Hello there. Today, we’re going to talk about a very interesting phenomenon…the idea of impressing people. Fundamentally, if you’re trying to impress someone, it means that you are putting on a flase “front”, in order to manipulate him into perceiving you a certain way.

Some common examples of this behavior are: laughing at jokes you don’t find funny, pretending to be interested in things that you’re not interested in, being overly nice and polite, dressing to impress instead of dressing to express, etc. The overall theme is the idea of trying to control someone’s impression of you, by playing to his whims, as opposed to expressing how you truly think or feel about something.

What’s wrong with this?

Well, the biggest damage is done to your self-esteem. Self-esteem is strengthened by the action of asserting yourself, not asserting what you think someone wants from you. By trying to impress people, you essentially give them “puppet strings” to control you as you wish, which is often found to be counter-intuitive. You see, the ironic thing is that in trying to control people, it’s YOU who ends up being controlled, because you no longer have the ability to say and do what you want, as you struggle to maintain people’s impression of you. Instead of presenting YOURSELF to people, you present them a mirror of what you think they want from you. And so, the manipulator ends up being the one who’s manipulated.

To subject yourself to the whims of others and place them on this pedestal where they essentially have control over your actions is to sacrifice your true desires. The damage to self-esteem can be absolutely devastating, not to mention the mental confusion and chaos that brews from not being able to discern your true desires from your desires to impress people.

So what do we WANT to do?

The answer is: expression, not impression. We want to assert WHO WE ARE…or in familiar words, “be yourself”. BUT, let’s just get one thing straight here for the record. When most people spout the advice of “be yourself”, they do not actually mean it in the proper sense. The sense they mean it in is COMPLETELY messed up. They want you to just act on whatever whims pop into your head, without thinking, whether or not your underlying beliefs and values are actually healthy or not. To them, we should embrace where we currently are, regardless of whether it actually needs improvement. So, in other words, a shy person should be shy, and an angry person should be angry…after all, they can’t help it. It’s who they are, according to them.

What “being yourself” actually means is drilling through any conditioned beliefs you may have absorbed and building your OWN values from the ground up, using your own rational mind, then acting in alignment with them. It does not mean blindly following whatever your dispositions tend to be. When you know who you are and just “be yourself”, then you stop trying to impress people. People begin to see you as the INDIVIDUAL that you are, instead of some shallow reflection. You have depth, character and identity.

When you’re being yourself, this does not mean that you need to air your thoughts to the world at every second. There are certain instances where we may choose not to assert ourselves as dominantly. For example, telling a boss that he is unintelligent is usually not a good decision. That is NOT impression. Impression would be pretending to like the boss, when you actually didn’t.

So, if you want to actually develop a true identity and have control over your thoughts and actions, stop trying to impress people. It might be hard to take the syringe out of your arm, but you will not regret it.

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