My Favorite You Is The Real You

By Mike Foster My favorite you is the real you.

Seriously. Your messy, honest, vulnerable, imperfect, glorious self is what makes you awesome. Because when you’re real, you’re relatable.

People connect with your story and your life when you’re vulnerable with who you are. So, the real you is actually your secret weapon to fight against shame and isolation to help others heal and build community.

Here’s the reality, we all get stuck. We all deal with disappointments and irreplaceable losses. Sometimes things hurt inside and we become confused and disillusioned with life.

But we’ve for some reason bought into the lie that we shouldn’t be broken. So we paint on a fake smile and then we pretend. And we pray nobody notices and asks us how we're really doing.

However, as we enter each other's stories and hear each other's dreams, we can no longer hide behind the smiles and the “I'm fines" and the shallow religious vulnerability that we've learned over the years. We have to get out in the open because freedom is contagious. When we’re free to be ourselves, we set others free to become who God meant for them to be.

It’s ok to be where we are.  It’s ok to feel what we feel.  It’s ok to be stuck.  But it’s not ok to pretend.

So be a little braver to be who God made us to be. I think maybe all of it starts in a community of friends seeing our flaws and loving us anyways. It begins with us getting comfortable in our own skin and sharing our dreams. It means abandoning our full time, 24/7 image management protocol and living a true self kinda life.

So, start taking tiny steps to being the real you.

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Mike Foster is the founder of People of the Second Chance and the author of Wonderlife: A Not So Perfect Guide To Who You Are And Why You're Here. He lives in San Diego with his family and fluffy dog.

Mike Foster