Authenticity and Consistency: “Stop Trying to Be Someone”

A new habit I’ve been developing is disappearing into Newlands Forest for an hour or so first thing a couple of times a week. It’s still cold and dark, but I’m wrapped up warm, have a podcast in my ears, and it is a stellar way to start the day.

Recently I was listening to Seth Godin on The Diary of a CEO when the conversation drifted into authenticity. It caught my attention because I’ve started to think that authenticity and consistency are far more closely connected than they first appear. The better you understand how you naturally operate, the less energy you waste trying to sustain a version of yourself that was never particularly natural in the first place.

An old water polo coach of mine used to pull us back into line when we were getting cocky with a wonderfully blunt instruction: “Stop trying to be someone.” At the time it was mostly about getting us to stop showing off and play the bloody game, but the line has stuck with me. The more time you spend trying to be someone, the more work everything becomes.

That got me thinking about why consistency in some parts of our lives seems relatively easy to maintain for years while other things require an increasingly ridiculous amount of discipline just to keep dragging ourselves back to them. We tend to treat a lack of consistency as a discipline problem: build better habits, develop more grit, remove distractions, wake up earlier, buy a more complicated notebook and presumably become one of those people who prepares overnight oats on a Sunday.

Sometimes that probably is the answer. But I’m convinced there is another cost hiding underneath consistency: how much effort does the thing itself require, and how much additional effort are you spending maintaining the version of yourself you believe you need to be while doing it?

Why Consistency Gets Expensive

Godin’s starting point was almost aggressively opposed to the usual conversation about authenticity. His argument was that professionals cannot simply behave according to however they authentically feel that morning. If you’ve made a promise, professionalism means keeping it. Nobody particularly wants their surgeon arriving for an operation and announcing that surgery isn’t really aligning with their authentic energy today.

Steven Bartlett pushed back from a different direction. If he intends to make thousands of podcast episodes, continually pretending to care about conversations that hold no genuine interest for him would eventually become exhausting. Godin agreed, eventually landing on the idea that people find consistency that “rhymes with their overall authentic self.” The episode itself labels this part of the conversation “Can You Be Consistent Without Losing Authenticity?”

I like the word rhymes. It allows for some friction without requiring you to become a completely different person.

Being authentic cannot mean behaving exactly as you naturally feel at every moment. That would make personal growth, professionalism and probably most functioning relationships extraordinarily difficult. For me, being your authentic self means finding your natural alignment: enough alignment between your values, interests, personality and the person you are becoming that maintaining your life doesn’t require you to continually fight against all of them. Because consistency compounds over time, and so does the friction created by fighting yourself.

We talked about this on the Story-to-Stage programme recently When you try to give a talk in a way that isn’t authentically you, everything becomes harder. You start thinking about how you’re standing, how you’re speaking, what you’re meant to sound like and whether you’re doing it “properly”. You are effectively doing two jobs at once: delivering the talk and performing the version of a speaker you think you’re supposed to be.

When the talk actually sounds and feels like you, it flows more naturally, feels more comfortable and is far more enjoyable to keep doing. That kind of consistency feels different because you are no longer fighting the form as well as the content.

That is what I mean by authenticity reducing the cost of consistency.

The Versions of Ourselves We Learn to Become

Finding that alignment is harder than it sounds because humans are extraordinarily good at fitting in.

James Clear writes about how strongly we are influenced by the people around us and by social norms. We learn what gets rewarded, what attracts criticism and which parts of ourselves are easier to leave outside the room. Clear describes humans as being “wired to imitate”, which is exactly why the people and groups around us can have such an enormous influence on our behaviour.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Adapting is useful, and sometimes deliberately behaving differently from what feels natural is precisely how we grow. The problem comes when repeated behaviours become part of the story we tell ourselves about who we are, long after we have forgotten why we started doing them.

My version took nearly two decades.

When Safe Becomes a Habit

My journey towards South African residency involved 19 years of visas, Home Affairs bureaucracy and fairly regular administrative firefighting. For most of that period, there was always some document, stamp, application or approval sitting somewhere between me and confidently knowing I could remain in the country I considered home.

So I developed a strategy: fit in. Don’t draw unnecessary attention to yourself, don’t create unnecessary problems, keep your head down and make your way through another enormous pile of paperwork.

That strategy started bleeding into other parts of my life too. Professionally, I stuck largely to marketing roles because marketing was safe. I understood it, I had experience in it, I could point to a perfectly sensible career path and nobody was going to wonder what the hell I thought I was doing.

From the outside, that probably looked like consistency. But consistency can look healthy even when it is being held together by safety. From the inside, safety had increasingly become one of the reasons I kept choosing it. I’ve written previously about that longer journey of trying to find work that actually fits you. Looking back, this was another part of the same story.

Meanwhile, there has always been another part of my personality that is enormously curious. When everybody heads in one direction, I’m interested in looking at what might exist somewhere else, not because I automatically believe everyone is wrong, but because I want to know what we might discover by exploring another route.

Sometimes the answer is absolutely nothing and everybody else made the correct call. Fine, we learned something. Other times, going somewhere less obvious gives me an idea, experience or perspective I would never have discovered by staying on the established path.

That curiosity had been there the whole time. I had simply spent a very long time teaching myself that following it didn’t carry unnecessary risk.

Seth Godin explores a version of this in Purple Cow. His idea of being remarkable is quite literally about creating something worth talking about, which inevitably means stepping outside the completely familiar and safe. Seth Godin’s writing on being remarkable

For 19 years, I had a pretty compelling reason to value safe. Walking through Newlands Forest at six o’clock in the morning, I realised how much of that behaviour had survived after the original reason disappeared. I had spent so long practising one way of operating that I had stopped recognising it as a strategy.

It was exhausting. Actually, that still isn’t quite right.

It was boring.

Boredom sounds harmless, but it becomes surprisingly corrosive when you are trying to sustain something over a long period. Discipline can carry you through things you don’t particularly enjoy, and sometimes that is exactly what discipline is for. It becomes much more expensive when consistency requires you to maintain that performance indefinitely.

Growth Discomfort or Performance Exhaustion?

This is where authenticity starts to matter to resilience.

Valorie Burton connects authenticity with resilience because pretending consumes energy. That makes sense to me. If life is already demanding, constantly monitoring how you appear, what you say, what you hide and whether you are successfully matching the environment creates another layer of work on top of whatever you are actually trying to accomplish. Burton’s broader work in Rules of Resilience is built around developing a sustainable personal resilience system rather than simply forcing your way through more strain.

None of this means avoiding discomfort. You still need to learn things you aren’t naturally good at, walk into unfamiliar rooms and occasionally discover that becoming the person you want to be requires doing something the current version of you absolutely hates.

But there is a difference between growth discomfort and performance exhaustion. Growth discomfort comes from stretching beyond where you currently are. Performance exhaustion comes from repeatedly suppressing how you naturally operate because you believe the environment requires somebody else.

Both cost energy. Only one is necessarily taking you somewhere.

Authenticity does not remove the need for discipline. It reduces some of the unnecessary cost of maintaining consistency over a long period. If the life, career, habits or commitments you are trying to sustain have some natural alignment with who you are and who you are becoming, you still need to do the work, but you aren’t simultaneously spending energy continually trying to be someone while you do it.

For me, that’s the connection between authenticity and consistency. Consistency still requires effort, but alignment means less of that effort is wasted fighting yourself.

Maybe my old water polo coach was onto more than he realised.

Questions To Think About

If consistency is the outcome you’re chasing and it feels unusually difficult to sustain, Start by asking yourself three questions.

Where is the energy actually going? How much effort comes from doing the thing itself, and how much comes from maintaining the version of yourself you think you need to be while doing it?

Is this growth discomfort or performance exhaustion? Are you stretching into someone you want to become, or continually overriding something important about how you naturally operate?

What would better alignment look like now? Is this behaviour still serving a useful purpose, or are you maintaining a strategy that made sense once but no longer fits the life you are trying to sustain?

You don’t need to throw your career away, sell everything and move to a smallholding because a podcast made you question your authentic self. Sometimes the adjustment is much smaller. But if consistency is becoming a continual battle, it might be worth investigating whether discipline is actually the entire problem.

If you want to have a deeper conversation about any of this, I’m available for a limited amount of one-to-one coaching to help people explore their own patterns, where they may be out of alignment and what a more sustainable way of operating might look like. You can book a coaching conversation here.

The less energy you spend maintaining a version of yourself that no longer fits, the more capacity you have available for the things you actually want to keep doing.