs. What I will say in all my years of coaching is that honestly, people don't value the same things. There is a huge amount of variation.
In the same breath, I will also say that there is one value that does recur almost universally. The second most popular is something around health and general well-being. But the one that is almost universal has something to do with close relationships with others. Depending on the client, this might show up as the word love or partnership or friends and family or connection.
But this inner circle of deep connection with others is almost universally seen as important. As a precursor or a foundation stone on which to build a good life. Which brings me to my next point. If authenticity is the pull towards living ever more aligned with the callings from within us, from that own compass that we may have and following our own guidance, then how does this intersect with belonging?
This is what I believe that Maslow's hierarchy of needs can give us a really useful model to understand the complex mix of human needs that we experience. Belonging or love, it is a de-need or a deficit need. Humans need it, so to speak. Whereas authenticity is a growth need.
We crave it. So that craving need versus a need need. It makes complete sense to me that we all have attended, to move towards having our basic survival needs met. But if a deficit need is not met, that we will be pulled to rectify that.
And to belong, to be loved, it is one of those inbuilt human needs. Referencing a book I mentioned at the start that got me thinking about this in the first place, The Myth of Normal by Gabe Ametet and Daniel Ametet really did help illuminate this for me. Attachment is a human need. Small babies need to have attachment in order to survive.
And so this will dominate our coping and be a reflexive need when we are young. But as we grow, we meet new challenges in life, right? Enter our ongoing development. My favorite undergraduate paper or course in psychology was called Adult Development.
Total aside, but if you're studying psychology or you're interested in the stuff I talk about on this podcast, you may also love it. So go look it up and check if your school has such a paper. But I digress. Coming back to this ongoing tension between belonging and authenticity.
Belonging is a central need that can keep us away from truly and authentically being ourselves. Looking at it through the lens of some of these theories of development, belonging, if it comes into direct conflict with authenticity, will in many, if not most cases, trump authenticity. And so most of us will choose belonging over authenticity simply by nature. I'm going to open another theory of human development or adult development here, and that's Erickson's eight stages of psychosocial development.
When I came back to it, it illuminated something else for me. While there's eight stages, I'm going to focus on the later few from teenager on. But when I looked at that, it appears like there are two areas where authenticity is probably more up for grabs, so to speak. In my experience as a coach, I have noticed that many people in, I would probably say their early 40s, but sometimes their late 30s, start to feel the pull towards authenticity and wanting to live a deeper and more connected life with themselves.
But the identity development phase that comes up as a stage in adolescence and Erickson's model is another fascinating time to consider authenticity. Now, I don't know about you, but belonging was very much dominating my behavior when I was in my adolescence. I wanted to be cool. I wanted to be accepted.
I wanted to be loved. I wanted the boys to like me. But I can also look back and see strong elements, especially in my earlier adolescence, interestingly enough, of being very authentic and being driven by my own needs, interests, and desires. A dear friend recently reminded me in a very sweet note on my 40th birthday of my love for Betty Boop and Hanson.
Now, these things were not necessarily cool in the wider landscape of my age at the time. Hanson especially not. They were like teenybobbical, and I was like 15. Let's be really clear here.
And I had this moment of being like, you are so right. I was very in tune with what I thought was cool. And at some level, at that point in my life, I could not have cared less what other people thought about me. At that same time, and I think as I moved sort of into my later adolescence, that was when I really started to feel the weight of expectations around me, the weight of glossy teenage magazines and how, as women, we should look in the 90s.
It was the rise of the, or the biggest era probably, of the supermodal phenomena, but also around sort of academics and how to be successful in life and what a good life looked like based on society's values. Case in point, I was doing well at school and good at English, so was strongly encouraged to go to law school. That wasn't necessarily a personal drive for me when I look back. I wasn't interested in being a lawyer.
I was more interested in things like communications and media, but law was the prestigious and approved path. And I know that I felt that, even if people weren't outwardly explicit about it. That need to belong, both in my social circles at the time, but also to belong at a bigger societal level and to sort of ace life, so to speak. I can look back now and see it was a time when I unconsciously started to live a life that was not necessarily driven by my authentic needs, but instead pulled by my need to belong and be accepted.
I found this quote in an article referring to Erickson's model of psychosocial development and this point in adolescence where our identity development is up for grabs. They said, it is also the turning point where what the person has come to be meets the person society expects one to become. And that inner voice can go quieter and get smaller and smaller. That inner voice that, as we are a teenager, is just trying to emerge can very quickly be diminished.
I think this also has ties with intuition, which I'll be talking about in upcoming podcasts, but I highlight this simply to say it's incredibly hard to live in authentically and aligned life the whole way through. And hey, if you are at Gen Z and in your early 20s and already mastering this, I just want to give you a double high five, because I do think that generations are starting to question this earlier and earlier, which gives me great hope. So to summarize, the central challenge, as this model frames it, of these adolescent years is to find that strong sense of identity. And if we struggle with that, we may experience role confusion.
As my dear friend Wikipedia puts it, the existential question at this point in our lives is, who am I and who can I be? Those are kind of the questions that we are pondering deep down. Who am I and who can I be as we move through those vital teenage years? So basically what you're hearing me say is I'll be the first to admit that I did not leave my adolescence with a strong sense of my own identity or character, I wish I had.
And when I look back at my own story, this is what I really had to recreate as I turned into my 30s, when I had that realization of how disconnected I felt from myself, when I just moved to the USA, become a mother, and some of these identity questions really came up to be revisited for me again. And I'm so grateful for that. Lead me to where I am today. At this point, I think it's really vital to highlight that you're not failing if you're feeling like you haven't mastered the authenticity thing.
I just want to make that point really, really clear. I strongly believe that living authentically is an ongoing process of continuing to have that. relationship with your true self, we continue to evolve. And it requires ongoing practice and a willingness to live courageously, to grow and to be self-reflective.
So while here I am talking about it in simple stages, I by no means think life is this simple. Okay. So it's just a really useful way to consider it. But as humans, we are infinitely complex and it's just not this simple.
This just gives us some context to really consider some things. Coming back to Erickson's model, what I think is interesting is after adolescence, the next stage of development is early adulthood. And that is characterized by intimacy and connection with others. It's the love and belonging piece that they sort of say is the crucial exploration of this phase in your life.
Yet again, we're seeing that there is this kind of flip-flop and pull between authenticity and belonging. Now the wiki provided existential questions underpinning this phase of our adult development is really, can I love and be loved? Then finally, middle adulthood, which this model says is around 40 to 65, don't get caught up on the age brackets, is about generativity versus stagnation. Now these terms sound super nerdy, but generativity is about making a greater contribution and really looking outside of yourself to consider the impact or legacy you are having.
And people can find a sense of generativity in so many ways, including parenting, creativity, work life, you name it. It's not defined how you find generativity, but I see there are certainly some elements of self-actualization and self-transcendence that really align here. And this stage is where I have noticed in my work that I think people really start to naturally reconsider authenticity. It kind of reasserts itself here as a core need for people.
And the existential question underpinning this phase is, can I make my life count? As I brush over there, I do think the ages are very arbitrary. I think many people experience these stages at different times in their lives. I think generations are considering them differently.
And when I look back at my life, it certainly does not fit into these nice little boxes. As I mentioned, I was reconsidering identity in my thirties and really considering authenticity and these kind of generativity questions too at that point. And you know, I'll give Erickson some grace. He was a bit of an old school guy, so who knows what he would say today, but there's still some use in applying his model.
Finally, in Erickson's final stage of his model of development, that 65 plus sort of age group is about integrity or if things are going well, a feeling of despair. It's when you really start to evaluate if you've lived a good life and if you've lived one that is authentic and aligned and which you can be truly proud of. As Wikipedia says, the final existential question underpinning this life phase is, is it okay to have been me? So while I may not have necessarily given us a clear answer for how to navigate this tension between authenticity and belonging, what I hope I have illuminated is that there is this ongoing tension, that it's not easy to choose our authentic selves, especially if we feel like we're at risk of losing belonging or love in doing so, but that as humans, those tensions are always going to be there.
The more secure we become with ourselves and the more we move into adulthood, often the less we feel like we need to take care of that belonging need and those higher level needs around growth and authenticity and personal alignment may come to the fore a little bit more. That was a lot of nerding out on some psychological models, but I hope it has given you something to consider. Closing out, what I think is kind of cool is that looking at Erickson's models, it kind of brings us right back to where we started. As Bronnie Ware noted, one of the greatest regrets of the dying is that they wish they had had the courage to live a life true to themselves, not the life others expected of them.
That is an authentic life and it's not by any means easy to do, but with self-awareness and a willingness to be courageous, it's certainly something you can continue to move towards. Well, I hope that gave you some food for thought. So great to be back on the podcast. I love nerding out on this kind of stuff with you all and always hoping that we can move towards continuing to have that deeper connection with ourselves and live those deeper lives.
That's why I do this podcast. We're going to be continuing conversations with some upcoming guests. So if you're not yet subscribed, wherever you listen, go and make sure you're following the podcast so you get updates every other week of when the new episodes drop. To check out Here to Thrive's website, you can look at heretothrive.com and you will also find the show notes wherever you listen under each episode.
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