Brandon Held - Owning Who You Are - Episode 26

The main idea of this episode is about owning and accepting who you are. It's important to embrace your unique qualities, flaws, and experiences without feeling pressured to conform to others' expectations. As you get older, it becomes less important to people-please and more important to be confident in your individuality. Self-acceptance and embracing your imperfections are key to this process. It's also important to be kind and respectful to others while being true to yourself. Your past experiences shape you but don't define you if you learn from them and allow yourself to grow. Owning your story means accepting who you are, both the good and the bad. Welcome back to Brandon Held's Life is Crazy, Episode 26. If you're downloading this episode for the first time, I implore you to please start at Episode 1. It is the story of my life, Episode 1 through 25. It gives you a better understanding of who you're listening to and what I'm about and how I have gotten from where I started to where I am today. And you can do that on BrandonHeld.com. Wherever you're downloading this from, you can go to BrandonHeld.com. And today, I'm going to talk about owning who you are, right? It's all about embracing and accepting yourself fully, which is hard to do when you're young. When I was young, you know, I was so worried about people-pleasing, even though I would say things like, oh, I don't care what other people think about me or, you know, whatever. That's not really true, right? You're trying to figure out who you are. You're trying to find your way in this world. And a big part of that is having other people like you. And I'm not saying that stops being important as you get older, but it's definitely less important as you get older. You have to understand that you can't people-please. No matter what you do, someone will not like you. You know, if you're too happy, someone won't like you because you're too happy. If you're, you know, grumpy, someone won't like you because you're grumpy. But someone will like you because you're grumpy. They'll find that quality endearing. You know, there's just anything on the spectrum, someone will or will not like you for it. And that's just the way it is. And as you become older and you get more comfortable with yourself, your strengths, your flaws, your experiences, and everything that makes you unique, you know, you learn to have a little bit more confidence and pride in your individuality and who you are because it's really important to fit in when you're younger, right? Whether you're in school, college, even when you first start, you know, your new jobs, you really want to fit in. That's just how you are. But, you know, as you get older, you embrace who you are, you accept who you are, and you take pride in who you are. And the reason I'm talking about this is because, you know, you don't have to wait until you get older to do that. If someone had helped me understand what it took to own who I am and embrace who I am and just accept that, maybe I would have done it at an early age. And why is this important? It's important because it's a huge weight off your shoulders. It's a weight that you don't necessarily even realize you're carrying. You know, maybe some people are fully aware that they are constantly trying to please people, and in those efforts, you know, it doesn't allow them to be who they want to be or it prevents them from doing things they would want to do. Whatever those things are, if you take time to think about it, you'll really see that the fact that you are trying to people-please is holding you back in different aspects of your life. Now, don't get this confused with being a jerk or being an asshole, right? Those or being a bitch, respectively, whoever you are, whatever's listening to this, that doesn't mean that that's okay either, right? This is about being comfortable with yourself. And hopefully in your self-acceptance and self-comfort, you have grown as a human being. You have some intelligence. You know how to treat people. You know how to talk to people, respectively, and maybe professionally if it's your workplace, which most people do have to do some type of professional behavior at work. Most people, maybe not everyone. Maybe you have one of those loner-type jobs where you sit behind a computer and you don't have to deal with people. Good for you. That's great for you if that's your life and that's what you want. But for the rest of us, we have to work with people and deal with people all day. And you can't just be mean to people. I mean, it's not the way society should work, right? I mean, you could be mean to people, but that's not a society we want to live in. And so here we are talking about owning who you are so you can be strong and confident in who you are, but also still be kind and a good human being to the people around you. One doesn't necessarily preclude the other. You can have both. You can be both. And so one of the first biggest ways is by self-acceptance, right? Like I already had said, embrace your unique qualities and your imperfections without feeling pressured to conform to others' expectations. You can totally be imperfect and own your imperfections. Let me give you an example for me. I am someone who is not patient. I'm impatient. You know, I've had other flaws through my life that I have tried to work on and tried to get better at, and I would say most of those I've at least gotten better in my personality and in the way that I behave. But I have always and still continue to struggle with being impatient. And I own it, right? I'm not saying it's okay to not try to get better because I still need to try to get better at being patient. I should be working on that. I am working on it. I will continue to work on it. But for whatever reason, this is the aspect of my personality I've struggled with the most. So when I say I own that, I mean when I'm showing impatience, whether I recognize it myself or someone else points it out to me, I say, you're right, I am being impatient. It is a quality of mine that I need to work on. And, you know, if it calls for an apology, I will apologize. So just because I own that I'm impatient doesn't give me the right to just say, you know, screw you, I'm impatient, fill my needs now. No, it's not okay. What happens, though, is instinctively, naturally, if something's not happening in the time that I would like or as quickly as I would like, my natural impatience kicks in and I start to get annoyed and irritated and, you know, potentially behave accordingly if I don't catch myself and police myself. And that's the thing that I have to work on. So I own that. I accept that that's who I am and that's what I have to do. Also, you need to embrace your flaws, right? I know it's a little bit the same, but it's also a little different. You know, you have to accept that nobody is perfect. Flaws and imperfections are what make you human and can be a source of strength. You know, for example, someone with a stutter may stop trying to hide it and own that part of their communication style, not seeing it as a weakness or a part of their personal story, but just owning it. And, you know, you're going to make fun of someone who tries to hide their stutter if you're a friend or, you know, whatever, maybe even if you're just an asshole behind their back. You'll make fun of that person who tries to hide it, but every now and then they spit out a stutter versus someone who does stutter, they own the fact that they stutter, and they don't hide the fact that they stutter because you immediately garner a level of respect for someone who behaves like that. You just do, you know, unless you're a sociopath or just someone who likes to build yourself up by beating others down, which is something I'll talk about on another podcast someday. You just have to respect someone who embraces their flaws. For example, another example for myself, I'm bald. I shave my head. I've been shaving my head since my mid-20s. And, you know, when you're a 20-something-year-old young man, people genuinely try to make fun of you for not having hair, for being bald. But the fact is, it doesn't bother me. It never has. It bothered me when I was balding and I had hair and I was wearing a hat all the time to hide the fact that I was balding. But once I shaved my head and I saw that acceptance from people and I just owned my bald head, there was nothing anyone could say to me after that that would bother me about not having hair. You know, I've been called Mr. Clean, you know, a thousand times. Like, that's the most unoriginal thing that people use, and I've heard it so many times, I can't even count, right? Just think of any bald white man, Woody Harrelson, you know, whoever. It doesn't matter. People have tried to compare me to them. They've tried to call me names. They've tried to make fun of me. And it literally bounces right off me because I embrace the fact that I was losing my hair and I shaved my head, and that's a flaw that I have in other people's eyes is not having hair. It's not a flaw to me because I love having a bald head. It's easy to maintain. It looks good on me. Thankfully, I don't have a misshaped head, and so it's just worked for me, so I embrace that flaw. Another aspect of owning who you are is owning your story, right? I can't be any more truthful about this. You know, your past experiences, your life experiences, even your mistakes are an integral part of who you are. They shape you but don't define you if you learn from them and you allow yourself to grow, right? Obviously, if you're someone that's killed someone or done something that extreme, it's hard to get past that, right? It's hard to not be defined by that. As much as you may want to go to prison and say, oh, I've reshaped myself as a human being and I'm a better person now, yeah, maybe that's true. Maybe it is. But you took someone's life out of this world, you know, and you're still here, and their family, their loved ones, everyone is affected by that. You know, you don't necessarily get to redefine yourself when you do that. That's, again, a personal belief of mine. Everyone has their own, you know, to each their own. Also kind of a way that I live life to some degree. So you have to let your experiences, even negative, even the bad things you've done, shape who you are, and you just have to own it, right? I have done bad things. I have said mean things to my ex-wives and had a sharp tongue. You know, I don't know. I've done things that aren't really coming to my head right now in life that if someone probably had brought it up to me, I wouldn't be proud of it. I wouldn't be happy to say, yeah, I did that, and stick my head up high. I would be like, you know, yeah, I did that. I learned from it. It's not something I would ever do again, or, you know, maybe it's something I regret doing. You know, whatever the case may be, but you still have to take all those hardships that you have in life because they've helped you become a better person, or they should have. If you didn't let them beat you down, let's just say you did. Say you're listening to this podcast, and you've let your life's hardships beat you down. Let the negative experiences you've had in life beat you down. Stop. Stop. I know that sounds simple, and maybe you need professional help with a therapist or something, but that doesn't have to be the story of your life. It doesn't have to be. I was heartbroken and devastated with my third divorce. Not so much about the divorce from my wife, but more about the loss of a family, the loss of, you know, my sons were young at the time, both below 10. And, you know, I knew what that meant. I knew that meant not being a father every day, not seeing my kids every day. And, you know, as I spoke about in my previous podcast, I wasn't going to quit on that family. You know, my wife and I didn't get along. I honestly didn't respect her very much. Again, that's partly her personality, partly me. I could have been a better man, more empathetic, but I wasn't. So that was devastating to me. And I could have let my life be destroyed right there. I lost my job at the same time. I was laid off. So now I was divorced for a third time, no kids to see every day. I have three sons. You know, one lives across the country. Two I don't get to see every day anymore, and also unemployed. That could have been the end for me. I could have ended my life, but I didn't. I felt that pain. I dealt with that pain. I lived through that pain, and I moved on, and I'm a better man for it. It's a part of my story. It's a part of my mistakes and my story, but it has made me better. And you can do the same. You absolutely can do the same. Whatever place you're in in life right now, if you're at your bottom of bottoms that you've ever been in your whole life like I was at that point, you can recover. You just have to take it one day and one step at a time, and it's possible. I'm here to show you it's possible. From how my life started to being resilient for the things that I've gone through in life to being where I am today, you just have to overcome those challenges and be a better person. That's the biggest part. You have to be a better person, and you have to own your experiences and learn from them and be better. You can't make the same choices. You can't make the same mistakes repeatedly, because if you do, then you're not learning from them. That's when it really gets to a hopeless ceiling. The next part I'm going to talk about is setting boundaries. Owning who you are also means knowing what you're willing to accept and what you're not. My entire life, even when I was in the phase of being a people pleaser, I wanted to please people. I wanted everyone to like me, unless it was someone that I met that I just couldn't stand it and I didn't care about them. But that was few and far between. I typically get along with pretty much everybody, and I wanted pretty much everybody to feel the same way about me. However, I don't drink, never had a drop of alcohol in my life. I don't smoke. I never have. Don't have any tattoos. Don't do any illegal drugs. I have been around crowds. I was in two different branches of the military. I was in college for seven years of my life. You think people don't want me to drink or get tattoos or smoke or any of those things, just even do things, behaviors, like, I don't know, just acting in ways that I feel are too immature or just ways that I don't want to represent myself. You just have to set those boundaries and be strong with who you are. I've had people tell me straight up, oh, I'm going to get you drunk. And I would look at them and say, no, you're not. That's never going to happen, right? Or someone would say, you know, oh, you should smoke this. It makes you relax. It makes you feel really good. You know, everyone smokes it. So that's not me. That's not who I am. And I don't know, I've never felt the brunt of people being upset with me because I wouldn't go drink with them or I wouldn't smoke with them. I didn't have a whole lot of drugs pushed in my face because I typically don't hang around people that do drugs. That's just not my crowd. I'm not saying never, but typically I'm not around people that are doing drugs. And I never felt personally like they felt any less of me, thought any less of me, or anything like that. As a matter of fact, I felt like I garnered respect for setting those boundaries and sticking to my boundaries. You know, people respected that. And that is what I felt. I did feel respected. I didn't feel like, oh, no, I set these boundaries, now they're not going to like me. No. They respected me. They showed me respect, and I got to stay within my boundaries that I had set. Right? So that's another part of owning who you are. You know, you have to live authentically. You know, it's important to make choices in your life that align with your values, right, rather than seeking approval from the others. That's the same thing, right? A lot of people start drinking or smoking or doing drugs because peer pressure got them into it. You know, maybe they were a little bit curious, probably wouldn't have done it on their own. Maybe they weren't even curious, but they just felt so much peer pressure in a moment that they gave in because they wanted to be liked. They didn't want their friends to make fun of them or, you know, they didn't want to feel like they would lose a friendship. Whatever goes through someone's head when they give in at that time, you just got to stick strong to that. You have to live authentically. You have to make choices that align to your true values. You know, that's one example. Another example is maybe you're not a person who wants to work a nine-to-five job. You're an artistic type person. So, you know, pursue that type of career. Do your best. Give it your all. You know, it's a tough career to make it in, but people do make it in artistic careers. Or conversely, maybe you're an artistic person, but you like the financial stability of a more traditional job. If financial stability is important to you, and that's the most important thing to you, then you have to choose that route. You have to live that life. You can't live a life trying to pursue being an artist, and maybe it's not going so well, and your pay is up and down, and it's driving you nuts because your financial stability isn't what you want it to be or need it to be. And it's just weighing on you. It's like pressure causes anxiety. You know, all the things that not living authentically can cause you is why you should do that. So you have to go down that path, and you have to follow it, and you have to be true to it, and you have to be okay to live with it, right? If it's, I want to be a musician, and it takes you a long, long time to get your career off the ground, and you're poor until that happens, you have to be okay with that. Or if you wanted to be a musician, but you're more worried about financial stability, so you choose the financial stability and take a nine-to-five job, but you don't get to be a musician like you wanted to be, then you have to let that go. Because you have to pick the thing that gave you the most comfort, that gave you the most authentic way of living for yourself. And so you could practice playing music on the side. You can do it as a hobby. Hell, you can even try to become a musician after hours if you want to dedicate that kind of time. There are other avenues to go. But however it works out, you have to be okay with what you have chosen, and you have to be able to live with what you've chosen, not live in torture, not live in anxiety, not just make your life hell. Because you had this dream about how you wanted to paint your life, and it didn't work that way. So whatever path you choose, live authentically, be good with it. And, of course, one of the last things I'm going to talk about is being honest with yourself. Maybe the biggest part, not only of owning who you are, but just of life in general, right? To own who you are, you must be truthful with yourself about what you want, what you like, and what you need, who you are, what are your personalities, strengths, what are your personalities, weaknesses. Just be truly, truly honest with who you are, right? If you're someone who likes to be alone, you're a loner, but you have this one friend that likes to go hang out in groups all the time, so you do it because you don't want to let this friend down. You're not being honest with yourself. You're not being true to yourself. If you're someone that blows up in fights, right, and you say awful things or you break things and you destroy things and you give yourself an out every time it's over and you just say, well, I was mad, you know, be honest with yourself. Is that okay? Is that good behavior? Is that behavior you want to show the world? Is that the person you want to be remembered for, right? A lot of people who are like that when they're young stop being like that when they get older because they, you know, quote, unquote, grow out of it, right? They realize that's not how they want to represent themselves. Unfortunately for some, it just takes a long time to be honest with themselves and do what they need to do to make the change. Or sometimes something dramatic and drastic has to happen in their life that is painful and they have to deal with the pain and they have to go through the pain and they have to figure out how can I prevent myself from being in this place of pain again. And they have to do a real honest self-assessment of what they can do differently. I've been there. I've had to do it myself. I definitely have had to do it myself. I have had to look at myself and say what am I doing wrong? How can I be better? How can I do better? Not just in my personal life but also at work, in my career. You know, I always thought I'm never going to be an ass kisser, right? I'm never going to be someone who portrays something other than exactly what I feel. And that has gotten me in a lot of trouble, right? I have gotten myself in trouble because maybe I'm just too busy being an individual that I don't cultivate relationships. And because I don't cultivate relationships and I also want to be severely honest even when it flies in the face of people who don't want to hear my honesty, that gets me in trouble. Because they already don't like me because I'm an individual. I don't care about, you know, cultivating a relationship or whatever. Some people call ass kissing. But you don't have to be like that. You don't have to do that. You don't have to be an ass kisser to cultivate relationships with your bosses and your coworkers and your clients or your customers. You don't have to be an ass kisser. You can just be sincere and genuine and have some kind of empathy and care about someone and someone else's life other than your own. And you can build relationships that way and you can still be honest with yourself and you can still be true to who you are and you don't have to pay for being who you are. And that's the final thought that I'm going to make on this podcast. If you grow, if you change, if you become a better person, if you recognize who you are, if you're honest with yourself, if you live authentically, if you do everything I've discussed here today, you can be happy and true to yourself and also still be someone that other people like, be someone that other people root for, appreciate, enjoy to be around. You can do both if you live in the right space. You don't have to be hardcore on one side of the line or the other. So that's what we got today. Be yourself. Own who you are. Thanks for joining. I'll talk to you later.