Have you ever felt uncomfortable in your own life? Have you ever felt like you are living someone else’s life? Have you ever felt like you do not belong? Do you ever feel like someone will burst through that door and expose the imposter in you? This is what most of us feel like occasionally.

I have three different women: there is Comfort, Nice and Perfection. Comfort is asked by a colleague to attend a work function, but she refuses, she does not know anyone that well and there is a good chance that the outing will just be awkward for her. She opts to just go to the gym; she doesn’t take a class, she just works out on her own with her phone as her closest companion.

Comfort happens to lay her eyes on a handsome guy at the gym, but she quickly looks back to her phone. Her phone is the place she spends most of her time and attention. It is a comfortable zone for her.

Then we meet Nice, who has plans for the night with this guy she has been seeing, but she has not heard from him all day. She decides to text him on her lunch break to confirm. It turns out tomorrow will be better for him, but it will be late so they will skip dinner and rather catch a movie at his place. This is not the date Nice had in her mind, but she does not want to be difficult, so she texts back and agrees because, well, she is nice.

Then finally there is Perfection, who wakes up early, puts on her makeup, shows up to a job she has worked hard to get, and over-delivers for the people around her, but despite her image of confidence and being put together, something is wrong.

There are moments where she feels like an imposter in her own life. Would you be shocked if I were to tell you that these three women were not different women at all? What if I told you that Comfort, Nice and Perfection are one person, on the same day? Each day, every day.
Perfection wakes up in the morning and despite her achievements, she cannot shake the insecurities she has about herself. When she meets the guy she likes, she reverses to become an adolescent teenager desperate to be liked and terrified of being alone. She slips into tolerating last-minute dates, late hookups and scraps of the time and attention of the guy she is waiting upon.

Just like that, Perfection moves into Nice. Nice sacrifices her needs to accommodate someone else, she convinces herself that if she could just try harder it would work out. In the blink of an eye Nice becomes Comfort. Attaching herself from the familiar while fleeing from the unknown, in her moments of discomfort and pain, she escapes to her default distractions. And so it goes, Comfort goes to sleep, and Perfection wakes up, ready to repeat the cycle.

To break this cycle, it is important to wake up potential, through core confidence. A thing that lets potential know that whatever happens in life, it will all work out. Today might be a bad day but tomorrow might be a better one, what happens now cannot determine the future.

Take everything as it comes and if you cannot change it then mold it to become what works best for you. We all have potential in us, but the catch is finding the means to awaken that potential.

Tell us: What did you learn from this essay?