But feel as if there are times when you don’t quite fit in?
I know exactly how this feels. In fact, I have lived the greater part of my life auditioning for the approval of others…dancing to everyone else’s tune…doing everything within my power to be liked, accepted, impressive, and one of the pack.
It is an exhausting way to live, isn’t it? The irony is…no matter how hard you to try to fit it, you only ever succeed in becoming inauthentic. Instead of living an authentic life, you end up phony, living a kind of surface and surreptitious life. Not only does nobody else know who you are, what’s worse is that you don’t either.
“How might I live an authentic life?”
The only way I know you can overcome this inner drive to please is to recognize, without judgment, when it is present. And, it is present almost always. When you notice yourself behaving in ways just to get someone else to like you…accept you, observe the behavior. Do not judge. Just watch it, as you would the antics of a child playing in the middle of the living room floor.
In other words, you don’t keep quite when you should speak because you’re afraid of judgment. You speak, always in love, but with passion and conviction, knowing not everyone is going to agree and some may even reject you.
So be it. I always think about something Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Our lives end the day we become silent about the things that really matter.”
What matters more than anything is that you live an authentic life. In the end, can you name one thing that matters more?
How can you know when you’re living an authentic life?
When the self-observation is no longer necessary. Make it your spiritual ambition to live an authentic life.
