Showing Up for Yourself

Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 141

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A little question to ponder on this week. How different would your life be if you were not afraid of showing up for yourself?

What would be different? What would it look like? What thing have you been avoiding that actually might be something that you could make a start on? Quite often we protect ourselves by trying to stay small, thinking that if we can just shrink ourselves enough, we're not going to get hurt, we're not going to feel some feelings that are uncomfortable, we're not going to say a whole load of unpleasant things to ourselves.

But the truth is that that's not how our brains work when we're shrinking ourselves and being a less-than-true version of ourselves, because we're trying not to inconvenience other people and trying to avoid anything that might feel a little bit uncomfortable for ourselves, what it does is it alerts your brain that you personally, the things that you've got going on in your personality, your makeup, that that's a problem, that that's a danger, that becomes the most important thing that your brain can focus on; that something about you is fundamentally wrong and we need to try and get away from it.

But of course, you can't get away from yourself. And so your brain goes on this wild loop, trying to suffocate all of the things about you that make you the most you.

And this is all really, really human. This is basic survival stuff that we have learned, but it is learned, it's not hardwiring, it's not concrete and cement that we can't break through. It's things that have come up in our past for many reasons, including socialisation, that mean that we have been taught that the smaller and the less of an inconvenience we can be, the more likely we are to be liked.

I wonder what ways you can try to unlearn some of this and instead teach yourself things that might be more fulfilling, safer, and stabilising if you were a bit more yourself. Because that means that you're trying to teach your brain that actually being you is not a danger and this is just something that you can explore as gently as you like.

If you stopped seeing yourself as being risky, what could it be? It could be wearing something that you think you are nervous about, what do I look like when I'm wearing this? Am I too old for it? Is this too loud? Is this going to draw too much attention to me? Is it applying for a job that you don't think you've that you've got enough qualifications for putting the application in for Is it asking someone if they want to hang out when you haven't don't feel like maybe you've been invited to something or they haven't been reaching out to you and actually you want to spend some time with them? What are the little ways and the big ways in your life that you can start to remind yourself that you can reach out and be the version of you that has your wants and needs, and that no one is going to die? That's basically what we're trying to teach our brain, you can do things and no one's gonna die.

It doesn't mean you're always going to get the stuff. But what it does is start to build this safety mechanism in your brain, which realises that when we take these kinds of risks, we are not always being met with immediate danger as soon as we put ourselves out there.

And this really is the difference between performing confidence and practising self-trust. It's building these small moments which build bigger dreams for us.

So this week your question to ponder on is where have you been hiding? And in the smallest possible ways, where might you like to start to begin to show up for yourself and see what can snowball from there?

I'd love to hear how this works out for you and I'll speak to you next week.

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