Eight ways to harness your inner rebel so you live a happy life true to yourself
Untethered Mind, Sunday Edition, 4-min read.
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One of the hardest things a human can do is risk rejection from the crowd.
Ever since I was a wee boy with milk teeth, I've felt the pressure of stepping outside the boundaries of 'socially acceptable.'
The trouble with this is if you never step outside, you'll be just like everyone else.
That may be nice for some, but no one made any significant impact or experienced what life was like as their own person when they played it safe.
I can confidently say that whenever I've allowed rebel energy to rise within me, I always feel more alive.
I firmly believe that if you spend your days conforming, avoiding conflict, and never taking any risks, you're living a lie.
And living out of integrity makes us depressed.
Let's champion our inner rebel.
This cheeky dragon, when embodied, needn't lead to chaos.
In fact, embracing this side of who we are will bring us more success and security than we imagined.
Celebrate your uniqueness.
In case you haven't noticed, the world has gradually been training us to believe that our differences are to be denied and squashed.
Refuse to buy into this nonsense.
Your true confidence will appear when you give yourself a break and embrace what makes you a weird little stand-out freak.
I'm sensitive as all heck and can barely spend 12 minutes in a crowd. But this makes me special in other ways.
I used to hate being called 'weird' at school. Now I worry when I'm not.
Become a leader.
There's something magical that happens when you volunteer to take the lead. You begin to forget your insecurities and see yourself less as a follower or victim.
Adopting a leadership role, whether leading a book group, starting a podcast, running a retreat, or mentoring others, is an empowering and responsibility-taking act.
Whether you choose leadership or rebellion, both will ultimately attract a community around you.
Be the leader when most people are followers.
Have at least a small outlet for ALL-OUT self-expression.
I am fortunate to have my writing, which allows me to express myself fully, as a major component of my work too.
My business is driven by my writing. It's not always infused with high emotions and explorations of colour and detail, but the thread is there.
Writing daily has made me more confident and happier because I get to fully be myself through these outlets.
And the great thing about full self-expression?
It attracts your real fans.
Challenge your inner critic.
No matter how 'together' we seem to ourselves and others, we all have that inner voice that shows up to varying degrees.
It's there to keep us safe. We don't want to be injured or abandoned.
So the inner critic has developed as our brains have developed, and we can sometimes be overwhelmed by such a voice.
The low-energy conformist listens closely to what it has to say and abides by its instructions.
The energised rebel acknowledges it when needed (like avoiding stepping off that cliff) but generally questions it.
So you want to start that new project.
Wait, you could fail in public? You might lose friends? You might offend some people?
What if that didn't matter as much as you thought?
Question, challenge, question.
That inner critic is rarely right.
Seek unconventional role models.
While everyone else is fawning at the same celebrities who spout empty nonsense, you’re digging deeper underground.
Who are those people who are quietly contributing in ways that may be underappreciated? And how can you borrow from them?
Mine continually change because when a role model goes mainstream, I drop them and turn to someone still unaffected by the perils of fame.
List those legends out. What makes their unusual differences valuable to you?
There's no shame in emulating these people.
It's the substream likely to contain the gems because anything that the masses adore is likely composed of at least 90% trash.
Question everything.
I've lost count of all the things I grew up believing were valid, worthy and essential that turned out to be utter bull excrement.
Just because someone wears a uniform and tells us what to do on the news has no bearing on whether what they say is truth.
The fool starts nodding before the expert has even finished their sentence. Not you.
Cultivate self-trust.
Without realising it, most of us go through our whole lives acting vicariously through other people.
We rarely make decisions based on what we want because we don't trust ourselves deep down. We try to impress others and do things according to what we think would make others happy.
If you want to live true to yourself, you must develop self-trust.
How?
Listen less to your insecure worries and nurture your connection with inner intelligence. It's there when you let your mind still for a moment.
Rebels change the world because they trust their intuition.
Actively make mistakes.
I don't mean being reckless, obviously. I'm talking about going against the grain of what 97% of people are doing, which, in your case, is to allow mistakes to happen.
You will not see success if you don't make some mistakes.
See mistakes as currency for the results you want.
You also want to upgrade your mistakes. If you're making the same pathetic mistakes as every other Tom, Nancy and Jane, you'll get what they have.
Which isn't a whole lot.
Don't be that guy who blocks his inner rebel from finding the escape hatch.
Nurture that part of you, and you will live a life of riches.
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If you want to be part of the first founding group of Mastery Den dragons, join the waiting list, which will get you a special launch discount.
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Alex a great inspiring piece ! It is so true , I now realise I am an outlier , I have never really conformed and it confused me for a while ....feeling good today having read this !