Being Yourself And Becoming Someone New

Oscar Wilde has a famous quote that goes “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.” I don’t think anyone would disagree with the importance of being genuine and authentic. Anything else is some form of an act, and life doesn’t feel as rich or fulfilling when you can’t be yourself.

Having said that, it’s hard to know what ‘being yourself’ actually is. It takes self-awareness to know who you are at your core, and often our minds can complicate things and convince us to be someone we’re not. It takes courage to be yourself, to all yourself to be fully seen, and stick with it even when others start to make you question if it’s good enough.

Now here’s the complicated part. How do we reconcile the fact that we must always try to be ourselves, yet as individuals we’re always evolving and changing? How can someone be themselves and also become someone new?

James Clear shared a great metaphor on this with Steven Bartlett on the Diary Of A CEO podcast. He talked about how an acorn was perfect, exactly where it’s supposed to be, just as a seed. The acorn finds rich soil and becomes a sapling, grows into a juvenile tree, and then blossoms into a massive oak.

You might think that ‘being yourself’ means that you always need to be an acorn, but that’s not the case. The final form of the tree is also all of the forms that came before it. It’s one and the same, only the present state and expression changed.

Similarly for ourselves we can be changing - showing up with different priorities and focuses in different seasons of life - and all of it can be authentic. 

And it’s easy to act like someone you’re not and in doing so… It’s easy to become someone new. But you won’t end on being yourself. In fact I’d argue the only way to become who you’re meant to be is by always focusing on being yourself. It’s only by protecting the seed that is your essence that allows your truest self to come out.

The reality is we’re always evolving anyway. We’re always becoming someone new. It’s by being yourself that you make sure you turn into the right person. 

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