HOW TO BE YOURSELF
1. Accept yourself.
Media (and social media) can make us feel unattractive. Models and actors
are attractive, of course, but now even our friends on social media have
photoshopped their pictures to perfection, often making us feel unattractive in
comparison.
Lots of evidence shows that the more media we consume with attractive
people in it, the worse we feel about ourselves. But because we don’t want to
give up our addiction to media — an addiction that provides us with
companionship, entertainment, and so many good memories — we don’t quit.
It subtly tells us we’re not good enough so many times that we start to
believe it’s true. Media wouldn’t lie to us, right?
Wrong! Media sets the bar impossibly high, so no matter how hard we try to
improve ourselves, we always feel like we're falling short.
2. Identify negative self-talk.
One of the ways we can better accept ourselves is to identify and challenge
our negative self-talk. We always have these inner monologues chirping away
at us, interpreting the events happening all around us. For many of us, this
self-talk is mostly negative. For example, we might think, "I’m ugly" or "My
life sucks," when we watch TV shows or look at our social media. Or we might
think, "He hates me," if a friend posts a picture of a fun time that we weren’t
invited to. We could stop some of this painful ruminating by simply limiting
our media and social media time, but we also need to practice stopping the
negative self-talk.
3. Celebrate your strengths.
In addition to negative self-talk, we can also easily slide into the habit of
focusing on our weaknesses instead of celebrating our strengths. We all suck
at things. In fact, we all suck at most things, and that’s OK. But it can really
get us down when we focus on these things instead of focusing on what we’re
good at.
For example, I sometimes put myself down, because I’m not great at
maintaining friendships long-term. It’s true. I’m an introvert. I don’t like
texting and often feel shy about asking people to meet in person. But if we
get down on ourselves regularly for the things we’re not good at, it’s going to
be hard to like ourselves as much as we could. So, in addition to trying to
improve our weaknesses, we have to remind ourselves of what we are good
at. If we think about it, each of us have many strengths, even if these
strengths seem small and insignificant. By identifying them we realize, hey,
our weird, one-of-a-kind self is pretty awesome after all.
4. Express yourself.
Source: Pixabay
What else stops us from being ourselves? Mostly, it’s our fear of what other
people might think about us if we showed our true selves. For example,
maybe our friends all have the same opinion about a political topic, so we
decide not to share our different point of view. Maybe our friends like a
particular genre of music, and so we decide not to talk about the kinds of
music we like. Or maybe our friends enjoy dining at fancy restaurants, so we
decide not to invite them to our house for the cozy dinner we'd really prefer.
We hold back because we are afraid of the possible consequences —
consequences like them thinking we're weird or ditching us.
It’s human nature for us to want to show the best sides of ourselves. And
holding back our opinions occasionally is a necessary part of life — in fact, it
can help make our relationships a bit easier and more enjoyable. As social
beings, we have all navigated the challenge of balancing self-expression with
social harmony in our face-to-face interactions. But now, in the technology
age, we are having to navigate this challenge in a whole new environment —
on the Internet, through text, images, or video. And we have no model to
follow, so we do what everybody else does. We show only a sliver of who we
really are — the best sliver of ourselves.
We don’t share everything about ourselves — in part, for good reason. We
don’t want everyone we’ve ever met to know every little thing about us, and
that’s OK. Where we get into trouble is when our self-expression becomes a
performance designed to evoke some kind of response in others. The result?
Few of the people in our lives know who we really are deep down, and we
might even start to forget who we really are deep down.
So how do we know whether our expressions have become presentations for
an audience rather than creative expressions of who we really are? Well, we
might start to wonder: Who is that person we pretend to be on social media
— the one with the perfect clothes, photoshopped body, with the biggest
smile you’ve ever seen? Or we might start to notice that we post pictures
online not to show to others, but to make others think something specific
about us. We’ll have to start paying attention to whether we are acting in
order to be ourselves, or whether we are putting on a show.
5. Show your vulnerability.
Another important step to being ourselves is showing our vulnerability. Most
of us, myself included, don’t really want to show the parts of us that we don’t
like — the parts that scare us or make us feel ashamed, embarrassed, or
weak. It’s not so easy to share these parts of ourselves. We worry — What if
others change their opinion of us, reject us, or abandon us?
It’s scary to be so openly vulnerable — it’s like opening up an old wound and
telling others right where to poke you. But to fully be ourselves we have to be
our full selves. We can’t just pick and choose the parts that we like; we can’t
just show the manicured, photoshopped version of ourselves. So we have to
be vulnerable from time to time.
