Showoff

I was kicking up dust, navigating rocks and tree roots, sweating puddles into my tank top. I was hiking to a lake and was pushing myself to keep up a good pace. I passed several people, always with a cheery on your left or beautiful day, isn’t it?

Then I passed a woman who said to her hiking buddy, “What a showoff!”

I laughed out loud and kept going, her comment rolling around in my mind. Was I showing off? What categorizes behavior as showing off? What is the opposite of showing off? What was her thought process that would make her believe I was showing off?

Showing off requires that someone else observes behavior and makes a judgment call about motivation. Showing off sounds like competition. Showing off sounds like doing something to make someone else feel less than, or incompetent.

I wasn’t showing off, I was showing up.

I was showing up for myself, challenging myself, working myself, pushing myself.

There’s a tricky thought that sneaks in when you’re about to try something new: “What will people think?” It can also sound like, “People will think I’m a fraud” or “What if people don’t get it?” or “What if people think I’m not good enough/smart enough/qualified enough to do this?”

They might. If you go enough outside of what people expect of you, it’s not a question of IF, it’s a guarantee that they will. If you challenge long-held traditions, societal norms, groupthink, or the average, you will be misunderstood.

But at what cost do you keep going as you are when you feel the pull to something different? You will live out of alignment. Dissonance. There will be friction between your inside and your outside. Another term for this is inauthenticity or being out of integrity.

Being out of integrity is one of the worst feelings. Knowing something so deeply and tamping it down, smothering it again and again because of fear eventually crushes your spirit. When we try to complete an assignment that is out of alignment we suffer confinement.

So go ahead. Show off. Rejection by others isn’t nearly as painful as rejection from yourself.