Remember when it was difficult to ask for what you want, when having your needs met felt more like a wish than a request, when saying 'No' seemed like a mortal sin and saying yes the natural response?
Do you remember the first time you got up enough courage to speak your truth, to look someone in the eye and speak with certainty and unequivocal power?
What about the days since then? How have you kept your voice in tact? Or did you fall back into the pattern of nodding, bowing, and “letting things go.”
Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
How true that is and, yet, how often do we go silent to avoid rocking the boat, ruffling feathers or, worse, to “keep peace.” Guess what? Peace never has to be kept. It simply has to be embraced.
The truth of the matter is this:
Finding your voice is scary.
The moment you begin to ask to have your needs met, you open yourself up to all kinds of rejection, conflict and grief. There’s no sugar coating the truth: when you move from people pleaser to autonomous being people get uncomfortable. You’ve changed and, possibly, they haven’t. You’re speaking things they may not want to hear. You’re doing things and going places they may not be able to follow you to. It’s a crack in the foundation of what they’ve known to be their relationship with you… and those people will fight your empowerment for a long, long time… at least until they find their own… if they find their own.
Here are some things you have to remember about finding your voice:
· Only you can find it
· It’s up to you to own it
· You must be careful not to repress it
· Your life will work best when you wield it like a crown rather than a sword
· Everything you say has power and everything you fail to say has meaning
· You get one chance to say in one moment what needs to be said; use it or lose it
· Think before you speak and trust when you talk; that way, you never have to apologize for having said the wrong thing in the wrong way to the wrong person
· When you talk, listen
· When you listen, hear
· When you hear, trust
· When you trust, say what’s so
Very beautifully put. Finding your voice *is* scary. I've only just begun to really let my voice sing out. That has consequences sometimes, but being authentic is well worth it.
ReplyDeleteBeing authentic is absolutely worth it. We've spent so much of our lives being conditioned to believe that being who we are isn't enough when the simple, amazing truth that who we are is EXACTLY what this world needs. I love this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, "“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
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