When you think of a genuine person, what sorts of characteristics spring to mind?
Who are the people you can think of who are genuine? What is it you like about them and are drawn to?
And – I guess for where this is going – would others describe you as a genuine person?
What does it mean to be genuine?
When you look up genuine in the dictionary, a number of things become clear. The Cambridge Dictionary says this:
…real and exactly what it appears to be…honest and sincere…”
We also get phrases like true and authentic, and it is easy to come up with words like trustworthy, accurate, incontrovertible.
“Exactly what it appears to be” refers to physical things and we think of genuine people as being honest and sincere. Genuine feelings are not fake or insincere or put on for show. And genuine friends are those we know we can trust.
But I like the idea of genuine people also being exactly what they appear to be. People who are neither fake nor false and don’t put on a show that smacks of manufactured emotion, but live in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get way. It is of course possible to do this without much grace or kindness, which is equally unattractive.
What does it mean to be the opposite?
Imagine being described thus: bogus, fake, insincere, artificial, misleading. Phony. Misleading. These are all antonyms for genuine, but would be devastating descriptors of one’s character.
We live in a world of social media where so much of what we see online might be fake. Curated to look like we are having the best time and living our best lives but the reality is very different. We can choose to present what and who we like to the world, but this is far from genuine.
Sometimes there are good reasons for this. There are times when keeping how we are or what we feel to ourselves is important for our own protection or in kindness to the other.
There are two different things at play here – being wise about what we show of ourselves to the world is very different from putting an Instagram-worthy post out there that misleads and misinforms.
How do we see beyond what is fake so we can really build authentic and sincere connections?
And what does it mean to be a genuine person?
This is where we are going to go for the next few weeks as we explore what it means to be genuine and how that impacts how we live and the choices we make.