The common sense understanding of self is incorrect. We are wrong about authenticity and what it means for us as coaches, argues Tatiana Bachkirova
The idea of ‘being authentic’ is very precious for many people, particularly for coaches who are in the business of helping other people develop. I also did not question it for a substantial part of my life.
However, when I began working on my book, Developmental Coaching: Working with the Self, I found that the traditional understanding of authenticity does not sit comfortably with the notion of self that I was advocating in my book. This unsettled me. It also did not sit well with the understanding that I was coming to, of the contexts in which we act.
Instead of dismissing it I decided to explore the origin of this idea which came from French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. To my surprise, I discovered that what he meant by authenticity is quite different from the way it became popularised. And to my delight what he meant was quite congruent with the way I presented the self and how we might work with it in coaching.
This is a preamble to the story and I will now describe the paradox of authenticity in the traditional sense and then will argue that we need to ditch this old idea and adopt a different meaning of it. Apart from arriving at a more logical and coherent position on authenticity, it would also help us in arriving at a better conceptualisation of our professional expertise as coaches.
Let’s start by reminding ourselves of how most people have come to understand authenticity. Usually when we talk about being ‘authentic’, we tend to mean something like ‘being true to myself’. Even at this stage, we could identify an unpleasant potential consequence of such a definition.
For example, someone who is pretty nasty can also be authentic if they behave in a nasty way and happily accept this. However, the main paradox of authenticity is more interesting as it concerns all of us, nasty or wonderful. I will now give a very brief overview of a theory of self that is becoming more and more acceptable, replacing what could be termed the common sense understanding of self.
With the common sense position, we imagine that the self is some sort of an operator somewhere in the brain. This ‘operator’ acknowledges experiences we have, makes decisions, gives commands for the body to act, etc. However, this seemingly intuitive picture has not been confirmed by current findings from neuroscience. There is no apparent centre in the brain. There are many mini activations that support the various actions we perform. They go on and off and some of them operate simultaneously. We could identify them as ‘mini-selves’ as they do what we believe the self does on a bigger scale.
Each of these activations happens when there is some input into our ‘system’ from the outside or inside of the organism. This input is processed in the relevant part of the brain where a further connection is made to the corresponding organs that perform the action.
Each of them is specific to a particular function we tend to perform and can act in parallel to each other. Some of them are simple, some are much more complex. Some of them involve conscious processing of information, some of them do not. So, when we act it is not one self that allows it, but many mini-selves that ‘come online and go offline’ at different times depending on context.
This description of the multiplicity of self has now become much more acceptable and resonates with both scientists (eg, Gazzaniga, 2012; Kurzban, 2010) and coaches (Bachkirova, 2011; Lawrence, 2018).
Now let’s go back to authenticity. If we stick with the traditional definition of it as ‘being true to oneself’, the picture of the self that is presented above creates a major challenge: being true to which self?
It implies a different assumption that there is some sort of self that can be true or false. The ‘multiplicity of self’ view, however, suggests that we could be quite different in every function we perform.
With this challenge in mind, we need to understand what Sartre had in mind when he introduced the idea of authenticity. Interestingly, the way he describes it does not need a notion of true self but brings into the picture a context that I have mentioned above that often dictates its own demands and therefore requires different actions. Here is what Sartre describes as being authentic:
“To be authentic is to realise fully one’s being-in-situation, whatever this situation may happen to be, with a profound awareness that, through the authentic realisation of the being-in-situation, one brings to plenary existence the situation on the one hand and human reality on the other. This presupposes a patient study of what the situation requires, and then a way of throwing oneself into it and determining oneself to ‘be-for’ this situation” (Sartre, 1999, p54).
To put it in a simple way, authenticity involves a person understanding the situation and oneself in relation to it and then acting in this situation assuming full responsibility for their actions. It could be said then, that authenticity is not ‘being true to oneself’ but ‘being true to the situation’.
It also means that authenticity is not a permanent quality of the person that can be established once and for all. One can only be authentic by choosing authentic responses to concrete situations, one by one.
This has interesting implications for us as professional coaches. It is part of our expertise to judge what is required in coaching situations and act accordingly. Authenticity in its traditional sense of ‘being true to oneself’ in this context becomes not only difficult but counterproductive. Authenticity as ‘being true to the situation’ allows flexibility and becomes essential.
- Tatiana Bachkirova is Professor of Coaching Psychology and Co-Director of the International Centre for Coaching and Mentoring Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK
References
- T Bachkirova, Developmental Coaching: Working with the Self, Open University Press, 2011
- M S Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain, Constable & Robinson, 2012
- R Kurzban, Why Everyone (else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, Princeton University Press, 2010
- P Lawrence, ‘A narrative approach to coaching multiple selves’, in International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 16(2), 32-41, 2018
- J-P Sartre, J-P. Sartre War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War, 1939-1940, trans. Q. Hoare, Verso, 1999