Modern Wisdom
#888 - David Sutcliffe - How To Stop Betraying Yourself & Be More Authentic
Sat, 11 Jan 2025
David Sutcliffe is a former actor and life coach. Balancing self-compassion with self-discipline can be challenging. On one hand, kindness towards yourself fosters growth and resilience, but on the other, pushing yourself can maintain drive and ambition. How can we navigate this balance to treat ourselves better while staying motivated? Expect to learn the role of authenticity in everyday life, what the cost is of betraying yourself, why self compassion is so hard, why people struggle to access their feelings, why its tough to be present all of the time, how to become more powerful to hold presence, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get the best bloodwork analysis in America and bypass Function’s 400,000-person waitlist at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Join Whoop’s January Jumpstart Challenge and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the role of authenticity in a good life?
How do you come to think about the role of authenticity in a good life?
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 gonna 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 or 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 ourself 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.
And 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 want to learn from- Oh, that's such a cool idea. The idea of making a mistake and it not even being yours.
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Chapter 2: How can we be more authentic in our daily lives?
Painful, painful. Well, 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. And, you know, so you listen to a lot of directors, you know, tell you how to play scenes.
And it got to a point where, you know, I would see the scene and I thought, yeah, I don't think that was the right choice. Now, it's my face on the screen, right? So if it's not resonating, people aren't thinking about the director, they're thinking about me. So there's a certain point I just... Decided to take ownership of everything.
And 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.
Is there an interesting feedback loop between authenticity and confidence? It seems like in order to be able to sort of stand up for yourself and to have a 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.
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 going to do something creative. They're going to 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 going to 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.
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Chapter 3: What are the costs of betraying yourself?
Generally, what we do is we suppress it because we want to create an idealized self-image that we're good. We don't want to know that part of ourself. And so it's in the place where it's hard to be compassionate for ourself. It's really hard to be compassionate from that place where there's this deep-rooted belief that there's something about us that's not okay.
Yeah, something wrong or broken. It is odd that, I don't know, I can't think of a much less functional belief than that. It's not really going to contribute to having a flourishing life or thriving. And yet it's so endemic to most people, especially people that are high performers.
Yeah, well, there's, and I understand it. You know, there's a belief that if I'm hard on myself, like I'm going to achieve more, right? Having that militant general in your head. And I think that's useful. I mean, I want a tough coach. I loved tough coaches. I love coaches that pushed me and who were clear. And if I wasn't meeting the standard, they'd let me know. I liked that.
And if they were disappointed in me, they also let me know.
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But at the same time, if that coach doesn't have the capacity to love me, to be there for me, to see me as human, right? And to transcend the performance of the goal and go underneath that, I don't really trust him. And ultimately it's going to unravel. And you see these coaches, those hard apps coaches, they don't last long. They move from team to team.
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Chapter 4: Why is self-compassion so hard to access?
that is a fucking powerful energy again and it will make you incredibly successful in the only way that we can all be judged which is outwardly but i think you know whether it's will bury and transcend and include or or you know alchemizing it into something else eventually i mean fuck you know you can get through your entire life uh and and and sort of get to that stage perhaps we have a new president who has managed to do such um but
It'll carry you a very long way, but I'm not convinced that that's the energy that you want to be using for the entire time. I think it's a toxic fuel when used long term. And I think that there's sort of more holistic and interesting ways to get there, especially after you've burned the first couple of rocket boosters filled with that, like me, energy. And then, okay, well, what's next?
I had my most satisfying experiences when I played hockey, when I didn't concern myself with my stats at
um or scoring goals whatever it was when i concerned myself with how can i be useful for this team like when i made that switch like because sometimes i was playing with a lot of really good guys and i wasn't as good as them and i was like i have to figure out a way to be useful and i always found that um those experiences to be the most satisfying because i was i was part of something and and sometimes you're appreciated sometimes you're not but you have this own
internal appreciation so i i think you're right i think real maturity is understanding that particularly as a man um that uh spiritual fulfillment psychological fulfillment comes from being of service that you have to you know give your life um to something bigger than yourself and and serve that thing and um i think you know unfortunately the culture is uh you know we're very much lost in being famous and being successful and all the outward things you were talking about
But that's the switch that I'm trying to make. Again, my ego gets involved. It's like, what about you, bro? What about what you want? But you also are less neurotic that way. When you're not thinking about yourself, you have less anxiety because you're just focused on giving. Now, not in a way that you're betraying yourself, as we talked about earlier. You have to be discerning.
You have to take care of yourself. But if you're oriented in that way, I think it's ultimately a lot more satisfying.
Do you think that there'll ever be a way to communicate to people that becoming rich and successful is not going to fix your problems?
No, I think you've got to find out on your own. I did. You are.
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