Your Favorite Self™

Your Best Self Is Exhausting. Meet Your Favorite Self™ Instead.

You’ve heard it a thousand times.

Be your best self.

It shows up on motivational posters, in coaching programs, in wellness apps, and in the kind of advice that sounds encouraging until you actually sit with it.

Be your best self.

And somewhere underneath that cheerful instruction, something quietly tightens.

Because your best self implies there’s a version of you that isn’t good enough right now. It implies a standard — usually someone else’s — that you’re perpetually falling short of. It implies effort, performance, improvement, optimization.

Your best self is a destination you never quite reach.

And here’s what nobody talks about: chasing your best self is exhausting. It’s a moving target wrapped in good intentions. It keeps you in a constant low-grade state of not enough — not focused enough, not disciplined enough, not evolved enough, not there yet.

That’s not personal growth. That’s a hamster wheel with better branding.

So What’s the Alternative?

Meet your Favorite Self™.

Not your perfect self. Not your most productive self. Not the version of you that meditates every morning, never snaps at anyone, and has their inbox at zero.

Your favorite self.

The you that shows up when you’re genuinely having fun. The you that laughs easily, thinks clearly, makes good decisions without grinding through them. The you that feels like you — not a project, not a work in progress, not a performance.

You already know this version of yourself. You’ve met them before.

Maybe it was on a road trip where nothing went according to plan and everything was somehow perfect. Maybe it was in the middle of a conversation that crackled with energy. Maybe it was dancing in your kitchen at 7am, or deep in a project that made you forget to eat.

That’s your Favorite Self. And the difference between that version of you and the stressed, contracted, running-on-fumes version isn’t willpower or discipline.

It’s frequency. It’s state. It’s coherence.

This Isn’t Just Feel-Good Philosophy

Here’s where it gets interesting — and where the science backs up what you already know in your bones.

When you’re in a state of genuine enjoyment, play, and positive engagement, your heart and brain operate in coherence. Your thinking is clearer. Your nervous system is regulated. You’re more creative, more resilient, more present.

And coherence is contagious. Research shows one person in a sustained coherent state directly influences the people around them — their stress levels drop, their mood lifts, their capacity for connection increases.

Your Favorite Self doesn’t just feel better. It functions better. And it makes the world around you function better too.

That’s not an accident. That’s physics.

The Problem with “Best”

The word best carries judgment in its DNA. Best compared to what? Best according to whom? Best on whose timeline?

It sets up a hierarchy — a better self and a worse self, a more evolved you and a less evolved you. And that hierarchy is the problem. Because the moment you divide yourself into the self you are and the self you should be, you step out of coherence and into performance.

You stop being present. You start managing impressions — including the impression you’re making on yourself.

Favorite sidesteps all of that.

Favorite isn’t about better or worse. It’s about resonance. It’s the version of you that feels most like home — energized, clear, engaged, alive. It’s not a destination. It’s a state. And it’s accessible right now, not after you’ve fixed everything that’s broken.

How You Get There

This is the part that surprises people.

The path to your Favorite Self isn’t through more discipline, more structure, or more striving.

It’s through play.

Not play as a reward for being productive enough. Not play as self-care you squeeze into a packed schedule. Play as a practice — as the actual mechanism by which you return to coherence, reconnect with yourself, and show up as the version of you that you actually like.

Fun isn’t the frivolous part of life. Fun is the foundation.

When you make genuine, unstructured fun a non-negotiable — not because you deserve a break, but because it’s how you maintain the state from which you do everything else — everything changes.

Your decisions get cleaner. Your relationships get easier. Your work gets better. Your body relaxes into itself.

That’s your Favorite Self. And it’s been waiting for you to stop trying so hard to be your best.

Discover Your Favorite Self™ — the book, the practice, and the path — coming soon.

If you want to go deeper now, start here →

Discover Your Favorite Self™ — Is part of Living With Intention. the book and the practice