Yo yo yo. Welcome back to the Further your Lifestyle podcast conversations on lifestyle passions and hustles. My name's Chris, I am your host and I'm super excited to be back here having the conversation with you, episode 188 today. We're getting so ever closer to the end of the year, which blows my mind. I can't believe we're almost in 2025. I hope you're doing well today. I hope you're, whether you're tuning in from the YouTube, from Spotify or Apple Podcasts, wherever you are. I hope you're having a wonderful day, wonderful evening, whoever you are, whatever you're doing.

And today's topic is it's a personal one, where we're talking about being me or being yourself, and this is a question that's come through and I think it's a great question for yourself to resonate with. It's a question that you should probably dabble with, and the question itself is how do you stay connected to your authentic self in a world full of distractions and expectations? Jeepers, just to be authentic in this world, it's easy to be authentic, but it's hard to live up to the expectations of the world in the sense that they don't think that authenticity is real. And there's big components around this where we can talk about self-awareness, mindfulness and all those great things, but that's the question today we're going to get into. I'm going to answer it from my personal perspective and tap into some of the ideas around that. But, yeah, buckle up, we're going to roll the intro, get cozy and maybe you should follow along and answer this for yourself and really dive into it. Yeah, let's get into it. Okay, so in case you've jumped ahead, how do you stay connected to your authentic self in a world full of distractions and expectations?

Look, I think there's been a bit of a not a hype, but there's been a bit of a trend of this over the last three, four years. Since the pandemic, there's been a big push for digital detoxing. We were so hooked online in terms of working from home, being on front of screens, and it's been a challenge to get back out into society and becoming our original selves. But I think, also from the pandemic, there's been a lot of opportunity to more aware of ourselves. That for me, definitely, and that's if we look back over the last couple of years. But I think there comes a point in time where we start to develop our individualism and we also have to then balance that and challenge that against conformity of the tension between expressing who you are but also expressing or trying to navigate and understand the social norms and expectations that we find through high school, teenage years, young adults and then even in the workforce, and even for me on YouTube, there's these ideas that no, you can't do this, or because I'm not doing it a normal way, it doesn't fit. That can be a bit of a challenge.

Now, authenticity in itself, I have found just from what I see on the internet, it's become a trend of personal branding, which is weird, because shouldn't we be ourselves anyway, and shouldn't we be authentic, and shouldn't we be showing up as our individual selves with integrity? So? So I don't know why that's become. Oh yeah, this is the real me. When? Why are we not being ourselves? So that one has really confused me.

But if I come back to myself, like, how do I stay connected to my authentic self? Look, I've had to go through a lot of figuring out who I am. I've had a lot of past challenges where I've been very hard on myself because I've been wanting to get results and see a progress and get to a certain point in life and I've spoken about this before. These were ideas that I thought that I wanted, and then everything changes and then you start to realize what you want isn't what you expected, and that's okay as well. Things will change.

In order for me to stay authentic to myself is sticking to my path, sticking to my guns in terms of understanding what I believe in, understanding what I trust, understanding what I know, understanding what I want, but also not letting other people dictate my dreams and goals. That's easier now because I know what I want. When you know what you want and you've got a purpose-filled kind of idea of what you want to create or do or become, it makes it very easy to sorry. It doesn't make it easy. It makes it easier to stick to that path. However, there's some big challenges around my own self-reflection. There's big challenges around my own fear of judgment, other people's opinions bringing me down. I have been bullied in the past and when I hear that feel that now it just it triggers a lot and I'm like it's ridiculous.

But the reality is is when I reflect on it, it's like why do I let this stuff bother me? But the reality is is because we're maybe we're insecure or maybe we've got our own issues we're dealing with and that's the thing. We don't know what other people are going through. However, we do know that they are going through stuff because you, me, we're all going. You've got something going on in your life that is keeping you up at night, or just stress or struggles, and it's going to be very hard to be able to avoid all those things. You can avoid them and be ignorant, but what's that going to achieve? So, I think, taking these things on head on, talking about them, working through them and trying to become the best version of yourself, and what that looks like, you don't know right, and I don't know. All I know is, if I'm not happy with where I am, what am I going to do about it to get me to where I want to be? And that could take six weeks, 10 weeks, two years, five years, 10 years. I don't know. Really need to keep that in mind.

Further to this, I think some of the struggles that I've dealt with is the external validation need being. On YouTube. There is a lot of that validation that comes from social media peers, other people trying to prove things to people, which is ridiculous, because the only thing I should be proving is to myself that we can do this, like I can do this, and when I say we to myself is my previous versions of myself. You know, in order for me to get to year one of me building my business, I was a certain individual. To get to year two, I had to be someone else. To get to year one of me building my business, I was a certain individual. To get to year two, I had to be someone else. To get to where I am now, I had to be someone else. We're about to hit $500,000 in revenue since starting this business and majority of that has come in the last year and a half two years. So that shows me that what I'm doing now is different and better and beyond and more advanced than who I was three, four years ago. But it doesn't mean that the external validation doesn't exist and the peer pressure from others Ridiculous. But that's definitely a pain point. The other one is probably being overwhelmed with expectations. This one I don't think has been as big as an issue now Because I'm treading my own path. Those expectations have gone. Been as big of an issue now Because I'm treading my own path. Those expectations have gone. I had some pretty bad overwhelm of expectations when working for someone else because I don't like displeasing people. That's definitely a struggle there as well.

Some other things we can consider is what are things that keep you grounded? What are the things that keep you sticking to your true self? Now, obviously, having a path of where you want to go makes sense, but I think just having whether it's daily habits, structured routines, things that you like to do, checkpoints in the week, exciting things, events all these different things that keep you grounded to your best version of yourself, your authentic self, bringing it back to the roots, and then, when it comes to overcoming distractions, I think, trying to work out what are the things that are bringing positivity to your life, that are helping you become a better version versus not, and if those things aren't aligning with your values or where you want to be, cut them out. This I'm starting to do more and more of. There's some things that I haven't, because letting go can be hard, but I guarantee you, when you do this, weight becomes off your shoulders In terms of what's Instagram, social media, culture, all those things for me, I've never really I've liked to stick to my own guns and the things that I believe, and I'm not heavily influenced by media and culture, in the sense that I'm not going to just change and adapt to their perspective.

And that's the beauty is, you don't have to. You don't have to follow the norm, you don't have to do what everyone else is doing. You can do what you like. And there is these pressures to like oh, you want to be able to get a social media presence or build a personal brand, especially in the business world, but at the same time, like, that's a lot of work and you've got to really understand what do you want? And is that true to yourself? Are you being yourself in doing that or are you creating a false persona?

So, look, I think the key thing for me when it comes back to actually doing this and how do I practice it is finding ways that I can be consistent, whether it is documenting me. Documenting my journey makes that a lot easier to be consistent, because I'm showing up, I and reporting back and I'm seeing the progress, tracking the progress. And then I think the other thing is like how do we go about setting boundaries? What are you putting in place to enable you to ensure that you have the right stream or the right path to make this as easy as possible for you? And the other thing is I've been inspired by many others that have done this how they have been able to go ahead and just cut off the external pressures or those that are around them that aren't really providing them any joy or fulfillment or fruitfulness to their life. That has been a challenge, but I think if you do it, you will blossom and you will thrive and it becomes easier to do it more. So that's my thoughts on being me and how I stay connected to my authentic self.

And while working through those distractions and, I guess, expectations of others, the good thing is working for myself. Now, the expectations I have come from myself, but the challenge is sometimes myself. I get stuck in my head because of all the noise from other people. So figuring out how to cut that crap out has been a challenge. I've been dealing with it a lot recently and the key thing that I've been framing now is that when people have issues with me or they don't like me, or they don't like what I'm doing, or they wouldn't do it that way they're not actually my issues. That's actually their own issues. It's their own problems. The issue that I'm dealing with is I don't like that, they don't like it, but it's not that I'm doing something wrong. It's just that my idea is peace over war kind of thing.

I don't like confrontation, so I try to be positive about it. I try to. My idea is peace over war kind of thing, and I don't like confrontation, so I try to be positive about it. I try to put myself in their shoes. I try to avoid all those kinds of things. But when they still want to be negative or disagree with me, that hurts and.

But now I'm starting to separate that. It's got nothing actually to do with what I'm doing. It's more so their own personal preference and they just don't like that, which is fair game. Just like I don't like, maybe, the way other people do things. It's fair game. It's not personal in the sense of you're any less than me. It's more that I just never would do it that way myself, which is fair game.

And I think we need to be more comfortable with letting people be comfortable with being themselves. Just because you do that and I don't and I don't like that doesn't mean that I shouldn't like you, right, it just doesn't make sense on paper, in theory. In simple terms, I digress. So that's my idea. I think my challenge and final words to you is figure out who you are, figure out what you want and then figure out how you're going to make that happen. And the thing is, the beauty of it is when you truly know who you are. You don't have to try to be something. You just be yourself and be honest and be open about it. When we try to hide and we try and please and we try and meet the needs for other people, it comes out and you'll slip up and you will not be comfortable. You will not be yourself, you'll have to be putting on different hats and the things will catch up to you and it'll become a slippery slope. That's it.

So if this has resonated with you, leave a comment, drop a message down below on the YouTube, more than happy to continue the conversation. How did this resonate with you? If it did resonate with you, I would encourage you to share it with someone else or subscribe. Comment all those great things. It does help the podcast grow. It really does, so I appreciate you being here. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Can't believe we're nearly at the end of the year. You take it easy, look after yourselves and you have a wonderful day. Cheers.