Be who you say you are: in 5 steps

I have been feeling like a fraud.

For the last few weeks I have been feeling itchy, not sure of something. I have been writing about courage, about doing terrific stuff imperfectly, about reframing failure. I have been spouting some great material. And yet, I have felt rotten. Annoyed and frustrated with myself.

Last week, when I had a while to sit and reflect, I recognised that it’s because there are a couple of things I want to do, which I haven’t committed to, because they frighten the pants off me. Put simply: I am scared that I will look stupid.

Once I realised that, I felt like a great, big, inauthentic, preachy, hypocritical fraud.

Yuk.

So I spoke to my favourite person about it [because as Dr Brene Brown so helpfully and eloquently reminds us, shame – that feeling of being flawed and so, unworthy of love and connection – is incapable of surviving empathy]. I grabbed him and spilled:

Me: I feel like a fraud! I bang on about courage and doing amazing things and I don’t do that stuff!

Him: Hang on. Aren’t you the person who goes on radio and live TV and appears in magazines and makes yourself incredibly vulnerable?

Me: Um, yes.

Still me: But there are things that I want to do that I’m not doing because I’m scared!

Him: Well do them! You could do them with your eyes shut.

Me: Huh. Yes.

That gap between how you say you want to live and how you really do live can be a very uncomfortable place to be. If you find yourself feeling itchy and frustrated it could be because you are aspiring to your values rather than practicing them. It can help to:

1 Sit

Find some space to work out what is really going on

2 Notice

Pinpoint the disconnect

3 Share

Speak to someone [who is unfailingly supportive] about it

4 Design

Decide on some practical [and manageable] ways to shift your behaviour [to align what you say and what you do]

5 Do

Do those things

Tags: choices, courage, happiness, values