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Stop Pretending - Let The World Deal With The Real You
Episode 11 • 16th September 2025 • The Daily Podcast with Jonathan Doyle • Jonathan Doyle
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In today's episode I want to share a great quote from Karen Horney that helps us all to realise that our task is to become fully who we really are. There is so much pressure to fit in and become something for other people that hides who we really are. This is not about narcissism. It's about being who God made you to become.

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Karen's MasterClass for Women is here:

https://bit.ly/geniusmasterclasskaren

Transcripts

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Well, hello there, my friend Jonathan Dole with you.

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Welcome to the Daily Podcast.

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Good to have you on board.

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How you doing?

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What is happening in your life?

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Are there challenges?

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Is it all plain sailing?

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Is your boat of life sailing serenely through the Azure seas of contentedness?

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You can tell I've just done a bunch of training, right?

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My endorphins are running pretty high.

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That just flowed.

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That just flowed.

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I should stop now.

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Hope you're doing okay.

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Maybe you've got a lot of challenges.

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Maybe things are difficult.

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Who knows, right?

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But all of us are in this great big journey of life.

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Sometimes it's absolutely perfect.

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Sometimes we're wondering who's cat we ran over, that we are being

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punished by the cosmos so mercilessly.

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But wherever you are, let's hope today that I can bring you something useful.

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I'm talking today just briefly about a quote from Karen Horney,

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She is a psychotherapist, a psychiatrist, and a writer of

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all sorts of interesting quotes, and I'm always looking for great

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stuff for you guys every single day.

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And what I have found here is another great quote from her where

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she says this, now listen to it.

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I'll read it to you.

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And then you're gonna go, well, there's a bit to that.

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What do you actually mean?

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So here it comes.

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She says, the most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals.

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What does that mean?

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What she's basically saying, the best way that she can say the goal

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of therapy for people is right.

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The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving

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for wholeheartedness to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere.

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To be able to put the whole of oneself into one's feelings,

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one's work, one's beliefs.

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I'm gonna read it to you one more time.

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Just, just listen to it.

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Again, this, this is really important.

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She says, the most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is

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the striving for wholeheartedness to be without pretense, to be

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emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one's

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feelings, one's work, one's beliefs.

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Okay, here's the summary of what I think she's getting at the goal of therapy.

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And I'm not saying you all need to go to therapy, but I'm saying

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the goal of personal development of becoming integrated is that

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we can be fully who we are.

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You know, way back, I think in the third century, Saint IUs of Leon

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famously said that the glory of God is the human person fully alive.

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That the glory of God.

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The most wonderful thing way that we will encounter God in this life

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is encountering somebody who is fully alive and fully integrated.

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You see, of course, God creates us, right?

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And then life happens to us, and all these different things affect how we live.

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Do you agree with me?

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We all get wounds and trauma and we get bullied, and all these things happen to

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us, and what do we learn early in life?

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We learn to hide.

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We learn to fit in.

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We learn to be accommodate what we think other people want

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us to be all the time, right?

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We're doing this in real time all the time.

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And so the tragedy of that is that the, the scars of life cause us to lose who we

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were really created to be over time and.

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All of us are gonna be different in this, right?

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Some of us are gonna have pretty great childhood and we didn't get knocked

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around too much and we had great parents and we are really integrated in general.

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I'm married to someone like that.

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It's exhausting.

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She's so perfect.

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I hope she's listening.

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Uh, but there's many of us that didn't have that experience, right?

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That we're really knocked around by life.

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And so we learn.

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It's like scars, right?

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This sort of builds over the top of who we could have really

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been and we, we compensate.

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We compensate with aggression or depression or withdrawal or

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all these different ways that we cope with the wounds of life.

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And what she's saying here is that the goal of personal development,

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of integration of therapy.

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It's to become, again, who we really were created to be and be able to

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be, as she says, wholehearted, no pretense, to just be who we are, to

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be truly comfortable in our own skin.

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Have you met someone like that?

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You know, you meet some people and you just sense that they're kind

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of like okay with who they are.

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And it's just extraordinary when you really encounter

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somebody deeply like that.

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Uh, I don't know if you agree, I dunno if you think this is unfair, but I think

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one of the many tensions that many of us have with the political class and

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politics in general is the pretense.

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Is the veneer of sincerity, is the pretending to be, you know, people that

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deeply care about the population or want to, you know, or they, they, they really

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into some particular thing when, I don't want to sound unnecessarily cynical, but I

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don't think that's often the case, right?

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Like our entire political system has a time horizon of three to four

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years and incentivizes people to promise things with printed money

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and then move on to the next promise.

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So, I don't know.

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In Australia we, we tend to be more cynical about our political operators.

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I dunno what it's like wherever you are listening, but do you see my point is that

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we, we, we, we bristle when we encounter people who we don't think are sincere.

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So let's get back to you.

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The goal of this personal development daily podcast journey is to do the work of

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daily improvement and to catch ourselves.

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In the act of pretense.

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So I wanna just give you one main thought today, which is sooner or later, my friend

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and I would encourage it to be sooner.

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You've, you've gotta be who you are.

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And I can speak to this 'cause my whole life growing up, remember

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my mother used to just say to me, you know, just be yourself.

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Just be yourself all the time.

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And I was like, never understood what she was banging on about, but as I've got

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older, I go, ah, that's what she meant.

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She said, don't try to be someone else.

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Like if you have an opinion, say it.

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I mean, I'm not talking about being obnoxious or rude or insensitive, like

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it's, you know, read the room, but eventually you have to be who you are.

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And I think what happens is as you increasingly state who you are and

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live who you are, you know, people are either gonna deal or not deal.

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There's a great line from a book by John Eldridge in a book by John Eldridge.

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It was a quote from one of his friends, and his friend said to him,

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look, John, he said, you have to let people feel the full force of your

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personality and let them deal with it.

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Listen to that again.

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Let people feel the full force of your personality.

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And let them deal with it.

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Now, I'm really stressing here.

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It's not about being obnoxious or I'm just gonna say what I think and do what I want.

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It's not that.

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It's like you've gotta just be who you are.

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And if people get it and they like it, then that's great and you know you win.

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But if they don't, as Jesus said, right, you shake the dust

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from your feet, you move on.

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Now, the point is, if you don't do this.

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If you continually live a kind of dramatist persona, right?

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Like, you know, again, Jesus' criticism of hypocrites was

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hypocrite comes from the Greek actor.

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It means to be an actor.

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He was angry at them and frustrated with 'em because they were pretending

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to be something that they weren't.

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And so when we allow the wounds of life to just take us over,

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then we are living in pretense.

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We're living a kind of dramatic presentation of what we think we

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should be thinking and saying.

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And of course we see this a lot in teenagers, right?

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And we all were teenagers at one point.

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We sort of feel this sense of, oh, well I've gotta fit in.

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I've gotta dress this.

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I gotta look like this because there's a fragile developing psyche underneath.

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But eventually, friends.

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You don't want to get towards the end of your life and look back and think that

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you played it super safe by being who you thought everybody always needed you to be.

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You know, what was it?

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Helen Keller said, you know, life is a daring adventure or nothing.

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Life is a daring adventure or nothing.

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We go big or we go home.

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Okay, so summary today.

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Thank you to Karen Horney for the quote that the comprehensive goal

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of personal development therapy, you know, self-development is to

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become who we really are, to become who God always created us to be.

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And when we do that, like the world benefits, the world is only gonna

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benefit from the fullness of who you are.

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Not some confected pretending version of who you think you're supposed to be.

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So ease into it today, just.

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Catch yourself in the act.

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Just go gently about your work today and your living today and just say no,

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actually think this and back yourself.

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Alright.

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That's it from me.

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Uh, everything on the website, Jonathan doyle.co.

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You wanna book me to speak?

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I'm gonna be in the States October, November.

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January.

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Um, I. You wanna book me a speak or find out, uh, anything about

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consulting or leadership work?

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It is@jonathandoyle.co.

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I'm back on Instagram.

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Jay Doyle speaks.

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If you're on Instagram, come and gimme a follow.

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Just uh, do a search for Jay Doyle speaks one word and, uh, please subscribe.

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Spotify Apple Podcast.

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Just look for the Daily podcast with Jonathan Doyle.

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Share this with people.

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That would be a huge blessing.

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If you think there's something in here that helped you, just

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grab the link and send it on.

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God bless you, my friends.

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This has been the Daily Podcast with Jonathan Doyle.

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You and I are gonna talk again.

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Tomorrow.

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