Our True Colors: Embracing Your Authenticity
New Ventures West
Leader in Integral Coaching education, dedicated to supporting growth and development in a vibrant community.
Before reading this piece, see if you can find a part within you — a memory, an experience — of feeling less-than, othered, or not fully appreciated as you are.
Hold this part of you with love and compassion, and allow yourself to read the following words from this place, noticing how you are impacted.
“I keep trying to be light blue,” my client* said. “But unfortunately, I am vibrant orange, purple and red.”
Many of us hold a deep belief that who we are is not okay, and in order to belong, we need to become something or someone else.
We yearn to feel welcomed, received, and appreciated, and when we are not part of the dominant culture, feelings arise of being less than.
We respond by leaving ourselves and trying to become who others want us to be.
This is reinforced every day by the media we consume, the messages we hear, and the interactions we have.
The weight of conformity
I started coaching a client recently who, as a vice president in her company, her CEO wanted her to speak up more during executive team meetings.
He knew she had more to offer and claimed he wanted to hear her voice and wisdom more.
In our coaching sessions, we explored the different aspects of her personality and embodied a narrative that keeps her quiet in meetings and cautious in her interactions with others.
And even though we had talked about race during these sessions, it was not until later that racial healing came to be at the center of her coaching process.
My client is a Black woman. She is the only Black person on this organization's leadership team and one of two women who hold executive positions there.
She has been asked to soften her style on many occasions in corporate settings—to avoid seeming “too Black” so that others wouldn’t feel uncomfortable.
She learned to sound, dress, speak, and act differently than her true nature and culture in the hopes that her white colleagues would accept her, and so that being a Black woman would not impede her professional growth.
Yet despite her best efforts to transform in this way—to become “light blue”—she found herself stuck and silent.
When she expressed this in our most recent session, I felt deep sadness and compassion arise in me.
I could feel her longing to be authentically herself while simultaneously being constrained by an environment that calls upon her to abandon herself over and over again — to conform to white culture just so that she can feel a sense of safety and acceptance.
In our coaching, I could feel the impossible double bind she was caught in: of being asked to speak more, but also the unspoken demands not to sound or be like herself. In the face of this contradiction, it’s little wonder she hesitates to speak during meetings.
What We Lose When We Don't Talk About Race
This story is not just about my client. It is a story about the part of you that has not felt seen, appreciated, or welcomed at some point in your life because of who you are.
This is about all the ways in which each of us — whether we belong to the majority or not — surrender a part of ourselves as we explicitly or implicitly accede to the norms and values of a white heterosexual dominant culture that was established before we even arrived on this Earth.
Consciously and unconsciously, we all accept those beliefs as the standard to live by. As we accept and learn to embody these values, inevitably, a part of ourselves has to be hidden, rejected, and put away in order for us to conform.
We take on the story that our true self is not acceptable, and we miss out on the beauty, the fullness, and all the true colors of our humanity.
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So it is no wonder people so often feel powerless, overwhelmed, or deflated as we try to face the issues of racial and social inequity in our lives and the systems we are part of. It often feels much bigger than ourselves — because, in fact, it is much bigger.
This work requires both deep personal inner work and deep collective work; neither is enough without the other.
The good news is Integrative methodologies can help us uncover the ways in which our engagement with the dominant culture keeps us disconnected from ourselves and from one another. Once we cultivate a capacity to stay in conversation, we can explore our discomfort and make progress.
By embodying and adopting practices and actions, we can create a way of living that honors our wholeness—not just individually but collectively.
Cultivating inclusivity
Here are some suggestions for beginning this exploration:
I envision a world where nobody is required to force themselves to be light blue or any color that does not truly express their unique, essential qualities.
Together, as a community, let’s construct a heartful future for our world where all the colors of the rainbow are welcome.
*I am deeply grateful to my client, who graciously agreed to let me share her story. I have adapted some elements of the story to preserve her anonymity.
Article by Cynthia Luna , Faculty member and Professional Coaching Course Leader at New Ventures West.
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From its humble beginnings to one of the top accredited coaching schools in the world, New Ventures West pioneered one of the deepest, most transformative forms of human development available for coaches, leaders, and anyone looking to bring people alive in possibility.