One of the key aspects of life we focus on during our training here at IMS is Relationships. We all have them. Family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, even our relationship to society and the world at large. And we burn an awful lot of energy tending, maintaining, hopefully strengthening all of them at one time or another. But how much effort are you putting into developing and nourishing your most important relationship? I’m not talking about your spouse or partner, or even your children. I’m talking about the relationship you have with you.
We have within us our truest way of being, what I call our higher self. But it’s not always easy to access that inner you because of emotional patterning that’s been passed down and developed over the years. You want to walk into the room with your chest held high, ready to add your voice to the discussion. But you end up hovering in the background, biting your tongue. Or maybe you’re finding yourself on edge at work, short-tempered with your teammates. Qualities that don’t align with the vision of your higher self. Whatever the case may be, if you feel you’re coming up short of the person you really want to be, it’s likely because your nervous system is trying to protect you from something.
Your nervous system has one job to do: keep you alive. It does that by constantly being on the lookout for danger. What tends to happen, especially during early childhood, is that the nervous system interprets things like mom and dad having an argument over money or a kid at school making fun of your shoes as threats to your very existence. Why? Because those things trigger feelings like fear or anxiety or embarrassment. And the nervous system doesn’t know a disagreement over paying the credit card bills from a saber-toothed lion. It just reacts the only way it knows how: fight, flight, or freeze.
So maybe there’s a creative person living inside of you but somewhere along the way, for whatever reasons, that creativity got stifled. Now, when you try to flex those creative muscles, the nervous system perks up and says, “Not so fast, buddy. This isn’t what we do” and you give up. Or maybe there’s a real leader inside of you but, because of experiences you had as a child, you were taught to believe you should keep your opinions to yourself. You’d love to speak up at the next team meeting, but just the thought of it stirs up uncomfortable feelings and the nervous system says, “Hey, let’s shut this thing down before someone gets hurt.”
In all my years of studying human behavior and the human experience, one of the key qualities I’ve observed in high performing individuals is authenticity. And the mark of a truly authentic person is to be who you are, no matter where you are, what you’re doing, or what other people think. To do that, you must do these four things:
- Know who you want to become. Who is it you want to be when you walk into the room? What could use some tuning up? Is it more confidence or drive? Maybe you want to bring more compassion or acceptance. Whatever the case may be, you first need to get clear on a vision for the person you want to be.
- Train to be that person. Join us for our Power Series and we’ll provide you with the tools, techniques and strategies for getting in touch with and nourishing that inner you who’s dying to get out. But in the meantime, you can start training the nervous system by just acting as if. The old fake it ‘til you make it. Start by observing people who possess the qualities you want for yourself. Notice the behaviors, the characteristics, the attitudes, and start practicing them in your own life.
- Be good with who you are (every step of the journey). This is going to take some time, right? Your nervous system has had years of training and practice at defining how you present yourself to the world. As you go through the transformation to the person you really want to be, remember, it’s not always going to be perfect, there are going to be setbacks, so be sure to embrace that inner you along the way.
- Stop caring what other people think/feel about you. I get it, easier said than done. Especially in today’s world of social media where people get consumed with their number of followers or how many “likes” they get. Not caring what other people think of you can be a tall order. But the true mark of authenticity is being your true self despite what anyone else might think of you.
So get out there and, as the kids say, let your freak flag fly. You do you, no matter what the naysayers or doubters or even your own nervous system has to say about it. Join us for one of our Power Series programs and we’ll get you tuned up to being the person you really want to be. Click HERE to learn more and sign up today!
