Staying True to Yourself
The word “authenticity” is used and overused today, but it is profoundly meaningful. Living authentically means staying true to yourself and making choices that align with your values, desires, and interests. This sounds like it would be easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult to do. It requires courage to deviate from the path expected of you by others and sometimes by society as a whole.
Bronnie Ware wrote a bestselling book called ‘The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing’. She found that the most common regret people had was wishing they had lived a life true to themselves, not one that was expected of them. Two things strike me about how prevalent this regret is: 1) this was the number one regret within the book, and 2) the book is a bestseller, pointing to how many people know that this is vitally important.
Expectations from others can be implicit or explicit. They can be past expectations from your parents that are carried over from childhood or they can be current expectations from your spouse/partner, friends, or workplace. Society tells us that we have value when we meet expectations of how we look or what we achieve. We want to feel valuable, so we do our best to look better and achieve more. We feel great when this is recognized and applauded, and we feel terrible when it’s not or when we don’t think that we measure up.
Living in line with external expectations can mean that you don’t take risks, step into new opportunities, or look too deeply into who you truly are. If you are feeling deep and unfulfilled desires, the price you pay for not exploring these and being true to yourself is dissatisfaction and regret. It can cost us our self-respect and dignity when we adapt and shape our desires, actions, and values to fit into perceived expectations. As Henry Cloud says, if you have to be someone else in order to do something, then don’t do it.
Dr. Gabor Maté believes that we are programmed to suppress our true selves. Nobody is born denying or suppressing who they are or trying to adapt themselves to please others. At some point, we learn that being our true selves carries the risk of rejection, which creates high levels of fear in us and can have a negative impact on our mental and physical health.
Here's the thing – if my actions are designed to impress or meet the expectations of others, then I am living in their mind and according to their values, not my own. Do I want to do this? Or do I want to live in my own mind and be true to my values? If I live up to your expectations or impress you, that’s great. But the degree to which I depend on your validation of that is the degree to which I am robbing myself of my authenticity. If I can feel comfortable in myself and meet my expectations of myself, that’s enough.
What I have learned: staying true to yourself sounds fabulous, but it’s hard to do. First of all, you have to discover who you are, as discussed in this blog post. Next, you have to have the courage and discipline to make choices that align with your true self, even when they go against the expectations of others. However, as with most, if not all hard things, the gain is worth the pain. Knowing who you are, accepting who you are, developing who you are, and living in alignment with who you are leads to tremendous peace and contentment in life. This is not a one-and-done event, it is a journey. We may not do it every minute of our lives, or even every day, but as long as we keep going, we will create a pattern of being true to ourselves that will become engrained.