Avoid the short-term discomfort of being authentically disliked.
All of my regrets stem from one source: trying (and usually failing) to avoid being disliked. In moments of prioritizing a shallow, short-term acceptance I have elected the long-term, deep pain of regret.
I have badly hurt people I cared about deeply in seeking to avoid uncomfortable truths. I have failed to connect, contribute, and grow in the face of a fear of fully investing my self in my life and being found unworthy.
The fear of being truly seen and truly unaccepted is not misplaced, just badly misjudged. The pain of regret to which we are vulnerable through inauthentic actions far outweighs the discomfort of being disliked through authentic ones.
The short-term discomfort of being disliked is shallow and precipitates long-term benefits for you and the recipients of your authenticity. Regret is a deep and lasting pain of an existential variety. Weighing these two outcomes appropriately allows fear to drive us toward authenticity and allows us to avoid regret.
The way we think about vulnerability gets this backwards. We associate vulnerability with authenticity in a way that enforces the idea that we should be afraid of showing up authentically. We convince ourselves that we are exposed to harm by listening to our inner voice and acting upon our internal drivers.
I grew up thinking of vulnerability as weakness. Authentic sources of inspiration later encouraged me to believe that vulnerability was strength. I believed myself brave for striving, and usually failing, to show up as my genuine self.
Why would being authentic make us vulnerable? What exactly is at risk when choosing whether to be authentic?
Our fear of being seen and deemed unworthy is a gift of our evolutionary heritage. The drive toward likeability was useful when being disliked meant tribal dismissal and disemboweling by lurking sabertooths.
We bear the gifts and associated burdens of numerous biases evolved in and for this setting, and benefit from a useful level of social cohesion driven by these fears. Our communities would be very different without fearful encouragement toward socially acceptable modes of interacting.
At issue is the ability of an unchecked fear of being seen as unworthy driving us from any opportunity to be seen at all. We avoid authentically committing ourselves to our lives in avoidance of the specter of being disliked, and so choose the pain of never experiencing the life exclusively ours to live.
We pursue likeability at the cost of authenticity. In choosing short-term acceptance over long-term alignment of our actions and beliefs, we make ourselves vulnerable to the deep pain of regret forged in the moments of misalignment between our actions and character.
Inauthentic behaviors have the potential to wound us with regrets that can never be fully healed. Hopefully the following don’t resonate with you.
- I have avoided listening to my inner voice in fear of the uncertain and unique path it might encourage me to follow. This guaranteed that I followed externally validated paths towards externally defined ends that were and will forever remain externally withheld.
- I have avoided sharing my genuine self with my community to avoid the pain of being authentically unaccepted. This guaranteed a flock of fickle followers at the expense of an incessant fear of being outed as a fraud and the loss of meaningful connections with the people who genuinely loved my authentic self.
- I have avoided voicing truths to “spare” those I care about (mostly me) uncomfortable confrontations. This established a precedent of dominance in which I chose which truths others were “capable” of receiving and guaranteed an inevitable erosion of trust and connection.
- I have avoided investing myself fully in my life, providing the excuse of “not really trying” to spare myself the discomfiting truth of “really not being capable.” This guaranteed that I avoided the wholehearted contribution of my unique capabilities, robbing myself of the chance to create meaning through my work and everyone of my contributions.
How to Avoid Regret
“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” Confucius, maybe
Avoiding regret starts with self-awareness. Once you can hear your inner voice, you can distinguish it within a crowded mind and allow it to guide you.
It is impossible to guide yourself without being able to listen to and know yourself. It is impossible to love yourself without knowing yourself first. It is impossible for anyone else to connect with and love you without you loving yourself first. (I won’t get on my meditation soapbox here, but the connection between self-awareness and being capable of love is as real as any.)
With self-awareness/love top of mind, you can appropriately weigh and choose between short-term pain and long-term regret. A fear-setting exercise is useful in this respect:
- Think about a time where you’ve felt discouraged from behaviors based on how you expect you’ll be seen. Recall the short-term discomfort you thought you could avoid by choosing to behave inauthentically.
- Consider the cost of fearful inaction or inauthentic action chosen in this moment. If it was five years ago, how does the path taken feel? If it was yesterday, imagine looking back in five years. Will you remember the short-term discomfort you attempted to avoid? Will you be okay living with the costs of your inauthentic behavior?
- Really consider the prospect of ridding yourself of people who do not want you. Is it worth the lost connection with the people who do? It is easy to be liked by people who are permitted to see only what you think they will like. You can attract everyone to your designer self for a short while or your people to your authentic self for life, but you cannot do both at once.
- What about the prospect of disappointing yourself? Your actions cannot be undone. Moments (or years) lived as a “likeable” version of you cannot be regained. The “life” you lead behind a mask is still the only one you get.
With this weighting of outcomes clear, it becomes easier to cultivate a chef’s mindset with respect to your life. Some of humanity’s greatest innovators have viewed themselves as chefs, with their lives a process of experimenting with recipes and inevitable, valuable failures along the way. Shifting your mindset from viewing your life as a recipe, in which you are a failure when a behavior/relationship/project fails, to viewing yourself as a chef attempting/failing in a process of learning and growth, is a critical shift for overcoming the fear of authentically trying and failing.
Start Happening
I’ve been reading Oh, The Places You’ll Go with my son almost daily. One line has particularly resonated (for me — at 6mo old he resonates with putting the corners of the book in his mouth): “When things start to happen, don’t worry. Don’t stew. Just go right along. You’ll start happening, too.”
I don’t know if anything less than living authentically counts for much. I suspect it’s one of those “more a journey than a destination” types. I know at least the beginning of the journey is neither easy nor fun. But we each have to start.
The shallow pain of being unaccepted and misunderstood is nothing compared to the deep pain of regret. We can use the fear of regrets sowed in inauthenticity to overcome the fear of being authentically disliked.
Let fear drive you to overcome the short-term/loss aversion thinking that prevents you from allowing yourself to be genuinely seen and (way less often than you likely suspect) authentically disliked. Cowardly commit to living all in.
If you buy the message but remain overwhelmed by the fear of being seen as unworthy, fake it. Pretend that you are confident of your worthiness and show it off to the world with feigned pride. There is no other arena in which faking it as effectively causes making it.
As the wise Doctor put it, once things start happening, you’ll start happening too. You will realize that the fear of your family/friends/followers not understanding you in all your authentic weirdness was a fantasy. Your people can only know and love you if you truly give yourself to them.
There has been no greater source of meaning in my life than the joy of authentically connecting, and no deeper regret than connections and moments lost to likeability-driven inauthenticity.
Your choice to go all in on your life will ripple through the world, inspiring others with your ability to authentically share, connect and contribute.
Do yourself, and all of us, the ultimate kindness: have the cowardice to be yourself.
