Does your fear of being negatively judged by others stop you from being yourself and makes
you feel like you're hiding behind a mask? Living like this for too long will leave you
feeling unfulfilled, unsatisfied and even empty. And I know because this used to be
me when I started my self growth journey. But today I can tell you there is another
way. And in this episode I want to share with you 13 ways in which you can accept yourself,
love who you are, land on your own worth, and really be your authentic self. I'm a
big fan of Brene Brown's work, and I love how she explains authenticity as a daily
practice of letting go who we think we are supposed to be and embracing who we are.
So if you're ready to hear how you can do that, then hit the like button and let's get started.
So the very first point is conscious decision. And I feel like I say this in all of my videos because
it's true. We need to commit. We need to make a conscious decision for anything in our lives to
change. We need to first decide to make it so and so often, even when you don't choose something,
even when you don't make a decision about something, when you hold yourself back, that in
itself is a decision. In order for you to really embrace your authentic self and love who you are,
accept all of yourself, you have to decide that this is now what you are going to apply yourself
to. This is what you are going to do. And then number two is you have to get out of autopilot
mode. So our brains have this wonderful ability of creating our lives and putting us in a comfort
zone to make us efficient so we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. They say that
only about 5% of your thoughts are new and original thoughts. 95% of you is habitual.
You have habitual thoughts and habitual patterns which are always playing out. And obviously when
we go into autopilot mode, this is what happens. And we go into autopilot mode in so many different
ways. It's so easy when someone says something to you immediately there's a response or a trigger,
and you always say the same thing. You always end up doing the same thing. It happens maybe
when you drive to work, you get to work and you can't even remember the road that you
took. Our brains go into autopilot mode all the time, and you have to then make the conscious
decision to override that, to start to live more consciously and drop from your mind, from
that autopilot ,into your body so that you can access the present moment. This is where
you are living in the here and now, and this is where your authentic self can be found in
the here and now. And then our next step is to be in integrity with yourself. Now, I always
speak of our personal power as being contained in a bucket. And every time that you break your word
to yourself, so every time where you dishonour yourself, every time where you betray yourself,
every time you say you do something and then you don't, or you say that you won't do something and
then you end up doing it, every time that you are breaking your word is as if you are punching holes
in this bucket and your personal power leaks out. When you begin to practice being in integrity,
what you will find is the instances where you are punching holes in this bucket of yours,
these instances become less and less. So you have more personal power available to you so
you can be your true and authentic self. Number four is to practice self-compassion. And this
is a biggie. Often we have this misconstrued idea that if we are hard enough on ourselves,
then it would help us to be better, do better, perform better. And the opposite is actually
true. Every time that you speak to yourself very harshly, every time that you break yourself down,
what it does is it actually activates your nervous system. It puts you into fight or flight response,
and in fight or flight response, it's not possible for you to really be creative and to tap into
your own truth. Because you are in survival mode. Learning to be more self-compassionate
through the way in which you speak to yourself is going to help you reparent your inner child.
It's going to help you to love and accept more parts of yourselves because this is really a
practice of the way in which you relate to yourself. Number five is to trust yourself
and to connect to your inner wisdom. This is something that I'm very passionate about,
if you've seen any of my other videos. We have so much truth and wisdom accessible to
us. We often think that we can only solve our lives and live our lives through the level of
the mind. But our own wisdom is such a powerful guiding force. And when you're really connected
into your own wisdom and into your own truth, can you see that automatically you start living more
authentically. So when we connect into the wisdom of our bodies, we really have access to all of
the data from our mental plane, our physical plane, our emotional plane, and our energy plane.
And we are really very well trained in accessing the data from our mental plane. So we are very
well versed in using our thoughts to create our reality, using our thoughts and our mind to go
after our goals and to push forward. But I feel that we are only using half of our capacity when
we do this. So by bringing our body into the equation and by tapping into the data that is
available to us from this side, it really empowers you to be more of yourself because of what you
will discover and learn to love and accept about yourself. Now the next point is to embrace your
vulnerability. This is what I believe. When we are vulnerable with our own truths
and we are willing to bring that vulnerability out into our lives, the stronger we land in
our own self-worth and in our own confidence. And when you are strong in your vulnerability like
that, you'll find that people don't take advantage of you. And so I think it's important for all of
us to change how we see vulnerability. Oftentimes, vulnerability is viewed as a weakness, and in
fact, this is not. So to me, vulnerability is an act of courage. It's an act that requires bravery.
And our vulnerability is what allows us to really show ourselves. If we walk around fearing that
others are going to judge us, of course you're not gonna be vulnerable. You're never going to risk
yourself. So by showing who you are, by showing yourself and running the risk of being judged or
perceived in a certain way, it does require you to be vulnerable. But through that vulnerability,
you also find self-acceptance. And that vulnerability comes from a place of self-worth.
And our next point is to pull back the layers of who you are not.
And this ties in beautifully with the practice that Brene Brown speaks of,
where every day we show up and embrace who we are instead of who we think we are supposed to be. As
you really begin to deepen into this practice of showing up as yourself, of dropping the mask and
being vulnerable, you're starting to peel back all the layers of who you are not. So often when
we betray ourselves, when we dishonour ourselves in that power bucket example that I spoke about,
the reason that we do this is because of the conditioning and the life experiences,
the lived experiences that we have. And all of these inform us as to who we are
and as to how we show up in the world. But so many of those things are external conditions,
and they aren't really who we are at our deepest core, at our truth. So by practising to be your
whole self by connecting into your body so that you can land on your own truth,
it will support you to peel back everything that you are not. Number eight is to stop comparing
yourself to others. So this is the thing, whenever you compare yourself to someone else,
you are always going to be better off than them or worse off than them. Usually what happens is
you forget about those who are worse off than you, and you only measure yourself against the ones who
are better than you. Finding yourself then as a failure finding that you aren't enough, that
you haven't done enough, that you haven't arrived yet, or that you need to do more or try harder.
Now, I think healthy comparison is necessary for us because it helps us
to measure how we are doing. It helps us on our own personal growth journey to see, ah,
all right, maybe this is something that I can explore. Maybe this is something that you can,
that I can try out. However, comparing yourself to all of the filters on social media or all of the B
roll that people put, or A roll, what's it called that people put on on their social media, you're
just going to end up feeling bad about yourself. You're going to feel bad about who you are.
And what this does is going put you in a spiral where you go into a mind loop of overthinking,
overanalyzing, remembering and reinforcing all of the narratives and the core wounding that you have
around not being good enough, not being worthy. These are the core wounds that I speak about.
not being good enough, being too much, not being lovable, not being worthy, or there's something
wrong with you that needs to be fixed. I see that this comparison game, it really
is designed to keep us in our maiden energy. So in your maiden energy, what happens is you are
possibly betraying yourself for the sake of being popular, for the sake of being liked. Whereas when
we step into our mature feminine energy, we are really coming from a place of worthiness,
a place of high self-esteem, high self-worth, and high self-love and acceptance. The invitation
here for you is to explore where in your life are you moving in maiden energy, where you are
betraying yourself or dishonouring yourself in an attempt to be popular or in an attempt to
be liked? Where are you judging yourself unfairly? And then where can you step
into your mature feminine energy? And this leads me then into the next point, which is
to create the distinction between the roles that you're playing in your life. I use many different
roles in my work, but the ones that I want to speak about here is the good girl archetype and
the wild woman archetype. So how I see this play out in the context of being authentic and really
embracing who we are is the good girl is that conditioned role that says, in order for me to
be love accepted, to be part of the tribe and to be a good girl, I need to do certain things. I
need to make myself more palatable. I need to be seen in a certain way. I can't be too much of this
or not enough of that. So we really offering a curated version of ourselves to the world.
In the process though, what happens is our own needs and our desires gets pushed to the
side. When we feel nourished, when we feel valued in ourselves, when we honour our own
needs and we have the confidence and the courage to speak that out into the world,
it fulfills us on such a deep level. And this spreads out into the world and it
spreads out into everything that we touch. It spreads out into our community as well.
And this is really then the realm of the wild woman. This is that fierce,
unconditional self-love. We know all our bumpy spots, we know all our sticky points,
and we love ourselves anyway, can you feel the power in that? And then number 10 is to challenge
your inner critic. It's very easy to slip into the habit of fighting with yourself, getting
angry with yourself, putting yourself down. Here, I really invite you to call on the
archetype of the warrior. When we are constantly in that battle with our inner critic, it really
tends to put you in a victim mindset where the way that you view the world, your narrative,
your actions, your experience really comes from feeling disempowered and like life is happening
to you. So this is a practice that you're gonna find helpful when you have a very overactive
and toxic inner critic. Whenever you notice that you have this inner critic, you know,
knocking you down and breaking you down, and you are in this overthinking overanalyzing mode,
see if you can just take a little step back and notice where do you hear this inner critic from?
Is it inside your head or is it outside of your head? Is it going from the inside out or is it
going from the outside in? Do you hear it in the front? Is it more at the back? So you really want
to kind of give it an identity of its own so that you see it's not who you are, it's not
the whole of you. As you collect this data about your inner critic, it empowers you to
challenge it. It empowers you as that warrior to not take everything that it says as gospel
and as the truth. And then, begin to establish healthy boundaries. And so here's the thing,
as long as you doubt your own worthiness, as long as you doubt your own right to say no,
as long as you are locked into this victim role or the good girl role where you're trying to please
others, it's going to be very difficult for you to establish boundaries. The two biggest reasons that
I see we struggle with upholding these boundaries is because we don't want to disappoint others.
And there's nothing wrong with not wanting to disappoint others. But you have to ask yourself,
is the cost, the sacrifice, the betrayal that possibly could happen in this boundary?
How does that weigh up against not disappointing someone else? And then another reason why we
struggle to uphold these boundaries, it's because we don't want to get into trouble. We are afraid
of what might happen if we stand up for ourselves, or if we say, I am no longer available for this.
This is our maiden energy that comes out where we try to please and we try to be palatable and we
try to be acceptable. So just recognizing that there are real dynamics that are playing out,
and again, a healthy dose of self-compassion and supportive self-talk is going to help you
to begin to create the boundaries that honour you and that keep that power contained in your
bucket. And number 12 is you accept your past experiences for what they are. So often I see,
I know for myself, this is also true, it's very easy to kind of latch onto an
experience or a series of events that happened to you in your past, and to let that define who you
are today. And here, I feel it's so important for us to again, take responsibility for those things
in our lives, which we can change and to take responsibility for those things in our lives that
might be the way that they are because of these patterns and these habituations, and 95% thinking
that we have, and not doing this from a place of judgment or saying you should have known better,
but just saying, I'm taking responsibility for this. I'm stepping into my warrior energy,
that wild woman energy of me that says, fiercely, I unconditionally, , unconditionally
love you no matter what. And from this place, I can start to choose different. So here's a
question that you can ask yourself, and that is, how do you want your past to define you? Who do
you want to be in spite of or maybe even because of your past? The choice really is yours. We all
can take responsibility for those things in our lives that we can control. And then the very final
way that I want to share with you today so that you can embrace yourself and be your authentic
self is to celebrate yourself. Celebrate your achievements. Celebrate how far you have come.
Celebrate what you have overcome. Celebrate your journey. And just celebrate yourself for
who you are. No other reason. You don't have to be afraid to show your true self. You don't
have to hide who you are behind a mask. You can trust that who you are is enough.
There's a beautiful and confident woman inside you, and the invitation is to trust yourself,
to let her out. And I hope these 13 ways in which you can embrace yourself and be your authentic
self will help you to do that. I'd love to know how they landed for you. So let me know in the
comments below any insights or takeaways that you have. If you are new to my channel and you
haven't subscribed yet, then I would love to have you on board. So go on, hit the subscribe button,
and this is all that I have for you this week. I'll see you in the next one.