Lifespring Book Excerpt: The Risk of Being Authentic

Your image may temporarily keep you less vulnerable to being hurt, but ultimately it closes down the possibility available to you. In contrast, authenticity and openness allow for breakthrough. Do you ever think about your patterns? Patterns in relationships, in jobs, in physical well-being, in finances, and so on? Who said life adheres to patterns? Who said you can't interrupt a patter and shift out of it? You can, but only if you are willing and, in fact, committed to breaking up your image.

Breakthrough occurs through inventing your identity from nothing, not through improving your already entrenched image; it requires a willingness to forfeit the predictable future that your image ensures. Inventing your identity, as distinct from setting goals, demands that you behave in new and unfamiliar ways. It is a risky endeavor. Your image is comfortable and it probably works in many ways or you wouldn't have developed and nurtured it. To access possibilities that exist outside your image, you must risk the unknown. You cannot attend a preview, a check it out, and then decide if you are going to stick with your image or go for the breakthrough. There is no guarantee about where the process will take you. It will be a struggle because your image's whole reason for existing is to keep you invulnerable, and your image has a fierce will to survive intact.

It is in the process of questioning yourself and challenging your fixed notions that breakthrough occurs. If, after any process, you are still singing the same old song, you have not been willing to integrate the new information in a way that makes a positive difference for yourself and the world. The operative word here is difference, implying that there is something missing in the status quo. It takes vulnerability and humility to admit that something is missing about you, far too much vulnerability for many people given the gigantic attachment they have to looking good.