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Living your personal truth is the key to success in your personal development. Knowing what you want is only part of the process of living the life that you dream of. True life transformation begins when you can start to translate what you want into radical honesty in each moment – honesty with yourself and with everyone in your life. In order to harness this radical honesty, we must connect with our deeper self and uncover our personal truth.
When we live an “unconnected life” (that is, unconnected to our deeper self, our core, our personal truth), what we understand to be “our truth” is nothing more than our ego’s petulant desires. When we live a connected life, our deep truth guides us to live an aligned life by providing us with signs and signals along the way. Our job is just to listen to these signals and act accordingly. When we do, our life becomes infinitely more fulfilled.
Our emotional state is one of the best cues that we have about whether or not we are living our personal truth. However, our emotions only reflect a path for our true selves if they are tied to the present moment, independent of any other baggage we might be carrying. When we are aware of the feeling of liking something, we learn it is in alignment with our deeper truth. When we are aware of our feelings of discomfort, we learn that something is off, that we are somehow not in alignment with our deeper truth.
The most important part of connecting with your personal truth is listening – listening to yourself and then adjusting what you are doing to bring yourself into a place of alignment with your truth.
The challenge to trying to live your personal truth occurs when speaking your truth brings loss or pain. Our fearful ego interprets this loss or pain as punishment for a bad or unhealthy choice we have made, and pushes us to revert the change or avoid future ones. The truth is that pain and loss are a natural part of change.
At times, the transformation that comes when you start to live your personal truth includes letting go of the old to make room for things you desire in the here and now. For example, when you speak your needs in a relationship, you risk not having them met. When you are honest with yourself about your work not being satisfying, you may realize that it’s time to look for new work. Your ego responds to the immediate pain of this sort of situation without taking into account the freedom and growth that come next. If you are able to challenge your ego’s fearful, knee-jerk response to transformation, you will be able to create real change for yourself.
Your truth can change everything around you. Learn how to speak and share your heart with the world, even when it is challenging, and tap into the profound strength that comes from this practice. If you need help learning your truth or practicing it, I can help you. My Personal Breakthrough Intensive is a great way to clear a path to living your truth. Click here to learn more.
Connecting with your core is the key to your empowerment through choice. “Make a decision,” is a crippling command for many. When your mind is presenting dozens of different scenarios, how can you know which is the right way to move forward? Learning to connect with your core allows you to tune out the white noise of ego, doubt, and distraction, freeing you to clearly assess your options and make an empowered, conscious choice in any scenario.
When you are more connected to your core, your path forward seems clearer, you feel happier and more at peace, and you are able to have a more positive impact. Think about it this way; would you rather make your decision from a place where you are doing what you think you should do, where you are angry or fearful, or where you are in contact with the highest truest part of yourself? Yep, me too. Below, I have outlined 6 ways to connect with your core.
Most of the time we walk around in the superficial part of our selves – the mask. In fact, many people don’t even know that is where they are living from. You can challenge you mask by asking if what you are thinking or feeling is actually true or if it might be able to be viewed from a different perspective. The work of Byron Katie does a wonderful job of challenging the mask and reconnecting people with a deeper part of themselves.
We might want to pretend that this part of us is not even there at times. The whole reason it is the lower self is that it was shunned and shut down—deemed socially unacceptable—but it needs to have its time as well. When we learn to connect with and safely express our lower self, we gain a ton of energy and are much less likely to leak out our negativity in unconscious ways.
It is a very simple fact that if you do more things you love you feel happier, more fulfilled, and more at peace. The trick is to know if you REALLY love what you are doing or if you have just adopted it because it is socially acceptable. So, pay attention. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about this in his book Flow. This book states that when we are doing things we truly love we experience things like time “flying” because we are so engrossed in what we are doing.
From a beautiful painting to a sublime piece of music, we connect with our core when we are inspired. This effortless way of returning to our core can be used frequently through our days and weeks to nurture this connection.
When we are in integrity with ourselves, we are more connected to the core of who we are. One of the things that I teach in my programs is that there are no methods or rules that guarantee a person fulfillment and success because each one of us needs to create a life and or business that is in alignment with who we are at a deep level and our values help us do this.
The most challenging and most profoundly life-changing strategy for connecting with your core is simply returning to love when you have left it behind. This requires that you are experienced enough with feeling deep love and that you are aware enough to switch gears at will. This is also a central teaching in my work. I believe that as people learn to do this their lives becomes infinitely better.
The most important part of this is remembering to pay attention to where you are coming from so that you can apply these tools and reconnect with your core self. You can also download this pretty infographic and place it somewhere you will see it everyday, to help remind you of your focus.
Marie Kondō, the reigning queen of de-cluttering, says, “The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t.” The same can be said when we talk about getting in touch with the Core and our Personal Truth. Holding onto things you don’t need weighs down the body, the mind, and the spirit, creating hurdles between you and your goals. If we do not clean things out, whether they are our houses, our bodies, or our businesses, things start to fall apart. So, how can we know if it is time to clean house? Listen!
Listen to your emotions. Our emotions are keys to helping us know what needs to go. Sometimes, things we don’t need fall off in a natural, easy way, like the falling of a leaf. Other times, what we do not let go of becomes like a bad smell in the refrigerator – difficult to find and growing more and more unpleasant each day. The ability to stay tuned into your emotions is a powerful tool that can be used to keep all aspect of our lives clean. Becoming familiar with your emotions allows you to recognize what is an ego-driven response and what is a true, deeper sign from your body, and your core, to you. The following are some examples of emotions we might feel and what they might be telling us about the clutter in our lives.
Are you feeling frustrated when you come to work, does the idea of picking up the phone and talking to that “friend” make you grumble like an old mountain man with a hound dog and a shotgun? When things are healthy they are also happy. The key is to figure out whether you need to let go completely or just make some kind of change inside yourself so that you feel more in alignment with what you are doing.
Do you find yourself spacing out while reading that book or unable to complete an essential task? Perhaps you need to pay attention to what you are not doing. What I mean is that sometimes we have a difficult time focusing on something we know we need to do or, under other conditions, might even want to do because we are not attending to other parts of our lives. Have you had fun or spent alone time recently? Doing something you have not been fitting in might balance you out and increase your focus.
Ok, so, sleepy is really just bored –most of the time. It is time to freshen things up! What is the new way that you can engage whatever is boring you to tears? It could be an aspect of your work, it could be a new program that you started. Find out if there is a fresh way of connecting to what you are doing or let it go.
Are your cupboards a mess, do you have too much to do, are you over stimulated by your life? Feeling overwhelmed is the experience of “too much” or even chaos. You can even have too much of really good stuff. So what can you weed out of your life so that you feel less overwhelmed and more at peace on a daily basis?
Learning to listen to your emotions is a tool that you will be able to apply to every aspect of your personal and professional development. Read your emotions as signs of things it’s time to cut on your journey to your core, and you’ll travel a much smoother path. No one knows you better than yourself, so start tuning into the things you are telling yourself.