What does it mean to speak your truth, and how do you do it without judging, blaming, and criticizing the other person?
I never truly understood the sheer power of my voice until the day it slipped away from me. That unexpected quietness illuminated something profound within me—the realization of how our genuine voices can shape our world and the connections we hold dear. In today’s episode, consider this your personal invitation into the sacred realm of heartfelt communication.
We uncover the differences between those conversations that surface from our egos and those that come straight from the heart. I’m eager to share some deeply personal insights on how embracing our truths can welcome others into our universe, creating bonds that touch our souls. This journey isn’t about assigning blame; it’s about extending a warm embrace.
Let's peel back the layers of our interactions and reveal the intricate dance of sharing the full spectrum of our truth, from emotions to the very sensations that ripple through us. Understand the profound intimacy that comes when we allow ourselves to see and truly be seen by another.
If you know you struggle to ask for what you want or speak up with you need support, then this month's virtual breathwork class is for you. We will breathe on April 28th @7:30pm EST and a recording will be available for a limited time afterwards. The theme is ' Reclaiming Your Voice'. Register here.
Let's Connect.
Free guide: 5 ways to find Calm: Get the guide here
Come find me on Instagram: @findherwildcoaching
Check out my website and my offerings here
What does it mean to speak your truth, and how do you do it without judging, blaming, and criticizing the other person?
I never truly understood the sheer power of my voice until the day it slipped away from me. That unexpected quietness illuminated something profound within me—the realization of how our genuine voices can shape our world and the connections we hold dear. In today’s episode, consider this your personal invitation into the sacred realm of heartfelt communication.
We uncover the differences between those conversations that surface from our egos and those that come straight from the heart. I’m eager to share some deeply personal insights on how embracing our truths can welcome others into our universe, creating bonds that touch our souls. This journey isn’t about assigning blame; it’s about extending a warm embrace.
Let's peel back the layers of our interactions and reveal the intricate dance of sharing the full spectrum of our truth, from emotions to the very sensations that ripple through us. Understand the profound intimacy that comes when we allow ourselves to see and truly be seen by another.
If you know you struggle to ask for what you want or speak up with you need support, then this month's virtual breathwork class is for you. We will breathe on April 28th @7:30pm EST and a recording will be available for a limited time afterwards. The theme is ' Reclaiming Your Voice'. Register here.
Let's Connect.
Free guide: 5 ways to find Calm: Get the guide here
Come find me on Instagram: @findherwildcoaching
Check out my website and my offerings here
Hi, my name is Bridget and this is my podcast, wake Up and Thrive. My intention for this space is to help women around the world live more awake, aligned and truly alive. I believe wholeheartedly that we are designed to live, feel and experience the full range that life has to offer, and in doing so, we can live fully turned on in all areas. My story began with sobriety and has since been an initiation into rediscovering parts of myself that I forgot about or had abandoned. Learning to reclaim all of who I am has been the greatest gift of living awake, and together we will go on a journey of helping you to do the same. You can expect to learn practical tools to help you connect deeper to yourself, your purpose and those in your life. All you need is an open heart and an open mind. So if you're ready, it's time. It's time to wake up and thrive.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome back to another episode of Wake Up and Thrive. My name is Bridget and I am your host. If you are new to the space, this podcast, if you're new to me and my coaching world, I just want to say a big heartfelt hello and welcome. So grateful that you found your way into the space. I really believe, because you followed that nudge, you hit play, you checked out my services and my voice, you listened to my voice. I really believe there's a message in here for you and I'm just celebrating you, celebrating you for following that nudge. For those of you that are recurring listeners, you already know how I feel about you, absolutely love you and I'm so grateful that there's a million things in this world you could be doing right now. And for some reason, for somehow, you hit play and you're tuning in with me and I'm just so grateful. I really treasure this time together. I treasure when I put the podcast out and I hear from all of you what's landing, what's resonating. Yeah, it's just really good stuff. So all that to say.
Speaker 2:If I sound a little bit different, it's because I'm on the tail end of losing my voice for six days and y'all I don't know if you know me personally or you just gathered this from listening to me, but I got a lot to say. I'm a talker. I literally talk for a living. So to not talk, not be able to ask for what I needed, tell people how I wanted certain things done, or what I would love to see from them, or experience from them, was really hard, really hard. And this was like as far as you know, obviously there were no heartfelt conversations going on during this time but also just like ordering food I couldn't literally couldn't order food. It hurt me to speak. So it was just a really humbling experience and, as I was reflecting on it, it really made me realize how much I value and appreciate the times where I did find my voice and I could use my voice to really explain and describe and illustrate my experience. Right To also ask for what I needed or desired. And, yeah, it was like this real life example of, like whoa, this is what it feels like, right?
Speaker 2:We've all experienced this on some levels, maybe not physically you haven't maybe physically lost your voice, but so often we don't say the thing that's true for us because we're afraid of how it's going to come across. We don't want to offend somebody, we don't want to be vulnerable, we don't want people to see our whole experience. There's so many reasons, or maybe we're just disconnected, maybe we just don't have the awareness of what's actually going on. And so what do we do Instead? We either shut down and don't communicate at all, or what I tend to see is we communicate, but we communicate in a way that deepens disconnection instead of bridging connection and calling people into our experience. So how do we do that? How do we call people into our experience? And if you've heard past episodes, you've heard me talk about ego-led communication and heart-led communication, and that's a little bit of what we're talking about.
Speaker 2:I want to talk about it from the perspective of what does it mean to share your truth? I hear this term thrown around a lot. I even will have clients come to me and say I was just sharing my truth and they weren't listening to me, and I'm always like, okay, tell me exactly how you were sharing your truth, and then I get a little bit more insight into exactly why they got the reaction that they got. Okay, so I just want to share some of the observations I've had. Again, this is with my clients, but this is also with my own life.
Speaker 2:Like I used to pride myself on speaking up and calling people out right, and I would say I'm speaking my truth, like I'm just being honest. Don't you want me to be honest? I'm dealing with this right now with my teenager. Don't you just want me to be honest? Listen, being honest is great if you're being honest about your experience. You can't be honest about someone else's experience because you don't fully understand their experience. You're not in their experience. You can be honest about the impact it's having on you, but that's not how we talk. We talk just about we call it honesty and we're really just calling people out. I mean, that's what I did for ages, and I don't want to call people out anymore. It feels icky, it doesn't create the relationships I want, it doesn't create the trust I want and it doesn't get me what I need and what I'm desiring right. So, instead of calling people out, I really want to call them in. I want to call them into my experience. But that requires two really important ingredients that we're going to talk about here that are necessary in order to fully share your truth, and so, before we dive into the two ingredients, let's just talk about why this is even important. What do you gain from speaking your truth about, like why this is even important? What do you gain, right, from speaking your truth?
Speaker 2:A lot of times, I think we forget that the only people we really want to speak our truth to are relationships that matter, either out of necessity right like it's a boss or they really are important to us, even if they're triggering a shit. They're important relationships that we value, and so that's when we want to speak our truth. When it's just somebody being nasty or rude, you know, and we're not really too concerned with the relationship. I don't necessarily call that speaking your truth. I just call that like setting a boundary, and if you need more information on a boundary, you can go back and listen to the very previous episode right before this. It's got some great information.
Speaker 2:But what I want to really talk about is sharing your truth. Okay, and your truth is your entire experience, and so your experience does not just include the stories and the judgments or your observations. Your experience also includes the felt sensations coming up in your body, like I'm feeling a knot in my stomach, my heart is racing, my palms are getting sweaty, the emotions you're experiencing. I'm feeling hurt, I'm feeling scared, I'm feeling shame, I'm feeling sad, and then also the behaviors that you default to when you're in this state, when you're thinking these thoughts and feeling this way. We don't share that. Most of us just share part of our truth, the stories, right, the judgments, and we label that as our truth. But I want you to write this down your truth is your entire experience. That's your truth and that's why I say not everybody is privy to our truth. Your entire experience, that's your truth and that's why I say not everybody is privy to our truth or our experience.
Speaker 2:But these are for the relationships that do matter, that you do want to be heard in. You want them to really understand your perspective. This information is going to be incredibly helpful for those relationships. So some reasons why this is important Well, first of all, you learn more about the people in your life. Right, as we start to get better at speaking our truth, we also get better at receiving other people's truth, because what I've found right now is, quite literally, there's no room for both experiences. Many times when somebody like, if I say, hey, my feelings were hurt, blah, blah, blah, and this other person says, well, that wasn't my intention. This was my experience. I take his or her experience to mean that mine is wrong, mine can't be wrong. Right, if there's only room for one experience, someone has to be wrong. And what I would invite you to look at is, when we talk about our experience, there's your experience, there's their experience and then there's, objectively, what happened. When we can start to make room and space for both, we actually start to really learn about the other people.
Speaker 2:If I had a conversation with you today and I just allowed you to talk and maybe you shared some opinions or judgments or whatever it is, some things that trigger you, I would walk away learning about your values, your beliefs, your standards, your desires, your needs, your love language. I would learn so much about you, so much about you. But the thing is is people aren't listening to learn. We are listening to defend, to be right, to win right, because there's only space for one experience and, of course, we want it to be ours, and so we take people's words as wrong and then we just stop there and we miss so many opportunities to go deeper. I have learned so much from people sharing things that are really hard to hear. They can absolutely be hard to hear and they can be uncomfortable, but I ultimately, again, if it's a relationship that matters, I walk away learning a lot, like I'm specifically thinking of so many examples now with my husband, like I learn a lot about him and my kids and yeah, so that's the first reason you learn about the people in your life.
Speaker 2:Secondly, when you start to communicate your real truth, you're going to let people really see you and remember I define intimacy as into me, you see. So, especially for those of you that often feel misunderstood, I would ask you are you actually sharing your whole experience? Are you sharing your whole truth? Are you sharing it from a place of? This is what's coming up for me. Look at me. Here's a part of me I want you to see. Or are you sharing it from a place of? This is what you're doing wrong. I need you to stop doing this. I don't know if you've ever been the recipient of that. I mean, I have recently and I'll tell you right now. I'm not going to reach out to this friend to go to lunch anymore because it's not even with all the tools in my tool belt. It's freaking exhausting to sit in a conversation like that. So when you can learn to really speak your truth and speak it from a place of an open heart, you do end up creating a lot more intimacy, which is what I think a lot of us are missing, and it's what we want.
Speaker 2:And then, finally, the third thing is when we take someone else's experience as a threat, what quite literally happens? Our brain doesn't know whether it's like a real threat, like a bear or saber-toothed tiger, or it's an imaginary threat. When we perceive anything as a threat, big or small, our body and our nervous system, it does things Physiologically. For example, our ears cannot pick up background noise I don't know if you know that, but they really focus just on the forefront sounds. Your eyes narrow, like literally your view narrows, which is really interesting to think about. Yeah, so I mean, I love that it's not a metaphor, because it's physiologically what actually happens. We get tunnel vision. We only see a small aspect of the experience. Right, it's an intelligent part of our body. It's so that we can focus on the threat and the danger ahead of us and not get pulled out of that experience or distracted or anything like that. But also our perspective is narrowed. So until we're really able to receive other people's experience and really understand ours. We're walking around with such a limited view of the world. Like I always say, we have two eyes, two ears and a brain. I mean, for the amount of sensory input that's available to us, we're only taking in a small portion of what's actually going on. So we need this is the third benefit we need other people's truth in order for us to, like, broaden, quite literally, the perspective that we have on the world around us, right? So it is really important to learn to speak your truth.
Speaker 2:So now let's jump into the two main ingredients needed to share your truth with an open heart. So I want to start, in case you've taken like a past course with me, even my most recent communication framework. I've started to. Really, I love the, I love the teachings out there. I love what the relationship experts share about how to communicate. Right, we want to use I language and not you language. I want to tell them how we're feeling and what we're needing. I think that's amazing and important, but I want to break it down a little bit further and give you a different. I want to give you some different language that I think is a little bit less robotic, more real, more authentic and can also, I think, share with you how easy this could be if you want to try, if you want to lean into this.
Speaker 2:So the first ingredient is ownership when we're communicating, the reason we communicate, I statements is because we are owning. Remember, our truth is our experience, so we have to own it, and that means own the felt sensations coming up, the emotions coming up, the stories coming up, the judgments we're believing right now, even the actions that we're doing, like I see so many people. It makes me want to cringe. They blame their like oh, I hung up because you were rude. Well, no, you hung up because the experience was really uncomfortable for you and you didn't have language to communicate that. That's why you hung up.
Speaker 2:Right, we don't communicate, we communicate in a blaming and shaming way and we never end up getting the results. We always feel misunderstood, and so this is why it has to really start with ownership, and so this language might be I've noticed this is coming up for me when you say that, or I'm trying to think of another way that I'd love to say this sometimes yeah, I'm really wanting, this is what I would love to experience in our marriage, in our friendship. I don't know what do you think? These are all like I'm owning it. I'm not coming to the table and saying you need to stop doing this, or I'm so sick and tired of when you say this it's not going to fly anymore. That's the way we talk and people are just left on the defense because you're attacking them.
Speaker 2:So the first ingredient is ownership. The second ingredient, when you're communicating or sharing your truth, is impact. You want to share the impact Because, listen, although people cannot jump into our body and create an emotional experience, their words, their actions, their behaviors, they do have an impact on us. Okay. So if we're owning it, we're owning the impact, because a lot of times the impact they're having is based on past experiences. Okay.
Speaker 2:But if this is someone, again a relationship that matters. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I would want to know if I'm saying something that's having a negative impact on someone. I really would want to know that and most likely I would also change that. But I don't want to hear it from this place of I'm wrong, because then I go into shame, blame spiral, like it's just I don't know, it's just feels icky. So I love it when people can come, they can tell me that what I'm doing is not working for them. But I should walk away from the conversation, learning more about the person who's sharing the truth. Okay, let me say that again. One way to discern whether you're sharing the impact or not is to ask yourself okay, I'm about to share something. Is this person going to walk away knowing and understanding me on a deeper level? If they're not, then you are most likely, first of all, not owning the experience, much less sharing it, and you're not sharing the impact. You're just sharing what they did or what you saw, and that usually falls on deaf ears.
Speaker 2:Okay, so here's another example. This just recently happened in my marriage. So my husband works for a bank and he gets invited to a lot of these fancy work events and I'll be honest, it's not really my jam, but I go. I mean, it's usually good food, good music, we get to get dressed up, it's usually fine. But I was coming off of an already hard week or a week where I was feeling disconnected from him, and so I said something like your work parties are so dumb or I don't wanna go, or I was like you never, I think I remember saying you never pay attention to me at these things. You're always distracted, right? Those little sneaky words creeping in, and it didn't go well. He was very defensive, of course, and you know it. Just, it ended up yeah, not good, not good.
Speaker 2:What I want you to see here is, first of all, I was not sharing my truth, I was simply sharing my judgments. Right, I didn't share anything about what was coming up in my body or anything about how I show up at these parties and I don't. You know that feels out of integrity with me. I didn't share any of it. So if I was going to share and I also didn't share the impact of how he was showing up, I just criticized him. I said you're always distracted, so and again, sorry, back to back.
Speaker 2:Paul would not walk away from that comment. Understanding me more, I mean, he might understand I don't like work parties, but that's even like surface level. He doesn't act because I actually don't mind work parties. So here is what sharing my truth would actually sound like. Hey, babe, I know you have a party this Friday and I want to be able to show up, but I notice when we're at these events, all of my insecurities come up right, and I'd rather just spend alone time with you at home. That's it. That's my whole truth. I'm owning it. I'm not saying he did anything wrong. I'm sharing the impact, right, the impact of these events, what it has for me, what comes up.
Speaker 2:I could have even gone a little deeper, been a little more descriptive, but I think even that it's like, oh my gosh, you guys, it's not that complicated, it really is not. And if you I hope, as you're hearing it described this way you're like, yeah, why don't we talk about this, right? So my invitation for you guys is the next time you're in communication with anybody whether it's a client, a possible business partner, a spouse, a kid, anything, notice, if you feel a little triggered or you feel like you'll notice in your body something will sort of you'll feel like a I don't know, like a slight hit or tinge or something, and notice it and, at the very least, just share that Like, just say, oh, like I'll put my hand on where it hurts and I'll be like that didn't land very well, right, I'll put my hand on my heart or I'll just say, okay, I'm feeling really activated right now. Can I just take a break and we'll come back to this and start there. Just start responding and sharing the physical sensations, because I really have found more success when I share that versus my judgments or my stories. Even if I'm trying so hard to use I language, I think we still can get wrapped up in stories. So just start with sharing your physical sensations. See how the other person responds, see how more receptive they are, how open they are to your experience when we approach it that way. Okay, so remember speaking your truth. It has to include ownership and impact, and when we do that, we allow more people to see us, we learn more about ourselves, we learn more about other people and we create the intimate relationships that so many of us want.
Speaker 2:That is all I have for you guys today, and I want to just remind you that April 28th at 7.30 PM, eastern Standard Time, is going to be my next virtual breathwork class. You can go in the show notes and register today. I tell all of my clients, just like you're going to the gym, you have to pre-schedule your classes so that you get the motivation to go there. If you've heard me talk about breathwork in the past, or maybe you're brand new to this and you just are somebody that struggles to get out of your story, out of your head. You really wanna start to connect to your desires and needs so that you can even communicate it or share it.
Speaker 2:Breathwork is gonna be an incredibly powerful tool for you. It is not your typical slow form, short form breathwork. It is a whole journey. It's a 30 minute very activating, very transforming breath that it really allows you to bypass the mind and get to the heart of what's going on for you. So I want to invite you. It's only $27. You can register below, and the theme for this month is ironically but not, it's reclaiming your voice. So we're going to be reclaiming our voice during the session and really just pulling back where we have lost our voice or forgotten that we had a voice and really, yeah, call that back so that we can reclaim it, so that we can share our truth, bring people into our experience and create intimate relationships. So that's all I have for you guys today. If you liked it, make sure you share it and tag me or leave a review. You can rate it or send it to a family or friend. I would be so grateful and with that, I will see you guys next week.