How To Stop Betraying Yourself & Be More Authentic - David Sutcliffe - #888

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
How do you come to think about the role of authenticity in a good life?

**David Sutcliffe** (0:08)
Well, I guess, I try to be as authentic as I can. I don't know if that's a thing that we can ever do perfectly, and we have to be discerning about where we want to be authentic, but as long as we're making choices, meaning I'm not going to show up at work and always be my authentic self, there's always a mask that we're wearing, but if I'm doing that consciously, then I can still maintain my authenticity. For me, authenticity is really just truth. Can I be in the truth of who I am? Which takes a lot of work, because we don't always know who we are, and we have habitual thought patterns and responses to life that cause us, I mean, we're authentic to those, but to be authentic to ourselves, to go after exactly what it is we want, to be present all the way. Maybe that's another way to define it, being present in the moment, which is a really hard thing to do, always being present. There's so many ways that we leave, whether it's through distraction or drugs or alcohol, pornography, or we get lost in our mind. So part of authenticity for me is just being embodied, being here, being present, being in the moment, telling the truth as best we can.
And I think that's empowering. I think that leads to an empowering life. And it's really what I try to teach people. How do we find our authentic self? I know it's an overused word, but I think that's what we're all longing for because we're aligned in some way within ourselves. We're true to ourselves and that feels good. So even if things go badly, at least we're true to who we are. We're making our own mistakes, not being guided by some idea of who we're supposed to be or what we're supposed to be doing. I've certainly done plenty of that in my life. I made a commitment early on if I'm going to make mistakes, I want them to be my own mistakes. I'm going to learn from that.

**Chris Williamson** (2:04)
That's such a cool idea. The idea of making a mistake and it not even being yours.

**David Sutcliffe** (2:10)
Painful. I learned this as an actor because when I first started out in Hollywood, you get there and you think that everybody knows what they're doing, and they're smarter than you. At least that's what I thought.
You listen to a lot of directors tell you how to play scenes. It got to a point where I would see the scene and I thought, I don't think that was the right choice. Now, it's my face on the screen. If it's not resonating, people aren't thinking about the director, they're thinking about me. So, at a certain point, I just decided to take ownership of everything. Occasionally, you'd get into conflict with directors, but the choice was, I got to do it my way. I want to listen, of course, to what people are saying and take that information in. But ultimately, I have to do it my way and live or die by it.

**Chris Williamson** (3:01)
Is there an interesting feedback loop between authenticity and confidence? It seems like in order to be able to stand up for yourself and to have faith that your intuition or your instinct is right, you need to be confident in it. And then presumably, the more that you do that, the more it feeds back into confidence. But as with most things that kind of spiral, they also spiral in the opposite direction, which is the longer that you live out of authenticity, the less confidence you have in being authentic and the less you know what authenticity is, which makes it harder to become so on and so forth. It seems to me like that's the kind of dynamic that goes on.

**David Sutcliffe** (3:32)
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I might use the word faith, having faith in your inner impulses to stay in the television and movie acting references. When I was growing up, I was a big fan of John Cassavetes. And he was kind of the original independent filmmaker. And his films were wild and raw and crazy. And he had a great career as a mainstream Hollywood actor. But his films were just something else entirely. And he had this quote about all these people. They go to Hollywood and they start getting into commercial projects and they say one day that they're gonna do something creative. They're gonna do something artistic, do something true to themselves, but they never do. Because once you buy into that and exactly what you're saying, once you stop listening to those innermost impulses, you start to forget that they're there. And so that had a huge impact on me. And I've done my best, not perfectly, I don't think any of us do it perfectly, to live by that, to live by that inner intuition, those inner impulses, like that thing that is inside me. There's a knowingness that we all have, and only we know it. And if we start asking everybody, you know, is this okay, is that okay? They're gonna be, maybe they'll be able to give you some legitimate reflection. But at the end of the day, I think anybody who's successful, at a certain point, they stood alone. They just went on their own intuition, their own gut, and they took a risk.