A bubbly friend asked, "What is your problem?" In a snarky comeback, the answer was simply, "This gal has had enough and the mask needs to be lifted."

She responded that she didn't understand. How could she? She never knew what it was like to toil, deal with life or be without. She was one of those friends that always has it together. After some time of explaining what was proposed, her face softened.

She wore a mask, too.

Isn't this our jobs as women? We put our work mask on, the transition to home and into our love lives. The dual and competing roles for our attention are trite. Above all else, we don't even know who we are.

Aristotle said that knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Maybe there is truth to this, but the fact is we can't uncover this unless we get real about ourselves. When you suppress your true feelings, you can't be your authentic self.

Here is how to discover, maybe for the first time, the real you.

Stop lying to yourself.

Deborah King is a New York Times best-selling author and a renowned spiritual leader. When you try to be someone else or follow another path you are lying to yourself. "Acting in line with your life purpose is one way to live in the light, another step on the path toward expanded consciousness," she wrote. Maybe you are afraid to express yourself, you are in a bad relationship or you were pushed into their career by another person. Living like this is not only deceptive but keeps you in bondage. We need to stop lying to ourselves in order to become free. People can't live your life for you. Decide to stop the lies and be who you really are.

Stop seeking approval.

Constantly seeking approval or respect from others will disappoint and ultimately stop us from finding our true selves. If you find yourself invariably changing your appearance, the way you talk or the how you cater to others--you are seeking out approval. "Seeking and receiving approval from others is like sitting down hungry to an imaginary meal. You’re invited to eat all you want, but no matter how much imaginary food is served, you can never get your fill. Your hunger remains. No fictional feast ever satisfies," author Guy Finley explained. No one can give you what you truly need in life. A man can't, a career can't or money can't satisfy the hunger. We must do more inner work in our lives to reach this wholeness. It is not another person's job to do this.

Clean up your thoughts.

Transforming your thought life involves in the way you live. Your thoughts will dictate the way you perceive yourself. If we are feeling bad about ourselves, our thoughts could be the culprit. In life, it is vital that we understand the dynamism of our thoughts. They are going to feed you or leave you malnourished. Choose the path of truth today, speak life into your being and power over the given situation. Clearing out thoughts that are contrary to who you are will help your overall mental health and physical health since everything is correlated.

Use failure to fuel your passions.

When you take unfortunate events to heart it will make it harder to bounce back. Use this as motivation to tackle the situation from another angle. Doing this maximizes your ability to handle impediments better. "Every failure experience you have since the most painful events in life often give us the most valuable experiences and dramatic growth," Life Hack explained. You can never get beyond what you think—especially what you think of yourself. We get into an irrational mess when self-doubt comes along tempting us to make failure our narrative. Not so, use it as a ladder to pull yourself back up. These are false, erroneous and misleading inner voices that need to be submerged.

Make the decision to be happy now.

Joy doesn't have to be a fleeting thing that we observe in fairy tales and other books. But there is a caveat, you need to do the work as it will not come easy. Keep your heart open and tap into an inner power. This tool will become an aid when you are making the needed changes in your life.

Be willing to be authentic.

Authenticity requires making conscious choices based on accurate self-knowledge. "Like the existentialists, psychologists emphasize the role of active choice in creating an authentic life: a willingness to evaluate nearly everything that you do," Psychology Today disclosed. We can do this by living a more simplistic life. It means stepping outside the shallow world in which we live in. Not an easy thing to do as we have so many things that distract the mind. "But our cultural climate is filled with an alluring array of distractions, from online gambling to video games, that often turn out to be junk food for the mind."

Stop the labels. 

Don’t identify with failure, addiction, depression or any labels as being who you really are, the Huffington Post reported. If you are imperfect, well, we all are. Accept yourself as being a flawed jumble as no one on earth is without defect. "It is accepting you, complete with all the things you like as well as the things you don’t like." Be unique and embrace your imperfections. 

Being the real you is scary because we need to get real and get honest with ourselves. Our masks that we wear to protect us and to create a barrier between will not last forever. This gets old and the method will eventuality erode the authentic self. Be the real you, not an imposter.