by Rana Williamson

Created on: May 12, 2009

Remaining true to yourself constitutes a tremendous act of self-responsibility and personal courage, often in the face of overwhelming expectations from others. While we all have people in our lives we don't want to disappoint, there are, in truth, only one set of eyes you must be able to look into without flinching - the ones that look back at you from the mirror. If you cannot be true to yourself, you cannot give the best of yourself to anyone else in your life.

Being true to yourself is a matter of maintaining personal ethics about belief and behavior as well as about making life choices that reflect your deeply held standards of personal responsibility. People who are true to themselves try to find the best possible mix between "want" and "need." For instance, a man is presented with two choices, remaining in the military and accepting a career-enhancing promotion or returning to his hometown and running the family business for his father who is suffering from terminal heart disease.

The man "wants" to take the promotion and fly the planes he loves, but his personal standards require that he go home. If he did not, he would never be able to live with the self-guilt that would follow. The livable compromise comes with what he makes of the choice - running the business, but also involving himself with the local flying "scene" and performing community service by qualifying to fly with the Civil Air Patrol.

Far too many people mistake being true to oneself with a license to do as you please. That's not self truth, it's hedonism. Self truth means making hard choices for the right reasons and weaving those choices into the fabric of a full, complete, well-lived life. People who have been true to themselves don't look back in old age with regret, but rather with the satisfaction of knowing they balanced principle with pleasure.

Most everyone who has survived high school English remembers the opening line of Shakespeare's famous quote, "to thine own self be true." They do not, however, necessarily recall what comes next. "And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." Not listening to that inner voice of wisdom that tells each of us what is and is not right in our lives is the path to bitterness and dissatisfaction. Listening to that voice, however, while not necessarily guaranteeing "happiness" in the euphoric sense of the word, is the road to self truth.

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