Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken

Transform Your Life with the Power of Authenticity

Mike Robbins

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780470395011
• eBook ISBN: 9780470455081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Praise for Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken

"Mike's book is a wonderful expression of authenticity in action—clear, honest, instructive, and a passionate call to be your true Divine Self."
— Cheryl Richardson, New York Times best-selling author, Take Time for Your Life

"Mike Robbins provides a clear guide for intelligently and compassionately coming face-to-face with yourself and loving the person you meet. His five principles of authenticity teach us how to embrace and celebrate all aspects of who we are and what it means to be a spiritual being having a human incarnation."
— Michael Bernard Beckwith, author, Spiritual Liberation

" Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken is an empowering and refreshing book about how to be successful, real, and fulfilled in life. I highly recommend it."
— Gay Hendricks, New York Times best-selling author, Five Wishes

"Mike Robbins has written a powerful, down-to-earth, and insightful book on one of the most important aspects of happiness and fulfillment in life—authenticity. Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Already Taken will give you tools and techniques to enhance your life and relationships in a profound way."
— Marci Shimoff, New York Times best-selling author, Happy for No Reason

" Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Already Taken reminds us that God created each one of us for a unique purpose.?We live in a world where the lines between fake and real have blurred. This powerful book teaches you how to access and express the realness you crave in your work, your relationships, and yourself."
— Jon Gordon, author, The Energy Bus

part one

why it can be hard to be authentic

1

don’t step out of line

“You were born an original, don’t die a copy.”

—John Mason

Why is it hard to be authentic? More important, why is it hard for you to be authentic? This isn’t an accusation or a judgment, it’s an important question. If you can ask and answer this question honestly, without judging yourself (remember, it’s hard for most of us), you’re well on your way to becoming more of who you really are and ultimately more authentic.

Are we born inauthentic? No, I don’t think so! So how did this difficulty in being authentic come to pass? Understanding how we got to be inauthentic is not only more complicated to answer, it’s essential for us to inquire into on our journey of authenticity. While I don’t believe we’re victims of our circumstances, nevertheless we’re influenced by the culture in which we live; the people around us; and our own internal make-up.

This first section of the book focuses on why it can be difficult for us to be authentic and on some of the societal, familial, and personal influences—thoughts, feelings, attitude, beliefs, decisions, and choices—that can make authenticity so challenging for us. Each of us is unique and therefore has a separate set of influences and challenges, but many of these factors are also universal. Chapter One focuses on the cultural level, while the second chapter delves into things on a more personal and psychological level.

We Aren’t Taught or Encouraged to Be Authentic

From the moment we come into the world, we immediately begin getting “trained.” The doctors, midwives, nurses, parents, family members, and others we meet on our very first day of life begin taking care of us and at the same time imposing on us their rules, procedures, opinions, beliefs, and ideas of how the world works and how things should be. As the father of two very young girls (our older daughter, Samantha, is three and our baby girl, Annarose, is not even one yet), I’m well aware of this process and understand how necessary it is. If we don’t take care of our babies for many years after they’re born, they could not and would not survive. This human dilemma, however, highlights one of the core conflicts we all face—how do we know what it means to be who we truly are when how we learn about life is through the filtered perspectives of the people who raise us and the culture in which we live?

In addition, the survival training we get as young children and throughout our lives is often at odds with our desire and ability to be authentic. Directly and indirectly we’re taught not to “step out of line,” literally and figuratively. There are many factors and social institutions within our culture that either initiate or perpetuate this. Some do both. Let’s take a look at some of the most significant examples of these influences and how and why they get in the way of our knowing and being who we truly are.

Family

Whether we come from families we consider “healthy” or those we consider “dysfunctional,” most of us didn’t learn to be authentic in our families. In fact, in most cases we learned the exact opposite. Why is this? Because most of the people in our families have a hard time being authentic, just like most of the people on the planet (you’ll see that this is a theme throughout this chapter, section, and the book, by the way). In addition, most families—even “healthy” ones—have a lot of unresolved issues, conflicts, and unexpressed emotions that have an impact on each person within the family individually and the family unit collectively. This causes us to create certain dynamics in our families in which each of us plays a specific role based on years of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and behavior. These roles often create a lot of pain and frustration for us and others in our families, and they’re not at all conducive to us being who we really are.

CHECK THIS OUT Statistics About American Families

• According to the 2000 U.S. Census, more than 60 percent of all American children are from divorced families.

• According to the American Medical Association, 72 percent of American homes harbor someone with an addiction.

• According to a 2006 Harris Poll, approximately 33 million, or 15 percent, of all U.S. adults admit that they were a victim of domestic violence. Furthermore, six in ten adults claim that they know someone personally who has experienced domestic violence.

Many of the major life decisions we make—where we live; our career choices; what religion or spiritual path, if any, we choose to follow; whom to be in romantic relationships with and ultimately marry; if we have children and how many; what we spend our money on; whom we vote for in elections; how we take care of ourselves; and much more—are significantly influenced by our family members, regardless of how old we are, whether we’re in regular communication with them, how far away they might live from us, and even in some cases whether or not they’re still alive.

Many people follow in lockstep with the values or beliefs of their families, while others, especially in the past fifty years in our Western culture, have rejected the beliefs of their families and make it a point to let everyone know they are “doing it their own way.”

Regardless of which end of this spectrum we find ourselves on, it’s obvious that our families play a huge role in our ability or inability to be authentic. Most of us unconsciously run the decisions we make through this base-level filter and ask ourselves, “What will my family think? Given that we all needed the love, approval, and acceptance of our families for our survival when we were children and adolescents, many of us still operate as if that is the case today, when usually it’s not. Others of us may have rejected this need years ago and operate in continuing opposition to our subjective recollection of our family’s values and opinions.

Many of us, as we grow and evolve, learn to disentangle ourselves from our family of origin (parents, siblings, and so on) but then re-entangle with our spouses and our own children. It’s the same phenomenon, just different players. In either case, when we do this (which most of us do, without even knowing it) we’re not fully thinking and feeling for ourselves and we’re letting the real or perceived expectations of others dictate who we are, what we can do, and how we think we’re “supposed” to be.

I still find myself doing this all the time. As I sit here and write this book, I notice that my automatic filter of what I think I can and can’t say is heightened, especially as it relates to my family. Wondering about what my mom, my sisters, my wife, my aunts and uncles, my in-laws, my daughters (when they’re old enough), and others will think of what I’m writing influences what I’m willing to say.

Being aware of this is the first step in taking back our power and being more of who we are. Our family is the first and often most powerful force in our lives that we allow to take away our authentic voice and our real power. In most cases we were and still are given direct and indirect messages from our family to not be who we really are, but to be who and what they want us to be or think we should be or, at the very least, to not be who or what they would be embarrassed for us to be.

School

I wore a maroon polyester leisure suit with tan desert boots and a grey clip-on tie to my first day of kindergarten. Yes, my mother did actually love and care about me. She swears to this day that I insisted on that outfit myself—although I’m sure she got a real kick out of it. It was the late 70s, my older sister Lori was into the Bee Gees, Shaun Cassidy, and disco, so I guess I just picked up this odd fashion idea from some of that influence. I’m not really sure if this was an act of me being myself or not, but it definitely was unique, and the snapshots from that day are pretty funny. However, I learned something on that first day of kindergarten when the other kids laughed and I felt stupid that stuck with me for a long time and still lingers today: Do everything you can to avoid being made fun of!

I think most of us learn this lesson at some point early in our lives, especially at school. Education is so important, and most of us in this culture are fortunate to have access to it and for free. Sadly, however, we all have experiences in school with the other kids, as well as with many of the adults, that affect us in a negative way both mentally and emotionally. Our educational system often misses the boat big time when it comes our mental and emotional development, to say nothing of the quality of education itself.

I believe that most teachers, like most parents, have the best of intentions. But because most of the people involved in the school communities have a hard time being authentic themselves (like most people alive), just by watching the adults and the other kids around us on a daily basis, we often literally were “trained” to be inauthentic in school.

While things do seem to be getting better, and there is much greater awareness these days about important stuff like room setup, exercise, diet and nutrition, mental and emotional well-being, creativity, multiple learning styles, and more, most of us who are adults today grew up going to schools and sitting in classrooms where we were stuck in rows and forced to memorize lots of information simply because that was the way it had always been done and because the standards, test scores, and funding for the schools often depended on the enforcement of these things. Sadly, this is still the case in many schools today.

While there is clearly an important place for discipline, training, rules, safety, and much more—both at home and at school—much of the fear-based, ego-driven way in which we were taught in school did not encourage us to think for ourselves, allow us to express our real emotions, or give us the necessary tools to figure out who we are, what we want, and what’s important to us.

Some argue that school was not designed for this in the first place and that much of the social and emotional training we need should come from home. However, given the amount of time we all spent in school, the relative dysfunction of many of our families, and the increased financial pressure placed on modern families to work more hours and leave their kids with others, school has become even more influential over the years in terms of the mental and emotional development of children and teenagers.

On average most of us spend fifteen years in school from the time we go to preschool at the age of three until the time we graduate from high school at the age of eighteen. Assuming we go on average of 180 days per year, for six hours each day, that’s over sixteen thousand hours of school, or just about two full years of our lives, by the time we graduate from high school—without even factoring in our time in college or graduate school. Suffice to say, we spend a good amount of time in our formative years in school.

Regardless of our current age or where we grew up, most of us learned a great deal in school—both good and bad, as well as in and outside of the classroom. And, since the educational system is often devoid of many effective tools for how to really think, feel, express ourselves, and deal with the reality of life, most of us were trained to simply follow rules and retain information, and were given a long list of social norms we either follow or rebuke as we move through life.

I’m not an expert on education, and I realize that the opportunities and challenges within different schools and communities vary a great deal, but from my own experience growing up, going to school as a child, and even as I got older and attended a well-respected university (Stanford), I feel that there’s not a lot we learn in school that teaches us about how to be ourselves, to speak our truth with confidence, and to live life in an authentic way.

Organized Religion

Organized religion is another powerful force and institution in our culture that can have a negative impact on our ability to be ourselves. This one is a little tricky for me to talk and write about, because I don’t want to offend anyone. We all have our own personal opinions about religion and our own personal beliefs about the role of God or religion in our lives, and for most of us these opinions and beliefs are held sacred. Even if you’re someone who doesn’t believe in God; doesn’t belong to an organized religion; and has never even gone to a church, synagogue, mosque, or spiritual gathering of any kind, you can still be mightily influenced by organized religion in our culture.

I have great appreciation and respect for everyone’s spiritual path, and I even respect those who choose not to acknowledge one or don’t think that God exists. I truly believe that “all paths lead to God.” But, paradoxically, I think organized religion is an institution that can and does damage people deeply, especially as it relates to authenticity.

I heard Dr. Wayne Dyer a few years ago say, “That which is of God unifies us and that which is of the ego divides us. Therefore, in most cases organized religion, which divides much of the world and has for generations, is of the ego, not of God.” When I heard him say this, I was shocked. I remember looking around to see if anyone else was as shocked as I was. There didn’t seem to be that much reaction from the people around me. I then turned to my wife Michelle and said, “Wow, I can’t believe he said that—he might get in trouble.” Even though I actually agreed with what he said, my knee-jerk reaction was based on years of programming, and I immediately thought to myself, “That’s blasphemy.” Wayne Dyer, who is one of the most prominent spiritual teachers of our time and one of my personal favorites, spoke a deep truth that resonated within me. But on the basis of my own notions of what’s “acceptable” to say about religion I was taken aback.

Religion can be a beautiful expression of spirituality, community, love, and service. So many good things are done by faith-based groups in our culture and throughout the world. But at the same time, I think religious doctrine, structure, and dogma in many cases stifle our creativity, our expression, and ultimately our authenticity. There are so many sad and painful stories of people being abused in very harmful ways by members of their religious community—leaders and others. And I’ve heard literally thousands of less dramatic stories from family members, friends, and clients over the years about how much fear, shame, and guilt they felt growing up based on what they learned or heard at church or temple.

I grew up quite confused in relation to religion and spirituality. My dad was raised Jewish and my mom Catholic, although neither of them really practiced their religions and we did not go to church or synagogue on any regular basis for the first few years of my life. A couple of years after my folks split up, when I was about five, my mom took my older sister Lori and me to St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in our neighborhood because they had free meals on Wednesday nights and progra...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• part one
• part two
• part three
• resources
• about the author