Living Lucky® Podcast with Jason and Jana Banana

Is Authenticity Just a Buzzword?

• Jana and Jason Shelfer • Season 5 • Episode 28

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Are you living a life that's true to who you are, or are you stuck in a cycle of meeting others' expectations? Dive into the transformative conversation between Jana and Jason Shelfer on their podcast, "Living Lucky," as they explore the complexities and rewards of being your authentic self.

In this episode, the duo delves into the concept of authenticity, distinguishing between our "social selves" and our "essential selves." They argue that living incongruently with your true self can lead to a life of resentment and unfulfilled dreams. The hosts also discuss the psychological and evolutionary reasons behind our innate need to fit in, revealing how this can conflict with our deeper desires to stand out and be unique.

Jana and Jason offer actionable tips for aligning with your authentic self, such as meditation, journaling, and self-communication. They emphasize the importance of this alignment in manifesting your dreams and living a life that truly resonates with you.

Don't miss their upcoming 4-day challenge, FINDING YOUR INNER VOICE, aimed at helping you connect with your inner voice. Say goodbye to a "beige" life and start living in technicolor. For more, visit their website at www.startlivinglucky.com


[00:03:03] Jason is saying that we all pretend to be what others want us to be.

[00:06:06] Sending mixed signals, uncertain about desires, self-doubt, chaos.

[00:08:07] Chasing meaning in wrong things, seeking authenticity.

[00:12:27] Live authentically with meditation, journaling, and self-awareness.

[00:14:22] Are you living a beige or boujee life?  Join the challenge at livinglucky.com

#LivingLucky #Podcast #JanaShelfer #JasonShelfer #Authenticity #SocialSelf #EssentialSelf #ManifestingDreams #Meditation #Journaling #InnerVoice #BeigeLife #TechnicolorLife #4-dayChallenge #StartLivingLucky #BoujeeLife 

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The 4 pillars of Living Lucky
Believe in yourself
Believe in the people around you
Believe in your circumstances and
Believe that God is working through you, for you, and always conspiring in your favor.

*Previously Recorded

Speaker 1:

Are you ready to create a life you crave? Let's spin that doom loop of negativity into an upward success cycle and start living lucky. Good morning, I'm Jana, I'm Jason and we are living lucky. We're talking about being authentic today. You just have to be yourself.

Speaker 2:

Be true to yourself.

Speaker 1:

So easy.

Speaker 2:

Just be you.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, my mom said that first day of kindergarten. Just be you, who else?

Speaker 2:

are you gonna be?

Speaker 1:

I literally thought mom has lost her marbles. Who else am I gonna be? I think I'll be George today, and as I get older, I realize it's the hardest job in the world. Right, it is so complex being Jana. However, when it comes to manifesting our dreams and creating the life that we absolutely fall in love with, creating a life that inspires us from within, it is very, very important to be our authentic selves.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, because then you get what you truly want.

Speaker 1:

Let's first talk about what does it mean to be authentic? Now, we've often talked about we all have our social selves. Now, this is the self that we have. Pretty much it's almost like Play-Doh. It's our Play-Doh self, it's our adaptive self. And it pretty much forms to what the people around us want us to be or expect us to be.

Speaker 2:

Or what we think they want us to be.

Speaker 1:

Right, yeah, and I don't know why we can't just learn growing up. People are gonna love us, for us. Do you hear that frog in my throat?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Well, they're either gonna be our true friends or they're not.

Speaker 1:

I know, but for some reason we feel like we have to show up the way we think they want us to in order for them to love and accept us.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and the truth is always gonna show itself. Over time. That's the thing it gets going to start coming out. If you're putting on airs, your authentic self is always gonna want to come out, because when you live incongruent to yourself, you're gonna start building resentments.

Speaker 1:

Your life gets hard, your essential self always wins. It always wins in the long run. That's why they say wherever you go, there, you are. That's what they say that feels like such an obvious statement. Is that a yogi-bara?

Speaker 2:

statement. It's probably some yogi, but it's one of those statements because people try to leave situations. And then they recreate them and they just recreate the pattern because they go try to change themselves when what they need to do is really just change themselves and everything around them changes.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so let me just put this in sixth grade terms. What Jason is really saying is that we all put on a facade, we all put on these masts of what we think society wants us to be, what we think our friends want us to be, or our community, or our family, or our friends, or our neighbors, our church. It's like we all put on these little, I want to say almost like roles Not like the kind of roles- Not a sandwich role. Like a play it's like an acting role. Yes.

Speaker 2:

We act a part.

Speaker 1:

We do, we all act the part, and when we get feedback for doing a good job in that role, then we think, oh, that's what we're meant to be in the world.

Speaker 2:

The feeds. End of that part.

Speaker 1:

Yes, that feeds our ego and our ego says, ooh, do more of that, because you'll get more attention if you do that.

Speaker 2:

But authenticity is being true to who you really are, at your core.

Speaker 1:

Yes, and there's also another part of that. There's also another psychological component to this whole thing, in that we do have an innate need to fit in. It's almost a survival mechanism that we developed way back in the Stone Age days. They have it in the animal kingdom and it's so that we don't stand out like a sore thumb and get eaten by the lions.

Speaker 2:

Right.

Speaker 1:

Right. So we want to blend in. So, that being said, we want to conform. Basically, we want to conform to what society wants us to be. So, therefore, we have been conditioned and programmed to follow the rules. Oh yeah, we don't want to get in trouble. We don't want to get in trouble, we don't want to stand out, we just want to be a part of the group.

Speaker 2:

So in our souls we want to stand out, but also in our social self we don't want to stand out, because our amygdala are that.

Speaker 1:

Already we have a conflict going on.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that primitive brain is telling us fit in, play it safe.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's like we want to stand out, but we want to fit in.

Speaker 2:

There's not that we're not in the dangerous world of the Serengeti and we're not in the dangerous world of prehistoric times, where the dinosaur is going to grab us or something. But I get it, I hear you, I feel it.

Speaker 1:

So we've talked about what it means to be your authentic. Now, why this is so important in manifesting is because when you have these conflicting emotions, conflicting thoughts inside your body, inside your brain, what are you sending out to the universe? What kind of vibration are you sending?

Speaker 2:

It's a conflicting vibration.

Speaker 1:

It's like you're sending mixed signals to the guy across the bar Right. Does she like me? Does she not? Does she want to go home with me? Does she not? Does she want me to buy her a drink? Does she not? Does she want my number? Does she not Like? You're sending mixed signals and so, therefore, you're manifesting to the universe. Oh, I want my dream. Oh, I doubt. Oh, I want my dream. Oh, but I'm uncertain. I want this dream. I don't know. I don't know if I can really handle it. Maybe I don't want this, or maybe I'd be better off, if maybe I'm just not worthy of it. Like you're just sending out all sorts of chaos.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's running towards and running away at the same time.

Speaker 1:

And so there's layers. There's layers of emotions that you're trying to filter through. That's why it plays such an important role in manifesting your dreams.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, when you know what you want and when you are true to yourself, you have a lot more confidence in going after what you want.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so let's make the turn here. How, how can we show up more authentically?

Speaker 2:

I think the big thing is you have to just slow down and quiet the outside noise, and for me it's meditation and saying, hey, who am I and what do I want and what do I stand for Like, what are my core values? And we've done the values test, some of the values test. I was shocked that I'd been chasing after a lot of things that weren't really in my values.

Speaker 1:

I know we have shiny object syndrome and we find ourselves getting distracted.

Speaker 2:

But what I found was chasing after those things was really trying to fill a hole in my value system. But I was just giving the wrong meaning to those items Because I wasn't being authentic. It was taking on what I thought I saw in someone else's life and I was adding my meaning to that for them, or what I thought they were getting from it, because I really had no idea what they get from these objects that I was chasing. And so then I thought, well, if it's true for what I think it is for them, then it must be true for me. So I'm going to chase after that.

Speaker 1:

Do you know how many people for some reason this example comes to mind but do you know how many people I know go into a particular career and the one that comes to mind? I know so many people who have gone to law school because they think their parents will be proud of them. Medical school law school, medical school Medical school, law school or even business school, because they think oh well, that's what my parents want me to do. My parents want me to take over the business.

Speaker 1:

My parents want me to make a lot of money. My parents don't want me to struggle when really deep down in their core they're like I just want to be a scuba diver.

Speaker 2:

Right, I just want to be an artist.

Speaker 1:

Right, I just I love music. I've always loved music. That's what lights my heart up. I could care less about having more cars and more property to take care of, I don't really want to fight for a living. Right. I don't really want to deal with blood and sickness, yeah, or you know, with the law they're like oh my gosh, I didn't realize that I had to read, like I had to sit and just read the law all day long, and there are some.

Speaker 2:

there are people that love it, and that's great, but there are so many people, they go into it, they go into it for the wrong reasons, just because they're, because they're showing up as their social self.

Speaker 1:

Yes, they're showing up because somewhere in their life their parents have said oh well, little Billy is the smart one in the family and he is going to become the lawyer.

Speaker 2:

Or they're just filling someone else's expectation.

Speaker 1:

And then, all of a sudden, little Billy is like oh, my parents want me to be this and for some reason it gets stuck in their subconscious brain.

Speaker 2:

That will give me love, that'll give me acceptance.

Speaker 1:

Exactly, that's your way of feeling it, and so then and then they go into this, this career, and it's never manifest into exactly what they picture, because underneath it is a conflicting emotion. It's a conflicting emotion of I'm just doing this out of obligation. There's, there's a seed of resentment that is deep, deep down underneath it and we don't realize that when we're doing it, we we feel like, oh yeah, this is what I was born to do, this is what I am meant to do.

Speaker 2:

We don't realize we're the easiest people to lie to like. It's easiest to lie to yourself about the small things, about the big things and the it.

Speaker 1:

That's just the way it is, and we will tell ourselves we're doing it for the right reasons, because we're so wrapped up in our social self and wanting to fit in and wanting to please someone and then we hit a point in our lives where, like you said, there's a hole, there's a void, and we we try to fill it, we tried to Figure it out, and we're like I can't find happiness, I can't find joy, I don't know what's happening here so many people get to a point where they actually described their life is just Bland or like beige, like it's like.

Speaker 2:

My life has no color.

Speaker 1:

I don't know what I like. Oh, do you have a beige life? How many people out there are living a beige life?

Speaker 2:

it's like I don't even know what I like anymore, I don't even know what brings me joy, and it's a and it's. That's that's where you know you haven't been living authentically.

Speaker 1:

I do. I don't want to live a beige life, I want to live in. You live in a.

Speaker 2:

I want to be a technic color. That's what I want to live.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so some ways to really find your authentic self. You said meditation. I always find that's a good one. Journaling, I think, is a good one. I really think Learning to communicate with yourself, I know for me lately just learning to find fine tuning my body and realizing you know what my emotions are, hold my issues in my t-shirt, and so when there's something that hurts in my body, it usually has nothing to do with my physical being. It usually has something to do with my soul is trying to tell me something.

Speaker 2:

So Just really listening and emotional tension, yes, and I hear you say all the time. What is this telling me?

Speaker 1:

my body is. What am I?

Speaker 2:

showed my shoulders hurt. What is that telling me? What is that telling me?

Speaker 1:

something, it's always.

Speaker 2:

What is that telling me?

Speaker 1:

so learning to communicate not only with my soul, but with my body and with my mind and with my emotions with my spirit and the universe and God and and just learning how to Navigate that whole.

Speaker 2:

so every answer is just waiting for the right question, and that's why, when I meditate that, asking myself, what do I want to stand? Who do I stand for like? Who am I like? What's that one word? What if someone's gonna associate me with something? What would that? One word to me it's extraordinary.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I think you're extraordinary, that's and I didn't know exactly what it was and it took me a while to get there, but I was like I know that I'm made for extraordinary things and just making extraordinary choices in the micro moments of life.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, but that's whatever you do. If you think of me, please don't think of beige. I hope this helped you. If you are looking to get in touch with your authentic voice, or what I like to call your inner voice, I hope you can join. Our four day challenge is starts.

Speaker 1:

September 12th through the 15th, and you can find the link in the podcast notes or you can always go to our website, living lucky dot com. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a beautiful day, bye, bye. If the idea of living lucky appeals to you, visit us at start. Living lucky dot com.