I’ve never really liked the word authenticity.
It’s become one of those words that the culture’s used so often that it’s almost collapsed under the weight of its own meaning. Brands are authentic. Influencers are authentic. Leaders are authentic. Everyone is being encouraged to “show up authentically”, which usually seems to involve talking to a front-facing camera about being vulnerable.
The fascinating part for me lies in not who is or isn’t authentic, but what happens when we actually are authentic.
Not performatively authentic, or strategically vulnerable. Not “being yourself” because someone on Instagram told you that’s the secret to personal branding.
I mean the deeper kind. The feeling of being so congruent with who you are, what you want and the life you’re living that there is very little friction between your internal and external worlds.
In my 37 years on this weird planet of ours, I’ve experienced enough periods of both alignment and misalignment in my life to become convinced that something strange happens when those two worlds match.
Things open.
Ideas arrive. People appear. Opportunities seem to find you. Decisions become easier. You have more energy. You’re less preoccupied with how you’re being perceived because you’re not constantly negotiating with yourself.
I’ve always described the feeling as the universe handing me a set of keys and suddenly there are doors everywhere.
It’s magnetic.
For a long time, one of my biggest ambitions was to build a big agency.
I wanted the NYC-style warehouse. Loads of staff. Desks everywhere. People coming and going. Energy and ideas bouncing around the room. I wanted to walk into this thing I’d built and feel the scale of it.
And for a while, that desire was completely real.
Then I had my kids.
Something changed in me, but it took me years to admit that my ambition had changed with it.
I’m an incredibly giving parent. When I’m with my kids, I’m with them, and that requires a lot of energy from me. But then I’d arrive at work and step straight into another role that required me to give. I had a team that needed leadership, direction, decisions, feedback, encouragement, management, nourishment.
I was giving at home.
And I was giving at work.
And somewhere in between the two, I had designed myself almost entirely out of my own life.
The strange part was that, from the outside, nothing was particularly wrong. I had built the thing I said I wanted. The agency was successful. I loved the people. I loved the work.
But the dream had expired before I was willing to let go of it.
I spent probably six or seven years trying to make myself fit inside an ambition that belonged to an earlier version of me.
Eventually, I read Jenna Zoe’s book on Human Design. Whatever you think about Human Design, and I don’t think you need to believe in any particular system for this to be useful, it gave me language for something I already knew.
I wasn’t in alignment.
So I did something that probably looked, from the outside, like I was moving backwards.
I restructured the entire business. I let go of the model I’d spent years building. We moved away from full-time staff and towards a much more flexible contractor model, and suddenly I could work alone again. I could disappear into an idea. I could spend uninterrupted time in the parts of the business where I was actually good.
The effect was almost immediate.
I felt lighter, more creative, more energetic and more decisive. Things started moving again.
I felt like myself.
And that’s when I started to understand something I wish I’d understood much earlier:
Sometimes the most inauthentic version of yourself is simply an authentic version you’ve outgrown.
I think we misunderstand authenticity because we imagine there is some fixed, true version of ourselves buried underneath everything else, waiting to be uncovered.
Find her and you’re done.
I don’t think it works like that.
I don’t want to be the person I was three years ago. I certainly don’t want to be the person I was ten years ago. I want to continue becoming. I want to shed what no longer serves me, bring in what does, change my mind, follow new curiosities and occasionally blow up perfectly functional things because I can feel that my relationship with them has run its course.
Moving forward requires change.
And sometimes remaining “true to yourself” requires betraying an old version of yourself.
This is where I think authenticity becomes much more interesting than simply knowing who you are.
It’s knowing who you are now.
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I’ve experienced the opposite sensation too.
I once had a very close friendship that, over time, began to feel different. We’d begun to evolve in different directions, and somewhere along the way, the ease we’d once had was replaced by something that felt more like friction.
I began to feel judged for parts of who I was and the choices I was making. Whether that judgement was actually there almost doesn’t matter. What mattered was what started happening to me in her presence.
I became insecure. And I’m not an insecure person.
I noticed myself explaining things I wouldn’t ordinarily explain. Softening opinions. Becoming more conscious of how I was being perceived. I suspect there was some version of that happening in both directions: we’d both changed, but perhaps neither of us felt entirely safe enough to let the other person change.
Eventually, the friendship fell apart.
I’ve thought about it since because there was something almost physical about the shift. A person I’d once felt naturally drawn towards began to feel difficult to be around.
Like we’d gone from opposite poles of a magnet to matching ones.
What I learned is that relationships don’t always end when staying connected requires one or both of them to become less of themselves.
And any relationship that requires you to edit yourself eventually becomes exhausting.
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Most people talk about magnetism as though it’s a quality certain people possess.
She’s magnetic.
He’s charismatic.
They’ve just got something.
But the most magnetic people I’ve met aren’t trying particularly hard to be interesting.
They’re not performing themselves at you.
They have an undeniable sense of self, and there’s something incredibly energising about being around that kind of clarity.
You know what you’re getting.
Their opinions are their opinions. Their clothes look like their clothes. Their house feels like their house. Their choices make sense in the context of who they are. Even when their taste, life or worldview is completely different from mine, I find that kind of self-possession magnetic.
Their energy isn’t being spent second-guessing itself.
It’s available.
Maybe that’s what we’re sensing when we call someone magnetic.
Not charisma.
Congruence.
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I’ve been doing the To Be Magnetic work for around eleven years now, and one of the things I like most about its approach to manifestation is that it doesn’t really allow you to sit around waiting for the universe to deliver the Range Rover straight from your vision board to your driveway.
The basic premise is that you expand your sense of what’s possible by finding evidence of people who already have or have done what you desire. You examine the subconscious beliefs and patterns that might be keeping you stuck. You work on your sense of self-worth. And then you take aligned action towards the thing you say you want.
I’ve used that framework in different forms for more than a decade, and I can honestly say I’ve manifested an extraordinary amount of what I’ve wanted in my life.
Whether you believe there is something energetic happening in manifestation or something entirely psychological, I think the mechanism is interesting either way.
When you believe something is possible, you behave differently.
When your self-worth expands, your standards change.
When you’re clear about what you actually want, you notice opportunities that are relevant to it.
When you’re no longer contorting yourself around other people’s expectations, you have considerably more energy available to pursue your own.
And when you take action, things happen.
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Maybe that’s why authenticity feels energetic to me.
Inauthenticity requires an extraordinary amount of maintenance.
You have to remember who you’re supposed to be. Monitor how you’re being perceived. Suppress the thing you actually want. Continue pursuing the goal you’ve outgrown. Stay inside the friendship where you can’t quite relax. Make the sensible decision when every part of you wants the strange one.
All of that creates friction.
Authenticity removes it.
The energy that was being used to hold yourself in place becomes available for something else.
Creativity.
Connection.
Ambition.
Curiosity.
Action.
Life.
Magnetism might simply be what happens when your energy is finally moving in one direction.
Which is why I don’t think becoming magnetic is about becoming more charismatic, interesting or impressive.
It’s probably the opposite.
Stop trying to be interesting.
Get interested in yourself.
Pay attention to what makes you feel expanded and what makes you contract. Notice the people around whom you become more yourself, and the ones around whom you start editing. Question the goals you’ve been carrying for years. Look closely at your jealousy. Follow the weird desire that keeps resurfacing. Deal with the beliefs that tell you you’re not the kind of person who gets to have the thing you want.
And then move towards it.
Not recklessly. Not because every impulse is divine guidance. But thoughtfully, deliberately and with enough self-knowledge to distinguish between something you genuinely desire and something you’ve simply been taught to want.
If my daughter, Dylan, came to me at 25 and asked how to become one of those people who seems to have that inexplicable pull, I don’t think I’d tell her to work on her confidence.
I’d tell her to get to know herself.
Find out what makes you feel alive. Look at the beliefs that make you smaller. Work out where they came from. Decide which ones you’re ready to stop carrying. Pay attention to what you desire before the world tells you whether it’s sensible, impressive or appropriate.
Then don’t sit around waiting for it.
Go towards it.
Because maybe the universe isn’t handing us keys at all.
The doors are always there.
We just become much better at seeing them when we’re finally walking in our own direction.