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"The oft repeated phrase Be yourself. Just be the person you are" means, or should mean, "Begin with your own soul-searching and take it forward from there."
This is the initiation of an ongoing process for finding your own strengths, shoring up your own weakness and building your own version of a person worthy of your own self-esteem.
Each of us has one's own identity. Our task is much like mining: to dig into ourselves and reach for those cells of insight rich with our own mettle and to bring this inner worth to the surface.
In the process, we are also bound to churn up a lot of emotional debris which must be isolated and aside.
Beginning with yourself, then, is the best way for being yourself which, in the final analysis, is the only way that we can in Socrates's parlance really "know thyself." This is not an easy thing to do.
Knowing oneself deeply and fully also means facing oneself, squarely and honestly.
This entails looking beyond and through the emotional costuming, the artificiality and the pretense ingrained in us, in order to see ourselves as we actually are. It means reconciling in a realistic way the discordance between our hopes and our accomplishments and making our peace with the inescapable conflict.
Becoming an emotionally healthy and happy person or a self actuated, fully functioning individual is neither a quirk of fate nor is it coded in the genes. Rather, it is an intellectual conditioning founded over time by balding rational, achievable goals with hard work, some sacrifice, and a willingness to take some necessary and calculated risks now and then.
The existence of the voluminous literature concerning the self-concept leaves little doubt that mental health and personal adjustment depend deeply on each individual's basic feeling or personal adequacy. The growth of an adequate self-concept, free from such encumbrances as phobic and misplaced ego o r unrealistic misgivings, is a critically important first step in creating a healthy self image.
To cope successfully with the objective reality of everyday living we must have a firm grip on our own unwavering self-identity.
Attaining a healthy self-image, with its attendant feeling of adequacy, personal worth, and confidence, is not some lofty goal beyond mortal reach, standing aloof as kind of figurative ideal. It is an attitude or cluster of attitudes that are acquired, which instinctively replaces negative destructive or self-defeating reactions by healthier ones. Past experiences can have a vast influence on current behavior.
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