I’ve always considered “be yourself” to mean “don’t pretend to be someone you’re not”, which is wonderful advice because unless you’re /very/ good at it, most people will see through your disguise.
Pretending can be helpful for learning. For example, if I am going to learn Japanese, it would help me to imagine during the lessons that I am a ninja. That will connect emotions with the information, which should make the brain learn faster and remember better. -- On the other hand, scolding me “you are not a ninja, you are not even a Japanese person, so stop pretending to be one” anytime I open the Japanese textbook would harm my efforts.
Also, there is this thing about attribution. Of course my estimates about how well do I role-play a socially skilled person are seriously biased. But so are the estimates of people who know me for a long time! They look at me and they don’t see the “today-me”; they see the “remembered-me” acting out of its usual role. (Strangers assume that the “today-me” is my typical behavior, whether good or bad.) Maybe I pretend to be a funny person, but I do it wrong and it’s awkward. But maybe I pretend to be a funny person and I do it right… but my old friends still feel awkward, because they know it’s not the “me” they know, so they will give me a negative feedback anyway.
It is difficult to keep your identity small if there are people around you who maintain it for you.
This may be specific for me: I am kind of a chameleon in my behavior. I instinctively feel what other people expect from me, and I start behaving that way. It is not conscious; behaving that way just feels natural when I am with the person, and it is difficult to change. With different people I behave differently, although within some limits. So when someone tells me to “be myself”, I want to scream at them that what they see as “myself” is simply “myself in their presence, acting according to their expectations”, but in a different situation I could be different; that I often already had an experience of behaving the other way, it’s just hard to replicate for some reasons (e.g. there were people who made me act like that, but I lost contact with them and can’t find a replacement). But I don’t say that, because it sounds silly, and it would be blaming another person for something that is my responsibility, and they probably couldn’t fix it for me anyway. I just consider the “be yourself” advice to be actively harmful. The beauty of meeting new people is that I only have to role-play the given behavior successfully once; then they assume this is “myself”, and then I can behave like this naturally with them. This is how I learned to be a funny person, a wise person, a self-confident person, an attractive person, a leader; in some specific contexts, but then I can experiment with expanding it to other contexts. Making me believe that I should not pretend to be someone I am not (in other people’s opinion) would be like cutting out of my brain the part responsible for self-improvement. In a paradoxical way, pretending to be someone I’m not is an important part of “being myself (as I see myself)”, so telling me to “be myself” is not really helpful in making me be myself.
I’ve always considered “be yourself” to mean “don’t pretend to be someone you’re not”, which is wonderful advice because unless you’re /very/ good at it, most people will see through your disguise.
Pretending can be helpful for learning. For example, if I am going to learn Japanese, it would help me to imagine during the lessons that I am a ninja. That will connect emotions with the information, which should make the brain learn faster and remember better. -- On the other hand, scolding me “you are not a ninja, you are not even a Japanese person, so stop pretending to be one” anytime I open the Japanese textbook would harm my efforts.
Also, there is this thing about attribution. Of course my estimates about how well do I role-play a socially skilled person are seriously biased. But so are the estimates of people who know me for a long time! They look at me and they don’t see the “today-me”; they see the “remembered-me” acting out of its usual role. (Strangers assume that the “today-me” is my typical behavior, whether good or bad.) Maybe I pretend to be a funny person, but I do it wrong and it’s awkward. But maybe I pretend to be a funny person and I do it right… but my old friends still feel awkward, because they know it’s not the “me” they know, so they will give me a negative feedback anyway.
It is difficult to keep your identity small if there are people around you who maintain it for you.
This may be specific for me: I am kind of a chameleon in my behavior. I instinctively feel what other people expect from me, and I start behaving that way. It is not conscious; behaving that way just feels natural when I am with the person, and it is difficult to change. With different people I behave differently, although within some limits. So when someone tells me to “be myself”, I want to scream at them that what they see as “myself” is simply “myself in their presence, acting according to their expectations”, but in a different situation I could be different; that I often already had an experience of behaving the other way, it’s just hard to replicate for some reasons (e.g. there were people who made me act like that, but I lost contact with them and can’t find a replacement). But I don’t say that, because it sounds silly, and it would be blaming another person for something that is my responsibility, and they probably couldn’t fix it for me anyway. I just consider the “be yourself” advice to be actively harmful. The beauty of meeting new people is that I only have to role-play the given behavior successfully once; then they assume this is “myself”, and then I can behave like this naturally with them. This is how I learned to be a funny person, a wise person, a self-confident person, an attractive person, a leader; in some specific contexts, but then I can experiment with expanding it to other contexts. Making me believe that I should not pretend to be someone I am not (in other people’s opinion) would be like cutting out of my brain the part responsible for self-improvement. In a paradoxical way, pretending to be someone I’m not is an important part of “being myself (as I see myself)”, so telling me to “be myself” is not really helpful in making me be myself.