“Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people.” ―Alain de Botton
Someone once gave me a card that said exactly that ^ quote. They gave me it and wrote inside ‘saw this, thought of you’. Now, before you think, that’s mean, it was one of those great moments in work life where you bond with people for all the wrong but right reasons.
The business we worked for had just launched a new leadership initiative called ‘Be Your Best Self’. It was well ahead of it’s time, this was many years ago! Unfortunately all the comms and literature had the caption ‘Just be yourself, everyone else is taken’.
It was unfortunate because that quote isn’t the same as ‘be your best self’. Because just being yourself might be a bit of a disaster.
“What if ‘yourself’ is rude, has no filter, is unskilled socially, is abrasive, condescending, prejudiced, entitled, pain in the ass? Is it ok to let all that hang out in the name of ‘just be yourself’.”
This was the discussion at the start of this programme, by a few antagonists who were ‘just being themselves’ but still not feeling the vibe of this initiative and yet displaying it in full glory.
‘The idea is to be your best self, not just yourself’ the trainer tried to get people back on track.
‘Are you saying that as I am right now is not the best then?’ the man said folding his arms. ‘Correct, we all have more to give’ said the trainer. The man ‘raising his self’s concerns’ shrank a little.
Because ‘being yourself’ isn’t easy. You have to deal with yourself and all the shenanigans it causes everyday. You have to deal with the consequences of being yourself.
It is easy to say ‘that’s just me, that’s just the way it is’ - it may be easy, but it is not true.
Yourself can change, can be managed, can be challenged, to get the best out of you, to create a better whole you.
You have to get to know yourself to do this. You have to face things you might not want to face. You might discover things you never realised about yourself, all this time.
But that’s where it starts.
With you.
And acknowledging that there might be an (even) better version of yourself you can grow into.
That you don’t have to be the man at the front folding his arms unhappy about having to take a day out of his important (busy) schedule for this nonsense.
That there could be another man that could be sitting there.
But if course that takes effort, and some work. And that’s why many of us don’t do it. Because it’s easier just ot deal with ourselves as we are, even if it’s not the best we could be.
So back to the card I was given. The colleagues that I was sitting with at the time of this programme discovered that ‘ourselves’ can be a bit awkward and giggly when things like the above were happening. Watching grown men battle it out for intellectual bragging rights, or maybe it was just a debate on the purpose of the programme, left us highly amused. And, being honest, we maybe didn’t get the most out of the day, and we maybe didnt discover our best selves.
So when one of them saw that card in a shop they just had to send it to me. As a reminder, that sometimes ‘just be yourself’ is definitely not the best advice you can ever give.
Has anyone ever said ‘just be yourself’ to you, and it couldn’t have been the worst advice ever?
eleanor
Love this post. It is right on. I had a boyfriend once who, to excuse his bad behavior, would say, "I am who I am." And I would think, "But don't you have higher aspirations for yourself? Because you're kind of a selfish dick sometimes."