I Read Two Paragraphs on Holiday and Realised I'd Been Performing a Version of Myself for Years

I have always said I don't care what people think of me.

I believed that. In the decisions that have defined my life it's largely true. Mexico. Ojo Rojo. The coaching work. None of those were made with one eye on what the people around me thought.

But I was on holiday recently, reading a book called Stand Out Hospitality by Cassie Davidson, when two paragraphs stopped me cold. Not because they told me something new. Because they named something I'd been living for years without ever having a word for it.

The Ten People in the Room

The idea is this. Walk into a room of ten people wanting all of them to like you and you moderate. You soften a few opinions. You tone down the parts of yourself that might be too much. You laugh in the right places and nod along and work hard to be agreeable. They think you're nice. Pleasant. Polite. But the conversation moves around you. You're there but not really present. You leave feeling accepted but not remembered.

Walk into the same room being fully yourself and maybe only two of the ten resonate with you. A couple don't get you. A few decide you're not for them. But those two stay and listen. You're at the centre of the conversation not because you're trying to be but because you're saying something that matters.

When I read that I felt it physically. Because I recognised myself immediately in the first version. Not as an occasional thing. As a pattern. A deeply ingrained, years long, mostly unconscious pattern of making myself agreeable rather than making myself present.

The Thing I Said I Didn't Care About

The moderating I was doing in rooms. The adjusting. The letting other people's decisions prevail because asserting my own felt like too much energy or too much risk to the relationship. The conversations avoided because I didn't want to create a wave. The times at work when something needed addressing and I didn't address it because addressing it would have made me the difficult one.

All of that is care about what people think. Just with a different label. Calling it being reasonable. Calling it picking my battles. Calling it leadership. When actually it was a version of people pleasing that had been so thoroughly normalised I'd stopped recognising it.

The Word I Had to Look Up

Years ago a friend got drunk at a gathering and went around the group saying what she actually thought about each person. Most of it was her own insecurities projected outward. Everyone laughed it off afterwards.

When she got to me she called me insipid.

I had to look it up. Bland. Tasteless. Dull. Lacking in flavour, spirit, or interest. I dismissed it immediately because it didn't match the person I knew myself to be. Someone who had taken risks and built things and been single minded enough to pursue something most people thought was too uncertain.

Except.

When those paragraphs landed in my lap on holiday, the word came back. And I could see for the first time how someone looking at the version of me that was moderating and adjusting and trying not to create waves could have seen that. Not the whole truth of me. But a visible pattern. A pattern that, from the outside, looked like someone who was present in the room but not available in the room.

How You Hand Yourself Over

The moderating doesn't happen in a single decision. It accumulates through a thousand small ones, each of which feels entirely reasonable in the moment.

You soften an opinion because the timing isn't right. You let someone else's preference stand because the energy required to assert your own isn't available right now. You don't hop the hopscotch because someone might see you.

Each of those moments is defensible. None of them are catastrophic. But over time they add up to a version of yourself shaped entirely by the path of least resistance. A personality that has defaulted to ease. And that version, however comfortable it feels from the inside, is not the version that leads. It's the version that gets led.

The burnout and the difficult years made it worse. When the pressure is high and the reserves are low, the energy required to be fully yourself rather than the version that causes the least friction just isn't there. The moderating becomes more automatic. The path of least resistance becomes the only path available.

Changing Is Not Betraying

The objection to deliberately changing who you are is that it's artificial. That consciously deciding to be different is denial of your authentic self.

But here's what that argument misses.

The version of yourself you're protecting as authentic has already been shaped by a thousand things you didn't choose. Social situations, important people, society, economic circumstances, education, your parents, a drunk woman at a party, a particularly hard few years. The person you are right now is the product of external influences none of which you consciously selected.

So the choice isn't between authentic and artificial. It's between letting the shaping continue to happen to you or deciding to take the reins and do it intentionally. Choosing who you want to be isn't a betrayal of who you are. It's the first time the person doing the choosing is actually you.

The Hopscotch at Fleet

On the drive back from London recently we stopped at Fleet services and there was a hopscotch game painted on the floor.

The old version of me would have walked straight past it. Too aware of who was around. Too conscious of how it would look. Too committed to not standing out.

I hopped it.

Nothing dramatic happened. My wife raised an eyebrow. And I carried on to the car feeling something disproportionate to the act itself. A small freedom. Like the chain had been loosened, even just slightly, around the part of me that had learned to stay very still in rooms.

I'm not fixed. I'm not transformed. The patterns didn't develop in a week and they won't be undone in one. But the awareness is there now in a way it wasn't before. And awareness is where everything starts.

What I Want to Leave You With

I have never claimed to be fixed. Just far enough along to have a perspective that might be useful to someone still in the middle of it. None of the coaches and gurus have it all together either. The ones worth listening to are honest about that. They offer their experience as a route rather than a destination.

It took two paragraphs in a book on holiday to show me something I should have seen years ago. It takes a million small decisions and a timeline that is entirely your own.

But the version of you that is fully yourself, inconvenient and specific and occasionally too much for some people in the room, is worth finding. Because the two people who resonate with that version will matter infinitely more than the eight who thought you were nice.

And you deserve to be more than nice.