Not Only Who You Tell Others to Be, But Who You Tell Others You Are
We often talk about authenticity in terms of “practice what you preach.” If you tell others to be kind, patient, or rigorous, you should embody those traits yourself. But there’s a second layer we rarely talk about: being the person you tell others you are.
That’s harder. Because it forces us to confront the gap between identity and reality.
The Image vs. The Actual
It’s easy to curate an image. You can say you’re a “lifelong learner,” a “systems thinker,” a “reader.” But if the behavior isn’t there, the identity becomes brittle. It doesn’t survive contact with reality.
And unlike a résumé, life doesn’t let you bluff for long. The mismatch leaks through - in conversations, in habits, in the way people silently notice what you do versus what you say.
A Personal Debugging Moment
As a child, and all through my teen years and early 20s, I was an avid reader. One of those people who read everywhere - on buses, in lines, even while walking outside. The young Gilmour who used to take several books to a party “in case she gets bored”? That was me.
Then came stress, work, and burnout. The kind where even absorbing information hurt. So I stopped reading. For years.
But here’s the twist: I kept saying “I love reading.” It was part of my identity. Until one day I realized - I hadn’t touched a book in over three years. That’s not “being a reader.” That’s clinging to an old story.
So I debugged myself. I looked at the gap between the story I was telling and the life I was living. And I changed it. I stopped burning myself out so much that I had no capacity left for fiction. Slowly, books came back into my life. And I can’t explain how happy that made me. Because books have always been my friends, and I’d nearly lost them.
Debugging Your Story
This isn’t about guilt-tripping yourself into more productivity. It’s about alignment.
A few prompts that helped me:
What do I often tell others about who I am?
Does my day-to-day reality reflect that?
If not, what small change would close the gap?
This process of “story debugging” doesn’t just reconnect you with who you want to be - it strips away false self-perceptions that drain you.
Why It Matters
In work, in leadership, in friendships - credibility doesn’t come from words. It comes from the alignment between your declared self and your lived self.
When you say you’re someone who values clarity, and your own documents reflect that, people trust you. When you say you care about learning and they see you carving out time to learn, people follow you.
But if you say you’re a “reader” and haven’t read in years, a “listener” who interrupts constantly, or a “mentor” who never makes time - the story becomes hollow.
Closing Thought
There’s freedom in alignment. When the story you tell matches the story you live, there’s no mental overhead, no stage performance. Just congruence.
So yes, be the person you tell others to be. But also - live the story you tell others about yourself.
It might require a little debugging. But the payoff is that you don’t just project a self - you inhabit it.