There’s a question most of us spend a lifetime avoiding: Just who will you be?

It sounds simple. But Maria Shriver turned that question into a book. She is a journalist and activist who comes from the Kennedy family and was married to Arnold Schwarzenegger. She has lived very publicly through some private storms.

Just Who Will You Be? is not a self-help checklist. It is instead a genuine invitation to stop performing your life and start living it.

“I’ve learned that you can have all the ‘whats’ in the world — the money, the fame, the power — but if you don’t know who you are, none of it will ever be enough.”Maria Shriver

Shriver’s central observation cuts right to the chase. Like the inscription at the temple of Apollo in Delphi and Socrates said, it is fundamentally important to “know thyself”. To lead a good life, you must truly know yourself. Then, you must do what you can to act in ways that are going to be the best for you going forward. No external markers of success will ever be enough otherwise.

Ten pledges to yourself

The heart of the book is ten pledges or commitments for you to make to yourself. Together, they form something like a roadmap back to your own interior life:

1. Start with how you talk to yourself. Being kind and compassionate to yourself is foundational. Most of us have an inner critic. It is often so harsh that we would never tolerate it from another person. We also wouldn’t accept it if it someone was saying it to another person. So why do we accept from ourselves what we’d never accept from or to another friend?

2. Then get honest about whose voice you’re actually following. Are your goals truly yours? Or do they come from your parents or your culture? Perhaps they come from the version of success that was handed to you before you were old enough to question it? Finding your own voice requires doing some uncomfortable work. You need to separate what you were told to want from what you actually want.

3. Service reframes the whole question of identity. Shriver argues that who you are shows up most clearly not in your resume or your social media presence. It shows up in how you treat people when nobody’s looking. This pledge quietly shifts the focus from self-construction to contribution.

4. Bravery is non-negotiable. Growth, she insists, only happens in discomfort. If you’re always optimising for comfort or looking “cool,” you’re not growing. You’re just managing your image.

5. Gratitude isn’t just positivity fluff. It’s a practical tool for shifting your orientation from scarcity to identity. When you focus on what you already have, the anxious scrambling for more tends to quiet down. It also quiets when you focus on having appreciation for who you already are.

6. Letting go of perfection is really about letting go of the fear of judgement. Perfectionism looks like high standards. Often it’s just armour. Shriver’s invitation is to embrace being a work in progress, because that’s what everyone actually is.

7. Silence matters more than we think. We live in a world filled with constant noise, notifications, and ongoing news cycles. In this, we often feel the pressure to always be reachable. Choosing to listen to your “still, small voice” is almost countercultural. You can’t hear yourself think if you never stop and try.

8. Forgiveness is about you, not them. Holding onto old grievances, either with others or yourself, keeps your identity anchored to past pain. Letting go isn’t excusing what happened; it’s releasing yourself from having to keep carrying it. It’s important to realise that everyone can make mistakes. What matters is learning from these mistakes so that we are less likely to repeat them going ahead.

9. Stay curious, always. A commitment to learning isn’t about accumulating qualifications. Curiosity is a posture toward life that keeps you engaged, humble, and open to being surprised. Shriver frames this as a character trait, not an activity.

10. Finally: be irreplaceably yourself. The world doesn’t need a better imitation of someone else. It needs the unique, unrepeatable person that only you can be.

Subtraction, not addition

Taken together, these ten pledges aren’t really about self-improvement in the conventional sense. They’re about subtraction and stripping away the noise, the performance, the borrowed expectations, until what’s left is actually you.

That’s the work. And if Shriver’s book is any guide, it’s worth doing.

Dr Damon Ashworth

Clinical Psychologist