Are You Trying to Find Yourself, or Create Yourself?
“I want to show up as my authentic self” is a phrase I hear constantly in my coaching sessions, across social media, and in self-help books, so much so that it feels as if this search for authenticity is the gold standard of personal growth.
But what are we actually looking for? What does it really mean to be authentic? Who are we trying to be? What is our true self, really?
We can look at two ways to approach the answers: Archaeology versus Authorship
The Archaeology Of The Self
The first assumes that your true ‘authentic’ self is already present, but you are so busy meeting demands, managing stress, or becoming who you need to be for others that you have lost touch with who you are, buried beneath the layers of daily life.
Therefore, finding yourself becomes an archaeological dig: if you just excavate deep enough through the layers of adulthood, you will discover the genuine article of you waiting at the bottom.
It is a comforting idea because it implies the answer is fixed and already exists. You do not have to invent anything. You simply have to uncover it.
But there is a flaw in this approach.
The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott introduced the concepts of the true self and the false self. The false self forms early, learning to please, to be acceptable, and to adapt to what others want, in an effort to feel safe. Therefore, we practise being whoever we need to be in order to secure that safety.
This raises a critical question. When you go digging beneath your own layers, are you actually connecting to your true self? Or are you simply excavating a well-practised false self?
If what you unearth is just another carefully constructed version of yourself and not, in fact, the authentic version of you, then perhaps digging for the true you is the wrong approach.
The Authorship of The Self
What if the self is not something we find, but something we author?
A practical idea that helps explain this concept dates back to the 1960s and comes from a plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz. In his book Psycho-Cybernetics, he made a striking observation. He could completely change someone’s physical appearance through surgery, and yet some patients still looked in the mirror afterwards and saw their old face. Their internal picture of themselves remained the same, even though their actual face had changed.
Maltz concluded that what we truly live from is not the face in the mirror but our self-image, the internal picture we carry of who we are. That self-image then governs almost everything we attempt and believe possible for ourselves.
Because our inner picture was learned, it can be rewritten. We are, therefore, not stuck with who we believed ourselves to be. If we shift that internal picture to who we want to be, we are authoring our authentic self, allowing us to take ownership of how we show up.
What This Means For Coaching
As we face the challenges life presents, they change us. The act of navigating the messy transitions changes our perspective, our strengths, and our values. So if the challenge itself is already altering who we are, do we really need to excavate the past to discover our authentic selves?
Because we could spend a long time digging for an answer to who we were before life shifted.
Whilst there is some value in that, it does provide grounding and context. Your past is data, so authoring yourself does not mean ignoring your history and pretending it did not happen; it helps you understand what you love, what you can no longer tolerate, what lights you up, what drains you, and so on.
However, I would say we can become stuck in a cycle of gathering more and more information about ourselves, which can keep us trapped in a past version of ourselves that may well not serve our present or future selves. And for coaching, that means we have no clear direction to move forward.
The more useful coaching question, then, is ‘Who could I become, and what would that version of me choose next?’
Thus, we study who we have been so we can author who we are becoming with more wisdom. Archaeology serves the authorship.
Something To Try
Notice the next time you catch yourself in an excavation statement. I’m just not a morning person. I’m just bad with money. I’m just a shy person. That is treating a learned, habitual self-image as an unchangeable truth.
The moment you catch yourself saying that’s just how I am, pause and ask the authorship question instead. Who is the version of me I am actively becoming, and what would they do here?
Treat your past as evidence of your materials, not as a boundary line. Your self-image was learned. Which means it can be rewritten.
Rethinking Authenticity
So let’s go back to where we started. What does it really mean to be authentic?
If we view authenticity strictly as archaeology, we can find ourselves looking backwards, trying to remain loyal to a past version of ourselves we have already outgrown.
Perhaps real authenticity is not about being faithful to who you were. Perhaps it is about having the courage to be faithful to the person you are choosing to become. The alignment between your conscious choices now and the self you are moving toward is what matters.
In our Health & Wellbeing Coach Training, I teach the importance of distinguishing between who a client wants to become and what they want to do. That distinction gives direction to goal setting, depth to habit and behaviour change, and a compelling personal reason to prioritise their own health and wellbeing.
