Saying What You Need To Hear
/I once had a client who told me that she was almost always telling people what they wanted to hear. I asked her, “Or are you saying what you think they want to hear?” She paused and told me she wasn’t sure. But she did know that when she had session with me, she found herself saying things she needed to hear. “How can you do that more often?” I asked her. “Maybe when I really can believe it outside these four walls,” was her reply. Do you find yourself saying what others want you to say, or you think they want you to say? We all do it from time to time. “How are you?” “I am great!” (When the reality is that you slept poorly the night before and you have a tension headache and you just don’t have the strength to discuss any of it with them.)
Sometimes just going with the flow of the conversation is the best, though it may not always be the most honest, but little is served with expanding. BUT there are those times when our honesty not only serves us or the relationship but our future as well. If we continue to not telling people our Truth, we begin to deny ourselves of it. And then we run the risk of not recognizing it, not trusting it or worse yet, not even being able to hear it.
My client could borrow the trust in our relationship to tell her self what she needed to hear, to speak her truth. She was able to recognize she needed to break the cycle. And in the safety of our relationship she could have the courage to speak it, hear it and believe it. With time we worked on expanding outside the four walls, bringing this attention to truth into her daily life and having the courage to speak it.
It takes times for patterns to be broken, because it takes time for them to be born. But the more they are stroked and fed, by our selves, by our family and friends or by society, the stronger they become. Speaking our Truth is not always welcomed. It can cause waves of energies around us that ruffle people’s feathers, cause them to doubt their own patterns, and can be an affront to what has become the accepted norm in our society.
It takes courage to take the risk. It takes an effort to break the pattern. It takes desire to be authentic and it helps to have an a community that supports this. Do you have a community that applauds your efforts to speak your Truth? Do your friends celebrate when you take a risk to say something that is not the expected norm? Do you listen to your words with compassion and understanding, allowing your honesty to be bold and brave?
Sometimes starting in a journal is a great place to practice. Just the simple release of the energies surrounding our Truth empowers us greatly. Sometimes sharing an excerpt or two with a trusted confident and witnessing their understanding, appreciation or acceptance alters the belief that we are not worthy of this Truth. Eventually, with time, the pattern gets challenged and begins to break apart. We find our selves no longer wanting to only tell people what they want to hear, but instead begin to say what we need to hear. We step into our power more fully, even if it is for brief moments scattered throughout the day. And surprisingly, it begins to get mirrored back to us. People begin to believe your Truth as much as they believed your mis-truth! Affirmation, affirmation, affirmation!