Coco Chanel is legendary for so many reasons. Apart from the clothes, the bags and the perfume, she also did a great job of taking charge of her narrative and wasn’t afraid of speaking her mind.

One of my favourite Coco Chanel quotes is “Be who you are, not who the world wants you to be.” As someone who seemed to pack a number of lives into one lifetime, she knew what she was talking about.

It doesn’t matter who we are and under what circumstance we arrived on this earth, we are constantly told to be more this and less that. Between society, our parents, our family, our work colleagues, our friends and our enemies, there are a lot of people who think they that they know better than we do about how to live our lives. They also think they have the right to tell us who we should be. The messages are frequently conflicting and we get so confused. When we are confused for too long we become uncertain and start to lose our confidence.

We all have at least one comment made by others that we struggle to get past. It can be decades later and we can still hear our second grade teacher telling us that nobody likes a know-it-all so we waste years of our lives hiding our intelligence. Maybe you were naturally gifted on the soccer field and got tired of being told to stop showing off. Maybe all you want to do is wear brightly coloured clothing but someone told you you looked ridiculous and you’ll never find a boyfriend looking like that.

I’ll wager that you’ve been told at least once that you’ll never achieve your dreams unless you change a laundry list of things about yourself.

So often the injuries that we nurse are unintentional. The people making the comment have forgotten it the moment it passes their lips. Yet we let it become the proverbial millstone around our necks. Most of the time people mean well and sometimes their feedback is warranted. Sometimes we do lose our sense of self-awareness and a little nudge every now and then is helpful. But often the feedback is serving the agenda of the person giving it and as we are ignorant to their true motivation we fail to consign the comment to the bad advice scrapheap where it belongs. Instead, we waste so much emotional, mental and physical energy trying to take the feedback on board.

If there is one theme you are going to come across regularly at Confidence Advantage it’s that you can’t make everyone happy and therefore it’s not worth trying to. If you want to guarantee a life of misery, turn yourself into a pretzel trying to be someone you’re not. It doesn’t matter how you choose to live and who you choose to be, there is no escaping the criticism of someone somewhere.

Some people don’t know how to be happy, some people don’t want to be happy and some people don’t want you to be happy. At the end of the day everyone should have good manners and treat each other with respect. After that it’s no-one else’s business how you live your life. We all have unique DNA for a reason: we are supposed to be different. We are supposed to be us!

We all know who we are but sometimes we forget to listen. The most important person in your life is you, so if you spend your day living a lie and not being true to you that’s a lot to carry around. If being true to you means changing something about your appearance, then do it. If it means changing your job or career path, then go for it. If it means changing anything else in your life then change it. Just make sure that you are making the changes for you. You’re the one that matters.