How Can You Be Yourself?

How can you be yourself? Or even better, what’s it like to be yourself? We can describe it as natural, spontaneous. It is how we are when we are not afraid, when we are alone or with people we trust.

Not only do fears diminish the authenticity of people, but sometimes for various reasons we don’t live according to who we really are, according to our values, skills, outlook on life and so on. There are many factors that can influence us and prevent us from being ourselves. It is about certain traditions, the lack of self-knowledge or doing things only to please others.

It is important to think about whether we are living to our true essence or whether we are creating a character to show to others. Each of us at some point has lived to a greater or lesser extent according to a facade. But you cannot experience happiness and well-being if you do not live according to your true ‘self’.

Selfknowledge

We must know ourselves to live according to our essence. To be able to do this, we need to be clear when it comes to these three points.

1. What am I good at? What makes me stand out? What are my best skills? Knowing our strengths allows us to focus on a path that will lead us to well-being and success.

2.What are my values? What is most important to me in life? What do I want to achieve in my life? If we live consciously and don’t let chance rule our lives, we will live a fuller life because we choose what we really want.

3.What activates my motivation? What do I enjoy most? To help us learn more about what we enjoy, we can look back to our childhood. We can find activities here that we haven’t picked up yet, but will make us very happy when we decide to start.

By getting to know ourselves better we find the tools that give us more security, but often the lack of spontaneity is caused by other factors.

Three Enemies of Spontaneity

1. Want to show an improved version of yourself. If we want to show the best possible picture of ourselves and we worry too much about pleasing others, the opposite is likely to happen. We’ll show you the worst version of ourselves, because you can’t be natural if you pressure yourself to look your best.

Personal acceptance is the key to improvement.  We are all unique and irreplaceable, and we all have good and bad qualities. We are the ones who decide. What do we care about most? Looking good or being happy? Let’s think about this. If we show a good picture of ourselves, what do we get in return? Others will get a good impression of us, but we will usually remain dissatisfied because we can’t show our true self.

We should never put on a mask just to please others. We should care most about our own well-being, and we can do that by showing ourselves as we are.

2. Focus on the impression you will make. When the focus of our attention is on ourselves, we feel insecure and will not appear natural because we worry about what others think of us.

Spontaneity arises when the focus is not on the image of ourselves we want to show, but when we enjoy what is happening around us without thinking about whether we look good or bad.

3. Nervousness. Tension is also something that can kill naturalness, and this can result from several things. The most common cause is wanting to look good for fear of rejection. It is more important to enjoy what is happening around us because that is when we are most authentic and spontaneous, because in those moments we do not suffer from fear and uncertainty. We have to accept ourselves as we are, and not focus too much on how we should be so that others like us.

Image thanks to Mr.Theklan and Alba Soler