The Most Important Thing You Can Be

People often make the comment ‘be yourself’ - and while that comment can be casual, humorous or patronising, at its deepest it conveys one of the profoundest senses of true living and life-building. At a number of deep levels, it’s essential to be your most authentic, true self - and passing up being yourself is going to be perpetually damaging and limiting in the short term, and absolutely devastating in the long run.

The most important way to be yourself is to always seek and tell the truth, because that’s the only way the self in becoming can actualise the self it can become. Compromising the truth and lacking the courage to pursue it fully creates the gulf between what we could have been and what we do become.

The second reason is that it’s only by being your authentic, truthseeking self that others can relate to you, like you and value you for who you actually are, rather than the mask you’re wearing for the attention of others. Your mask-wearing self – the persona version of ‘you’ that exists for others at the detriment to your true self – feels none of the benefits of praise, because it’s unknowingly directed at your persona, not the authentic you. Similarly, your mask-wearing self rebels against most criticism or correction because you’re detached from your authentic self.

If your self is inauthentic and not in line with your truthseeking self you could be, you can’t be a fully integrated part of the achievements you appear to have, or have accountability for the areas in which you need improvement. The persona receives both these things on your behalf, and that is going to increase anxiety and decrease well-being, despite attempts to hide and repress it.

A significant part of people’s dissatisfaction and insecurity in life is the lack of their true self impeding what they could be becoming – and such is the trap of the mask that if it has been worn long enough you are detached from the provenance of many of your primary woes.

It certainly requires courage and discernment to be our most authentic, truthful selves – but there is no other way to live and thrive. We have one shot at life – and we must ensure we play the lead role, not outsource to an actor who has no chance of being a better version of ourselves than the best we that can emerge from authentic truthseeking.

And for further encouragement, the world will be so much more enriched for the appearance of our true selves, because nobody else in the world can achieve exactly the things we can achieve by being ourselves.

There are obvious costs to committed truthseeking and being yourself, and they will bring inconvenient challenges – but the cost of not becoming who you could be is the biggest cost of all.