I’m always myself, which means I’ve gone through some periods with great friends, and some with no friends, and sometimes for the same reasons.
The corollary I’ve found that goes along with this is “even if some people don’t like you, because that’s okay.” If you constantly fret over getting people to like you when the reasons they don’t like you are unimportant, you are wasting your time and energy.
Elvis impersonators everywhere are plotting to overthrow your authority.
A smart kid I know once said, “A saint is someone whose insides and outsides match up perfectly.”
I have often wondered these same things about this phrase. For anyone raised in the chaos of a wildly dysfunctional home, wherein most every behaviour being modelled is ill chosen and disastrous, it definitely gives one pause. If I’m trying desperately NOT turn into the human I was trained to be. Not so sure, ‘Be Yourself’ quite fits my needs.
Once it was framed more as, ‘try not to waste your energy being someone you’re not!’ I found it a much better fit for me.
I think that what is behind the whole idea of “just be yourself” is the issue of confidence. IMO, trust in yourself is the essence of confidence. That is the simplest definition I can come up with. So, in order for you to “be yourself,” you have to trust yourself first. This is where things get complicated.
See, one of the biggest fears of most all people is the fear of failure. We do not like to fail, and we especially do not like it when other people take notice of our failures. But, we can’t help it. We are all flawed individuals in one way or another and are bound to make mistakes from time to time.
Honestly, people these days don’t seem to have a lot of tolerance for mistakes. A single mistake could cost you your relationships and even your livelihood. That’s why I think a lot of people put on an act. It’s easier to compensate that way, and pretend like you’re perfect, than face the world honestly.
That’s why it’s so difficult to “just be yourself.” If you want to actually be yourself, you better be a damn good person.
Not only confidence, but also in a way efficiency. For some reason, the parents of many of my brothers’ classmates asked me to help them convince their sons to study what the parents wanted rather than what the son wanted; every time I was able to convince the parents that if one is lucky enough to have a vocation and the basic abilities needed to follow it (i.e., it doesn’t matter how badly you want to play in the NBA, if you’re 3’10" better aim for a different line of work), it’s best to do so.
In the case of people who play a role, often they’re very bad at it (which doesn’t lead to earning others’ trust), but what happens when you succeed and are eventually found out is that people get madder at having been lied to than they would have in the first place. It doesn’t even have to be something huge: my sister in law was terribly pissed when she found out after 8 years of relationship that my brother likes the fantasy genre - because he’d been directly asked several times, and he’d lied to her (his siblings offered to tie him down for her to beat with a hairbrush, but she didn’t take us up on the offer; the table-rpg friends whose existence he’d been denying for those 8 years weren’t happy about the whole thing either).
Or, “Character is how you behave when nobody’s watching.”
I think of it as being about growth, not change. In a lot of ways we’re stuck with the personalities we’re born with, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of ways to improve yourself, your life and your relationships.
I agree Rhubarbarin. It is about growth, but a lot of times that growth is stunted by the fear of failure for reasons I mentioned previously. What do you do about your fear of failure? Especially, in times when failure is not acceptable. That pressure can be a bit overwhelming and actually make failure more likely. You also have to take into account the fact that people in this country and across the world grow up in widely different circumstances, for better or worse.
The only answer I can think of is to continually work on improving yourself and appreciate what you have. I try my best to do both, but when I look around, I realize just how unbelievably fortunate I have been. I wonder about how people who are much worse off than me can find their own sense of appreciation in this world.
When is failure not acceptable?
I’m not saying that there aren’t times it’s not. But the times when it really, completely, absolutely, is not acceptable to fail are a lot fewer and farther between than our fear instinct tells us, or at least it used to be for me (I was raised knowing that anything I did was a failure and that failure was unacceptable; so, anything I did was unacceptable). But you know what, even in those cases in which failure would have had dire consequences (say, someone dying, rather than Mom’s orange blouse not being ironed when she wanted to wear it), what I would have had to do afterwards is pull up my big girl pants and go on living.
Unacceptable? Think about it. Maybe that word doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Well, failure is unnacceptable at school and in the workplace for the most part. So that’s two daily stressors that take place in nearly everyone’s life.
I think we are still on the same page, Nava. The fear of failure is irrational a lot of times but is a major factor preventing someone from fully embracing their character. So how do you deal with that fear? I think that all you can do is continually work on improving yourself and do what you feel is right.
As far as how to specifically manage your emotions? I’m not always sure how to effectively do that. Take it slow? Deep breaths? Try to detach from the situation? I employ these methods with varying degrees of success from time to time. Still, I feel like I have personal issues that prevent me from being the guy I want to be. A lot of that stems from past failure and regret.
Literally, the one thing I have been doing is to make a point of all the things I am grateful for each day. That helps puts thing in perspective.