Being the Best Version of Yourself versus Becoming More Yourself: A Psychology Workshop

In the month of February, which was among other things and events also Psychology Month, the BC Psychological Association offered two free public talks on interesting topics related to mental health and self-help. Unfortunately, I was only able to catch the second one of the series entitled “Being the best version of yourself.” The quest for oneself is not only my daily bread and butter (it has been since my early teens at least), but it is also the main incentive, guiding force and philosophy behind my upcoming book, so I knew I had to attend this workshop.

But I almost didn’t end up going. There were two valid and plausible reasons for my hesitation. One, this event occurred on a Saturday morning and since it was a bit of a commute for me, it meant I had to get up early and have a quick and rushed breakfast with the family instead of a slow and languid one, which is usually the case on weekends. The second reason was even more pertinent: There was a snow storm outside, which apart from being uncomfortable and cold would also signify delays in traffic, so I would have to head out even earlier than planned to ensure that I would make it there on time.

In fact, I arrived there way before time and had to idle away my extra time with the help of a self-help psychology book on how to handle anxiety. Finally, we were allowed to enter, and the room was not as filled as everyone would have assumed or expected for such types of talks; many of the prospective attendees had been most likely discouraged by the wild weather outside.

Yet when Dr. Sara David started on the importance of acceptance, I immediately felt embraced and accepted and forgot about the turmoil of getting there. Acceptance is the main missing ingredient in mainstream popular thinking. Accepting yourself the way you are. This came on the heels of me watching the moving and inspiring documentary Won’t you be my Neighbor on the incomparable Fred Rogers. When I was much younger, I used to watch and enjoy his program very much.

Both the message of Fred Rogers and Sara David was that you are special exactly the way you are. Although we all supposedly know this to be true and it may seem obvious and self-explanatory, you would need to ask yourself two things with complete honesty: Do you indeed accept yourself exactly the way you are, your special and unique qualities as well as your warts and shortcomings? Because if you do not, then you would not fully embrace and love yourself, but only partially and conditionally so.

The second question is of importance as well: Do others accept you for who you are? By others, look at your parents, family members, friends, teachers, co-workers, and so on. Most often, they do not, but surprisingly there is a significant overlap between us not fully accepting ourselves and others not doing so either.

Sara David mentioned trauma at the beginning of her talk. Although she has personally worked with the worst trauma imaginable, from Holocaust survivors to indigenous people whose loved ones had been brutally and heinously murdered by the hands of serial killer Robert Pickton, we have to keep in mind that we all in our own ways carry our emotional trauma around.

And this trauma can have various sources. It often starts with parents who do not love and accept themselves, and then - consciously or unconsciously - dump their own anger and frustrations onto us. It could also be teachers who were not interested nor cared about our health and well-being and even made us suffer in our youngest and most vulnerable years.

And finally, and equally important, it could be the conditioning that our culture, society and nation imbues us by bombarding us with various messages that mark and traumatize us from a very young age onward. The latter is of quite importance especially in Western capitalist structures. Western society and culture consistently push us to be the best we can be, namely, to be our very best version. This has led to continuous hard work and at times material success among individuals.

Yet there is often a fundamental and essential difference between being oneself and being who our culture wants us to be and therein lie the very issue and the very heart of acceptance. Western society, culture and religion tell us from the get-go that we are not good, deserving nor worthy enough and that we must work hard to redeem ourselves in order to become special. They all give us clear indications and images of what is considered worthy and admirable; everything else that does not conform to this ideal we are asked to avoid or shun.

It is rather ironic that in a system that so much praises and prides itself upon the importance and relevance of individuality, the very starting point implicitly denies expression of one’s full-fledged individuality and merely accepts those who fit the mold or convention, meaning those who conform to and match those preset and preconceived ideas. As a result, people have been marginalized for different reasons, be they of different color, sexual orientation or disabled. A society that is truly free and accepting would not keep any of its members at a margin, or worse, segregate among its own population.

Sara David’s message was first accepting yourself and then deciding how you can improve upon yourself, meaning to get even better at who you are or want to be. Her philosophy is based on the idea that we already have inner wisdom, a spiritual source and light that could and would guide us in the best possible direction in our lives, but this fountain has been polluted, in many cases even poisoned by toxic thoughts and feelings, people and environments.

And that is exactly where our trauma stems from. We feel inadequate, not good and worthy enough because that is what and how we have been taught throughout our lives. Two important observations and parallels can be made here about the Mr. Rogers documentary I saw the day before. One, it is a foolish and erroneous accusation that telling children that they are special would make them spoiled or directly lead to feelings of entitlement. That is certainly not true; narcissism occurs in our society not because one accepts oneself, but rather its opposite direction: it comes from a complete lack of acceptance as well as festering insecurity about one’s being.

Love and acceptance are not about feeling better than or superior to others because for a person who fully loves and accepts him or herself, there can simply be no possible comparison. How can you compare two completely different individual entities with each other, and why should you? Love means accepting yourself the way you are and that you are indeed unique, while arrogance is a denial and rejection of both love AND acceptance. The arrogant person is driven by fear and rejection; they think they are superior to others because inside they feel inferior. On the other hand, narcissists do not accept anybody and use all beings, including themselves, as pawns and objects to move around for shallow egotistical reasons.

The second observation - and this one is more painful and disheartening in itself - is that throughout those years that Mr. Rogers preached (he was an ordained minister after all) of love and acceptance and of being special, he himself felt unloved and inadequate and not special at all. This is sad but not hypocritical in my mind. It just shows how deep the recesses of pain and trauma can reach us and how they can affect us for entire lives if we do not do something about that.

What can we do? Here is where Sara David gave us tools to deal with and slowly undo and untangle this deep trauma inside of us. For healing to occur, there are seven Cs that we need to build on and develop, and she explained and elaborated them in some detail.

Most of them are rather self-evident terms and truths, but they are of vital importance for acceptance, love, growth, and moreover healing, so I shall name them here with some quick commentary. First off, for any kind of substantial change to take place, we need two things to occur, namely Calm and Clarity. Put differently, we need to act from a calm center of ourselves and need to be clear and honest about ourselves and about our subsequent actions. This state can be aided or achieved through meditation, visualization or other brain and emotion-calming activities. This would then enable us to tune into ourselves, in fact, to gain access to the most inner recesses of our being.

The next big C would be Courage. For any change, for any habit or automatic response or conditioning that we want to replace, we require courageous action. Courage also signifies the willingness to face fear. In fact, those who are courageous are not magically free from fear; they are simply not as constrained or trapped by it. In other words, courage is not the absence but rather the mastery of fear.

Most of us react to fear by avoiding it because it is an unpleasant feeling and experience, but instead we need to face and deal with those situations with courage. This again does not mean we should reject or repress fear; instead of pushing it away, we need to welcome it. Anxious feelings are more often than not messengers or signals that something in our lives is amiss, is not working as it should or is simply out of whack. We also need to get past the emotional conditioning that tells us that we are weak because we are afraid; in fact, the very opposite is true, vulnerability is strength, and with courage we can listen to it more clearly and act upon our anxiety.

All this would then help us get to the next step: Confidence. Our natural confidence often gets eroded by our thoughts and experiences, so we are tasked with rebuilding and reconstructing our own ability to trust in ourselves again. Reclaiming confidence is very different from being narcissistic in that the former is not as judgmental and self-critical and rather comes from constructive feedback that helps us grow and develop our innate abilities.

It would then lead us to Compassion. This step is very important because by being compassionate with ourselves, by taking care of ourselves and treating us well, we can heal many parts and aspects of our lives. This is an essential ingredient in mobilizing us to become the best version of ourselves. It cannot be reached without empathy and forgiveness towards ourselves and others.

Next, we have Curiosity. We need to be mindful and curious about ourselves. We need to observe ourselves and our emotions because they are essentially well-meaning messengers trying to get our attention. If we listen to them instead of judging, ignoring or repressing them, we can make important headway in our quest for healing.

In this case, we need to silence the critic, the remnants of those toxic voices of our past that we have internalized within ourselves, and we need to stay away from shaming and blaming. Instead, we need to be curious about what is the source or the origin of any given anxious feeling, what are the reasons and motivations for their existence, what is it that fans and feeds them. This would lead to both discovery as well as solutions instead of negative feelings of stagnation via blame, anger and resentment.

This combination would then unleash our Creativity, which is important for finding the best actions and resolutions to one’s emotional issues. Through our creativity, we may also realize the importance of the next C: Connectedness. We can achieve close bonding with others by opening our hearts, first to ourselves and then outwards towards others. When we are open-hearted in this manner, we see each other with the eyes of love, and our interactions become indeed heart-felt and are not just based on thoughts or selfish reasons.

A person who is genuinely interested in you, feels not only curiosity about you but is also fascinated with who you are. They will be present for you, giving you their undivided care and attention. This is also the main difference between a caring parent or caregiver versus an absent or toxic one. The latter is not fully present or grounded with you, and they often harbor cold, angry feelings. They may be physically present and supposedly they are there for you, but it is not a nourishing or loving presence and it is certainly not genuine or honest.

But the person who is genuinely interested in you is an interested witness of you and your growth and will provide affection and warmth to protect and take care of you, not to change or use you for other means or motives. Through this, we can achieve healing and evolve and grow like a tree by expanding our branches and leaves yet remaining firmly rooted in our own existence.

Finally, it is most important to protect and shield ourselves from toxic people around us. They may include family members or colleagues, but if you are surrounded by them, their bad vibes and negativity are contagious, even if you think you may be immune against it all. The fact remains that there are mean-spirited and negative people out there, whether they do it intentionally or unintentionally, is not within our purview, nor should we pass judgment upon them. But it is still best to avoid them like the plague and deal with them only when necessary, even if they be close family members. We should not feel guilty about weeding them out of our lives because if not, we would merely further hurt and damage ourselves.

To sum up, we can use the analogy of the body; we need to release toxins and assimilate all that is good. We need to avoid and shun all that is bad and unhealthy for our body and mind and embrace everything that is good, healthy and nourishing for our well-being, growth and development. For this to occur, we should use an “emotional enema” (her exact words) to erase, remove or replace all the obstacles and hurdles that are in the way of who we want to be. We want the best possible food, and we want to surround ourselves with positive people, that is people who have good vibes and are kindred spirits. By being around them, we can catch their good vibes, and they can aid us in our quest for our true self.

Fear mongers in all their shapes and forms plant the seeds of fear and hatred within us, but at the same time, we can ourselves plant seeds of love and nourishment by reaching the best version of our self, which is, in and of itself, natural and aims to connect with others in a genuine and heart-felt way.

However, there is an element of confusion or a minor contradiction here. On one hand, we should accept ourselves the way we are, yet we still need to become a better version of who we are. This is misguided in my point of view. If you can fully tap into the inner wisdom deep inside of you, that light will guide you and there shall be no need for improvement because you already are perfect exactly the way you are.

So why is there this constant need and drive to get better? This is one of the problems of cognitive behavioral approaches since unlike psychoanalysis, they do not tap deep enough into the human psyche and its unconscious drives and motivations. In other words, they still retain traces of the conditioning that they want to undo. The idea of being the best you can be smacks intentionally or not of Western capitalism thinking and conditioning. Being yourself is simply not (good) enough, you should not remain idle but keep improving on your skills and abilities.

My point is not to dismiss self-development and improvement, but I think that by accepting yourself the way you are and by being able or having found the way to tap into the innermost recesses of your core being, then you are simply perfect as YOU. You are already the best and perfect version of yourself.

Getting there of course takes effort and diligence, but it is most certainly worth the labor and turmoil. This is a path that I intend to trace in my upcoming self-help book that sees the cognitive behavioral field as a useful tool, but not as sufficient enough to uncover and unveil one’s core self and being. But it represents an important and essential first step or mechanism, and this informative and enlightening talk proved and underscored this to me.