October 6, 2022

Ep 103: Telling YOUR Truth

In this episode, I talk about the importance of getting honest about who you really are and telling YOUR truth. You’ll learn what it means to tell your truth, why it’s important, and how to do it even when it’s hard.

Show Notes:

Welcome to EPISODE 103 of Real, Brave, & Unstoppable – `Telling YOUR Truth

In this episode, I’m talking about telling the truth – YOUR truth.

As a kid, we’re taught not to lie–that we should ALWAYS tell the truth. And interestingly enough, throughout our childhoods and into adulthood, we’re constantly acquiring information that causes us to alter who we are in an effort to belong, fit in, and be “acceptable” to others.

But isn’t this also “lying”?

The answer is yes. But it’s lying to ourselves.

In this episode, you’ll learn what it means to tell YOUR truth, why it’s really hard sometimes, and how you can work on it.

Resources

Want to learn how to create the life you REALLY want? Do you want to learn how you can be unapologetic about who you are and love your life?

Download my free guide, How to Create a Live You Love HERE!

Resources

Feeling stuck? Don’t know where to start?

Start here: schedule a Strategy Session to discover how you can start.

Schedule a call at www.kortneyrivard.com/lets-talk

Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kortneyrivard)

Other episodes:

The Real, Brave, & Unstoppable full episode catalog

Transcript:

Episode 103: Telling YOUR Truth

Hello, and welcome back to Real, Brave and Unstoppable for episode number 103. And today I’m going to talk about truth telling. You might be able to hear my voice… I don’t know if I have a cold or actually I have, I’ve been sick. I it’s been a crazy few weeks. So I, I apologize to you loyal listeners who are waiting for an episode. I had my retreat at the beginning of the month and then my grandma passed away. So I had to travel unexpectedly and then I got sick. So I’m still recovering from all of that and trying to take care of myself and get some rest. And. Sometimes things have to get put aside for a little while. And that’s what happened with Real Brave Unstoppable. I would just kind of needed to take something off my plate. So I did and, my voice is probably a little better today than if I would have brought you an episode sooner. So there’s that. So. Today, I’m going to talk about, I said truth telling and recently I’ve had quite a few conversations with people about this, and what that means is it’s telling your own truth or living what’s true for you. I wrote an article on my blog, many blog posts ago about being a shameless truth teller. And I borrowed that term from Glennon Doyle. And I don’t remember if it was in a book or on a blog post of hers or what. But I’ve always really loved that term. Shamelessly telling the truth or being unapologetic in who you are, and what’s true for you. And it can be hard to do this for a lot of reasons, but when we don’t live our truth, that’s when we get stuck on the proverbial hamster wheel of life. And it’s where we live our lives feeling like we’re kind of going through the motions. You know if you’ve ever thought, oh, is this all there is, or like Glennon Doyle says in her book Untamed. I thought it would be more beautiful than this. And a lot of people I’ve talked to kind of have that sense of things that is this all there is? I wish there were more, I want more, but then feeling guilty for wanting more. Like, who am I to want more? You know, I have kids, I have a family. I should be happy, happy with what I have. But you feel like there’s more because you’re not, you know, you’re not living your truth, you’re not telling your truth. And when we don’t tell our truth or live our truth, we aren’t really fully being alive. Because we’re really just living someone else’s life. But that’s not what we’re here for to live someone else’s life because we’re here to live our life, who we’re meant to be. That’s our purpose. To experience life through our own authentic lens. Not someone else’s version. So today I’m going to dive into why telling the truth– your truth is important, and we’re going to cover why it’s hard and how not telling the truth gets in the way of your own transformation and evolution in your life on this planet. So, first of all, though, I want to share a few quotes that really resonated with me about this whole topic from Glennon Doyle’ book Untamed. And if you haven’t read this, I highly recommend it. I love all of her stuff, but this. But untamed is really great. The first one is, and I love this so much. I can’t even tell you. Are here to decide if your life, relationships and world are true and beautiful enough for you. And if they’re not, and you dare to admit that they are not, you must decide if you have the guts, the right, perhaps even the duty to burn to the ground, that which is not true and beautiful enough and get started building what is. I love that so much because it’s exactly… like that’s, that’s what you’re here for is to decide what is true and beautiful enough for you. Because it’s your life. And you are you know, you’re perfectly justified in burning down what doesn’t fit that. To stay true to who you are. And then she goes on to say the building of the true and beautiful means the destruction of the good enough. So when you have a life, that’s “good enough” that means you’re settling and that’s fine. If that’s what you want to do, right? Everybody has their own comfort level. But I really. I really firmly believe that when you settle for good enough, that’s where you kind of live in the flat line and the gray zone of, you know, you experience good enough emotions, You don’t really ever get the full spectrum of emotions and feeling like sheer joy. You might feel some pretty low lows, but you also get the really high highs. But if you’re in the good enough and settling realm, It’s just all kind of, you know, flat line. So, you know, you get to decide. If you numb pain, you also numb joy. And then this other quote is, the truest most beautiful life, never promises to be an easy one. We need to let go of the lie that it’s supposed to be. Yes. Absolutely. The truest most beautiful life is never easy. Because that’s the one where we step out of our comfort zone and we try new things and we really try to live, but without, without stepping out of that comfort zone, you’re not ever going to really feel alive. And so the lie is that staying in the comfort zone is where you should stay because nothing bad happens there. And that’s not true either. So, what does it mean to tell the truth and how did we lose it? The truth is, simply put what is true for you? Without the perceptions you have acquired from childhood and you know, all the rest of your life without the stories you’ve taken on about who you are and how the world works and the fear patterns that you’ve adopted to make it through your life. And it seems simple, right? But it’s not so simple because here’s what happens: as kids, you know, we’re, we’re new, we’re innocent, we’re pure. We don’t have, you know, all the stories and narratives that tell us we should be any different than we are. But then something happens. We’re told that we should be different. Or in other words, we’re told that who we are isn’t acceptable. So we changed to make ourselves acceptable because we want to belong. I think I’ve shared this analogy on the show before. I read it in one of Debbie Ford’s books. I think it’s in the dark side of the light chasers and she didn’t actually create this analogy. It came from someone else that I cannot remember his name. But let’s just say that you have this beautiful castle. And if you’ve heard this before, just stick with me. These are, this is for the people who haven’t heard it. Maybe you need to hear it again. If you’ve already heard it. But, imagine you have this beautiful castle and you are so proud of every single room in the castle. You love them all equally. And there’s all types of rooms. There’s the grand ballroom. There’s a, you know, dirty cellar. There’s the, you know, everything in between, but you love all the rooms the same. But then someone comes to your castle and someone says, you know, that room is really, it’s not very good and you should just lock the door so no one can see it because if someone sees that they’re not going to like your castle. But you love your castle, but you want people to like you too. So you lock that door. And over time, that keeps happening and so you lock more and more doors. Pretty soon you only have this few. You only have this few doors and you know, you’ve just pretty much forgotten the other ones even exist because you’re, you know, you want to belong. You want to fit in and you want everyone else to think you have this beautiful castle. So, yeah, you just forget about all these other really unique rooms. Go on about your life. And that’s kinda like how it is with us too. Right? As we grow up, we have people tell us, well, That’s not. You know, that’s not acceptable. You should not be that way. You know, over time we block off parts of us that are our truth, because somehow we’ve been led to believe that what’s true for us isn’t acceptable or good enough. And this happens to all of us in varying degrees and no one is really immune to this. It doesn’t matter who you are, you had a great childhood or a shitty childhood. Everybody has this. So some examples, let’s say you were really enthusiastic kid and you’re always really eager to learn and then share what you learned with other people. And you love to feel heard and valued. So you were very quick to share your knowledge, but one day a parent heard you asserting yourself to like someone who. Um, to someone about all this knowledge you had and pulled you aside to tell you that you shouldn’t be like so forward, you know, that’s too much, you shouldn’t argue your point. You’ll be a know it all, and you don’t want to be a know it all, because that’s bad. As a kid being a know it all, you, you adopt that, being a know, it all is bad, and that’s all you probably need to hear because no kid wants to be bad. You know, we want to to fit in. We want to be liked. We want to, we want love. We want safety, security. So moving forward, you’re always conscious of making sure you don’t act like a know it all, you know, you rein it in. And as you grow up, that might mean you hold back valuable knowledge and end up being afraid to speak up. So there’s an example of kind of a room you’ve locked off. And also a belief that you’ve adopted as well. Don’t be a know it all. Being a know it all is bad. Another example might be regarding creativity. Maybe you were a super creative kid, but creativity wasn’t really valued in your family. I once had a client whose parents were both doctors and she always knew that she wouldn’t really be allowed to pursue a career in art. She knew she would disappoint both of her parents. So she shut that part of her off in an effort to live up to her parents’ expectations. And these things are hard as kids, because like I said, we just want safety and security. We just want to be loved and getting approval from the caregivers in our life helps us feel that. It helps us feel connected. And the point is the stories we develop as we grow older. You know, like being a know it all is bad or, and people won’t like you, or you need to temper your knowledge in order to be liked. You don’t know too much. Or creativity isn’t valuable. I need to be perfect, to be loved and approved of stuff like that. We develop those stories, then we hang on to them and we don’t really think to question them. Because they’ve been with us for a very long time and in some way have kept us safe in some way they’ve had a benefit, even though the costs are probably much greater. I just want to be really clear. This is not an opportunity to blame our parents for the wounds we have as adults. I’m a parent and I am quite certain that there are wounds my kids will have as a result of the way I parented, even though I try to be super conscious of all of this. You know, parents do the best they can. It’s just the way life works. We have material we need to deal with to come back home to ourselves once we grow up. And in some ways that’s a gift because it does make us really look at you know, where we are living our truth and where we’re not at what we need to do to be the fullest expression, to live in the fullest expression of who we are. And when we grow up, we can also look at our parents’ own experiences and honor that their experiences contributed to the role they played in our lives and having some of the same experiences in dealing with some of the same stuff our parents did gives us a new perspective with it. So it’s not, this is not an opportunity to be like, oh, my parents screwed me up. That’s not what I’m saying here at all. So what are some other ways that we lose ourselves or our truth? As we grow up, we take on this false self that has all the stories about who we are and how the world works. Like you talked about shutting off for locking the doors of the castle, kind of putting those things aside. This is not the good way to be, so I have to change myself to be acceptable and fit in and be loved and, you know, and belong. And this aids us in all of our decisions, all of it. We’re living life through this lens that we’ve created. But it’s kind of like going to the eye doctor and they just decided on a prescription for you without really doing the whole thing, you know, without the, which left or right, which one’s better? Like they didn’t actually go through the whole process. So they just give you a prescription. Cause this is the one they think you should have. So, you know, if somebody just gives you a prescription, the chances of it being right are pretty small. So we’re seeing through blurry lenses, it’s not the correct prescription for us. And so we make decisions based on how we see things through these blurry lenses. We choose careers, partners and all kinds of other things based on these glasses that you can’t see clearly through. For example, college. When I went to college, I chose my major of aerospace engineering because I was smart. I was a straight a student and that’s what smart people do. Right. We choose careers in math and science. Right. Anyone? Anyone? Don’t get me wrong. At the time I like w I thought I wanted a career in math and science, but I don’t really know if I ever… it’s not clear to me whether I really ever let myself entertain a different option because that was just the path. You know, In addition to the quote, unquote smart people do math and science. There is also the generally accepted path that you were supposed to take. Go to college, get a good job that’s safe, insecure. When the pays well work, the hamster wheel grind get raises some promotions, save for retirement and then retire at 60 or 65 or whatever. So there’s the prescribed life, right? So the shoulds were based on a lot of self-worth and financial security kinds of things. And I think, you know, it’s no fault of anyone’s, but we just grow up through, you know, whatever it is, family, society, just the people in our lives that we’re around. And it varies from culture to culture you know what those are. But like for me, going to college for engineering. I just, I don’t think I ever, I don’t remember ever saying, oh, I wish I could go to art school. I don’t, it’s not that I’m not saying that, but now that I’m older and kind of have, and have stepped back a little bit, I kind of am able to look at it and go, I wonder if I would have, you know, if there was never any sort of societal influence or, you know, anything like that, if it was just like everyone on the planet just did what they loved and there was no, you know, blurry lens to look through. I just kind of wonder how that would have been different. But everything also happens for a reason I believe too. So, you know, I brought me here. But then there’s the rest of the path that, you know, at least at the time was kind of just what everyone did. You graduate. Get a job, get married, buy a house, dogs, have kids work and then have a midlife crisis. Um, I laugh, but I, I think it’s kind of true. You know, it’s all the box checking. I talk about that a lot. You know, we check the boxes. But in all of this, when you’re making the decisions of, you know, how to check the box and you’re doing things based on your lenses, your blurry glasses. But the prescription that isn’t truly tailored to your actual eyes, your actual self. So we end up at a place in life where we’ve taken on all these roles, like employee, manager, boss, mom, dad, daughter, son, friend, helper, fixer, people pleaser, perfectionist, et cetera, et cetera. And then we come to the realization that we haven’t been living the life that our soul really wants to live, or, you know, we came here to live that we’re put here on, on this planet to live. We’ve been in our head the whole time, trying to live up to this external gold standard that’s arbitrary and really means nothing. And we’re also looking at it through these, you know, this incorrect prescription, someone else’s prescription. So we get to a point where we realize this, and I think it’s usually based on what people have talked to in your late thirties to early fifties. Depending on how aware you are to all the signs or where you are in your life. It happens. Where we just sense this. Like, it’s the whole feeling like you’re stuck. Feeling on the hamster wheel. Like you’re on the hamster wheel. Feeling like you’re going through the motions. Isn’t there more than this? Feeling guilty for wanting more. You know, we get to that place and then it gets to be too much to bear. Like we can’t stand the fact that there’s gotta be something more. And so we do the work to try to find what that is. And there are some people that just stay stuck in that forever. You know, and I, you get to decide which one you are. So when you get to that point, it was like, well, how do you find it? How do you find your truth? And really at this point, I really believe that there’s something that will happen in your life that will clue you in to the fact that you are not where you’re supposed to be. That you’ve been kind of lying to yourself for a long time. And actually this is exactly where you’re supposed to be because without being here, you’d never get to learn this lesson. Yay. And some people have small, you know, for some people it’s just the awareness that they don’t feel like life is great. For other people like myself, we get hit over the head with a two by four and our, partners leave us and disrupt our life, but, you know, it’s all over the map. So my point is it can be just the awareness that there’s something more and you’re ready to explore that or something big can happen in your life that really knocks you to your knees. And forces you to have to like, do something different. And that was me. And there were probably a lot of little awarenesses I missed, you know, little whispers along the way that I missed. In fact, I know there were. But, you know, something happens where it, it prompts you or pushes you to, to figure that out. And the first step in finding what’s true for you, your authentic self, is realizing that the way you’ve been living is not authentic. Is not true to yourself. You haven’t been telling your truth. That’s the first step. The next thing is really, I think surrendering to let go. To understand that the way you thought your life was supposed to go isn’t what was really in the plan. That’s so hard too. Like for myself, I still have times where I kind of will get hit with this. Like why am I here? I had this life that, you know, now it’s like gone, this is not where I thought I would be at the age I’m at. And so, you know, even, I have moments like that where I kind of have to bring myself back and go, no, this is, this is where I’m supposed to be. And I’m here for a reason. So I’m letting go of that life that I thought, well, I was going to coast into death with, you know, the family, all the things. I thought that was what I was going to have. So accepting. Letting go surrendering that there’s a different way that my life is supposed to go. That is not what I thought. Wasn’t really in my plan. You know, you have to learn to let go of your false self, the stories, the narratives, the perceptions, the patterns, and the behaviors that your brain has tricked you into believing we’re keeping you safe. You know, all the things that make up the blurry glasses. You have to be willing to put those down. You have to be willing to trust that there’s another way. There’s actually a prescription that makes you see clearly. And to trust that the truth of who you are, doesn’t actually reside in your brain and the stories or the perceptions you have. The truth of who you are lies in your heart. And this is my favorite part because that’s what I call coming home to your heart. And I often talk about it like this when we’re little, we started our lives, relying on other people to take care of us. You know, we look to other people for direction on how we should be. What’s right. What’s wrong. What’s accepted. What’s not. So we craft a life based on that information. It’s the information we have, right. We do the best with what we have and that’s what we had. And by the time we’re capable of discerning what’s true for us… Because we’re not really capable of that before the age of seven, we’ve already accumulated all this data. And we’ve created this program to run in the background of our brain, you know, to make more, make life more efficient. Cause that’s just what our brain does. So that program’s running, just telling us how things are without us really questioning it. Cause it’s underlying. And we busy ourselves with creating the life that’s quote unquote right or acceptable. You know, the life we quote unquote should live and we shift who we are inside to match that to match what’s on the outside. The problem here is that when the outside crumbles, your insides don’t match anything anymore. And there’s no foundation to come home to because this is just now so in-congruent. So we have two choices. One week we can change who we are to recreate, you know, some other version of the prescribed life, or number two, we can surrender. And we can start to just peel off the layers of who we aren’t. It’s like realizing that you’re in some kind of suit that doesn’t fit. And you’re just going to start to take it off. And then we can come home to our heart. The person that we truly are. And then we create a life that’s true to who we really are. We create, the life that on the outside matches who we are on the inside, not the other way around. And finding it, it’s a funny thing because it’s already there. It’s always been there the whole time. Your truth, who you are. And it always will be there, but you come home to it. You, you start to rediscover it. It’s like I said, it’s like taking off the funny suit or whatever the, the. I don’t know, for some reason I wanted to say meat suit. I don’t know why that came into my head. But you’re taking off these layers of something that just doesn’t fit you. You know, and this requires surrender. Presence. Being in the moment. Practicing awareness of what you’re thinking and feeling. And being in discernment about how your actions and thoughts feel to you. Do they feel, do they feel congruent for you? Do they feel aligned? Do you feel good about how they align. Know how you want to feel, you know, what do you value? What’s important to you? Is being content and peaceful the most important thing, or is it feeling sheer, joy and excitement? Maybe it’s being carefree and easy-going, having freedom. Maybe it’s a combination of all those things. And then be aware of how your thoughts and actions make you feel, you know, do you sense alignment with that, with how you want to feel. Or do your thoughts and actions bring up emotions that don’t feel aligned? So here are a couple of examples about that cause that may feel a little, hard to grasp. Uh, for example, if you’re hanging out with a group of friends, who tend to gossip a lot. And it makes you feel gross. And now that you’re practicing being more aware of how your actions and thoughts make you feel, you may realize this group of friends isn’t really who you want to spend your time with because participating in gossip isn’t really. It’s not who you really are. It’s not your truth. It’s not a true part of who you are. It doesn’t mean you necessarily cut all ties with those people, but it might mean that your relationship to those friends change and maybe you decide you don’t want to spend as much time with them. But my point with that example is that you’re in that group of people and you can kind of sense whether or not, you know, gossiping about people feels in integrity with who you really are. You get a sense of that. Or maybe you’ve been a super driven person for your whole life. This may or may not be related to my self… and you’ve always taken on really big, impressive projects. But in your own like self exploration, you’ve realized that you’ve always done this for this positive feeling hit you get from people being impressed or, you know, external approval. People really admire your skills and your drive and they let you know that it makes you feel good. But you find that every time you complete something big, you feel like more empty than you did when you started. It’s like, oh, it didn’t really, at the end of the day, it didn’t really, you know, make me feel how I want to feel. So. You know, and then you just take on something bigger. And then you just repeat the cycle again and again, and again. So maybe you realize that your truth is that you really don’t care about completing like big things or achieving a lot. You just want to enjoy doing things in the moment. you know, for the joy of it, not necessarily the end result, because you’ve realized up until now, you’ve kind of just been doing it for the end results. And it’s not making you feel better, really. So now you might be able to tune into what it is, that does make you feel good and do that with joy. Or contentment or whatever it is, even if it’s something really simple, like taking a walk in nature or, you know, trying something new. And even if you’re not good at it. And you won’t need the external validation anymore if you’re now able to give yourself. Your own validation. But in that, you know, you start to realize that you’re not feeling in alignment with your values in that situation, you know? Achieving big things for external approval is not really making you feel true to yourself. So you realize that and you shift something so that you can. This is all hard. Telling the truth, telling your truth, being true to yourself is it’s hard because it’s hard to let go of our own perceptions and stories that we’ve held so tight. Held on to so tightly for so long. In the example of like big achievements, it might be the underlying pattern of perfectionism driving the bus. And it’s hard to let go of perfectionism. I know there’s a lot of perfectionist listening to this right now. Because it’s hard to let go of it because there’s an underlying story of, if I’m not perfect, I have no worth or no value or some variation of that. So by not striving for perfection, you’re risking that you’re worthless. And that’s not really true, but in your brain, you’re risking that you have no worth and that’s a big, scary thing. Right? It’s a big, scary thing to your brain. And your heart knows there’s a different truth, but your brain is really afraid that it’s going to be worthless and have no value. So that’s a, that’s a big risk. So telling the truth requires a lot of trust in yourself. You know, it’s trust that you’ve got your own back. Trust that your heart really does know the answer and that your brain’s just wrong a lot of the time. In the perfection example, you really have to trust that you don’t need to be perfect. That you’re enough, no matter what. You’re enough, just by existing as a human You’re perfect just as you are without doing anything. If you’re a perfectionist, I’m guessing this is probably hitting home right now. But when you’re a perfectionist, it is scary to drop that story that you need to be something. Because that’s how you’ve operated and letting go of that is a scary thing. Another example. I see a lot is with body image issues. When someone feels like their body isn’t good enough, maybe they want to lose weight or get in shape, they do it from a place of body, you aren’t good enough as you are. So I’m going to change you. And then I will be happy. And the reality of this, you can imagine is that even if you lose the weight or get in shape, you might feel good initially, but you haven’t addressed the underlying problem, which is again, unworthiness, unless you’re a certain way, you’re never going to get to a place of satisfaction with their body because there will always be something else. You’re relying on outside of yourself. And outside of yourself always changes and you have no control over it. So you’re, you’re giving away your power. So you need to accept the body that you have and recognize you are more than your body, but most people are so scared to accept the body that they have. And that’s understandable. I mean, look at the world. We’re constantly being told that we need to change something about our bodies. It’s really like, no wonder that this is a tough topic, right? But most people would rather focus on losing weight, counting calories, working out, counting macros, all the things, doing the latest fad diet, to change themselves because they think that form of external approval will make them happier instead of working on accepting and loving what they’ve got. Because they fail to realize that if they trust themselves, that if they accept, if they accept who they are and what they have. They’re not going to be worried about what other people think anyway. And that’s a really hard thing to get your head around. I’ve been there. This is something I struggle with too. The story that there is a certain body type that’s acceptable is a story that’s tough to lose because it ties in so deeply to our self-worth. Over the years, I’ve done a lot of work on perfectionism and competitiveness. I used to feel really terrible about myself if I wasn’t like the best at something. So I was super competitive even with like the dumbest things. I couldn’t just accept being average at something. And then I got to a place where honestly, I think I was just so exhausted from trying to be achieving something all the time that I got to a place where I adopted a mindset that we’re all just average and I love this mindset. So take it if it fits or consider it at least. We all have gifts and times where we shine. And we all have things we’re not good at and times when we fall. And fail and just completely mess up. We all do. So it all just averages out and we’re all just average, normal human beings with our own unique gifts. No one’s better than another person. And when we can just recognize that, and I’ll just be human together, it takes so much pressure off. But, when I would get around other competitive people, it was really hard for me to let go of my story, that I needed to be better than someone else to have value. And this is where telling your truth gets hard. When you get into situations where you might have to accept feeling less than through your old lens, though. It’s a challenge to see yourself through the new lens, the lens that actually sees clearly, because you’re so used to seeing it through the blurry one, that it It’s it’s like, whoa, it’s hard to trust that that new lens is actually the one that is true, truth. As humans we want to belong. Connection is a basic need. And when our sense of belonging feels threatened, we want to file into line and well belong. So ruffling feathers by being truthful to ourselves, being authentic, Speaking up doing the things that maybe aren’t conventional or what everyone else is doing, and that can feel super unsafe. You have to ask yourself first of all, what do you want in your life? What do you want your life to be? Like? How do you want to feel in your life? And a lot of times when we sacrifice our authenticity, well all the time when we sacrifice our authenticity, we’re making ourselves uncomfortable. By lying to ourselves in order to make someone else comfortable. And that discomfort that you’re placing on yourself, we kind of tend to overlook it because we you know, because of that desire to belong or that fear of not belonging. But when we really take a pause to look at what that discomfort is, those emotions that come up in that, and look at that, like, do I want to live my life feeling stuck? Do I want to live my life feeling kind of checked out and numb? Or do I want to live my life feeling alive and feeling joy and also feeling sadness and anger and frustration, but you know, also feeling love and exhilaration, excitement. You know, all of those things, they all can exist at the same time. And when you can really accept what is, that’s really the key in living your most authentic life. You know, being who you truly are is going to bring up a lot of difficult emotions sometimes. And when you can be in the present moment, notice what comes up and be with those emotions you can choose. You can choose to roll with the default way of being the way you’ve always done things, or you can choose to be you. Here’s an example for you of a recent experience I had. I, as you know, I did my retreat. Uh, if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you’ve heard lots about my But, leading up to the retreat. I, you know, I didn’t have as many people sign up for it as I wanted to. And, I’m getting really vulnerable here. But, I didn’t have as many people signed up as I wanted to have signed up and I had a lot going on just personally in my life too. And I was really stressed out about it and I almost, you know, I was through going through the whole thing of, do I cancel it? What do I do? And I, I almost canceled And I, but I realized in that moment, I was like, that’s my default. That’s what my, my non-truth telling self would do. I get really overwhelmed and stressed and I want to shut down. And so thank goodness I had so much awareness of what was happening. And I was able to make that choice of saying, okay, I can choose to step into the truth of who I am and the truth of who I am trusts that this number of people that are coming to my retreat is perfect. And it’s all gonna work out how it’s supposed to be. That’s not easy to do. Right. Cause I, you know, by doing that, like my old lens might’ve said, well, this is the people that coming, they’re gonna hate it. And it’s going to be, you’re going to fail and all the things, you know, my old lens, might’ve said some things like that. Right. And, but I realized that I was aware that that was happening. I accepted. I accepted that I had some really hard emotions around this, a lot of stress and I accepted it and got present to it. And then I, I also got present to the fears I had and then I was like, you know what? This is not, who I am, is to succumb to these fears. Like, cause that’s I would be letting down the beautiful souls that were coming to this retreat. And I chose to be true to myself. So there’s an example of, you know, things not going your way and your life too, and accepting that they didn’t go the way you wanted them to. But trusting yourself, trusting that your real prescription can show you the way your heart can show you the way. So, I have a few more quotes I want to share with you before I end, and I just really loved these, so, I wanted to share them. The first one. I don’t know who Della Hicks Wilson is, and I didn’t look her up, but, I found this quote on, I think it was on Glennon Doyle, his Facebook page, actually, but it’s really good. “Darling you feel heavy because you are too full of truth. Open your mouth more. Let the truth exist somewhere other than inside your body.” I love that because we do hold stuff in our bodies. So if you’re feeling like tense, you know, notice that. If you’re, if, if you’re feeling tension in your body or, you know, things, aren’t, your body just doesn’t feel loose and healthy and, you know, like think, get present to that. And. And ask yourself. You know, why is that? Why do I, why do I carry this tension? Or why do I carry this pain? And how does that relate to me living in my truth? It’s a good question to ask. The next one is from Scott Stabile. I’m not sure how you pronounce this either, but I like this one too. “When you’re brave enough to live in your truth, quirks, insecurities fears, and all you carve out paths for others to do so as well. You inspire the same kind of freedom, the same kind of commitment to a life without falseness, the same desire for something real. What a gift you give this world by being yourself.” I love that one as well, because I’m always saying that like, when you can show up in your full authenticity and just let down your guard, you know, that’s vulnerable, but people, when you’re like that, I’ve met some of the closest friends, the most trusted people that I’ve met are because I opened up and shared something that I, I really in the past wouldn’t have. And it’s like you connect on a human level. And when you do that, you give other people the sense of safety in doing it too. And it’s beautiful. The last one I have is from our dear old friend, Oprah Winfrey: “what I know for sure is that you feel real joy in direct proportion to how connected you are to living your truth.” And that’s my friends is exactly what I’m trying to say here. Is that you feel real joy and really feel alive in direct proportion to how connected you are to your authentic self. And that’s what I’m going to leave you with. So take that into your day and think about that. Think about how, how are you telling your truth or not? And, as always, I thank you for tuning in and being a listener of Real, Brave and Unstoppable. I would love it if you would take the time to go give me a rating and a review if you have time that always helps people. If you rate it well, five stars is always great. But if you write it well, and give it, even if it’s a short little review, it helps other people find the show. And I really love to get this out to as many people as I can. So appreciation in advance for doing that. Thank you. All right my friends have a wonderful day and I will see you soon.

meet your host.

Don’t Miss a Thing!

Enter your email below to be the first to know new episodes and other news!

My Real, Brave, & Unstoppable Story