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Physician Heal Thyself

Bill Treasurer is a fake! I came to that conclusion about a year after I had become a full-time internal executive coach at Accenture. The role itself was perfect. I had a budget, a good deal of latitude to do the job as I saw fit, and although most of my coachees outranked me, all had signed an agreement that it would be a “levelless” relationship. Besides all that, I was making a lot of money doing what I love to do, helping people grow.

Why was I a fake? Because the more I coached my clients, the more I realized that my own beliefs and actions were out of step. As a coach, it is my job to help accentuate my coachees, to help them become the person they want to become. To do this, I help coachees identify their deepest aspirations, and then help them create a plan for making those aspirations real. While I was successful in helping my coachees apply these techniques, I wasn’t applying them in my own life. I had become the consultant’s consultant, someone who could give advice better than he could apply it.

The problem was, I was not being the person I wanted to become. I was living an inauthentic life.

The Risks of Being Yourself

Throughout the ages, the most consistent prescription for personal well-being is this: Be who you must be. The Greek poet Pindar said, “Grow into what you are.” Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Insist on yourself, never imitate.” Famed psychologist Erich Fromm said, “Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.” Robert Louis Stevenson said, “To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end in life.” And Abraham Maslow said, “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.”¹

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These sages said explicitly what we all know implicitly, that when you have become far removed from who you are supposed to be, when your work-self and personal-self are wholly different people, and when the masks you wear don’t look anything like your real face, you expend too much energy living a life of pretense.

Authenticity has to do with integrity. When the person we portray to the world is the same as the person we truly are, we are being our authentic self. When we are authentic, we are who we are, take us or leave us. To live authentically is to live without pretense, and to express and assert the gift of your individuality. Living authentically means being psychologically patriotic, proud of who you are. The benefit of being our authentic selves is that instead of wasting time pretending to be someone we are not, we have more impassioned energy to get on with the business of living. Living a life of authenticity represents the end to an exhausting game of make-believe.

Shake the Global Village

At no time in the history of the world has the need for us to be who we must be been greater. As the world’s communications infrastructure turns us into a “global village,” there is a danger of creating mass homogeneity. People in developing countries are watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island. Kids in Asian slums show how cool they are by wearing Nike sneakers. You can find the “golden arches” in over 120 countries.

Yvon Chouinard, the irrepressible founder of Patagonia, a brand of pricey outdoor clothes, summed up the dangers of sameness when he said, “I knew Man was doomed when I realized that his strongest inclination was toward ever-increasing homogeneity—which goes completely against the grain of Nature. Nature moves toward ever-increasing diversity. Diversity is Nature’s strength.”² Chouinard’s comments are as accurate as they are ironic; Patagonia used to connote that remote land at the edge of the world, now it connotes stylish fleece pullovers for trendy suburbanites.

The danger of our growing homogeneity is that the individual becomes swallowed up by the collective, diluting the potency of everyone. When our identities are subsumed by the masses, our uniqueness is stripped, our sense of self is lost, and our dignity erodes. We become passively disengaged and collectively indifferent. Perhaps no phrase epitomizes today’s growing indifference as much as this: “whatever.”

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Cultures that adopt a “whatever” philosophy—Whatever Societies—lack depth of character. Whatever Societies are places where distinctions between people are made not by who they are, but by what they have. In Whatever Societies, getting is more important than giving, because getting is how one distinguishes oneself. People here are judged not by one’s character on the inside, but by the garnishes on the outside; what they wear, what they drive, and where they live. In Whatever Societies identities are forged through acquisition; the more I have, the more I am. Therefore, if people aren’t buying, they aren’t being. The entire economic engine, indeed the entire purpose of such societies, is based on appetite. In Whatever Societies, your most important duty is to be a good consumer, because consumption makes the whole thing work.

The problem with Whatever Societies is that they are made up of people with no identity of their own. People with all the originality of a prefab subdivision. People who chose their hairstyles, their clothes, and the names of their children based on popular sitcom characters. People who, in their professional lives, are more concerned with “branding” themselves, than being themselves.

Other than material acquisition, Whatever Societies stand for nothing in particular. As long as one’s bank account is fat, no one really cares about the political climate, environmental situation, or state of the outside world. Prosperity anesthetizes, and the richer a Whatever Society gets, the more it chooses consumption over compassion, greed over generosity, and selfishness over selflessness. People take the wrong risks for the wrong reasons, risks that feed the ego but fail to nourish the heart. In such places the only risks worth taking are the shallow ones, the ones that promise to make a person wealthy, powerful, or famous. Otherwise, why bother endangering yourself?

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Loitering at the Gates of Hell

In The Divine Comedy of Dante (Vol. I: Inferno), a haunting image provides a stark warning for people who adopt a Whatever philosophy, and in the process reinforces the merits of being who one must be. Dante’s Inferno, you will recall, tells the story of a man who midway through his life realizes that the person he has become and the person he wanted to be are two wholly different people. To get from where he is (his compromised self) to where he wants to be (his true self), Dante must travel through the depths of hell. Just before embarking on his journey, he notices a group of people loitering outside the gates of hell. They are the souls who heaven didn’t want and hell wouldn’t have.

As Dante describes it, “Heaven, to keep its beauty, cast them out, but even hell itself would not receive them . . . “ Just who are these pathetic souls? They are the people who did nothing meritorious or reprehensible, earning neither blame nor praise, and who, consequently, in Dante’s words, “never truly lived.”³ They are the people who never stood for anything, benign people, diluted and impotent people, people who led irrelevant lives . . . Whatever People. And what is the punishment for the rejects of both heaven and hell? To march aimlessly behind an empty banner that signifies nothing. For just as these souls stood for nothing in life, they will stand for nothing in eternity as well.

The Danger of Being Ourselves

What about you? Are you a Whatever Person? Would you know if you were? Ask yourself these tough questions:

• Are you living a lie?
• Does your life stand for anything? What?
• Are you selling out in some area of your life? Have slow, incremental compromises turned you into the person you never wanted to be?
• Would the person you are at work be welcomed into your home?
• Do you judge others mainly by their appearances?
• Does your life revolve around money? Which of these do you equate it with: freedom, happiness, security, status, and/or power?
• Would people describe you as “genuine,” “real,” or 8220;down to earth”? Are you?
• Is your true self the self that the world gets to see?
• Are you the person that you always wanted to become?

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If you are disappointed with your answers, take heart. Whatever does not have to be forever. Like Dante, it is never too late to save your life. But, like Dante, to become the person you are supposed to become, you may have to go through hell to get there. Why? Because being our authentic selves is a huge risk. If it wasn’t, it would be a more universally pursued goal. But authenticity is more than a risk, it is the Rightest Risk of all. Authenticity is a life imperative, because to live a compromised life is to live a life of irrelevance. Life’s journey should be one of self-discovery, not self-rejection.

The best use of the 10 Right Risk principles is to use them to reclaim your identity, to take the risk of being yourself. But make no mistake, there are hazards along the way. Consider some of the risks of being authentic:

Being authentic means assuming full responsibility for your own life

Emerson once wrote, “Society everywhere is in a conspiracy against the personhood of its members . . . The virtue in most request is conformity.”⁴ Conformity is easy because all it requires is abdication. When we conform, we allow society to tell us what to think, what to believe, what to value, and even what to wear. The authentic person rejects the notion that society always knows best. She refuses to rely on society to provide all her answers, to set all her rules, to determine her worth, to make up her mind. She spends a lot more time governing her own thoughts and actions. Authenticity requires responsibility. The authentic person forms her own opinions, makes her own choices, and, therefore, assumes responsibility for making her own mistakes.

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Being authentic prompts resentment

When you are who you are and not as society would have you be, you become a butterfly among a bunch of caterpillars. You stand out. As the full plumage of the authentic person’s originality unfurls, she burns bright with fresh ideas. Her individuality contrasts the conformity of everyone else, making it more pronounced. This brings new dangers. What gives her the right to think that way? society asks. Like a plantation master seeing a former slave, society resents the authentic person’s newfound freedom. The authentic person has grown more powerful and independent; she is far less intimidated by society’s discipline, far less dependent upon society’s permission or approval, and far less subservient to society’s authority. She doesn’t always do what society insists. She is, in society’s view, out of control. And the first instinct of the controller is to control the uncontrolled.

Being authentic requires self-acceptance

At its base, being authentic means being truthful. The authentic person knows that to be fully authenticated, she must be able to accept and integrate her beauty and her ugliness. One is needed to contrast the other. The authentic person isn’t afraid to acquaint herself with her less-than-perfect side. Personal fidelity, that defining characteristic of the authentic person, demands being faithful to the totality of yourself, even your less desirable parts.

Keep in mind that being authentic is not about being different. All of us have seen those counterculturalists whose very difference is based on conformity. In their desire to be different they clump together in groups of sameness. “Phisheads,” “Granola-heads,” “Goths,” and the pierced-everything crowd fall into this category. For the authentic person, being different is far less important than being real. Being authentic means saying, “I am somebody”—not because of how I look, what I own, or where I live, but because of the genuineness and distinctiveness of my character.

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The High-Diving Hypocrite

I know what it is like to be a sell-out. I know what it is like to parcel out large portions of your soul to have a comfortable, but compromised, life. I have faced situations of consequence and allowed my decision to be a decidedly uncommitted “Whatever.” As I mentioned at the start of the chapter, though I was a successful coach, I was a fake. I was a coach who advised one thing, but applied another. I was a man hiding from himself.

Good coaching is essentially about helping people become their authentic selves. For me, I knew down deep that I wanted to be a writer, professional speaker, and independent consultant . . . in that order. But I knew that to be this person, I would have to take a giant leap with my life. Let me tell you, there is a great deal of security in a steady paycheck. Besides that, having been at Accenture for almost six years, I was well networked and established. So, I buried my dreams under heaps of reality, and told myself to be more practical.

The problem with buried dreams is that they make a lot of noise. They rumble inside you like rioting prisoners. The more I helped my coachees to live their dreams, the more my own churned inside me.

The irony was that I had already started writing Right Risk, and, informally, had begun using the 10 Right Risk principles with my coachees. Here I was, the guy who had dived from higher than the treetops, the guy who had done some 300 dives while engulfed in flames, the guy who spent most weekends thrashing through treacherous whitewater in his kayak, utterly incapable of applying the risk principles in my own life. I rationalized that this was different, that there was a lot more at stake than just a physical risk. I didn’t care how “right” this risk was. It could end up injuring my career, my reputation, and my livelihood. Heck, I could even end up losing my marriage. Leave a high-paying job to become a writer and professional speaker? Yeah, that’s attractive.

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Choosing Ourselves

Every person must apply the Right Risk principles in his or her own way. Think of them as navigational aids that help you become the person you want to become. My authentic destination was to become a writer, speaker, and consultant. This meant leaving the security of a good job with a reputable company. Your destination, and therefore your risk, will undoubtedly be different. Instead of detailing the specific ways in which I applied the Right Risk principles toward my risk, I am going to tell you about the very first, and most important, thing I did. The thing that makes all giant leaps possible. I MADE A CHOICE.

The Bible tells us that “many are called but few are chosen.” I see it differently. I think that all are called, but few choose. Each of us has a calling, some worthwhile endeavor that we are supposed to be pursuing. But because listening to our calling takes patience and effort, and because following our calling means giving up so much, we ignore our inner longings and in the process deny ourselves. Shunning our calling, we are left with no choice but to settle for lesser dreams lived out by a less-than-authentic self. The low-frequency sadness that a lot of us feel is merely a longing for the person we are supposed to be. We miss ourselves. We miss the self denied. We were called, but we didn’t choose.

To be authentic is to follow your calling and to embrace your uniqueness. Being authentic is ultimately an affirmation, an act of homage. It is saying “Yes!” to both our God and ourselves by being who we are supposed to be. For me, as much as I knew that I was denying my soul, I just couldn’t choose yes. That is, until the walls came crumbling down.

The Giant Leap Decision

The turning point came in September of 2001 as I watched the Twin Towers crumble to the ground. The whole tragedy unfolded on our television monitors at work. In those brief, profane moments, like so many other Americans, I became acutely aware of life’s fragility. Few things are as stark as death to make you so aware of the value of life. A good friend of mine was killed that day. We had been lifeguards together in my hometown of Larchmont, New York.

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I stared out my office window for a long time that day. I was completely incensed. But the anger jostled something loose in me. Things had changed, and so had I. One thing was immediately clear to me: Life is too short to live a compromised life.

Right there in my small office, with the world seeming to fall apart around me, I made my giant leap decision: I WILL STOP BETRAYING MYSELF!

There were a lot of other things that I would do before taking my big risk. There would be months of preparation and applying the Right Risk principles before I left Accenture. I went on a three-day retreat and consulted my golden silence. I wrote my risk script by picking a mantra (“Trust God”). I mustered the courage to inform my boss of my decision. I trespassed beyond the wishes of all the people who implored me not to risk it (my wife was not one of them, by the way). And I exposed myself in every way possible. Applying the Right Risk principles was indispensable in helping me take my big risk. But giant leaps with your life start with giant decisions in your heart. I would not have been able to apply the principles at all had I not made the critical decision to stop betraying myself. That decision helped prioritize all the other decisions that followed, and has become the basis for all of my future risk-taking decisions.

Reaping the Rewards

Success, like wealth, is a matter of definition. I cannot tell you that my giant leap has been a financial windfall, though I have made a bit of money. But I can tell you that I am happier and more full of life. All the energy that once went into masking my true self has been redirected toward my passionate aims. I am no longer a fake, and, I believe, I am living an authentic life. Not because I am a writer, speaker, and consultant—that’s what I do, not who I am. But because my dreams are no longer held hostage by my fears. I am living farther from societal preferences, and closer to my instincts. I am living unattached to outcomes, beyond the confines of my comfort zone, wonderfully exposed.

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Ultimately, giant leaps are leaps of faith. Joseph Campbell once said that when you take leaps of faith, unseen hands are there to catch you. That certainly has been true in my case. I now know that providence works if you let it. But we have to be the ones to make the first move. We have to step off the high platform.

Now It’s Your Turn

Yes, the Rightest Risk of all is to be yourself, even if being yourself means losing stature, money, prestige, or the identity that others prefer. Living a life of authenticity is an act of personal fidelity. When we stop betraying ourselves, our life takes on meaning, substance, and relevance. You cannot escape the longings of your soul, nor should you. The closer you get to your authentic self, the less you diverge from your own identity. It all starts with a choice, the exercise of prerogative. Will you be who you are, or will you be who you are not?

Taking the Right Risk of authenticity means embarking on a journey of liberation, the journey of your destiny, your own personal freedom march. There are no maps, few boundaries, and plenty of hazards. Yes, you will have to give up a lot, and yes, you will suffer through hardship. You will be called to do what is uncomfortable and inconvenient, to stand alone and face your fears, and then to bring the full potency of your authenticity back into the world.

Why do it? For the same reasons you take any other Right Risk. In the struggle to overcome your fears, in the courage to face your demons, and in your willingness to take a stand for what you believe in, you build and fortify your integrity. When you risk because you feel called to do so, when you risk out of your authenticity, you risk with greater confidence and less regret. Right Risk-taking, then, is about something much more important than adrenaline, or control, or machismo. Each Right Risk becomes a projection of your character, an external manifestation of your personal theology. Thus, the greatest reward for each Right Risk taken is an intimate encounter with the magnificence of your own soul.