The Power of Being Yourself
What I watched: The art of being yourself at TEDxMiltonKeynesWomen by Caroline McHugh. Posted February 15, 2013.
I keep a list of people with whom I’d like to have dinner. These are people I admire, find fascinating, or from whom I think I can learn. Caroline McHugh is on that list.
I’m not exactly sure why I added her to the list the first time I watched her speak. There’s just something about her. Her presence. Her intellect. Her passion. Her clarity. All of it blends into a fascinating person I admire and who I know has things to teach me.
I offer to you here a video I’ve shared with many friends. It’s one of my favorites. If I were teaching a Life’s Lessons 101 class, I’d probably show this video during the first class. Its message is important. For all of us. Everyone. The advice to be yourself is always good advice. Always. And McHugh delivers that message with an aplomb few can match.
Authenticity isn’t as common as we’d like. So many people are covering up their true selves with cosmetic veneers, status signaling, non-vital wealth accumulation, consumerism run amok, and other means by which we shield the revelation of our true self from the world in order to fit in or bow to the social programming that nudges us to sameness. But sameness doesn’t lead to greatness.
Because what I do for a living is I help people be themselves, not in any narcissistic or solipsistic way, but because I believe that social reformation always starts with the individual. And when you look at remarkable individuals, and when I say remarkable or successful individuals I don't mean monetarily successful, I mean people that have been successful at achieving whatever they set out to do, you find that the thing they have in common is they have nothing in common.
This makes sense to me. When I look to politicians, business people, social movement leaders, artists, and others whom I admire, the one resounding quality they all exude is uniqueness. They aren’t copies of other people. They stand alone as an entirely different type of person than anyone else.
I don’t buy into the notion that we are born with an innate purpose and usually not with any particular gift. I believe both purpose and the development of ourselves is mostly nurture not nature, mostly the product of how we’ve decided to navigate through life in ways that enrich and enliven us or not. So, I interpret McHugh’s point about having a gift as not something bestowed on us, but developed within.
And I've identified this thread that links them. These are individuals who have managed to figure out the unique gift that the universe gave them when they incarnated and then put that at the service of their goals.
McHugh gets to the heart of her talk when she asks the audience this question: “Who do you think you are?
When asking this question of ourselves or others we frequently come the often-uttered piece of advice, “Just be yourself.”
But it's the use of the word just that I find interesting, because it would imply two things. Number one, that that was an easy thing to do. Number two, that it was an original piece of advice.
McHugh talks about our “life sentence” by which she means that none of knows exactly how long we have to walk the planet. Few have expanded on that truth better than Oliver Burkeman in his book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, that I wrote about in Your Life Will Be Absurdly Brief.
Dwelling on our mortality isn’t useful except when it spawns some meaningful self-reflection. Life expectancy will be what it is, and much of that is outside of our control. But, we can and should ask ourselves the questions of what do we expect from life and what does life expect from us?
When we’re quite young, we’re good at being ourselves. Young kids are not burdened by the collective expectations to be in the world any particular way. Kids at that age don’t yet feel the need to disguise their definiteness.
But then, at a certain age, perhaps seven or so, children begin to feel the weight of social pressure, the call of conformity, and most of all we become more self-conscious and therefore less good at being ourselves.
Older people are also pretty good at being themselves. I can attest to many of my own shields being let down as I’ve aged. Do I care what people think of me? Yes, but nowhere near as much as I used to in the past. Some pass off self-aware older people as eccentric, but they’re actually being more authentic. Each year that passes seems to usher in a bigger sense of not giving a fuck what others think and this allows me to be more me, to be myself.
Between early youth and older age lies that part of our lives we find problematic. We have to socialize, accommodate, and adapt to meet the perceived expectations that we then take in as manufactured core identities. They might not be authentic identities, but we cling to them like a life preserver to avoid drowning in people’s harsh judgment.
McHugh discusses the “I complex,” a model she’s developed to help people frame this internal discussion we have with ourselves. What “I” do we mean when we say “I.” There is the well-known superiority complex. There is the well-known inferiority complex. But there is a third way of being and McHugh created a word to describe it, interiority complex.
So, the word interiority describes a particular disposition. And there's two reasons that might be useful to you. Number one, it's completely uncompetitive. If you have a superiority complex or an inferiority complex, you need other people around. For a superiority complex, you need other people to be smaller. For an inferiority complex, you need to suffer from the I'm going to be found out syndrome, so somebody needs to find you out. Interiority is entirely unrelated. So, to operate from this position of interiority, it's like a perceptual vantage point. It's a sensibility. It's an orientation. And it's the only place in your life, the only place in your life, you have no competition. Try and find a comparison to yourself and you'll draw a blank.
As an illustration of interiority, McHugh plays a clip of singer Jill Scott who is about to go onstage after Erykah Badu. When the interviewer asks Scott if she’s nervous going on after Badu, Scott displays quite obviously that she’s learned how to be herself and revel in that uniqueness.
We all have our own thing, that’s the magic, and everybody comes with their own sense of strength, and their own queendom. Mine could never compare to hers, and hers could never compare to mine.
Each of us is unlike anyone else. We’re not composites or amalgams or others. We’re nothing like anyone else walking among us. We are us. But McHugh contends there are four of us we might call ourselves.
One aspect our ourselves is what others think of us. Everyone has an opinion about us, how we’re perceived. We can’t do much about that but it’s important that we understand these perceptions. McHugh suggests that women tend to suffer from approval addiction more than men and perhaps she’s correct. I don’t know. That would be an interesting study to undertake.
Needing other people’s approval is one of the most debilitating things when it comes to being yourself. How can you be yourself if you’re constantly looking to others to validate you, and that validation is replete with their own insecurities, social programming, and other shortcomings that might validate you against a conformist worldview rather than one that respects individuality.
The second aspect of ourselves is our wish image, what we would like everyone else to think about us.
This one is your adaptive personality, your construct self. And even that's unique because nobody in the world has had the same experiences or influences that you have. But this is the you that keeps moving, that keeps changing all the time. And it helps you avoid being one of those people. You know, the people that say to you they have 15 years experience when they mean one year 15 times. They literally repeat themselves year after year after year. What I want you to think about is with every passing year, your job is to be better and better at being who you already are. This is not a cosmetic exercise. You're already different. Your job is to figure out how and then to be more of that.
We all encounter periods in our lives when change is more readily possible or goes deeper. Sometimes these pivotal moments are opportunities presented to us that we can embrace or ignore. Sometimes we’re forced to struggle with change due to some catastrophic incident. Change under both positive and negative life circumstances is change, but making such changes is better when we’re doing so from a good mindset, during those times we have strength. Negative circumstances present us with a landscape in which we’re vulnerable and weak. So asking ourselves how we want to be our authentic selves during the good times is a wiser move than waiting until life throws us a curve ball.
The next aspect of ourselves is what we think of ourselves. Some days we feel we’re superhuman. Other days not to much. McHugh says that our entire life unfolds as a process in which we are attempting to build a stable relationship with our ego.
You need an ego to live in a Western capitalist world. If you didn't have an ego, you'd be toast. But your challenge is to take the ego from its dominant position and pull it back so that it's in service to yourself. That's when it becomes useful.
Confidence happens when we’ve reached a balance with our ego, somewhere between self-congratulation and self-castigation, that middle point, equanimity or equilibrium. That midpoint can’t be influenced by anything happening outside you. In Western cultures, we might refer to this as humility.
McHugh offers a definition of humility that she got from Baroness Campbell, the women who runs UK Sport, that I rather like.
Humility is not thinking less of yourself. Humility is thinking about yourself less.
The last aspect our ourselves is the ever-present, unchanging you. This is who we are and have been our entire lives. McHugh offers a response Gandhi gave when a journalist asked him what his message is to the world? Gandhi replied, “My life is my message.”
Our lives are our messages to the world too. Our life has to be our message. Otherwise, what’s the point, why are we here? This is the one life we have.
McHugh encapsulates her talk’s message this way.
So, when you think about your identity, when you think about what it means to be alive, when you think about why you deserve to exist, you're not your thoughts, because you think them. And you can't be your feelings because otherwise who’s the you that feels them. You’re not what you have? You’re not what you do? You're not even who you love or who loves you. There has to be something underneath all that.
If we can overcome living our lives according to social judgment’s directives and avoid falling prey to making ourselves into a copy of others, we can find ourselves. Our real selves. Our authentic selves.
So, if you can do this, not only will the speed of your life get quicker, not only will the substance of your life get richer, but you will never feel superfluous again.
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