on being authentic

Authenticity is about shedding pretences about yourself. It includes a lack of artifice and being transparently honest and sincere in your relationships (both with yourself and others). To be authentic is to be thoroughly genuine and trustworthy. This, of course will feed into a firm sense of identity and integrity, because you are not trying to dupe others or trick yourself into thinking that you are something that you’re not. (Layder 2004: 42-43).

Being authentic ‘is not just a matter of concentrating on one’s own self, but also involves deliberation about how one’s commitments make a contribution to the good of the public world in which one is a participant’ (Guignon 2004: 163).