"How many times in your life has somebody offered you that well-meaning piece of advice that you should just be yourself? How many times have you said it to somebody else? One of your kids comes to you, or one of your team comes to you, and they tell you they’re nervous, they’re scared. They have to go and do something and their bold goes, and you say to them, “Darling, just be yourself, because when you’re yourself, you’re fabulous”.
Now it always resonates, because it’s all we want to do. If you tell John to be himself, he doesn’t want to be Mary. He’s quite happy being himself, but it’s the use of the word “just” that I find interesting because it would imply two things. Number one, that that was an easy thing to do. Number two, that it was an original piece of advice. You know, John had never thought about it himself.
When it comes to being yourself, when it comes to being in the world, the minute you showed up, the minute you incarnated, you were given a life sentence. Now, you don’t know how long you got. Maybe you got 70 years and I got 62. We’ve no idea how long we got. Although, where you’re born, when you’re born, to whom you’re born, all these things have a certain influence, or impact on how you become who you become. So if you’re born in Switzerland, chances are you’ve got a long time to figure this shit out. If you’re born in Zimbabwe, or some parts of Glasgow, and I’m not kidding, you’ve got significantly less time.
So what I want you to think about is not what your life expectancy is, but what do you expect from life? And what does life expect from you? Those are more interesting questions. And the two places in life where you are awesome at being yourself, you’re fantastic at being yourself, one of them is when you’re a kid.
When you’re a kid, you’re fantastic at being yourself because you don’t know how to disguise your differentness. That’s why you see kids on the beach, you know, naked up until the age of five, and then suddenly at the age of six or seven they want a bathing suit, they want a bikini. Who’s got a four-year-old boy? Anybody got a four-year-old boy? I’ll take a three-year-old. Jose, you’ve got a three-year-old boy.
So I want you to imagine I go into Eduardo’s class in school, and it’s a class of three-year-old boys, and I say to the boys, “Who’s the strongest boy in the class?” What’s going to happen? Every hand, right? Every single hand in the class will go up. They’ll be competitively strong.
If I go into the same class, but it’s full of seven-year-old boys, and ask the same question, they’ll say, “Him,” because they know by time they’re seven. He’s the strong one, he’s the fastest runner, he’s the funny guy, he’s the bully. Society archetype emerges round about the age of five, six, seven, eight. That’s why the Jesuits say, “Give me a boy until the age of seven, and I’ll show you the man,” because that’s the birth of consciousness. And from then on you become more self-conscious, and by default less good at being yourself.
The other place you’re fantastic at being yourself is when you’re a wrinkly, because you can’t be arsed. You get to that stage in your life where you realize there are more summers behind you than there are in front of you, and everything intensifies. You become more honest; you become less compromising. So you’re going to tell people, “I don’t want the spinach, I’m not going to eat it, I don’t like it. And I don’t like jazz, so you can shut that noise off. And while I’m at it, I don’t like you!” And we call these people eccentric. We call our oldies eccentric. In fact, what they’re doing is being authentic.
So it’s kind of like an hourglass effect. When you’re young you’re great at being yourself; when you’re old you’re great at being yourself; but the bit in the middle is sometimes the most problematic. That’s the bit where you have to socialize; you have to accommodate; you have to adapt."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veEQQ-N9xWU
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