How to Enjoy Yourself

How many people do you know who truly enjoy being themselves?

Not who think they might enjoy themselves after losing weight, making more money, fixing a relationship, or becoming more impressive. Who enjoy being who they are right now?

Most of us spend a lot of time wanting to be different. We miss the extraordinary experience of being ourselves because we’re waiting for a version we think will finally be acceptable.

I want you to consider waking up excited that you get to be you, without changing anything first.

In Episode 327, I shared a lesson on enjoying yourself and your life, including the challenges and disappointments. Enjoyment doesn’t require removing the human parts.

The life in your head

We all have an idea of how life is supposed to be. How we should look. How our parents should have raised us. How a spouse should treat us. How the world should work.

Then we compare reality with that picture and decide something has gone wrong.

We do this with other people’s lives, too. They have the body, family, or business we want, so we assume they’re doing life correctly and enjoying it more.

I’ve learned through my own life and my work with clients that getting what you want doesn’t remove the 50/50 experience of being human. The subjects you worry about may change. The ability to feel worry remains.

At the time of this episode, I described having created the life of my dreams and still waking up with anxiety. Earlier, I had worried about money. Later, I worried about employees. I still felt sadness, frustration, and boredom.

That didn’t mean the life I had created was wrong. It meant I was still human.

If you keep waiting for circumstances that produce uninterrupted happiness, you keep postponing enjoyment that is available now.

What if hard is part of the point?

I taught a master coach training in Grand Cayman with 20 coaches. They knew it would be hard and came ready for it.

There were tears, frustration, anger, and doubt. At the final dinner, they told me it was the best training they had experienced.

They expected it to be hard. They wanted the challenge. When it came, they used it to learn and grow.

I thought about what would happen if we approached life that way. What if difficulty didn’t mean something had gone wrong? What if we could enjoy being ourselves while doing something hard?

That changes the reason for improving your life. You don’t have to pursue a goal only because you expect it to make you happier. You can pursue it because you want to grow, change the world, or see what you can create.

You can enjoy what is and still change what is. You can appreciate yourself now and still want to evolve.

Actively choose to like yourself

One thought that helps me is remembering that I didn’t create myself. I was created. I can spend my time judging that creation, or I can marvel at it.

There has never been a human exactly like me. I get to experience this life as this person. I want to appreciate that.

This isn’t about thinking you’re better than other people. It’s about letting yourself get a kick out of being alive as you.

Liking yourself needs to be active. Listen to what you want. Tell the truth. Say no sometimes. Know your dreams and desires. Take care of yourself for the long run.

Work on your own behalf.

If you spend an enormous amount of time trying to get other people to like you, notice what that costs. You may do what you think they want while ignoring what you genuinely want.

Then you feel resentful when they don’t appreciate the sacrifice or make the same sacrifices for you.

That is people-pleasing pain. It is very different from enjoying yourself.

Let other people have their thoughts

When you ignore yourself, you send yourself a message that you don’t matter. Acting from that thought can create more situations that seem to confirm it.

Start paying attention to your thinking and your true desires. If you have been people pleasing for years, you may also need to acknowledge choices you would rather avoid remembering.

Bring them into awareness, make amends to yourself, and let them go. You don’t need to keep using them as evidence against yourself.

Other people get to think what they want about you. Trying to control those thoughts doesn’t give you control over them.

When you show up authentically, you can discover who likes you as you, rather than who likes the version created to please them.

Clients sometimes worry that listening to themselves will make them selfish. I believe we have a desire to give. Giving to ourselves first increases our capacity to give from the heart, instead of giving to earn approval.

Buffering can hide what you really want

People-pleasing relationships can be painful. Buffering makes that pain easier to tolerate, so the pattern continues.

You seek a pleasure hit instead of acknowledging that you’re ignoring yourself. Over time, your true desires get buried beneath false desires and pretense.

People pleasing and buffering feed each other. Buffering can become a way of people pleasing yourself: giving yourself immediate pleasure while avoiding what you actually want.

When you stop buffering, your tolerance for people pleasing may decrease. At first, that can feel terrible. It can also be the beginning of listening to yourself and changing your life.

Our brains want pleasure, avoidance of pain, and the easiest option. Our true long-term desires often require discomfort and a willingness to let things be hard.

This doesn’t mean forcing yourself into exhaustion or beating yourself up in the name of success. Power comes from listening to yourself, caring for yourself, and having your own back as you do hard things.

Enjoy the human you are

I enjoy my life, including the mistakes I continue to make, the cringy things in my past, and the people I sometimes disappoint.

The way I have found to enjoy being myself is to actually be myself. I embrace the 50/50 experience rather than using the difficult half as a reason to reject me.

Look at the version of life you keep comparing reality against. Look at where you are ignoring yourself to earn approval. Look at what you use to avoid hearing your true desires.

Then consider that you can appreciate yourself now. You can let life be hard and still enjoy the person living it.