JULY 9, 2026

The story you tell yourself, about yourself

When we think about living an authentic life, you may have heard the Oscar Wilde quote: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

It’s hard to argue with that advice. Pretending to be someone you are not is exhausting. Not to mention, most people see through it.

When I’m coaching leaders who try to perform with someone else’s personality, I often see them paying for it in some way or another. They may lose credibility with others, or they lose their own energy to keep up the act.

But I also think there is an assumption people make when they see authenticity as “just being themselves.”

They are assuming that they already know who they are.

The executive who did everything right

One of my former coaching clients was an executive who had just been promoted to his CEO’s senior leadership team. He expected that the hardest part about advancing to that role would be shouldering responsibility for thousands more managers and employees around the world.

Yet after a few months in the role, he was shocked to find leading his expanded team was a piece of cake compared with influencing across his peers at the CEO’s leadership table. At times it got so confusing trying to understand the political dynamics across a mere 7 other colleagues, he would painfully laugh at the incredulity of it all.

These other executives had worked together (and occasionally been at odds) for years. They challenged each other directly and disagreed without concern for optics. And the CEO didn’t see much point in handholding my client toward being included. He would have to find his own way in, and he had no idea how long that would take or if he would succeed.

So, he responded to this new challenge the way he always had. He tried harder to build relationships, asking for 1-on-1’s and time to get to know them. He was overly accommodating when their agendas clashed with his. He chose to be patient and understanding rather than combative, even though he felt he was letting his team down. But this was how he normally operated when in conflict and it felt authentic to him.

Unfortunately, the reciprocity he figured would eventually arrive, never came.

Many months in, he was still on the outside of this clique. He realized many of the collaborative and humble qualities that earned him the promotion became the very ones that stalled his progress at this new stage.

When I asked him what he planned to do about it, he said, “Honestly, I don’t know how to work with them without becoming someone I’m not.”

The identity ceiling

My client, like most high performers, had reached a point that demanded a new and uncomfortable level of self-examination.

By the time you reach a certain level of success, you’ve accumulated a story about the kind of person you are. And you come to attribute your success to being that kind of person. After all, how could you have come this far if you hadn’t been true to that style?

For my client, he may have developed a story about himself that goes, “I’m not confrontational and I’m not political. I’m a thoughtful person who gives people the benefit of the doubt and I would never criticize someone in a public forum. I’ve worked with people who are aggressive in meetings, but that’s not my style.”

These ways of explaining you to yourself feel like healthy and enlightened doses of self-knowledge. And they are, in that they represent true aspects of your experience.

But here’s what I’ve come to see: these stories don’t represent all the facts about you.

They are thoughts that have been running long enough that they feel indisputable. And perhaps they are but they are also incomplete. They omit the possibility that you can be more than one thing, expanding your range rather than simply being one way or the other.

Once you tell yourself, “Well, that’s just not me,” you stop exploring what might exist on the other side of that boundary. And this creates a ceiling in who you are. It may feel like you’re practicing the highest degree of self-awareness, but it can also become the clearest form of self-limitation.

What the scoreboard and your story have in common

Last week I invited you to consider who you are without the scoreboard and all the ways we measure our worth through external indicators. We saw how performance results start to become verdicts on our identity: e.g. if I’m ahead of a certain metric, I’m successful, etc.

What I’m sharing today is the same mechanism but it’s one level deeper. The scoreboard says that your results determine your value. The story you tell yourself says that your history determines your range.

Both feel like reality yet are merely thoughts that can be disputed. They just happen to be thoughts you don’t really think about because when things are going well, there’s no need to question them. Until you arrive at a new threshold that requires such introspection and courage.

And it’s at these times where we start to see that the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves is just a description, not a foregone conclusion. My client’s story about himself: I build relationships, I don’t create friction, had become so ingrained in his self-concept he wasn’t even certain he could try on something else for size.

But if he stepped aside from clinging to that story, he certainly might find a way that felt authentic and yet effective for the new world in which he was leading.

Expanding your range

To properly navigate his place in the senior leadership team, my client didn’t need to become aggressive the way he saw others were. And he didn’t need to abandon the warmth and tendency to find common ground that had defined his leadership.

But he did need to see that by holding onto such a fixed view of “this is who I am,” and “that’s not who I am,” he was letting thoughts dictate identity. And that’s dangerous because thoughts come and go all the time.

Instead, he needed to loosen his grip on such definitions and explore what could be available to him through experimentation without expectations.

Who says one can’t be collaborative and assertive at the same time? What’s keeping him from being kind but also direct? And maybe making a few vocal interjections before being invited to speak could do him good amidst a group that seemed to thrive on noisy debate.

In this way he wasn’t replacing one version of himself with another. He was becoming larger than his past self. And notice how this is different from self-improvement.

Self-improvement makes you better at who you’ve been.

But this is about recognizing that who you’ve been was never the full extent of who you are. And about noticing that the story you’ve held can both be a true account of past success or failure, but also a set of beliefs that protected and sustained you and now may be worth challenging.

This week’s questions

Where in your life are you treating a story about you as though it were a fact about yourself?

What boundaries did that story create that may have contributed to your success because they protected and sustained you?

Could something new become available in your life or work if you saw the boundaries as less fixed than before?

The Threshold: the moment you realize the story you’ve been telling yourself about yourself didn’t have to be set in stone; and that what you’re capable of was never fully captured by that story.