I thought I would share some of my favourite quotes about being your authentic self and living your life purpose. For each, I have also added a brief note about why I think they are important. Feel free to add your own favourite quotes on the subject in the comments.
I think we all want to be living a life that just feels right, like we’re on the right track and everything feels easy. This quote from Jacob Nordby (author of, amongst others, Blessed Are The Weird) sums that up for me:
You know how every once in a while you do something and the little voice inside says “There. That’s it. That’s why you’re here.” … and you get a warm glow in your heart because you know it’s true? Do more of that. (Jacob Nordby)
Leadership expert Lance Secretan gives a great description of authenticity, which he says is important in creating trust and getting people to buy into your mission:
Authenticity is the alignment of head, mouth, heart and feet – thinking, saying, feeling and doing the same thing – consistently. (Lance Secretan)
Being yourself and doing what you’re here to do is really the only way to live a happy and fulfilled life. The daddy of psychotherapists Carl Jung sums it up very well, when he describes it as a privilege:
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you really are (Carl Jung)
Although to be honest I think I’d go further and describe it as a right, maybe even a responsibility.
Apple founder Steve Jobs expressed this right very well in his famous Stanford Commencement Address. Much as I’d like to reduce it to one simple pithy statement, I think you need the whole section to grasp the depth of what he was saying:
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary (Steve Jobs)
And if we want something a little more instantly quotable, try this from actress Judy Garland:
Always be a first-rate version of yourself and not a second-rate version of someone else (Judy Garland)
This theme of trying to be something you’re not comes up again in this quote from “Dr Love” Leo Buscaglia, only this time it highlights the pressure from others to attempt to be something different:
The easiest thing to be in the world is you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don’t let them put you in that position (Leo Buscaglia)
And everyone’s favourite vulnerability coach, Brene Brown, echoes this idea, and brings it back to authenticity with a way to achieve that by resisting the tendency to conform:
Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we are supposed to be and embracing who we are (Brene Brown)
Authenticty and being yourself isn’t a new idea, of course. As far back as the nineteenth century philosopher Thoreau picked up not just on the pressure to conform, but on that fact that a lot of the time we create that pressure ourselves, and even double down on the distortion by second-guessing what we think others expect us to be. That makes this one of my favourite quotes, and I use a variation of it in a lot of my work.
Be yourself – not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be
Henry David Thoreau
He may have added an extra subtlety to the concept, but even Thoreau was repeating what earlier great minds had spotted. The Bard himself was very clear on the value of being true to ourselves:
This above all:
To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
And finally, albeit at risk of a little hubris, here’s one from me, inspired by an article I read about actress Emma Watson, where she was quoted as saying we worry too much about what we’re not that we think we should be:
Stop defining yourself by the limitations of what you are not, and start designing yourself by the possibilities of what you could be (Andrew Horder)
Bearing in mind that all definition is, by definition, a limitation, my question for you is this:
What are you choosing – to define yourself or to design yourself?