The Audacity to Be Yourself

I remember being in my twenties and hanging out in my Manhattan apartment with my boyfriend at the time, looking through a giant bowlful of photographs that I kept on a table in my living room. I’d dumped a couple of hundred pictures from various parts of my life in there, and while we sat and drank beers and sifted through them, I was actually only fake‐sifting through them. What I was really doing was sneaking any picture where I looked sexy or cool or world‐travel‐y to the top of the pile so he’d be sure to see it. To my great frustration, however, he kept digging deep into the bowl, oblivious to my offerings, and ended up pulling out a picture of me at around age sixteen, standing in my friend’s driveway with ratty long hair, twiggy arms, not a breast yet in sight, wearing a blue T‐shirt that said to a teNNIs player, loVe meaNs NothING. In the picture I’m also eating a bag of Doritos, helpless laughter exploding through my big, nacho‐cheesy smile.

I tried to casually insert a picture of myself onstage wearing a miniskirt and an electric guitar into his hand. OMG, I have to tell you the craziest story about this night… but he just moved the one he was already holding even closer to his face to get a better look.

“What is so fascinating about that picture?” I asked, not caring at all.

“I don’t know,” he said, “there’s just something I love about it. I guess it just really looks like you.”

This whole self‐development thing—upgrading your habits, pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, expanding your perception of reality, being a badass—isn’t a competition or some socially dictated finish line you cross that means you’ve finally “made it.” Nor is the quest to better yourself supposed to make you feel like a loser if you’re not thinking positive thoughts, or staying laser focused on your clearly defined goals, or clicking your heels with overflowing self‐love and happiness 24/7 (can you imagine how annoying that person would be to be around?).

All this work is about giving yourself the room, the means, the information, the motivation, and the permission to be the most authentic expression of who you truly are.

Being authentic means loving who you love, pursuing the stuff you’re interested in, laughing at the shit you find funny, and fighting for what you think is right. Being authentic also means giving yourself permission to change your mind, to make mistakes, to be a jerk, to beg forgive‐ ness, to be sad, lonely, stupid, and lazy. True authenticity means embracing your whole self, the you who’s wearing a miniskirt rocking out onstage and the you that’s eating a bag of Doritos wondering when the hell puberty is going to show up.

As you do this work, see the habits that you’re cultivating as opportunities to let the rare gems of your authenticity shine through, instead of viewing them as proof that you’re finally becoming a disciplined, and therefore more socially acceptable, person.

For example, getting into the habit of writing every morning is about expressing your desire to connect with other people through your words, words that are in your voice and that bravely share your wild and weird perspective on the world with your readers. Getting into the habit of eating better and losing weight is about your desire to feel lighter, healthier, and more connected to the physical manifestation of your one and only self, otherwise known as your body. Even getting into the habit of doing the damn dishes every night is about your desire to restore order to your life, to treat yourself and your surroundings like they matter, to make the world a better, more ant‐ free place.

As you go through the habit‐forming process, you will hit oil slicks on your road to success—you’ll stay snuggly in bed and blow off running on the treadmill before work and you will erupt into a tirade of expletives behind the wheel of your car, contrary to your no‐being‐ an‐a‐hole decree. The question is not whether you’ll slip up but how you’ll choose to respond when you do. Get‐ ting back on track with your habit ASAP is critical, but how about if you also spend the time you usually reserve for beating yourself up or whining about what a dope you are on immediately forgiving yourself instead? What if you included, with all future habits that you embark on, the bonus habit of allowing yourself to be human and therefore flawed?

I’ve peppered my book with stories about real people who recognized a habit they wanted to change and got their mindset into a place where they could attack that goal like their pants were on fire. And while I love hearing all the inspirational details of how we humans pull off success, keep in mind that it’s easier to see the progression of a process like habit forming/breaking when you’ve got the advantage of hindsight and the ability to leave out the details of the massive slip-ups and buffoonery that we all experience along the way. Not only were these people able to look back and see how their habit anchored in but they could notice how even some coincidences and activities that seemed totally unrelated at the time served to reinforce the new behavior pattern they were pursuing.

When you’re bravely forging through this process, you might not be able to recognize the tricks that help you sidle past obstacles, or how your new obsession with waking up and charting the progress of the anthill behind your garage is helping you get centered before sitting down to study every morning. Trust your intuition, don’t question stuff that feels good if it’s not harming your progress, and remember that just showing up and giving it your best shot is an act worthy of a round of applause.

We live in a culture obsessed with achievement and goals. And while I loves me some good, solid gettin’ ’er done, I do not love it at the expense of our own self‐ worth. We need to deny the over-popular trend of smearing fear and shame all over ourselves and instead celebrate compassion, colossal screwups, and vulnerability. Think about the people in your life who you love. You’re in‐ spired by them when they do great things, you’re blown away when they face their fears, and you dance around them in circles when they ace the bar exam. But you also love your peeps for the fact that they don’t realize they have some salsa stuck to their lip and that they cry at graduations and that they look so scared and lost when faced with downloading a new operating system onto their computer.

Real human connection happens when we’re vulnerable, not when we’re being handed a gold medal. I believe that this natural pull toward vulnerability is why we literally can’t stop staring at babies. Babies are cute and all (usually; I’ve certainly seen some that look like turtles or fat truck drivers), but I think we’re mesmerized by how fragile, exposed, and helpless they are. Staring at a baby is like plugging into the motherlode of human vulnerability; it’s a force so compelling we literally can’t take our eyes off it until the baby’s mom yanks at the stroller, hurries off, and shoots us a look like she’s memorizing our face, just in case.

We all have a little fleshy baby inside of us that we’ve covered up over the years in order to survive. And while a world full of adults stumbling around all openly vulnerable and helpless would not serve anyone well, we’ve swung too far the other way. We’ve made a habit out of being scared and ashamed of these softer parts of our‐ selves, which cuts us off from the connection, serenity, and happiness we so deeply desire.

Use this journey of forming habits that you love as a way to go beyond just the noble achievement of a goal and to forge a more intimate relationship with your most authentic self. Understand that embracing who you truly are is about accepting yourself through all of it—when you’re at your most victorious, your most irritable, your most temper-tantrumy, and your most vulnerable.

Give yourself the permission to be, to do, and to have whatever lights up your heart and practice forgiving your screwups along the way. Loving your whole self is simply a habit, a habit that’s definitely worth having.

Excerpted from Badass Habits: Cultivate the Awareness, Boundaries, and Daily Upgrades You Need to Make Them Stick. Copyright © 2020 by Jen Sincero. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Life. 

This excerpt was featured in the February 28, 2021 edition of The Sunday Paper. The Sunday Paper publishes News and Views that Rise Above the Noise and Inspires Hearts and Minds. To get The Sunday Paper delivered to your inbox each Sunday morning for free, click here to subscribe.