The Courage to Be True to Yourself
lessons from one year of living on the road
How much does your daily external life reflect the genuine essence of who you really are?
I love this question. But man, does it sting.
I’ve been living full time in my van now for just over a year. I’ve traveled through some amazing landscapes, experienced moments of beauty I never expected. I’ve known both the healing peace of long silences and the restorative comfort of community and friendship in ways I never knew I could experience on the road. In a lot of ways, I’m more alive now than I have been in years. I’ve always been drawn to the open road — to wild, untamed landscapes, to stories of vagabonds and pilgrims, to adventurous quests and holy peregrinations. I’ve always seen myself as a sojourner at heart, a stalwart traveler through the world who doesn’t put down roots, but is always passing through a place on my way to somewhere else. For all those reasons and more, the way I’m living right now deeply aligns with the genuine essence of who I really am.
But that does not mean that any of it has been easy.
People are often afraid to admit this, but the truth is it’s actually really hard — really hard — to be true to who you really are. It requires a mountain of courage, not just a single blast of brave defiance done once and then it’s settled, but a continuous blaze of white hot audacity, sustained all day, every day, fueled by the winds of faith like the fires of a forge.
To be true to yourself is to accept risk as the status quo for your daily life, to know that you must, as a matter of course, not go with the flow, not bend to the masses, not think with the herd, not allow yourself to pass the precious hours of your life in the dull unconscious bliss of the social systems you inhabit.
To be true to who you really are means you won’t fit in. Family, friendships, career, culture, religion, politics, society — all of the systems you must navigate as an active participant in the human drama — will chafe against your strange insistence on following the track of your own life. They will label you eccentric. They will call you odd. They will say that you are strange. You will be told you “don’t get it.” Even those who love you will insist you need to fall in line and play the game.
You will of course make compromises. Being true to yourself is not about hating the world or giving it the finger every time it asks anything of you. But you need to gain real savvy and wisdom to find that subtle boundary between those compromises that make life better for all including you, and those that violate the essence of who and what you are meant to be.
It is not a simple matter to live true to your essence in a continuous maelstrom of forces intent on shaping you into what they want you to be.
To be nobody but yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. — E.E. Cummings
So…How much does your daily external life reflect the genuine essence of who you really are?
When I use this question in my coaching work with clients, it’s always deeply revealing, and often leads to very powerful, generative conversations about what is or isn’t working in the way they currently live, and what would have to change for their life to be more aligned with the genuine essence of their truest self.
If you’re curious about how best to answer this question for your own life, here’s what I would suggest:
Do a time audit of your typical week. If you’re not familiar with a time audit, it simply means to keep a record of how you spend each hour of your day every day for an entire week.1 Then evaluate the results on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 = “a 100 % genuine expression of who I really am” and 0 = “not in alignment with who I really am at all.” For example, maybe you love to fly fish, and when you get to do that, it’s a perfect expression of your true self. So you give it a “10.” But then you work in a job where you feel invisible and underutilized and you’re basically just marking time to put in the hours so you can go do something you actually enjoy. Well, that likely has 0% alignment with the core essence of who you really are.
Once you’ve completed the time audit, step back and ask yourself a few questions:
What stands out to you about your time audit?
How do your time audit results make you feel? What do those feelings tell you?
How satisfied are you with this current arrangement?
In what ways do you want to become more true to who you really are?
What new courageous commitments would you have to make for those changes to happen, and to become permanent?
Are you willing to make those commitments now? Why or why not? If not now, when?
It’s not easy, being true to yourself. But based on my own experience, and backed by 20+ years of coaching, here’s what I can tell you:
It is better. It is worth it.
And, you can do it. Anyone can move toward living in a way that’s more true to yourself.
All it takes is the courage to say yes to who you really are.
If your schedule varies a lot from week to week, then it might be better to do a time audit over a few weeks or even a month, then evaluating the results in aggregate.
So so good! 🔥
Thanks!🙏