The Other Side of Leadership: Moving from Authoritarian to Authentic
Robert Palmer, PhD
Your reality is what you make it, but that doesn’t mean it’s actual. Most people are not aware of the difference between their reality and actuality. They also lack awareness of how they let circumstances affect them at the core of their authentic being. Your reality includes a complex layering of thinking, emotions, relationships, health, and spiritual assumptions that cause problems because you are unaware of what you are doing to yourself. Your reality is the world you create. The state of things in your life is based on your romantic idea of them. Your reality is the unconscious bending of your perception to meet your desires or achieve your expectations. Your thinking creates your reality, and your choices reinforce this reality. However, your reality is not necessarily actuality, and you live with much dissonance, where many of your problems emerge. Dissonance is tension, a clashing that takes a mental toll on your well-being because your intrafunctioning (i.e., personality strengths, character, habits, attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, values, and perceptions) is out of alignment. You strive for consistency, but dissonance occurs when your reality differs from actuality. It’s not healthy for the long term, so you must become aware of your reality versus actuality.
Actuality is the world as it actually exists (e.g., the laws of nature, principle of reaping and sowing, etc.). Regardless of how you think or feel about it, actuality is the state or quality of something as it is, not as intended, expected, or hoped for. You can determine your reality by shaping it how you want it. Your circumstances, finances, talents, knowledge, abilities, attitudes, skills, and experiences influence what you think, which impacts how you feel and motivates your behavior, but that doesn’t mean it’s actual—hence the false reality. Everyone lives in a false reality to some degree, and the question is, to what degree? The higher the degree of your false reality, the more dissonance you experience. You experience a more significant performance gap that minimizes your performance or effectiveness in your mental, social, physical, emotional, and spiritual functioning elements because it skews your thinking (Brookfield, 1987). Skewed thinking lacks clarity of the actuality of the situation and circumstances, allowing dissonance to emerge in how you feel, behave, and make choices. If you minimize the gap between your reality and actuality, your performance or effectiveness improves. The minimized performance gap is because your thinking is based on actual facts and actual experience. If you make good choices, you will feel better, smarter, and more confident as you reinforce this process for yourself and strive with hope toward your potential to be fully functional.
Living a life based on actuality enhances you and helps you shape a more accurate reality, allowing you to pursue your potential and fully function. You need to be aware of what is actual in your life, and not simply good intentions, dreams, and desires. What are you learning? What are you (actually) doing? How are you measuring what you are doing? For example, many people love the idea of being a writer. “I’m going to write a book one day.” However, few actually write. You are constantly influenced all day, even at night, when you dream. Daydreams and Nightdreams keep your mind active. What is this constant influence doing to you? On a scale of 1-5, how aware are you of the impact of what is influencing you? Most people need to be aware of what is happening around them. How significant is that influence? Who are you allowing to influence you?