The Courage to Stop Performing — Why Authenticity Is the Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Do

Well, hello there, my friend.

Guess what time it is?

If you've hit play, well, welcome aboard 'cause it's time for the daily podcast.

My name is Jonathan Doyle, and it is my great privilege to have this

very short space of your time.

Why?

Because as somebody who is an investor and does a great deal of study in

global macrofinance and central banking theory, I've come to realize that

the single most valuable commodity in the world is time Because it's

the only thing that can't be-- you can't manufacture and create more of.

So the fact that you are giving me this little window of time is a huge

blessing, and I wanna honor that.

I wanna bless you with something useful.

Today we're gonna talk about the courage to stop performing.

The courage to stop performing.

You know, one of my favorite thinkers and writers was the

psychotherapist Alfred Adler.

I really like his stuff.

And Adler had this belief that one of the fundamental human drives that we all

share is this desire for significance.

Any Tony Robbins junkies out

there know that he talks about this a lot, and the first thing we have to

understand about this drive towards significance is we all have it.

We can pretend we don't.

We can say, "Oh, I don't really care what anybody thinks. I don't need

to be significant." But this is-- it's central to the human condition.

And it's interesting 'cause it can play out in so many ways.

You know, Robbins used to give this example of the different ways

you can get significance, right?

So you can be, like, uh, in a street gang, and you can pull out a knife or

a gun and stick it in someone's face, and instantly at that moment, you have

massive significance in their life, right?

The fact is, you are the most significant person in the

cosmos to them at that moment.

So you can get significance through doing antisocial, destructive, terrible things.

And then you get someone like a Mother Teresa or you fill in the blank, somebody

that you know who's just-- who doesn't even drive towards significance but lives

in a way that their sense of who they are comes from blessing other people.

So there's multiple ways to get it in life.

It's just worth thinking about how we get significance.

I mean, the ultimate level, if you wanna get to the highest

level, is truly spiritual, right?

Because so many people spend their entire life wracked with problems of

self-esteem and identity and who am I and I'm not good enough and if only I

was more beautiful or taller or this, but they don't realize, and it's hard

to get there, I get it, but the ultimate significance we all carry is our creation

in the image and likeness of God.

That the God of the universe wanted you to exist.

You are not an accident.

You are here on purpose.

So the highest level of significance is that deep spiritual awareness that

God loves us and wanted us to be.

Now, people used to say that to me for many years.

I always found it hard to internalize.

Maybe you do, too.

As I get older, it gets a little easier because you realize how imperfect you are.

You know, you kinda go, "I've lived long enough to have done a lot of

good things and a lot of things that aren't so good, and I'm a imperfect

human." But God still thinks you're pretty cool and wants you to exist.

You know, a lot of the great scholastic philosophers would say that, you know,

just remind us that the-- that if God was to withdraw His care for you, you

would cease to exist in a millisecond.

Your, your existence itself is held in place by this profound spiritual reality.

So ultimately, this is not the purpose of this message, but just always

remember that that deeper significance, you know, why we serve the poor, why

we treat the least among us, the most vulnerable with care, it's because

every human being has that significance.

But on the existential level, on the psychological level, we're humans, right?

So we actually, you know, we, we don't walk around all the time deeply

in touch with that spiritual truth, so we often tend to find ways to

get some significance in the world.

So every one of you listening to this, at some point in your life, has

run a strategy To get significance.

Now, you might have done it by being a great student or being the funniest

person in your family or being a great athlete, and we're all looking for these

ways, and the problem, of course, is that if any of those ways go away and

we've built an entire identity upon it, then that becomes really problematic.

Now, let me add another dimension here, that in the world that we

inhabit now, the social media world, we've now got this situation where

people are performing significance.

That's an interesting distinction, performing significance.

That they're demonstrating and showing their lives in particular ways that

I'm this kind of influencer and I do this, and their significance comes

from a relatively narrow framework.

The problem with performing your identity, however you build it, is

that it's eventually exhausting because you're basically always on stage, right?

You're kinda always on stage.

And sometimes with my own content, like on Instagram, I, I, I used

to kinda think to myself, "Is this real? Is this who I really am?"

And it took me a while to come to peace with it, especially like the training

that I do and, you know, I, I live a pretty disciplined, extreme kinda life.

I mean, this week if you saw me on Instagram, I was in the gym

at… I mean, I woke up at 2:50 in the morning or two, 2:20.

I, I just, I go to bed really early.

I take it seriously, but I just woke up early and I was in the gym by 3:30.

But I used to ask myself like, "Is this… W- why-- Is this real?

Is this who I am?" And it took me a while to get to peace with it and go, "Yeah,

th- this is actually how I do live.

I do live this way." And the great thing about not performing an

identity is you can relax a little bit, that you actually allow yourself

just to go, "Yeah, this is me.

This is the package." Let me add a couple of other things here.

Many years ago, there was a person, um, called John Powell who wrote a book,

and he tells this funny story about it.

Um, sadly, his career did not end well.

And but in this-- He wrote a book called Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am?

That was the title of his book.

This is a true story.

And he tells a-- He gave a speech once and he tells this quite interesting

story where he was in his office working on this book, and he was

quite stuck and he was working away.

And I th-- whether it was his secretary or somebody else that worked in the building,

it's quite the-- This lady walked past and she said, "Hey, what are you working on?"

And he said, "Oh, look, I'm really stuck. I'm working on this book and,

uh, and I was str- stuck struggling with some of the ideas." And she said,

"What's your book called?" And he said, "Well, it's called Why Am I Afraid to

Tell You Who I Am?" And she laughed out loud. She goes, "Oh, that's easy.

I can answer that." So this guy was a pretty famous academic at the time.

He's like, "Oh, really?

You can tell me the answer to that?" And she said, "Yeah." And he goes,

"So tell me, why am I afraid to tell you who I am?" And she looked at him

and she said, "Well, because if you don't like it, that's all I've got."

I always thought that was a profound thing to say, that one of the

reasons we often perform identity, we feel we have to be somebody, is

because what if people don't like us?

And this goes back to this Adlerian thing that I've talked about before is like,

you know, that, um, that we're afraid that if people look at the package and they

don't like it, that what else can we do?

And so we learn to perform, right?

Often from the youngest age.

But have you ever met people that are really authentic, that are

just so themselves that it's like they, they can be out there…

But I've often said that when you meet people like that, whether you like them

or not or they're too direct or not, I often say that you can relax around

them because there's no surprises.

You kind of know who they are and what you're gonna get, and you're

kind of like, "Yeah, there's no game being played behind the scenes here.

They're not performing for me, pretending to be somebody else." So I

guess the question I want to ask you is, I'm not, I'm not your accuser.

Like, I'm human too, right?

We all do it.

But what would happen if we stopped?

If we stopped performing any kind of reality, whether for social media,

for something else, and we just learn to settle into the grace and

authenticity of who we actually are.

Let me give you another great quote here from Adler.

I, I posted this on Instagram last week.

He said, "The only normal people are the ones you don't know

very well." How good is that?

The only normal people are the ones that you don't know very well.

I thought that was quite brilliant, that all of us have got our stuff.

The most perfect, beautiful influencers, the most significant people in our

culture are all dealing with something.

So we don't need to perform because everybody's got their own brokenness and

limitations and setbacks and problems.

What you've got to master is the art of being yourself Years ago, the,

uh, the author, um, John Eldredge talked about a mentor of his that

said to him, "John, you've gotta let people feel the full force of your

personality and let them deal with it."

I always loved that line.

It doesn't mean being obnoxious or insensitive.

It just means who you are is who you are, and that's always gonna

grow and change, and hopefully it gets more wise and beautiful and

gentle and compassionate over time.

But you gotta be who you are.

And can we not agree together that we've all been born into this technological

moment where it's very easy to perform that we're not someone else?

But if you took Instagram away and you came to my house at 4:00 AM, I'm

still doing the same things because I'm not performing it, I'm just doing

that, and there's a certain peace that comes from just being who you are.

So is that helpful?

Especially for my younger listeners, like the perfect selfie, the,

you know, saying the right thing.

Man, I remember being a teenager.

How many of you remember that?

You had to kinda be cool and aloof and not affected by anything.

That's exhausting.

Oh, man.

Oh, boy, I got teenage kids now, and I'm like, "It's tough," not being a parent

to teenage kids, but it's tough for them.

But it's just a beautiful grace that comes from being who you are.

All right.

That's it.

My name's Jonathan Doyle.

This has been the Daily Podcast.

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God bless you, my friend.

You and I are gonna talk again tomorrow