When I used to hear people say things like…

“Just be YOU!”
“You are unique!”
“You are special!”

…it always sounded to me like when a mother tells her child she loves him/her. Sure it is endearing, but it’s not necessarily true. Of course she thinks that – she’s their mother!

However, after years of coaching people to live their truth – after years of working with leaders to act and speak more authentically, to be more self-expressive, to have deeper personal integrity – what I can see is the ‘mothers’ weren’t just under the spell of their parental love.

“Just be YOU”, although highly conceptual and hardly pragmatic, is deeply wise.

What I have seen is that the more you are willing to cut through the BS, the more you are willing to say exactly what you think and feel without holding back and the more you are willing to do life and work exactly the way YOU want to do it – the more often successful results are created.

Here are three reasons I see as to why ‘just being YOU’ is a powerful strategy for success:

1. TRUST – You are in integrity with your truth and this congruence helps people to trust you.
2. PASSION – You are doing what gets you most excited and your passion is contagious.
3. VALUE – You automatically differentiate yourself and in a world of conformists this difference creates value.

This last point, about differentiating yourself, is what the moms mean when they say things like “you are unique” and “you are special”.

If you want to create more success, then listen to your mother.

Just be you.

COACHING QUESTIONS:

• What is one way you know are you NOT being you?
• How might this be stopping you from creating what you want to create?