Living Our Truth
What does it mean to live in your truth? Simply put it means that you are living as your most authentic self. Each day you are doing things that bring you joy and your are living as true to yourself as possible. So how do we get lost at times and deviate from living as our authentic self? This is something I have thought about a lot in the last year thanks to a leadership training that I was part of.
What I discovered when faced with this same question was that there was not one thing but several things that had taken me off my authentic path and lead me down a path that was not me but something others had wanted for me. What I realized was that circumstances and other life events had slowly taken me from what I knew to be my path, and the person I knew I was, and each event had taken me yet another step down this path of someone I was not and never wanted to be. In all honesty I can say that the Pandemic of 2020 had begun this discovery when we were all forced to stop our lives and life as we knew it shut down in March of 2020. That unnatural pause to my daily life made me realize that my life balance has been tipped too much in a direction I never would have allowed myself to go but these life events has slowing started to suck me into a path without realizing it.
Each day during the lockdown I would get up and go down to my home office to work. (I was one of the small number of people who were still able to do my job from home). At the end of each day I would close my office door, walk up the stairs to my family who were ready to have some “normal” family time in the mist of the unknown world we were living in. Even though I was still working, the rest of the busy outside world seemed to stop and I began to realize what valuable things I had taken for granted and lost focus on in the chaos of life. It was during that time that I told myself I didn’t want to fall back into the fog of the chaos once life opened back up. I enjoyed the quiet life at home, relaxing in the evening with my family outside in our back yard. The family movie/game night that we had and I really thought we had all started down a path towards a life of more meaning and less distraction.
It was later that year that my world was turned upside down and I found myself not able to recognize the person I was looking at in the mirror each day. How has things gone so off track to the point that I no longer recognized myself and was questioning who I was? As I decided to try to work through this doubt I began working with a counselor to try to find myself again. Through this work I began to discover things about myself that had allowed me to be diverted off my path and I was learning how to handle them but some of them I was powerless, at the moment, to change for financial reasons. Then, just when I thought my world was starting to normalize again I was faced with another event that turned my life upside down and took me down a road that I had to take to protect my family and my financial stability. It was in that moment that I lost myself once again in the chaos that was my life. I went into survival mode and took each day as it came realizing that I was not living my authentic self. So when did I find myself again? It was a year later when I started down the leadership training journey.
In that journey I realized that there were things we all face that take us away from living our authentic lives as who we are. These things are fear, societies expectations of our roles, family expectations of who we should be, self doubt, competition to have the “perfect” social media life, fear of being rejected for who we really are, work life balance, and financial stress/status. Instead of focusing on who we are and being OK with the rest of the world seeing us we give into these pressures to be accepted or liked that we change who we are to fit what others want us to be or think we should be. The reality is is that we give into these pressures to be accepted and we find ourselves unhappy and unfulfilled because we are living an imposters life and not the life WE want. So people fool themselves into thinking this is what you have to do be to “happy” according to society however the reason we are not happy and unfulfilled is because we have “sold our soul”, if you will, to have what we think we want that will make us happy. This is a recipe for disaster.
The question becomes how do you live your truth and handle the pressures that cause us to be knocked off of our path? The answer is that we have to remain true to ourselves and accept that we may have people leave our lives or that we may have to walk away from some to truly be happy. For me, the reality that I would be disappointing people I cared about was a trap that had kept me in that wrong path because I put my own self worth in what others thought of me and how they viewed me. What I realized was that I was much happier once I stopped trying to not disappoint people because I was unhappy that I was disappointing myself. Life didn’t get easier but is was easier to deal with the difficult moments when I was living my truth because I knew I was living as my authentic self.
I do not fit the image one would expect of someone in my profession. I am a professional with ethics and integrity but I have multi colored hair and dress professionally as I am comfortable not the “uniform” that I was raised to wear to be respected and accepted. There are still moments that I find myself hearing “Bob”, that is the name I have for the little guy of self doubt that tries to push me back off my path, and I start to have those moments of life might be easier if I ….. Let’s face it, no one is perfect and we all have those moments of self doubt but I then tell him to shut up and remind myself of what I have now that is too valuable to loose again. My confidence in myself and my inner peace is worth more to my own mental health and wellness than anything that “Bob” tries to get me to leave my path for. At the end of my leadership training journey, we were each asked to write what came to mind when we thought of a person and were asked to write them down. Those little pieces of paper sit on my desk because they are the proof that people know me for who I truly am. Those little pieces of paper contain words like, “such a genuine human”, “you are authentic”, “kind”, “easy to talk to”, “a kind leader” and others that remind me that in the 9 months of that journey there were 12 people who saw me in my truth and liked me for me.
Life is challenging and for those who are afraid to live in their truth it can be very unhappy and unfulfilling. We all want to be accepted and live a life of purpose but it is easier than we think to be diverted off of our truth path in life by what other people want or to try to fit an image that we think is what will make us acceptable in society. What we do not realize is the mental toll this places on each of us and the strain it can place on our families and friends because if we are not true to ourselves then how can we be true to the people we love and care about the most? Isn’t that enough to encourage us to be brave and live in our truth?