Be yourself: authentic growth vs mimicry

The biggest cliché in the personal development niche is being one’s self. As a random individual who is working on bettering themselves, getting a “be yourself” advice is the most frustrating thing ever.

Let’s say one wants to be more confident in order to have the bravery to set and achieve certain goals in their life. By telling such a person to be themselves, you are basically implying that they should remain as they are and therefore stuck at the same place too clearly. After all, I am a shy socially awkward person who cannot start a conversation to save my life, you telling me to be myself is saying I should give up on being a great person.

How do we grow without losing authenticity?

The main idea about being yourself is to remain authentic to yourself. After all, you don’t want to find yourself being someone you are not and living a terrible life despite achieving what looks for outside: great goals. But being yourself has nothing to do with remaining the same. You want to remain true to yourself while also challenging yourself to become better. Basically become the best version of yourself and the more you play at that level, your best keeps on stretching because everything is relative.

Achieving great goals and still feeling miserable only goes to show that you are not being authentic and are instead living someone else’s life. This is probably one of the signs of the dark side of personal development. Where people just become clones of the motivational speakers they follow and not just learning to apply their advice to who they already are as humans.

One of the biggest signs of not being authentic when following someone who would otherwise be helpful to you is when you agree with every single thing they say. That is a sign of a lack of a backbone. From friends to family and even lovers, there is no way any normal human being can agree with everything the next human being believes in. It’s the differences in most cases that unite us. A little contrast if you may.

In our growth, we have to make sure we drift towards learning the things we personally care about and not those that we feel would gain more attention than others. The reason is simple, everything works -particularly if you’re at the top. Everything also has it’s challenges…therefore at some point a person may want to give up. With something you genuinely want to do, you’re less likely to give up and you are also more likely to reach the top through sheer persistence.

Being authentic to ones self includes pursuing challenges that are already aligned with who you are as a person already. Say you love music but cannot sing, you going for music lessons is being true to yourself because you are sharpening a part of you that already exists. It means you are doing it for you and not to gain social capital points from those who are around you.

In the case of motivational speakers, its actually good that you choose to absorb information from those who are doing well in their lives, but by all means, do not become a copy and paste version of the people you follow. Identify your own identity and paste everything else around it. You are the center of your own life and everything should revolve around you to improve you, not something or someone else take center stage in your life. OWN YOUR LIFE.

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