Speak Up
Do you ever have trouble speaking up in your relationship? Saying what you mean and meaning what you say? I know I do. I work every day to bring awareness to what I am doing and to change it.
I know that speaking up for me comes from fear. Fear that I will not say what the other person wants to hear. That they will be disappointed in me. I also know that the only way to living my dream is to say what I am thinking. This is how my authentic and true self will show up. If I don’t show up how I am, I am basically people pleasing (aka lying) and this always comes back to bite. It shows up as shame or resentment or some other uncomfortable emotion where I spend way too much spinning about it.
It’s so interesting because I think I know how the other person is going to react. So, I tip toe around. But in reality, I don’t know what they are thinking and I certainly am not in charge of their feelings.
I had a funny example of this a while back. I was scheduled to visit my husband in the Bahamas and had scheduled the 11-day stay. I started stressing…. thinking I had way too much to do for the upcoming Holiday with it being a busy work time for our on-line retail business, wanting to spend more time with my daughter while she was home, having to rearrange some of my coaching sessions, preparing the house to leave and so on. All the stuff…just churning for days in my head about how I shouldn’t have booked the trip for that length of time. At the core of why I didn’t want to change it was because I knew how important it was to my husband for me to come spend some time with him there. I really didn’t want to disappoint or upset him. Literally, after days of stressing about it, I decided to speak up. I had created this whole story in my head about how he would react and then how bad I would feel. I poured it out just like the above, explaining exactly how I was feeling. He simply said “Why don’t you just come over for fewer days?”. There was no judgement. There was no hesitation. There was no drama. I had created it all with my thoughts! I had all these untrue beliefs that were going through my head. I just needed to speak up. Be true to how I was feeling. Share openly and honestly. Show up as I am and speak up!
What I great lesson. I can keep practicing speaking up and it will get easier and easier. And I get to be exactly who I am and be loved just as I am!
And what if he had been disappointed? That’s okay too. He’s allowed to have thoughts that make him feel a certain way. It doesn’t mean anything about me and It doesn’t make me love him any less. If anything, the truth and the vulnerability just makes our relationship even better.