“Just be yourself” has to be one of the most overused phrases in the industry. It’s also probably one of the most useless. I’ll admit, I’ve used it myself, more than once in fact. Those three words are thrown around with such ubiquity that we assume their meaning is clear to everyone. They’re just three little words, how could they possibly be misinterpreted? Just. Be. Yourself. Simple, right? Except every time someone told me to “just be yourself,” it felt like my body entered panic mode.
You see, I have absolutely no idea who that is.
Even though my own experience of being told to “just be yourself” was negative and sent me spiralling, I continued to use it. I hear others use it, in auditions, in workshops, on panels, as advice, in blogs. Just be yourself. It is the industry mantra, the golden key to unlocking everything - a better performance, more work, bigger jobs. If you can manage it, a world of possibilities opens up for you. Fail to achieve it and you will continue to struggle. It’s not just our industry either, it’s everywhere. Shakespeare advised us to be true to thine own self, Rousseau wanted us to recover our inner voice, Ralph Waldo Emerson transformed authenticity into a cultural ideal, while Carl Rogers’ nineteen propositions articulated a theory of self that continues to shape modern psychotherapy.
And it is, of course, ubiquitous in pop culture. RuPaul’s “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?” frames authenticity as both personal affirmation and performative requirement.
Musical theatre, meanwhile, has taken authenticity, structurally embedded it into the form, and elevated the ‘self’ to something approaching the mythic. From whole shows built around the revelation of the self, like A Chorus Line and Rent, to Act I hinge moments such as La Cage aux Folles’ “I Am What I Am,” Wicked’s “Defying Gravity,” Dear Evan Hansen’s “You Will Be Found,” Frozen’s “Let It Go,” and Legally Blonde’s “So Much Better,” and on to Act II climaxes like “Rose’s Turn” in Gypsy, “I’m Here” in The Color Purple, and the narrative reclamation that wraps up Six, one thing is obvious: you won’t succeed in musical theatre if you don’t have any yous.
The pop culture understanding of authenticity that is so prevalent today is, more or less, a bastardisation of much older intellectual traditions. “Just be yourself” is the tea-towel version of a more demanding philosophy that privileged self-knowledge and self-awareness. Know Thyself was the imperative carved at Delphi. But from the Greeks to Freud, ‘self’ was understood as something to be interrogated, not merely expressed.
The sociologist Erving Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, argued that human beings are always performing versions of themselves before others:
“A ‘performance’ may be defined as all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers.”
All social interactions operate through performance: we appear before audiences, deploying expressive markers like clothing and props in an attempt to continually shape the definitions others form of us.
Occasionally I meet someone whose identity appears so well-defined that I say, “you really know who you are,” with something approaching awe or jealousy. What I mean is something very specific: through accent, bearing, attire and presentation you communicate a coherent sense of self to me quickly and legibly.
Of course I was jealous of the seeming ease with which they achieved this. I had never been able to accomplish it myself. That feeling of panic that coursed through my body when told to “just be yourself” had, over the years, calcified into a personal failing. Actually, it was a problem of mistranslation.
When agents advise their clients to “just be yourself,” the implication is that the authentic, true self will be valued and respected. Authenticity, it is suggested, is pure, unmediated, honest.
Except there is no such thing as an unmediated self in a mediated society, let alone a mediated industry.
In most situations authenticity is best translated as legibility. When audition processes have shrunk from weeks to days, a pressed-for-time industry responds more quickly to clarity. In the audition room, performers must establish legibility within seconds. Anyone who has ever sat on an audition panel knows how swiftly and instinctively decisions can be made. The ability to articulate oneself quickly is particularly useful in an industry that is not only highly-visual, but also relies heavily on semiotic markers. Clear legibility can also mitigate risk; if your legibility transmits to the panel then they assume it will also transmit to an audience.
But legibility depends on shared cultural codes. What is legible to one audience may not be as clear to another and for those whose identities are less easily read, this system is difficult to navigate. The instruction “just be yourself” is less a liberating invitation and more a confusing demand to translate an inner complexity into something immediately recognisable to others.
When the ability to transmit one’s legibility clearly and quickly is framed as authenticity, we transfer more responsibility onto the performer. If ‘success’ depends on ‘being yourself,’ then failure must, by extension, be a failure of self. It’s a useful shift, of course, because it bypasses the systemic realities of bias, fashion, aesthetics, economics and privilege. “Just be yourself” sounds empowering but it frequently functions as a way of absolving institutions from responsibility for the conditions they have created or, at the very least, the conditions in which they are content to operate.
When we are complacent about those conditions, treating authenticity as a broad expectation while remaining opaque about what we actually mean, we force individuals into a state of constant self-monitoring as they attempt to anticipate invisible criteria. This self-monitoring produces the very strain that is later interpreted as inauthenticity. Reducing opacity through clearer communication, transparent criteria, and more precise feedback is not just good practice; it is, surely, a structural precondition for authentic expression. The confidence to express oneself legibly depends, among many other things, on access to resources, familiarity with institutional codes, and the psychological safety required to experiment and take risks. Authenticity is not a private virtue existing independently of context. It is a relational outcome that emerges only when individuals and institutions share responsibility for the structures within which it is constructed.
The demand for authenticity often operates as a series of mutually incompatible expectations. It’s a kind of institutional double bind, an ouroboros of contradictions that circle back onto the individual. Be yourself - but also have mass market appeal. Be truthful - but fit the brief. Be original - but within the structural framework. Be true to yourself - but do not require us to adapt.
It’s time to redefine authenticity. It is not a single, unifying, emotionally stripped-back essence waiting to be revealed. It is not the distillation of the self into one central nucleus. Identity is not singular; it is plural. Psychological research consistently shows that people who can hold multiple roles and self-aspects without losing a sense of continuity are more resilient than those who define themselves narrowly. Increasingly, researchers understand identity not as a fixed core but as an ongoing narrative. Authenticity is not rawness or unfiltered expression. It is congruence: the alignment between inner experience and outward communication.
We all contain multiple, differentiated self-aspects through which we construct identity depending on the situation, and we express it authentically by aligning our internal experience with our external presentation.
In a nutshell: authenticity is not being the same everywhere. It is ensuring that what matters about you survives the journey.
Now, can I get an Amen?