#15 13 Ways To Embrace Your Authentic Self and Live As The Real You

The relationship that you have with yourself is the most important one and affects each and every area of your life. When your live as the real you, your whole life improves, you have better relationships, you trust your decisions and you have healthy boundaries.  In this episode you will discover 13 ways to begin to live as the real you.

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About Tertia

I am a certified feminine embodiment coach and embodiment teacher.

In my private coaching and online programs, I teach you to drop from your head into your body so you can take your nervous system out of survive into thrive, clearing the way for you to live a life that fills you with joy and be guided by your inner knowing instead of outside influence.

I trust you found this episode helpful! It would mean the world to me if you could leave the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and share it with your friends. That will help me reach more people. If you have any questions about this episode, I'd love to hear from you, send me a message via the links above.

Transcript

Does your fear of being negatively judged by others stop you from being yourself and makes you feel like you're hiding behind a mask? Living like this for too long will leave you feeling unfulfilled, unsatisfied and even empty. And I know because this used to be me when I started my self growth journey. But today I can tell you there is another way. And in this episode I want to share with you 13 ways in which you can accept yourself, love who you are, land on your own worth, and really be your authentic self. I'm a big fan of Brene Brown's work, and I love how she explains authenticity as a daily practice of letting go who we think we are supposed to be and embracing who we are. So if you're ready to hear how you can do that, then hit the like button and let's get started.
So the very first point is conscious decision. And I feel like I say this in all of my videos because it's true. We need to commit. We need to make a conscious decision for anything in our lives to change. We need to first decide to make it so and so often, even when you don't choose something, even when you don't make a decision about something, when you hold yourself back, that in itself is a decision. In order for you to really embrace your authentic self and love who you are, accept all of yourself, you have to decide that this is now what you are going to apply yourself to. This is what you are going to do. And then number two is you have to get out of autopilot mode. So our brains have this wonderful ability of creating our lives and putting us in a comfort zone to make us efficient so we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. They say that
only about 5% of your thoughts are new and original thoughts. 95% of you is habitual. You have habitual thoughts and habitual patterns which are always playing out. And obviously when we go into autopilot mode, this is what happens. And we go into autopilot mode in so many different ways. It's so easy when someone says something to you immediately there's a response or a trigger, and you always say the same thing. You always end up doing the same thing. It happens maybe when you drive to work, you get to work and you can't even remember the road that you took. Our brains go into autopilot mode all the time, and you have to then make the conscious decision to override that, to start to live more consciously and drop from your mind, from that autopilot ,into your body so that you can access the present moment. This is where you are living in the here and now, and this is where your authentic self can be found in the here and now. And then our next step is to be in integrity with yourself. Now, I always speak of our personal power as being contained in a bucket. And every time that you break your word to yourself, so every time where you dishonour yourself, every time where you betray yourself, every time you say you do something and then you don't, or you say that you won't do something and then you end up doing it, every time that you are breaking your word is as if you are punching holes in this bucket and your personal power leaks out. When you begin to practice being in integrity, what you will find is the instances where you are punching holes in this bucket of yours,
these instances become less and less. So you have more personal power available to you so you can be your true and authentic self. Number four is to practice self-compassion. And this is a biggie. Often we have this misconstrued idea that if we are hard enough on ourselves, then it would help us to be better, do better, perform better. And the opposite is actually true. Every time that you speak to yourself very harshly, every time that you break yourself down, what it does is it actually activates your nervous system. It puts you into fight or flight response, and in fight or flight response, it's not possible for you to really be creative and to tap into your own truth. Because you are in survival mode. Learning to be more self-compassionate through the way in which you speak to yourself is going to help you reparent your inner child.
It's going to help you to love and accept more parts of yourselves because this is really a practice of the way in which you relate to yourself. Number five is to trust yourself and to connect to your inner wisdom. This is something that I'm very passionate about, if you've seen any of my other videos. We have so much truth and wisdom accessible to us. We often think that we can only solve our lives and live our lives through the level of the mind. But our own wisdom is such a powerful guiding force. And when you're really connected into your own wisdom and into your own truth, can you see that automatically you start living more authentically. So when we connect into the wisdom of our bodies, we really have access to all of the data from our mental plane, our physical plane, our emotional plane, and our energy plane. And we are really very well trained in accessing the data from our mental plane. So we are very well versed in using our thoughts to create our reality, using our thoughts and our mind to go after our goals and to push forward. But I feel that we are only using half of our capacity when we do this. So by bringing our body into the equation and by tapping into the data that is available to us from this side, it really empowers you to be more of yourself because of what you will discover and learn to love and accept about yourself. Now the next point is to embrace your vulnerability. This is what I believe. When we are vulnerable with our own truths and we are willing to bring that vulnerability out into our lives, the stronger we land in our own self-worth and in our own confidence.
And when you are strong in your vulnerability like that, you'll find that people don't take advantage of you. And so I think it's important for all of us to change how we see vulnerability. Oftentimes, vulnerability is viewed as a weakness, and in fact, this is not. So to me, vulnerability is an act of courage. It's an act that requires bravery. And our vulnerability is what allows us to really show ourselves. If we walk around fearing that others are going to judge us, of course you're not gonna be vulnerable. You're never going to risk yourself. So by showing who you are, by showing yourself and running the risk of being judged or perceived in a certain way, it does require you to be vulnerable. But through that vulnerability, you also find self-acceptance. And that vulnerability comes from a place of self-worth. And our next point is to pull back the layers of who you are not. And this ties in beautifully with the practice that Brene Brown speaks of, where every day we show up and embrace who we are instead of who we think we are supposed to be. As you really begin to deepen into this practice of showing up as yourself, of dropping the mask and being vulnerable, you're starting to peel back all the layers of who you are not. So often when we betray ourselves, when we dishonour ourselves in that power bucket example that I spoke about, the reason that we do this is because of the conditioning and the life experiences, the lived experiences that we have. And all of these inform us as to who we are and as to how we show up in the world. But so many of those things are external conditions, and they aren't really who we are at our deepest core, at our truth. So by practising to be your whole self by connecting into your body so that you can land on your own truth, it will support you to peel back everything that you are not. Number eight is to stop comparing yourself to others. So this is the thing, whenever you compare yourself to someone else, you are always going to be better off than them or worse off than them. Usually what happens is you forget about those who are worse off than you, and you only measure yourself against the ones who are better than you. Finding yourself then as a failure finding that you aren't enough, that you haven't done enough, that you haven't arrived yet, or that you need to do more or try harder. Now, I think healthy comparison is necessary for us because it helps us to measure how we are doing. It helps us on our own personal growth journey to see, ah, all right, maybe this is something that I can explore. Maybe this is something that you can, that I can try out. However, comparing yourself to all of the filters on social media or all of the B roll that people put, or A roll, what's it called that people put on on their social media, you're just going to end up feeling bad about yourself. You're going to feel bad about who you are. And what this does is going put you in a spiral where you go into a mind loop of overthinking, overanalyzing, remembering and reinforcing all of the narratives and the core wounding that you have around not being good enough, not being worthy. These are the core wounds that I speak about. Not being good enough, being too much, not being lovable, not being worthy, or there's something wrong with you that needs to be fixed. I see that this comparison game, it really is designed to keep us in our maiden energy. So in your maiden energy, what happens is you are possibly betraying yourself for the sake of being popular, for the sake of being liked. Whereas when we step into our mature feminine energy, we are really coming from a place of worthiness, a place of high self-esteem, high self-worth, and high self-love and acceptance. The invitation here for you is to explore where in your life are you moving in maiden energy, where you are betraying yourself or dishonouring yourself in an attempt to be popular or in an attempt to be liked? Where are you judging yourself unfairly? And then where can you step into your mature feminine energy? And this leads me then into the next point, which is to create the distinction between the roles that you're playing in your life. I use many different roles in my work, but the ones that I want to speak about here is the good girl archetype and the wild woman archetype. So how I see this play out in the context of being authentic and really embracing who we are is the good girl is that conditioned role that says, in order for me to be love accepted, to be part of the tribe and to be a good girl, I need to do certain things. I need to make myself more palatable. I need to be seen in a certain way. I can't be too much of this or not enough of that. So we really offering a curated version of ourselves to the world.  In the process though, what happens is our own needs and our desires gets pushed to the side. When we feel nourished, when we feel valued in ourselves, when we honour our own needs and we have the confidence and the courage to speak that out into the world, it fulfills us on such a deep level. And this spreads out into the world and it spreads out into everything that we touch. It spreads out into our community as well. And this is really then the realm of the wild woman. This is that fierce, unconditional self-love. We know all our bumpy spots, we know all our sticky points, and we love ourselves anyway, can you feel the power in that? And then number 10 is to challenge your inner critic. It's very easy to slip into the habit of fighting with yourself, getting angry with yourself, putting yourself down.  Here, I really invite you to call on the archetype of the warrior. When we are constantly in that battle with our inner critic, it really tends to put you in a victim mindset where the way that you view the world, your narrative, your actions, your experience really comes from feeling disempowered and like life is happening to you. So this is a practice that you're gonna find helpful when you have a very overactive and toxic inner critic. Whenever you notice that you have this inner critic, you know, knocking you down and breaking you down, and you are in this overthinking overanalyzing mode, see if you can just take a little step back and notice where do you hear this inner critic from? Is it inside your head or is it outside of your head? Is it going from the inside out or is it going from the outside in? Do you hear it in the front? Is it more at the back? So you really want to kind of give it an identity of its own so that you see it's not who you are, it's not the whole of you. As you collect this data about your inner critic, it empowers you to challenge it. It empowers you as that warrior to not take everything that it says as gospel and as the truth. And then, begin to establish healthy boundaries. And so here's the thing, as long as you doubt your own worthiness, as long as you doubt your own right to say no, as long as you are locked into this victim role or the good girl role where you're trying to please others, it's going to be very difficult for you to establish boundaries. The two biggest reasons that I see we struggle with upholding these boundaries is because we don't want to disappoint others. And there's nothing wrong with not wanting to disappoint others. But you have to ask yourself, is the cost, the sacrifice, the betrayal that possibly could happen in this boundary?
How does that weigh up against not disappointing someone else? And then another reason why we struggle to uphold these boundaries, it's because we don't want to get into trouble. We are afraid of what might happen if we stand up for ourselves, or if we say, I am no longer available for this. This is our maiden energy that comes out where we try to please and we try to be palatable and we try to be acceptable. So just recognizing that there are real dynamics that are playing out, and again, a healthy dose of self-compassion and supportive self-talk is going to help you to begin to create the boundaries that honour you and that keep that power contained in your bucket. And number 12 is you accept your past experiences for what they are. So often I see, I know for myself, this is also true, it's very easy to kind of latch onto an experience or a series of events that happened to you in your past, and to let that define who you are today. And here, I feel it's so important for us to again, take responsibility for those things in our lives, which we can change and to take responsibility for those things in our lives that might be the way that they are because of these patterns and these habituations, and 95% thinking that we have, and not doing this from a place of judgment or saying you should have known better, but just saying, I'm taking responsibility for this. I'm stepping into my warrior energy, that wild woman energy of me that says, fiercely, I unconditionally, unconditionally love you no matter what. And from this place, I can start to choose different. So here's a question that you can ask yourself, and that is, how do you want your past to define you? Who do you want to be in spite of or maybe even because of your past? The choice really is yours. We all can take responsibility for those things in our lives that we can control. And then the very final way that I want to share with you today so that you can embrace yourself and be your authentic self is to celebrate yourself. Celebrate your achievements. Celebrate how far you have come. Celebrate what you have overcome. Celebrate your journey. And just celebrate yourself for who you are. No other reason. You don't have to be afraid to show your true self. You don't have to hide who you are behind a mask. You can trust that who you are is enough. There's a beautiful and confident woman inside you, and the invitation is to trust yourself, to let her out. And I hope these 13 ways in which you can embrace yourself and be your authentic self will help you to do that.