David E. Nielson has a new book out The 9 Dimensions of Conscious Success - It’s All About You! The book is a journey about finding your purpose and growing as a leader with by creating your own path. Here is a guest post from David. Enjoy!
I was really disappointed when one of my favorite news anchors was caught being inauthentic. Brian Williams had stated that he had been in a helicopter that had received gunfire during his coverage of the Iraq war in 2003. Years later, people who were there came forward and said his story was not true; he had not been shot down in the Chinook helicopter and forced to land.
He experienced the true cost of being inauthentic as other stories of his were questioned such as his coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the Berlin Wall coming down. As a journalist, honesty, integrity, and authenticity are paramount. Once Williams lost that, he lost his job.
One of the significant consequences of not being authentic is erosion of trust. It’s very hard to trust people who project something they aren’t.
Trust
Let’s look at the trust issue on a tactical level, and at a very specific tool to increase your trustworthiness and, by extension, your authenticity.
There are some good books and articles on trust and undoubtedly some good definitions. I like to keep it simple. For me, trust between two or more people is simply “expectations met or unmet.” Generally, if you repeatedly do what you say
you will do, others will find you to be trustworthy. The opposite
is also true.
Years ago, I learned about a simple model called “Management by Agreement—MBA” taught to me by great mentors at The Atlanta Consulting Group. Basically, it is a trust model for making and keeping agreements.
The model has four basic tips or practices:
1. Make only agreements you intend to keep.
2. Avoid making or accepting fuzzy agreements.
3. If you have to break an agreement in the future, give earliest possible notice.
4. If you break an agreement, clean it up
immediately.
If you have mastered the clarity of your purpose and you operate with high self-awareness, you then can become effective and impactful when you are operating authentically!
When you are living your life on purpose, you are living your authentic life. Everything you do has a purpose. No longer do you have to walk the road of being the victim or victor of chance. You are making the rules and you are living by them every day.
About David Nielson
David Nielson brings over four decades of corporate, Fortune 500, and private consulting experience in organizational change management, leadership development, and training. David has helped guide large-scale change initiatives and business strategy driven by ERP, mergers, restructuring, and the need for cultural change. He's been a featured and frequent speaker at PMI, Project World, Chief Executive Network, Management Resources Association, TEC, IABC, Training Director’s Forum, and the Alliance of Organizational Systems Designers.
David has worked around the world delivering training and consulting Services. In all those years, those countries, those clients; David has observed, learned and collected great experiences and teaching points. David decided to work on a way to “give back.” His latest book, The 9 Dimensions of Conscious Success helps readers identify their definition of purpose professionally and personally to achieve conscious success.