Why it’s sometimes bad advice to be yourself

So, what is the difference between these four selves?

The Perception Self is the outermost version of the self and is how other people see you. It’s called the Perception Self for exactly this reason – it’s the perception others have of you. Our Perception Self is created by different things, and often, it is far removed from our Authentic Self. How others see us, is often not how we really are, or how we see ourselves. Or we might have become trapped in the self-imposed and never-ending cycle of having to maintain the perception – or should we say illusion – that we are fine; that our lives are going great; that we are successful, or happy, or productive, or lucky or whatever it may be. This can become quite exhausting, since no-one is ever successful, happy, productive, or lucky all the time. There is a natural eb and flow to life. Sometimes we are ahead and sometimes we are behind. Unfortunately, we live in a society that perpetuates the idea of perfectionism and that encourages us to only share the “good” parts of ourselves and our lives, and to hide the “bad” parts. The result is that our Perception Self becomes disconnected from our Authentic Self.

The Persona Self is how we would like others to see us. It is the image of ourselves that we try to project to the world, and this is the Self we use to create our Perception Self; since we cannot directly impact or change other people’s perceptions. We influence others’ perceptions of us by what we show them and what we choose not to show them. Most people have an idea of who they would like to be or who they want to become – an idealised future self – and usually the Persona Self drives this need to show only certain parts of ourselves to the world. As Caroline McHugh explains, the Persona Self is our Wish Self – i.e. who we wished we were. Of course, having a Wish Self that is completely distorted from our real or Authentic Self, can also become problematic. Not only do we then strive to build an unrealistic version of ourselves, but we are also denying our own humanity, and that which essentially makes us different or unique.

The Ego Self represents how we feel about ourselves. Our lives are a constant struggle between the extremes of self-congratulations and self-castigation. It’s a never-ending tug-of-war between the best and the worst versions of ourselves. Some days we feel great; we seem to be aligned with the natural flow of life and we feel capable and competent. Other days, nothing seems to work; we feel disconnected and frustrated, unwanted, incapable, incompetent or even worthless. The goal of the Ego Self is to find a balance somewhere in the middle. No-one is pure good or pure evil. We are human beings and human nature is flawed. Every day represents an opportunity to live our best lives and be our best selves. And there will be days that we will succeed and there will be days that we won’t have the energy to try. The trick is to try again the next day and to never give up. According to Burnett and Evans, life’s journey might seem like a finite game with a clear winner and loser, but it’s actually infinite when you consider how many opportunities you have to be your best self or live your best life. And the race is not against others; it’s against yourself.

The Authentic Self is our deepest, most real self. It’s the enduring self that you’ve always been and that will always be part of you. McHugh explains that there are two times in our lives when it is easy and natural to be our Authentic Self – when we are small children and when we are geriatric. As small children, our Ego and Persona Selves haven’t developed fully yet, and we don’t know how to be anything but our true selves. As we become domesticated, we struggle with the tug of both the Persona Self and the Ego Self. Then when we reach a certain age, we realise that we have less time ahead of us than behind us and we realise our own fragility. This realisation of our own mortality and fragility, brings with it a need to be who we are and to stop trying to please others or live up to unrealistic expectations of the self that rob us of our authentic joy. So, it could be argued that we rediscover our Authentic Self in old age. For some, this happens too late. However, if you choose to embark on The LEAP Journey, you can rediscover your Authentic Self – the Deconstructed Authentic Self – sooner and start living more authentically without having to wait until the end of your life.

So, with all this in mind and considering the benefits of living more authentically, why is it sometimes bad advice to be yourself? It’s simple really, if you don’t know your real self or Authentic Self, how do you know which self you should be? Additionally, the more we live in alignment with our Perception Self and thus in misalignment with our Authentic Self, the less self-aware we tend to be and the more our blind spots and ego defences can wreak havoc in our lives. If you are a constant chatterbox, or you have a tendency to be too critical of others, or you become anxious quite quickly and then project your concerns and fears onto others, or you are a people pleaser, but you don’t know that you do these things, then being yourself can wreak havoc in your life and relationships. You could unintentionally sabotage your career or relationship prospects by falling back on defence mechanisms and blind spots that you have no awareness about.

A lack of self-awareness thus poses a real and tangible threat to building and maintaining the life that you want. Additionally, when we lack clarity about what drives us and what we value most, we tend to let others decide for us which career options we should pursue or what we should be interested in. When we allow society or our friends or our partners to decide for us what we value, we tend to become disillusioned, frustrated and resentful quite quickly. And sometimes we can’t even explain why we feel this way. We simply feel stuck and we don’t know why. As we’ve explained in our blog post on choosing a meaningful life over a happy life, the most fundamental human need, is the need to find meaning. When we disconnect from our Authentic Self and our authentic values, we effectively disconnect from the intrinsic meaning in our lives and we tend to feel stuck or lost.

When we function from our Perception Self, we often feel that the solution to our problem of feeling stuck or lost, is to change how we present ourselves and to reinvent ourselves. So, we focus on updating our personal brand or changing our external behaviour to present a better picture of ourselves. We might even take some drastic steps like resigning from our jobs, changing careers, divorcing our partners, or starting a business. Of course, these things might work in the short-term, but before long that same feelings of being stuck and lost will return. The real solution doesn’t lie outside of us. The real solution doesn’t lie in changing the environment or attempting to change the perception that others have of us. The real solution lies within. When we dive deep to rediscover our Authentic Self and do the work to redesign and align our external life to our internal values and who we are authentically, things in our external environment shift naturally and we no longer feel stuck or lost.

It’s dangerous to “just be yourself” if you don’t know who your Authentic Self is. The LEAP Journey consists of three distinct phases and during each phase, we focus on a different layer of the Constructed Self. However, contrary to how most other transformational coaching initiatives work, we work from the inside out. During Phase 1, we temporarily ignore the Perception Self, the Persona Self, and the Ego Self, and focus all our energy on discovering and getting to know the deepest layer of the Constructed Self, i.e. the Authentic Self. The other layers of the Constructed Self are reintroduced during Phases 2 and 3 of The LEAP Journey. This process that we call Deconstructing the Constructed Self, is depicted in the figure below.