“I learn what I think as I hear myself speak.” - Daryl Bem
Topics which we discuss today are: Actualisation, Integration, Authenticity, Integrity, Coherence, Shadow Work and Interroception
Just Be Like This Today: “Today I am speaking my truth”
This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about personal development, wellness and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.
Say the wrong thing…
I don’t mean give yourself a license to be an asshole —the world is already full of assholes who say unnecessary things all the time, without which social media would not exist. I am talking about the way you bite your tongue to ‘keep the peace’, the learned habit you have of saying the ‘proper’ thing because that is how you want to be percieved, or how you want to see yourself, but in doing so, you fail to be authentic or courageous, and you act out of integrity.
I am talking about being prepared to say the ‘wrong’ thing, for a right reason.
Authenticity, ironically, requires practice. Authenticity is about being yourself, but the reality is that we grew up as kids inheriting the language and the norms of our families. Later we adapt to the cultural language and norms of our school or church, then our college and later our workplace or our marriage. Social media and the internet have given us a culture of moral and language policing, with very high costs for saying the wrong thing. We have a learned behaviour that to be accepted means we have to speak and behave in certain ways. This is always going to be necessary to a point because otherwise, we would have lawless chaos. But the limit to this has to be self-expression and self-actualisation, otherwise, what are we doing here at all? But, by definition, we do not have user manuals for how to be ourselves, especially in a changing, shifting world that is becoming harder to belong to.
A community, or a family, or a society, or a relationship, needs to be homogenous to a degree, for coherence. But if there is too much sameness and conformity, we, that is neither the individual nor the whole, do not grow. You should value belonging to a community, or a family or a relationship, but then you should also be valued in that, and the goal of any of these social arrangements has to be actualisation, as well as integration, for the individual and the whole.
Actualisation is how you become you. Actualisation does not work without Integration. Actualisation is about the skills, persona, gifts and interests you pursue growth through, including your craft and calling. But these each require integration into your nervous system, your psychology, your language, your lifestyle and the environments, both physical and social, that you inhabit.
That means that Authenticity requires practice. Finding your voice, especially if it means courting criticism and the risk of conflict, is a part of that practice. No one knows the right thing to say, or how to say it, especially now. The first essential step is to speak your truth to yourself. Just say the wrong thing, get it out, and then you can start to figure out how to let that truth live in the world.
SAY THE WRONG THING Talk less, and so say what matters. Say the wrong thing, so that your truth can be heard out loud. —So that you can stand to be corrected, so that you can learn what you think as you hear yourself speak. Love out loud, from the rooftops of an empty page. Speak your truth, and live your truth while you speak your words.
HOW TO UPGRADE YOUR PRACTICE
Don’t expect to get your language and your expression right ‘first time’. Actualisation works by iteration—one step at a time.
First, you allow yourself to think your whole thought, feel your whole feeling, and accept that it feels uncomfortable and makes you question your own character. This will happen. Just sit with it. Then you can write it privately. And then you can begin to try and find better language.
The key is always to understand what you are feeling and why. None of us get taught how to do this effectively.
INTEROCEPTION
Interoception is also called ‘Self Affect Labelling’. Simply, it means describing your feelings and thoughts to yourself, as objectively as you can, and this is how to do it.
Describe it.
Rate it.
Process it.
This practice develops discernment and self-regulation capacity to observe your own feelings, process them and act from a place of empowerment, not simply react.
You will get triggered. That is what it means to be a human being, to have a heart, and to care about something. Your psychology and your nervous system have parts that are operating partially or completely outside of your full awareness. This and nothing more, is what is meant by Shadow.
Describing it: When you feel angry, frustrated, aroused, or turned off, it always means there is truth to be looked at and sometimes something to be done. The best way to decide what those two things are and not invite regret or more internal conflict is by simply saying to yourself: “This is what anger feels like. I am angry.” If you do not have the right words for it, make a note somewhere to explore this and sit with it properly later. If it keeps coming up, the invitation is to integrate better language.
Rating it: Your reactive self is notoriously subjective. When you are aroused or triggered in some way, your critical thinking and objective reasoning are offline. To introduce objectivity and perspective, give it a rating of the intensity you feel between 1 and 5, and see if you can describe whether it feels more like arousal or withdrawal.
Processing it: Now you have to decide what to do. Processing it can be as simple as breathing or as challenging as doing something difficult in the world. This does not require immediate action, this just defines your intention. Give yourself time to work out what the appropriate action should be.
We never get taught the skill of how to express ourselves and say complex things, so we learn a protocol of speech and behaviour that we integrate, which is not authentic to ourselves and we shift the conflict from external to internal.
If your priority is to avoid conflict, you will simply allow it to persist within you. Things that remain unsaid, can never be heard and can never be changed.
PROGRESSIVE EXPRESSION
This practice is an essential part of what is meant by Shadow Integration and Processing. The objective here is Coherence.
When you begin to accept the contradiction inside you, and let it out, you are on your way to becoming your own full self. Everyone is a contradiction inside, everyone has a shadow, and everyone has inconvenient feelings. But not everyone is honest.
And because so few of us practice this form of radical honesty, we don’t have good language or skills to articulate what we feel and package that in a way that can be heard.
Allow it.
Say it.
Work it out.
This practice allows you to transmute your feelings and thoughts into understanding that can be communicated and prioritised into appropriate action. Coherence.
Allowing it: You first have to be vulnerable. You have to say it badly at first and then have the courage sit like a leader or parent with yourself and make breathing room for whatever that truth is. Allow yourself to feel angry, judgemental, unforgiving, frustrated. Your feelings are your truth! You don’t have to vent all of that, and there still has to be a moderation in how you express that to other people, but you get to do that too with authenticity and integrity, by allowing the contradiction and the inconvenient feeling in yourself.
Saying it: Journal it. Try the One Voice at a Time practice if you find yourself talking over yourself. You have to have one conversation at a time with yourself. You have to listen to one voice at a time, and let it speak, without your voices of judgement and self-protection shaming the voice of your inner child or the soft animal in you.
Working it out: The more you practice speaking and journaling your truth, the better your own articulation and language of your vulnerabilities will be. Try it out on a trusted friend, or even say it badly to chatGPT and let that tool help you articulate your feelings in a more coherent way. Then you can properly speak your truth, without causing yourself more and other unnecessary harm. Sometimes you have to sit with it for a while, find better language and express it in totally different ways. Movement helps. Go for a walk or a run, and listen to music. Paint, draw. Find a way that works for you.
To really work it out, will always come down to how self-aware or radically honest, you can be with yourself about your ‘why’—the reason you feel the way you do, your ‘because’. This is how you find out who you are, what about yourself you would like to work on, and what you cannot change.
This is how you practice your authenticity and align with your integrity.
Just be like this today: “Today I am allowing myself to speak the whole truth inside me.”
If you need guidance on deepening and integrating these practices, book a free session with me, it will be an investment in yourself.
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Love this! I definitely feel like I’m being inauthentic sometimes particularly when it comes to topics such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and things of that woke ilk at work. Then again I suppose that’s the aim of that ideology, to weaponise your shame against you. It’s a struggle to find the right language to counter it without sounding like an uncompassionate asshole but there are also real consequences for getting it wrong in the workplace.