It's so good to see you! Today, we will be talking about authenticity and how that looks and feels from me as well as to me. Thank you for listening and I hope you have a happy and healing weekend! Cocoahontis xoxo
Cocoa’s Cup
epidode 23: autheticating
[music] Hello hello and welcome to another episode of Coco's Cup. I'm your host Coco Hontas and I'm so grateful that you're here. For today's topic of discussion, we're going to be talking about authenticity, what that looks like for me, and what it means to me. I've done this before in a couple podcast episodes where rather than having an outline of things important points that I want to cover and discuss, this time I have questions that I've written down for myself, kind of like a self-interview, and I'll just be answering those as I go. I'm probably not going to get through all of them because I've written quite a few, so in that case the episode might become like a part two or part three at a later time when I do revisit it. The premise of these interview style questions is so I'm thinking on my feet, kind of. I don't have as much time to really think about the episode or what I'm going to say because it's just fresh off of my mind and whatever pops up first, so we're going to go ahead with the first question. What does being authentic mean to me? This feels like a loaded question just off jump. I don't know why I wrote it. I think it's a good question, but to me as simple as it sounds, I think being authentic means being real and being true to yourself, and to me being real holds a lot of value because I've met a lot of people who I would qualify as superficial or one-dimensional, and I've found that people tend to hug trends really glue themselves to the trend and in doing so they lose themselves, and I've done a lot of growth and development through my years, and a lot of people like to say that college are your developmental years. For me I would disagree because I don't think I had the best college experience, which is okay. I'll get over it one day, but because I didn't really grow much in college per se, like I guess in that space I didn't grow besides educationally, just you know getting smarter, getting my degree, blah blah blah, the basics. I didn't and I'm going to loss for words and make thoughts. I think that my experiences have shaped me quite a lot, and I think sometimes people are afraid to really delve into their emotions, be honest with themselves, and that's another big part of what being authentic means to me, being honest with myself, and I've had to have lots of hard conversations, not only with myself, but with my therapist, with my friends, with people that I really care about, and people that really care about me enough to want to listen to my struggles. Not only that, but my success is too, because that has been a big part of my growth for me and being authentic to myself. I just say that my support system has done numbers on me, and I couldn't think them enough and very grateful for them, and they helped me to become, and to stay authentic to myself, and to them too, because authenticity doesn't necessarily just mean your relationship with yourself, but it's how you, how you reflect yourself to other people, because I think that you reflect the people that you are close to, the people that you spend your time with, and I'm happy to say that I would qualify myself as an authentic person, and those close to me are very authentic as well. How do I define authenticity in my own life? I think it starts with choosing me, and choosing me even when I'm not happy with myself, and that's that part of honesty, the part that I would love to ignore and pretend, and for a long time I was one of those people that I was describing a little bit earlier about hugging trends and just doing what is appeasing to others, conforming, for a better word, and it's very exhausting, very draining, you lose yourself so easily, so quickly, because you're trying so hard to be somebody that you're not, and being true to yourself, choosing yourself even on your worst days, to me that's very brave, and I admire that when I see that in other people. I think that there's a plethora of things that change the way somebody navigates their authenticity, and I think one of the biggest things is social media, because what people see on social media, considering the amount of time that people will spend just on their socials, just scrolling, and taking information, even if it's false, I think this has to do with because people can be so impressionable, and that's very natural. There's nothing wrong with that, but when social media has these beauty standards, or standards in any sense, and you don't feel like you fit into it, that can cause you to try to change, I know there's this whole topic of girls' girls, and I even got some backlash for it, because I was speaking on a double date that I was going on, and I initially wasn't very excited to do it, just because I'm not the biggest fan of meeting new people. I can be friendly, but I will most likely not become your friend. That is a hard no for me. It's very hard for me to trust people to the degree that I would be friends with them, and I hold my friends to a very high standard, as they do me. And with that, people quickly jump the gun, and again, hate culture is, and cancel culture has become so big, it's insane to me now. People wait for the moment that you are "caught lacking," or you've said something that can be disagreeable, and all of a sudden, they just diminish your entire brand, your entire persona, everything that you've built for yourself, but that's a whole different conversation to have. Anyways, back to the story. I was just talking about how I wasn't comfortable, how I was most likely going to portray myself as very shy, standoffish, not really open to conversation, and that's not something that I want to do. It's just my natural response. I'm not going to initiate under-the-surface conversations, and people really have said about that, and they started the conversation of, "Oh, you're not a girl's girl. You hate girls. You hate women. You don't like seeing women succeed." Jumping the gun, just bullet after bullet after just saying crazy things that I had not said myself, right? Just jumping to conclusions, and I find it funny that if you see majority of the comments are nice, people tend to leave nice comments, or they just won't say anything at all, but when it comes to disagreement and rude or hateful comments, then they start coming in like ants. Someone's just waiting for a reason for you to be bagged on and disliked, and I actually don't know what that is. I should study that. That leads me to my next question about how I'm able to differentiate the superficial and meaningful relationships. I think it's crazy because a year ago, I had a completely different set of friends. There's, of course, the one friend I've had for four years, but the rest of my what, two, or three friends are fairly new, and I've met them within the past year, but I was friends with this group, and particularly very close friends with this girl who I ended up going on a trip with, and my discernment just must have been off, because the rest of the group, I was okay with being their friend, but that kind of friendship had limitations. I wasn't going to be there for them emotionally as they were not going to do that for me. It was more like the relationship was fun. If we were going to go out to do something, the more people the merrier, and that's the kind of energy and relationship that they seem to have wanted, so I was just going to match the energy. I was not going to be there on a rainy day, because I know that that's not something that was in the works for me, and I wasn't going to put so much effort into relationship where I knew it wasn't going to benefit me. I didn't want a parasitic relationship. I've been through too many of that, but where my discernment was wrong was with the girl that I was the closest, and I thought she had a lot of substance, so I thought that really got me. She's really funny, she was cool, but we went on a trip, and when people tell you that when you go on a trip, it shows it reveals the person, right, and it did, and I quickly realized that she had been talking badly about me to that same group of friends, and meanwhile she's talking badly about that group of friends to me, which I should have assumed was a red flag because she still initiated a conversation with them, she still wanted to hang out with them, things of that nature, and this is just one of those, one of many examples of where I've been able to differentiate superficial and real meaningful relationship friendship that I've had, but I cut her off very quickly at a conversation with her, and I left it at that. I never confronted her about the fact that she had been talking badly about me. I just stopped talking to her, I had maybe one discussion with her post that trip, and left it at that. There was nothing more to be said in my opinion, because I feel like the less you say, the more powerful it is. Like, why I waste my time explaining myself, there's needs to be no justification actually, and in prior times when I've used my discernment, it's always been, I'm someone who I'll give trust to somebody because I think that you don't know if you can trust someone until you give it to them, and then they break it, right? And that puts you like in a vicarious cycle of giving so much trust and hope and love and care and affection to a person, and they have the ability to mishandle it or to treat you well. And I'm someone who is very analytical when it comes to friends. I heavily analyze them. This is with any person, really any person that I meet. I analyze them very heavily to try to see where their head is, their heart is, their mind, what they want. If we have goals or things that are uncommon, that's a good way for me to judge whether or not I think that this friendship will work. If it's going to be long-term or short-term, I haven't had a short-term friendship in a very long time because I want long-lasting friendships or even just companionship. If it's not going to be a friendship, if you're just going to be a fun time, maybe I'll entertain it. But you'll know when a meaningful relationship, when it's somebody that's authentic, someone you feel like you can be yourself around, you don't have to filter yourself in front of them. Someone who shows up for you offers their support, is supportive, isn't jealous, doesn't downplay you, doesn't give you backhanded compliments. And there's some friends who even just, you go to the store, okay? You're trying at clothes. Oh, I really love this tea. What do you think of it? Oh, that one. Yeah, it's cute. And in that exact term, right? But there is some jealousy somewhere, there's some hatred somewhere. I knew these two friends of that same group that I was talking about earlier. One of them thought of the other one as just like the funny friend. And so she would take her everywhere because she, the other girl thought she was the pretty friend. And they just allowed it. Both of them kind of had an established understanding of where they stood in the friendship, and they entertained it. And I mean, it didn't work out for them. They're not friends anymore, but for what it was worth and for what it lasted, I hope that was a good time because that's what you guys wanted, right? And that's not me anymore. I don't need a good time. I have my best friend and I have my man. And that's all I need right now, really. If there becomes a time where there's supplementary people that come in my life and they bring value, then I will consider it. But that doesn't seem like it's in the books for me right now. This is going to be the end of this week's episode. I hope you guys enjoyed listening to it. As always, videos are going to come out every other Friday for right now. I'm hoping to make them a little bit sooner. You can keep up with me on my socials, Koko Hantas. And I will see you in the next one. As always, I want to share some gratitude and I hope that you guys can too. This week, I am very grateful for my job. I have been learning a lot about leadership and what that looks like for me, what it looks like to own your lane and leadership to lead your faculty, your partners, and to do it creatively and to do in a way where they're excited for success. I also have some merchandise available if you were interested. You could just look up Koko's Cup with Koko Hantas on Etsy and it should show up. I will see you in the next video. Love you so much!