Why Is It So Hard to Just Be Yourself?
Nobody is at fault or to blame, but neither does anyone tend to teach you this.
Two of the most distressing things that dominate our society are the expectations of others and the “shoulds.”
Early in our lives, before we’re even scientifically capable of self-awareness, our parents and other family members guide us. Eventually it moves from guidance to direction.
Instilling good habits in the young is very useful throughout life. Brush your teeth twice a day, fasten your seatbelt when you get in the car, modulate your volume when you speak, and the like help us develop healthy habits that can last us our whole lifetime.
However, in time this moves to more blatant directions. Sometimes they come with threats of punishment or some other unpleasantness if they’re not followed through. This can be direct or indirect. It tends to include things like how you should act, what you should do, who you should worship, and other things that are expectations of you based on the intents/desires of others.
This gets reinforced in school. The importance of conformity is hammered into us pretty early on. I have nothing against setting boundaries and instilling a sense of discipline in children as they grow up. The problem is that most models are one-size-fits-all. Yet overall – one size seldom, if ever, fits all.
All too soon, we accept that the expectations of others, personal or impersonal, when not met, make us outcasts. Add to this all the “shoulds” presented along the way, and we bend, twist, and reshape ourselves to fit a given mold. We wear masks in public that can prove difficult to remove in private.
This is the easy answer to why it’s so hard to just be yourself.
Start with recognition and acknowledgment
As far as I can tell, for many people, the challenge begins in that they don’t see this for what it is.
A lifetime, since childhood, of needing to meet this expectation or live up to this or that “should” wears you down. It becomes habitual, subconscious, and so deeply ingrained in your persona that you can’t recognize it for what it is.
Before you begin any work to break out of this mold, it’s very, very important to understand one thing. Nobody is at fault or to blame for this. With a few exceptions – because let’s be honest, there are always exceptions to the rule (hence no one-size-fits-all) – nobody sets out to force you into a specific mold. They followed patterns laid out by their own parents, loved ones, religious leaders, business leaders, and societal expectations. Then, add to that their own experiences, environments, biases, prejudices, beliefs, values, habits, and so on.
What’s more, placing blame or seeing fault does nothing for you. That’s because placing blame and fault displaces feelings and emotions. Why? Because even if you can place blame or fault, does that change anything? No.
Only you can get to know the real you. That’s because you’re the only in in your head, heart, and soul. That begins and ends within you.
This is the other reason it can be hard to just be yourself. Nobody teaches you how to know yourself.
Learn self-awareness to be yourself
Spend as little as two minutes on social media, and you will be flooded with information. Much of it is oversharing or TMI (too much information). You will see the many woes, trials, and tribulations of friends and loved ones. World news tends to be deeply upsetting, negative, and ever-present. Then there’s all the advertising, invoking your fear of missing out, not meeting expectations, and other matters you “should” give a shit about.
This is all about as far removed from self-awareness as you can possibly get. Yet this is how society suggests awareness works.
Nobody lives in a bubble. You should have some awareness of the people, places, and things around you. This applies to both the direct and indirect. However, you don’t need to be utterly bombarded and inundated with this info.
The key to being yourself is self-awareness. This is right in front of you and readily accessible to you. Yet nobody teaches you this for all sorts of reasons. Largely because one-size-fits-all for this can’t be easily applied.
However, there are some universal truths to take into account. Self-awareness is far easier than it’s often made out to be. To gain it, all you must do is be here, fully present, and in the now. Then, ask this question,
- What am I thinking?
Asked when fully present, here and now, this question makes you self-aware.
The next step is to add a few more, similar questions that can only be properly answered here and now. These include,
- What am I feeling?
- How am I feeling?
- What do I intend?
- What am I doing?
This active, conscious awareness is mindfulness. To be mindful of yourself is to be yourself.
Mindfulness, conscious awareness, and yourself
One of the most insipid elements of modern society is the drive to conform and live lives of rote and routine. How many people think that the standard 8-hour workday is absolutely how it’s always been?
The reality is that because one-size-fits-all is rarely the case, the conformity of rote and routine is the antithesis of conscious awareness. That’s because rote and routine are products of the subconscious mind.
Everyone has both a conscious and subconscious mind. Your subconscious is where your beliefs, values, memories, and habits live.
Habits are things you do regularly by rote and routine. These can be good habits like eating a vegetable with every meal and saying thank you – or – bad habits like smoking and chewing your fingernails. Most are done routinely, automatically, with almost no active thought behind them in the least.
Your conscious mind is where you actively think about things. Further, you question and consider your actions via thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Before you automatically do something, an effort of thought and feeling is made.
Making a regular practice of active conscious awareness – mindfulness – tells you who, what, where, how, and why you are. That is how you be yourself.
Mindfulness is how you can be yourself. Because when you know, consciously, what you think, feel, intend, and do, you are capable of choosing to be who, what, where, how, and why you desire to be.
Get into the inner workings of yourself to be yourself
It might seem incredibly obvious, but I’m rather certain it’s not. To be yourself, you must first know yourself. Active conscious awareness lets you look under the hood, so to speak, into the engine of your subconscious.
In your subconscious are your beliefs, values, and habits. Yes, your memories are there, too – but they are only important to being yourself in the lessons you can learn from them. Your beliefs, values, and habits, however, are what make you, you.
Most of the time they’re just there, existing, doing their thing. Until you look under the hood and see them at work. The process of opening the hood is active conscious awareness, i.e., mindfulness.
Once you examine your beliefs, values, and habits, you can see which of them work for you and which don’t. Then, if you desire, you can change them.
This part varies wildly from person to person. However, everyone is capable of changing values, beliefs, and habits. It starts with active conscious awareness of what those are. Then you can alter them.
That’s how you can be yourself. Recognizing and acknowledging your subconscious elements lets you consciously, mindfully, be yourself.
This takes time, energy, and work. However, I believe that it’s ultimately worthwhile. Why? Because who else are you if you’re not yourself?
Actively choosing to be yourself isn’t hard
It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct your actions.
When you use your conscious awareness to look inside yourself, you can see what your beliefs, values, and habits are. Knowing the subconscious elements of who, what, where, how, and why you are, you can make new choices to alter and change the things that aren’t true to who you are so that you can genuinely be yourself.
This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you.
Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts life in a way that opens more dialogue. With a broader dialogue, you can explore and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.
Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.
The better aware you are of yourself in the now, the more you can do to choose and decide how your life experiences will be. When that empowers you, it can spread to those around you to their empowerment.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the five-hundred and thirteenth (513) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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