Six tips to honor your truth.
Do you hide what you truly think and feel because you fear others will trample on your vulnerable truth? Or do you aggressively express yourself because you’ve always had to fight for the right to be heard and understood?
Both seemingly opposite extremes are rooted in low self-esteem and trust issues. Whether you’re hiding your expression or are aggressive with it, let’s uncover the underlying reasons for it so you can make different choices.
In this blog, I offer 6 tips to honor your truth. These suggestions aim to 1) Help you authentically communicate your truth so that others get to know the real you, 2) Save you the energy it takes to wear a mask of inauthenticity, and 3) Build the foundation of trust within yourself so that you can create loving, stable relationships.
This blog describes the sixth of nine attributes of a Loving Self-Advocate (LSA), this one being on the emotional realm. A LSA is a woman who is holistically balanced, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. She knows her worth and how to get her needs met in a healthy way.
Are you feeling overwhelmed and stuck in harmful habits that are blocking your success? Join our upcoming free masterclass and learn tools and techniques to banish the overwhelm and expand your potential. Our workshop will help you get to the root of your self-sabotaging behaviors, clear barriers to your success, and prioritize taking care of your own needs. By releasing resentment and feeling a sense of support, you will be able to relax, feel good about life and your choices, and bring your vision into focus. You will feel energized, alive, and ready to take action to make your dreams a reality. Don’t miss this opportunity to transform your life and achieve your goals. Register now for our free masterclass!
To read more about the other attributes, see below. Learn how to move away from the extremes and move towards a holistic, balanced path.
Foundation for all 9 Loving Self-Advocate attributes
First attribute, Balanced Self-Discipline
Second attribute, Prosperity Mindset
Third attribute, Balanced & Organized
Fourth attribute, Humble & Kind
Fifth attribute, Taking Responsibility in a Healthy Way
What do I mean by “Honoring Your Truth,” and why should you even care?
Honoring your truth is being willing and able to authentically and vulnerably express what you feel and want, while being mindful that others don’t have to agree with you. In other words, you are well-expressed in a non-aggressive, centered way.
This is important because authentic communication is the foundation of every healthy, intimate relationship. Intimacy (in-to-me-see) is allowing some select people to really know you. It is not necessarily romantic, but the quality of intimacy is needed in romantic as well as in all relationships.
This E.E. Cummings’ quote summarizes why perfectly: “The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else.”
First, people want you to be someone who makes them comfortable, easy to be around. Consequently, they will manipulate you to get you to conform to their agenda. You being empowered around your health, success and happiness makes others uneasy because it reminds them of what they aren’t doing.
Secondly, all humans have this tragic tension between authenticity and attachment per Dr. Gabor Mate` (renowned addiction & trauma expert). We are drawn to attach to others for the sake of being taken care of, taking care of another, or to reproduce.
Mostly it’s about caretaking. When you are born, you are 100% dependent upon mom and dad, or whoever your caretakers are. Therefore, you have this deep attachment to others.
BUT you also have a need for authenticity and capacity to be yourself. If these needs bump up against each other, the need to attach will always win because being acceptable is a matter of your survival. You will sacrifice your true self and the need to express that as it’s secondary to your survival.
So if you’ve ever wondered why it’s so blasted hard to tell what you truly think and feel, now you know why. You are wired to survive, not be happy.
Expressing yourself is not a necessity for survival, for the most part, unless you’re choking on a hotdog, and your mom wouldn’t ordinarily notice unless you tugged on her shirt (true story of my husband’s).
Does it not feel safe to speak up, or do you feel compelled to speak in a way that is over-powering, and people end up NOT hearing you anyway?
Did you say yes to any of the above?
There is a saying, “When you’re well expressed, you can’t be depressed.” Can you see how much this fear of speaking your truth is harming your relationships and your happiness?
Did you answer yes to any of the above? Can you see how being a “bull in a china shop” with your words is damaging your relationships and your own joy? Fortunately there is another way.
The reason you don’t ask for your wants/needs to be met is that you don’t feel worthy of them on a subconscious level. And there is a fear that if you ask someone for something, you’ve now put power and control in their hands. Therefore, two of the scariest words you can say are , “I want.”
By practicing humility, you give others the benefit of the doubt and respect their viewpoint even if you don’t agree with it. The other person is always at least 10% right. You’ve given up the need to be staunchly right because that activates sabotaging behaviors which then activate another person’s. Shirzad Chamine calls this saboteur contagion.
You use language such as, “What do you think?”, “How do you see it?”, “What would you like?”, ”How could we work this out?”
You have kind, respectful self-talk. You make mistakes like everyone, but when you do, you don’t harshly judge yourself. Instead you say to yourself, “It’s OK, buddy. You can always try again.”
Therefore you respect the needs of others and really try to understand them.
And if you feel hurt by another’s words or actions (someone who you care about), instead of minimizing your feelings and putting up a tough exterior, you say something like, “I feel hurt. I need some space right now to process what just happened. We can talk later.” You don’t abandon them because they hurt you. When we choose to love another, it IS painful.
This builds trust and connection with others.
You let them know that you’ll get back with them in a specified period of time. You might say, “I would enjoy A or B but not C,” or “That doesn’t feel right for me.”
Can you see how taking the LSA approach would lead to better outcomes and impact on your relationships? The problem is that you’re fighting your survival needs of attachment to be your authentic self.
What can you do? You have to rewire your thinking so that your survival brain isn’t triggered into fight, flight or freeze responses when you speak up authentically. Another way of saying this is that you need to heal the issues of the heart.
You can do this with various energy techniques, such as emotional freedom techniques, the healing codes, hypnosis, energy medicine, positive intelligence, etc. I’m trained in all of these areas.
Check out my upcoming free, healing circle in which I’ll deliver a free healing code and help get you on your way to healthily expressing yourself.
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