Every time you suppress some part of yourself or allow others to play you small, you are in essence ignoring the owner's manual your creator gave you and destroying your design.
I'd lose weight if I was an actress and had to play a role where you're supposed to be 40 lbs lighter, but weight has nothing to do with my career. Even when I was signing a contract, most of the industry knew if anyone ever dared say lose weight to me, they wouldn't be working with me.
Imagination builds the image of the self, and thought then functions within its shadows. From this self-concept grows the conflict between what is and what should be, the conflict in duality.
But inwardly we are as corrupt as the person who sits in an office and plans war-because, we want to be somebody in the family, in a group, in society, in the nation.
If we choose an external marker as the measure of our inner worth, whether it is the amount of money we make, or others' opinion of us, or the success of some project we're involved in, sooner or later we're bound to be battered by life's inevitable changes. After all, money comes and goes, and thus is an unstable source of self-esteem, an unreliable foundation upon which to build our identity.