Authentic Conversations Make a Difference

Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable. Be honest and transparent anyway.  ~ Mother Theresa

Having authentic conversations can be tough. Not only is it challenging, it requires you to be vulnerable and transparent.

Showing your vulnerable side may seem scarier than any Halloween Monster could ever be. But if you truly want to make a difference in your life and the lives of the people who matter to you, you have to be willing to open yourself up to having them.

What is an authentic conversation? It’s not necessarily what you think it is. Rather than having authentic conversations, here’s what we are trained to do:

  • Defend, justify, and protect our opinions and positions at all costs
  • Be nice – at least on the surface
  • Compartmentalize and keep our deepest feelings suppressed because expressing them is “inappropriate”
  • Judge and label each other’s feelings and opinions as “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”
  • Believe that telling the truth will hurt others when we are really afraid of backlash

Many of us have held back our feelings and our truth for so long, even from ourselves, that we have to dig deep to uncover what we are truly feeling.

Doing the work to dig deep may feel yucky and messy. So what? Your payoff for doing it is that it will make a huge and permanent difference in your ability to have authentic conversations that lead to living a bad-ass sexy life.

How do you dig? Begin by noticing your thoughts and reactions. Objectively noticing how you feel about what happens in your life starts the process of dealing authentically with what you are feeling.

Something happens and you feel some way about it. You might feel hurt, angry, or resentful. You may feel slighted, invalidated, or made wrong. 

Accept that you feel what you feel. Accept that what you feel is real and okay, even if it’s not what the other person intended you to feel. Accept that whoever you are in conversation with feels what they feel. Accept that it’s real and okay for them, even if it’s not how you intended them to feel.

Acknowledging the truth of your experience is a huge relief. To share your experience without fear of judgment gives you clarity and helps you let go of pain, free yourself from the past, and remodel your life in that area.

Authentic conversations become possible when each of you can be vulnerable and share your experiences knowing that you both are listening from a desire to understand the experience of the other. When we truly “see” each other, love and affinity are restored.

How ready are you to start having authentic conversations with the people in your life? Are you willing to start by getting real with yourself about what’s working in your life and what isn’t? Are you willing to look at places where you are being true to yourself and where you are not? Are you willing to take actions consistent with your own inner knowing about what’s true for you?

When you are, you will find it hard to tolerate anything other than authentic conversations, no matter how tough or challenging they may be. You will see a definite shift in the quality of your life. What price are you willing to pay for that?

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Have you been avoiding getting real with yourself or someone else? Share your thoughts in the comments.