“Just be yourself.” Most common self-help sermon ever. I’ve been preaching it for years. Except…being yourself doesn’t always work. Sometimes it’s dangerous. Sometimes it’s not worth the frustration or the futility.

“Maybe I should just have a real conversation with him. Just…be myself.”
“I just want to be all of me, with all of them.”
“There’s so much I can’t say to her.”

Not everyone can hear you, see you, and appreciate you. Bullying twists what you say and uses it as ammunition. Narcissism can’t have a genuine two-way conversation. Strike a nerve and narcissism strikes back to annihilate. Lots of “healthy” people are sick with poor judgment and they poison every single interaction.

I want you to blaze brightly in the world. I want you to fly your Soul flag—all your colours, sounds, and sonnets. And… I want you to leverage your light so that you can give more to the world. The surest way to do this is to seek resonance and protect your value.

So I suggest that just once in awhile you make a conscious decision to keep yourself to yourself. Not because you’re scared of showing up, but because you have the clarity to see who’s who.

And in some extreme situations (ya, a family reunion might qualify as an “extreme situation”) you put on your cloak of invisibility and just watch the situation unfold.

Being consciously reserved is not the same as being repressed or oppressed. @DanielleLaPorte (Click to Tweet!)

Intentional self-restraint can be incredibly powerful. It’s an ironic form of self-expression…an expression of how wise you truly are.

Danielle LaPorte is the creator of The Desire Map: A Guide To Creating Goals With Soul — the book that turned into a day planner system, a top iTunes app, and an international workshop program. A Desire Map workshop happens every weekend somewhere in the world. Author of The Fire Starter Sessions and the wildly popular #Truthbomb series, Danielle is also the co-creator of Your Big Beautiful Book Plan and co-host of the Beautiful Writer’s Group podcast.

Entrepreneur Magazine calls her “equal parts poet and entrepreneurial badass…edgy, contrarian…loving and inspired.” A speaker, poet, former business strategist and Washington-DC think tank exec, she writes weekly at DanielleLaPorte.com, where over four million visitors have gone for her straight-up advice — a site that’s been deemed “the best place online for kick-ass spirituality,” and was named one of the “Top 100 Websites for Women” by Forbes. The Huffington Post named her Twitter feed as one of the “12 of Wisest Twitter Accounts Worth Following.” You can find her @daniellelaporte just about everywhere.