Take the Fame! part 1

"You can't be who you are until you acknowledge who you are."

There we are, a fauxtation from my own pen.

It sounds simple and self evident - you need to recognise your strengths and your talents before you can use them. If you think you're crap, it's pretty hard to be anything else. But acknowledging yourself can be a real struggle. There's all sorts of barriers we can have about it. Modesty's so drummed into us - mustn't blow your own trumpet, don't want to end up being arrogant, etc etc etc. You have to shed the modesty though before you can take a good honest look at who you are and share it with other people.

The first thing to get is that you can't be talented and modest. It doesn't work. Either you completely suppress your talent and keep it a secret, or you use and express your talents and pretend to be modest. Which gets very hard to distinguish from the arrogance we're so afraid of.

Being who you are is simply self expression. It's authenticity, it's honesty, it's being real. Modesty, just as much as arrogance, is a pretence, an egotistical lie which seeks to manipulate. Horrible, isn't it? Well, it's not that awful really. Modesty and arrogance are concepts we learn pretty early, basic building blocks from when we're first getting to grips with social relations as children. Nobody wants their kids to get picked on because they're big-headed.

As adults, we can trust ourselves to be more subtle. We just need to remember to move on.