Ready to Speak Your Truth? 4 Reasons Why It’s Time
Today more than ever it seems like we’re struggling with this idea of truth. We’re being bombarded with talk about real news, fake news, and it begs the question, what is truth?
Truth is fact, truth is honesty, and in personal life, truth is the willingness to put what you say and believe on the line.
Are you motivated to be more truthful with your loved ones?
Here are 4 reasons why it’s time for you to speak your truth.
Today more than ever it seems like we’re struggling with this idea of truth. We’re being bombarded with talk about real news, fake news, and it begs the question, what is truth?
Truth is fact, truth is honesty, and in personal life, truth is the willingness to put what you say and believe on the line.
Are you motivated to be more truthful with your loved ones?
Here are 4 reasons why it’s time for you to speak your truth.
1. Take Your Power
As women it can be hard to stand in your power. Many of us were trained to be gentle peacekeepers. And oftentimes when women do stand up, they’re branded as “bitches.”
Of course there’s another way – to bring the heart of compassion into what we say. Think about your chakras. The chakra of power is in your belly, as you move up, the next one is at your heart center, and then your 5th chakra is your throat.
The goal is to speak your truth – moving that idea or power up from the belly – through the heart and out the throat.
There’s a world of difference between someone communicating from this space as opposed to bypassing the heart and speaking truth from a place of power.
Think about people you’ve heard talk – politicians, motivational speakers, reporters. When you listen to those voices, what do you hear? Clarity and compassion or harsh aggressive, bombastic truth?
2. Be in Integrity
When we are true to ourselves, we are in integrity.
What is integrity?
One definition, according to the American Heritage Dictionary is, “the quality or condition of being whole.”
I think about integrity as alignment. I want my actions and my words to align with my thoughts and beliefs as much as I am able to do that.
So when we choke back words or don’t speak authentically, we fall out of integrity.
How can you say the words that need to be said today?
3. Forgive
Speaking your truth allows you to forgive and I believe that forgiveness is one of our primary functions on earth.
Forgiveness is an act of release – both for you and the “other.”
When we speak to someone about what we really think, how we genuinely feel, we are opening a door through which true conversation, healing and love can occur.
This is the power of forgiveness.
4. Help Others
Are you one of those people who has the ability to see exactly what’s happening? As if you can cut through to the core of something and genuinely understand an issue?
Whether it’s a business challenge or a personal one, you sense which way to go or how it should be navigated – for the right outcome.
But then, you don’t say anything.
Maybe you stay quiet because you feel like it isn’t your place to share. Or perhaps you think it’s presumptive to offer your opinion. Maybe you don’t want to hurt someone else’s feelings.
But here’s the thing, by not speaking up, you are denying that person your authentic voice, your clarity, your insight.
Think back to when a friend spoke truth to you. Maybe in the moment it wasn’t fun or you didn’t like it, but did it help? Did those words prompt action from you?
I remember the first time I got advice like this as a young adult. I was living in Hong Kong and had finally quit a job I really hated. In all honesty, I just wanted to run away from everything – the city, my failed existence, even myself.
One day I was picnicking with my best friend. We’d traveled to an outlying island and hiked up a canyon following a trickle of a waterfall. From there, we could see across the harbor to Hong Kong island with its towering skyscrapers. She turned to me and said; “What are you going to do now?”
I replied, “I don’t know, anything, as long as it isn’t here.”
Then she asked; “Where are you going to go?”
And I answered, “anywhere as long as it isn’t here.”
She looked me straight in the eye and said, “you have to make your happiness here.”
Immediately I wanted to tell her to f**k off but I also knew she was absolutely right.
What did I do?
I did what she suggested. I stayed, made peace with the city and my life, and grew up.
I still remember her honest words nearly thirty years later, that’s the impact they had. What if she’d been afraid to speak? It would have been a huge disservice to me.
Hard conversations are hard but they're also important.
Whether they are with loved ones or colleagues, speak your truth. Say what you feel, what you need and what you see. All of us need feedback even when we don’t want to hear it. But that feedback when given with love, kindness and compassion can be invaluable and life changing.
Let me know how it goes! Leave your truth below!
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Move Through - Make This YOUR Year
Now that January is back in swing and your life has returned to business as usual, it’s time to ask yourself, is this exactly what you want? Life as usual?
If you’re really ready to take your year and your life to the next level, it will require change.
As Einstein is often quoted as saying, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
If you want different results in your life, here are 3 areas to explore:
Now that January is back in swing and life has returned to business as usual, it’s time to ask yourself, is this exactly what you want? Life as usual?
If you’re really ready to take your year and your life to the next level, it will require change.
As Einstein is often quoted as saying, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
If you want different results in your life, here are 3 ideas to explore:
1. Making New Habits Means Breaking Old Ones
One of my goals for 2016 is to be more visible on Social Media but that means I actually have to go onto my Twitter account, Instagram and Facebook.
I have to change my habit from perusal, from when I “feel” like it to actually scheduling it into my day and making a point of connecting to people.
My habit of scrolling lazily through my Facebook feed as I lie in bed is what I’m used to, so I keep doing it but it won’t help me achieve my goal. That requires me to foster a new habit.
What habit are you ready to change?
2. This Place is Familiar and Comfortable
So many people are unhappy in some area of their lives – with their bodies, relationships, careers, yet there is a comfort in that discomfort.
We’re used to feeling it. We’ve felt it for so long, it’s familiar. Sometimes that suffering even helps define who you are. And yet we also yearn to be free of it.
How would it feel to be without that pain?
To be in your dream body, relationship or job? Can you imagine yourself living a life of true joy, with a partner who absolutely supported you, in a body you embraced? What needs to change?
If you can imagine it, you can step into it!
3. The Upper Limit Problem
I first heard this concept in Gay Hendricks’ book, The Big Leap.
Essentially, what he explains is that we all have an unconscious set point for how much good, success, power, money, health, etc. we’re willing to accept into our lives and when we hit that threshold, we get stopped.
Think about it.
Have you ever had a huge breakthrough in one aspect of your life, maybe you got a great promotion, were ecstatic about that, came home and got in a huge argument with your spouse? That’s an example of the upper limit problem in action.
Or maybe you’re finally ready to launch your first webinar and you wake up feverish with the flu.
We upper limit ourselves because we don’t believe we deserve everything.
So when something goes well in our lives- we become super fit, publish a great article, hit a sales figure- something else in our lives has to suffer.
The first step in overcoming this is awareness that it exists at all! Then, it’s a dive in to understand what and why we hold ourselves back.
Is it an old story from childhood? An unconscious belief that is no longer true for you?
You deserve everything and Source/the Universe/God (whatever name you like) wants to give it to you.
Are you ready to receive it?
What habits and old stories are you ready to let go? Where do you see the upper limit problem manifesting in your life? Ready to break through?
Take some time to ponder these three issues. Dive into them and see what comes up. Use them as questions to ask while you meditate.