Are You Comfortable Being You?

How do you feel about being you?  Are you ready to sing the praises of you from the rooftops or do you shy away keeping yourself private?

It's a big ask to really be yourself.  People are very judgmental and we've all heard the sorts of things that get said behinds others backs when someone stands out and the last thing we want is to be the person on the end of that gossip.

But it's a fine line. If you spend your life trying to be who you think others want you to be it's very unsatisfying and can make you resentful.  But if you don't fit in at all it can leave you feeling socially isolated and one of a kind.  So how do you find the balance?

The obvious problem with not being yourself is that part of you is always there saying something is wrong with me, they won't like me if I am totally myself, I might get hurt/rejected/abandoned.  If you didn't think this way even a little then you'd have no problem being totally 100% you like little children before they've learnt the social rules.  The tragicness of our society is that we breed individuality out of people as we want everyone to all behave in a certain way, otherwise face public disapproval.

The beautiful thing about people is that we are all different.  No two people are alike, we all have strengths and we all have weaknesses or flaws.  No one person is perfect and above these qualities.  It's part of the human condition to have both.

The problem seems to be that people in general want to be perfect or close to it.  They want to have no flaws and to be liked by everyone otherwise they feel unsettled and it is unsettling when you get that feeling of disapproval by anyone, even total strangers.  We avoid it as genetically in our past being  in group of people and being liked was what kept us alive and fed.  Nowdays though this isn't a problem and people are then faced with finding the right balance that makes them feel authentic.  The problem is to be really you means can stand out, perhaps upset people, perhaps not fit in perfectly, perhaps have views that others don't share and perhaps be disapproved of sometimes by someone.

If you don't back yourself 100% then these situations will cause anxiety so you'll learn to start avoiding them due to the discomfort.  In the end before you know it you've become a social chameleon blending in with your surroundings.  If you can do that and make it work that would be great.  But most people find they then feel false and inauthentic and they have a true desire to just be themselves.  And you know what it's impossible to be the type of person that everyone likes.  Someone will always disapprove  of something you've done or not like you but it's learning to not worry about what others think.  It's how it sits with you that matters.

We learn not to be ourselves in childhood.  Even if you had the most perfect childhood there would still be wrong conclusions about life that you made that have resulted in you not being 100% you.  When you think about it and if you are a parent yourself, you'll see that children always do things that parents don't like and parents try to minimalise these things to make their lives easier and so they are not socially embarrased.  It can be as simple as this that can cause a person to pretend to be something they are not.

The way out? Start to be really honest with yourself and look at when you are trying to blend it and how you could start showing the real you.  It's all about baby steps, one step at a time.  You can't be the way you are today and the next day jump out in all your glory it's just not possible.  It's about small gradual changes that end up being something huge.  That's what you want to start today.

How Do You Feel About Change?

If you are like some people, you don't like change very much.  Change is hard and as we are creatures of habit often letting go of the old habits, the old way of being and the old you can be quite an effort.  But what are we afraid of?

Change involves the process of letting go, which might be easier than it sounds.  If you are graced with being able to let go easily then thank your lucky stars as letting go is something that people often have to work on.

To make matters worse the ego shies away from change and in most cases rejects it.  To the ego, change represents a death and since it is really a death of a way of being, the ego has reasons to be afraid!  But the beauty of it is that after the death we are reborn and have the chance to redefine who we are.  Who we are is never constant but should change and evolve over time as we experience all life has to offer.

To really live in the moment means that we have to train ourselves to be flexible and to adapt to change.  The benefit of this is when change happens the process is much easier and not fraught with anxiety.

When we find it hard to let go, the process is drawn out and using anxiety provoking so it is very uncomfortable and as a reaction part of the personality can become very rigid and inflexible to change thinking that might solve future problems.

What I find is that life is constantly shifting and changing and you can't allow yourself to be stagnant and unchanging.  Also as relationships continue to evolve and change if you don't then part of your relationship gets left behind, whether it's a significant other, friends or work relationships.

So I ask you, ask yourself what it is that you find hard when something is trying to change.  Is it the change itself making you unsettled, is it fear of the unknown, or something else?  When you discover what you are really afraid of it makes the whole process easier as you can acknowledge your fears but go on changing anyway.  And besides, being able to redefine yourself is just an amazing experience.  It's not scary to ask yourself who you are, it's a chance to be someone totally new.

What Are You Most Afraid of in Relationships?

Relationships can be the most enjoyable, amazing things we have in this world, but they can also be the most terrifying especially if your worst fears keep being realized in them.

Often I find with people that they are afraid of one of three things:  being abandoned by their partner, being rejected by their partner or being betrayed by their partner.  Sometimes unfortunately people also have a combination of one or more of these things as well usually abandonment being combined with one of the others.

Each one in itself can be absolutely debilitating to experience in a relationship as they hit right at the core.  Feeling someone will leave you takes you right back to that state of being a tiny baby and having to rely on someone else for nourishment, so the thought of being abandoned keeps a person very young and helpless in a relationship and forever fearful and anxious that their worst fears will one day become a reality.  Even if the partner doesn't leave, often the person's relentless anxiety and questioning about leaving drives the partner out the door.

Feeling you will be rejected also brings up very painful feelings of not being good enough, being criticized or being judged by the person we love.  When you are rejected your heart is what feels rejected so what happens is you end up hiding your heart from others so it is not broken further.  Their relationships then become very unfulfilling as it is just a head or sex relationship.  These unfulfilling relationships often result in them ending which confirms the rejection.

Being betrayed is equally as painful.  Expecting your partner may be cheating on you, often when they actually aren't, is very anxiety and paranoia provoking.  What is often worse is that you can be very trusting of the wrong people and so you are very heartbroken when it inevitably happens.  It usually ends up reversed in that the innocent person gets questioned and suspected or cheating when they aren't but the person who is likely to cheat is trusted wholeheartedly.  This mix up is very painful and causes a lot of heartbreak.  If it doesn't happen the relationship is often hard as the constant accusation of infidelity can be too much for some partners to bear.

The worst thing about these fears is that they always end up happening without help.  As I've said even if the person doesn't cheat, doesn't leave or does reject you the relationship can end anyway due to all the questioning and anxiety that comes out of that fear.

These painful things I am talking about have their origins in childhood and then experiences to support them often happened through adolescence and early adulthood, and sometimes longer.  Sometimes they are so ingrained that the person cannot imagine what a normal relationship without these feelings is like or relegate themselves to the "I'm just not right for relationships category".

The first step out of this vicious cycle is to acknowledge that something is going on in your relationships, that you are in a cycle where the same type of partner or same type of feelings within you keep emerging.  Once you do that you have started the journey into finding out where they came from and concentrate on attracting partners that give you exactly what you want and where you can be relaxed and fulfilled.  And when you start confronting the part of you that gets anxious and worries about abandonment, rejection or betrayal then you can start to feel more empowered and in control.

Anxiety – What is it Really?

People often ask me what is anxiety and how do I make it go away!  Anxiety is an awful, physically and mentally uncomfortable phenomenon that is easily explained as "fear of the future".  If you think about the last time you felt anxious or worried about something it will always be something you are concerned about happening at a later stage.

It's normal to think about things in the future and sometimes worry as you can never be certain of what is going to happen, there's an element of faith that life will work out the way you want it.

So when that worry goes too far it ends up being anxiety, the difference being that worry is something short lived that you can stop and anxiety is often something you can't.  It starts as a little niggle but then it grows and often what people do is when they are feeling anxious is they start thinking of lots of other situations that also make them anxious as well so they go down a big anxiety spiral until they are so frazzled that they are a heap on the floor needing a wine or chocolate to feel better.

What happens when people get anxious is the nervous system becomes activated so instead of being relaxed and having your body relaxed, the nervous system is reacting like something bad is happening and so it is on high alert.  Then not only do you feel mentally uncomfortable but you are also facing hormone release like adrenalin and cortisol that leave you feeling very depleted and exhausted after.

Anxiety can become a habit and you can see that especially when you realise that people will think of anxiety evoking things when they are anxious!  It is also very ungrounding and when someone gets anxious they leave their body and end up with all their energy in their head (and also often headaches or neck aches as well).  The head is all about fear, its job is to come up with fearful scenarios of what might happen, not say let's just trust in our self that it will all be ok!

When you are in your head you've lost the ability to know that you'll be ok, that last time you were fine and the time before that and even if something bad did happen, I'm sure you'd pull through.  To the head everything ends up feeling like life or death.

So what to do when you feel anxious?  First you need to ask yourself, what am I so worried about.  It can also help to write down each time you feel anxious so you can see what the common thread is in your anxiety as it will most likely be triggered by the same sort of things.  Then the next thing to do is take at least 5 deep belly breaths and on each breath feeling the stress and tension going down your legs and out your feet.  The more of these breaths you do the better as they are bringing you back into present time (for more on present time see my article ‘The Present Moment').

The more time you spend in present time, the less anxious you will be.  And the next time you get anxious you know instantly that you have left the present moment.  So do your breathing, come back to present time and start using your energy resources to get to the bottom of what you are worrying about.

That's when you find your anxiety lessens and happens less often and as a result you feel more empowered and present in the moment to live life to the fullest.

The Present Moment

What is time? Most people might be unaware that time in the conventional sense was a Newtonian invention.  That is why it can feel so varied some days whizzing by and other times an hour feeling like 5 for no apparent reason.  Other people have theories that time is in fact circular and not linear and that everything is happening right now.

I find that a lot of people don't live in the present moment and if they do it is only a small percentage of the time.  They often traverse between the past and the future jumping in and out of the present as they go through.  This makes sense when you think of time being circular as otherwise you'd never visit the past as it was in the past!

The problem is the less time you spend in the present moment the less aware you are of what you are creating right now and feeling the joy and spontaneity of life.

Being in the past is problematic as it is always riddled with bad experiences.  You don't often hear people saying great things about their past experiences.  A lot of people have painful memories of their childhood, adolescence and early adulthood that they want to try to put past them, but their beliefs have been founded around these bad experiences.

What happens is when a person leaves the present moment to go in the past, they are going back to those old dysfunctional (not to mention untrue) beliefs to check their reality.  For example they might see a nice girl at a bar and think maybe I'll go talk to her but then they instantly go into the past where they say to themselves, she's out of my league and she'll just reject me like all the rest.  Another example might be that someone wants to go to university but then unconsciously decides they are not smart enough to do it and they should stick to what they know.

The beliefs that we make contact with when we leave the present moment are deeply unconscious and this is why they are so hard to confront and change as most people don't even realise they are there!

The beliefs you have is what make up the experiences that are around you.  This might sound odd but our beliefs are so strong that they end up shining through in situations.  You get a job and you are not appreciated so your belief of not being valued is confirmed.  However as you have this belief in the first place that is probably what attracted you to the job (subconsciously of course) and why the employer liked you.  They weren't thinking that consciously of course, but remember talking makes up 10% of communication.  10%!!  That means 90% of communication comes from body language and energy.  So this is what people are reading and it becomes an unconscious agreement, one person saying I agree to allow myself to be undervalued and you agree to undervalue me.

I could give you so many examples of this happening in all areas of life and a popular reaction is often to blame the person doing the other thing.  Blame your boss for undervaluing you, your partner for leaving you, for people being rude to you, for friends standing you up and so on rather than looking at what beliefs you have that keep these experiences around you.

Ever notice how the same things don't happen to everyone around you?  Each person has their own little world of beliefs all being replayed in the here and now.  When you challenge these beliefs in the present moment by saying why is this happening to me, what is it I think that brings this to me, not only does it keep you in the present moment, but it puts a stop on the past and future jumping.  When you are in the present moment you are fully alive and can embrace life.

Communication – It's More Complex Than You Think

Ever walked into a room after someone has had a fight and thought I could cut the air with a knife?  We have all experienced situations like this when the room feels so heavy and the air feels like and tangible.

What this is explaining is the phenomenon of communication and that communication is only 10% verbal.  Sounds ridiculous really considering we all talk every day all the time and talking in person wasn't even enough we had to invent other ways to talk like telephones, mobile phones, email, texting, skyping and so on.

But it has been proven that verbal communication is only 10% of the entire way we communication.  Body language takes up a small part as well but most of it is largely energy.  How we perceive someone which is not done through the eyes but how we "feel" about them.

Have you ever had the experience of not liking someone instantly even though you know nothing about them?  This often happens as when your energy connects with theirs and instant dislike occurs but the brain hasn't caught up yet.  The brain is saying you don't even know that person or making up excuses that they look like ‘that' type of person and that's why you don't like them.

But how do you know you don't like them?  Think about it, how do you know when you like someone.  Within a few seconds of meeting someone or seeing someone (not even talking to them) we have established if we like them, do we find them attractive and what sex they are (male or female).  When you notice someone from across the room or on the train you haven't spoken to that person but you still know whether you would like to speak to them.

This is because all of the so called dialogue is happening energetically and sometimes our opinions are warranted and other times when you talk to the person you might find you got the wrong impression of them.

So it's important to consider what you are thinking about others is what they are getting from you.  If you are judging others but pretending on the outside not to be, people will still be picking this up from you.  The same if you feel you are not good enough, that's what you put out there in your non verbal communication and that's the message that people get.

So take the time to think about what you're putting out there and you'll find it makes a big difference to your life.