Claim What Lifts You Up

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My book, Genuine Power—7 Techniques to Be Powerful in a Loud, Complicated World, includes a chapter called “Make ‘Be Appropriate’ Your Motto.” The lesson behind the technique is easy—people pleasing robs you of your authentic self. You may think you can only get ahead by using negative or self-sacrificing behaviors you’ve seen others use. But the reality is simple—when you take actions that don’t align with your values, you lose yourself one small, painful piece at a time.

You can stay in genuine power if you calibrate your behavior, where you keep your authentic self while adapting to any situation. However, staying authentic is easier said than done. So, we’ll do a deep dive on this topic and talk about four ways to be your authentic self in the May series, Claim the Real You.

Baking is for Kicks. Or is it?

After watching “The Great British Bake-Off,” Maggie Olson was equal parts excited and intimidated to try a baking experiment. She quickly knocked out a recipe wish list. But after watching one baking fail after another on the show, she was determined to get it right. So, she designed a strategy. Every week, she’d choose a recipe, carefully select the ingredients on Friday night and have a go at it on the weekend.

Pushing herself to make everything from bagels to Oreos to carrot cake gave Maggie’s self-esteem an unexpected lift. She thought she was baking for kicks, but she says, “My internal monologue slowly evolved from, ‘Well, I guess I’ll try that,’ to ‘I can do that.’”

Maggie learned something new about herself: She likes taking smart risks. She decided to apply that courageous approach to other parts of her life. She took a chance the next time there were new projects at work, and her job took on newfound meaning. Then she gave her portfolio a second look and courageously rebalanced it to meet new financial goals. Maggie observed, “If you can do one thing, you can do more hard things, and there is great satisfaction to be had in chasing these milestones.”

The Feel Good Challenge

There’s nothing like the feeling of accomplishment—the, “Hey! I did that! moment— to boost healthy self-confidence. But don’t let a rewarding moment be a one-off. Claim whatever makes you feel strong and self-assured and make it part of your essence, wherever you are. Here are three ways to do that:

• Make it fast by taking 30 seconds to affirm, “My success lies in being authentic. I believe in myself.”

• Make it deep by taking 30 minutes to ask a few friends to describe three qualities they love about you. (You might even break up this exercise into work or school people and after-hours friends.) If you’re unsure where to start, kickstart the conversation by asking about attributes like, “brave,” “kind,” “smart,” “adventurous,” “insightful,” “fun,” and “loyal.”

• Make it real by choosing one quality you love about yourself, and then use it everywhere. You may have a dynamic chain-reaction of good, just like Maggie Olson did.

Don’t keep your best qualities in a silo. Claim what lifts you up.