Unfiltered: Speak Up, Take Up Space & Use Your Voice
You’re going to piss some people off when you start being more vocal with your opinions. But what’s the alternative? Showing up as a shadow of yourself to please people you don’t even like?
We are talking all about being unfiltered and true to yourself today. Life right now, amidst this pandemic/quarantine, is the perfect time to start stepping into the truest version of yourself. No one is doing things perfectly, and we are all trying to figure out what could be next for us. What if now was the exact moment you chose to start that podcast? Or build that business you’ve been talking about? Have the impact on this world you’ve only dreamed about?! Because the thing is, we were NEVER designed to live a small life.
Grab a coffee, your favourite journal and a pen to take notes, because today we are covering:
- The importance of not watering yourself down to make other people comfortable
- Living your biggest dreams and wildest vision without fear or hesitation
- Letting go of the idea that other people’s opinions matter
- And so much more&##8230;
Look for references from today’s episodes? Find them all here:
Episode 152:[BIZ TIPS] Harness Your Creativity: Switching From Consumer to Creator
Episode 108: How to Set Boundaries: The Key to Healthy Relationships
Are you ready? Get listening right away by clicking the link above, or if you’re more in the mood to read today keep scrolling for the full transcription of today’s episode! Let’s do this!
Hey, welcome back to the Room to Grow podcast. Emily here and today we’re going to be talking a little bit about speaking up more and really voicing your opinion, and why right now, there’s actually been a better time to do that, might seem like the opposite, but I promise I have reason to back this up. Okay, and before we dive into that, I did want to remind you that the Speak Your Truth Academy, my brand new program is opening the doors on Tuesday, May 19. I do have a waitlist set up that you can jump on to. This program is going to be unlike anything I’ve ever offered before, a ton of personal coaching from me within the context of a small group as well, super supportive, kind of like a mastermind and all the details are going to be coming out shortly. I’m really, really excited about this, I cannot wait to share the details. If you want to be the first to know, make sure to jump on the waitlist there and I’ll also be giving information specifically to the waitlist that won’t be available anywhere else either, bonuses and all that type of stuff. You can jump over there or go to roomtogrowpodcast.com.
Okay, so let’s get into this. I’m just gonna be straight up with you, you’re definitely going to piss some people off when you start being more vocal with your opinions. This is why a lot of us aren’t vocal with our opinions. This is why so many of us just kind of keep the peace and fly under the radar a little bit and stay quiet and go along with things that we don’t necessarily agree with for the sake of being agreeable. The reason why this is such a problem is because we end up being resentful, we end up getting very resentful of the people around us that we are not speaking our truth to and we end up being resentful of ourselves for not speaking up for not standing up for what we believe in. That affects us in far more ways than we even realize.
When it comes time to actually speak up, you might piss some people off, but you want that to happen because you also have to repel people to make room for the ones who are right for you too. There are risks with that just like anything else, but what’s the alternative? Otherwise, you’re simply showing up as a shadow of yourself to please people that you don’t even necessarily like. If we’re talking from a business standpoint, I see this so often in business where people are afraid to voice their opinions, because they’re afraid that they’ll lose customers. Well, if you’re voicing your opinions, and those people don’t line up with your opinions anyway, they were probably never going to buy from you in the first place. If they were going to buy from you, were they really going to be a good fit. I would rather turn away the people who aren’t going to be the right fit in order to make room for the ones who are, and that applies just as much in our personal lives as it does in our professional lives.
I’ve always thought of myself as unfiltered, very unfiltered. I am direct to the point of unintentionally offending people. I step on toes sometimes, I create some waves when I don’t even necessarily intend to, and the people closest to me have all kind of confirmed that. Yes, I am pretty unfiltered. I’m fairly widely thought of as unfiltered. This whole situation that we’re in has really shone a light on some spaces that made me think about that a little bit more closely. It made me realize I’ve been more filtered than I thought I had been. Just not wanting to step on too many toes, or risk being disliked pushing too many buttons. All of those things have held me back. I spent nine years in a relationship where, much as I always remained a huge personality, I chose to water myself down, and I made that choice for a partner who occasionally found me to be too much because I wanted to be loved. I wanted to fit in. I didn’t want to rock the boat too much. I was reminded of this recently when a longtime girlfriend of mine, she’s known me for more than 20 years, long before this relationship ever started. She said that I had been a more muted version of myself the past few years to the point of being downright eerily calm and quiet in the months that followed my ending that long term relationship due to infidelity and all that. When I came home from traveling back at Christmas, when I came back to Canada, before I went back to Bali again, she said that it was as though I had finally stepped back into the full technicolor version of myself that she’d always known from long before I ever got involved with my foreign partner and in bigger ways than ever before. I have felt that to my absolute core. What’s interesting is that even though I have felt myself coming back more towards being more and more unfiltered again. I still could kind of sense in this whole situation, this whole global situation, I had kind of been holding myself back a little bit.
When I started thinking about it, I thought about when you ask people what they would tell a younger version of themselves, if they could give their younger version of themselves advice. One of the most common answers I’ve ever heard, is to assure their younger selves to go ahead with whatever it is they want to do without stressing so much over the opinions of others. This has been backed up by a woman named Bronnie Ware, who is an Australian nurse. She spent several years working in palliative care, and she was caring for patients in the last few weeks and days of their lives. She ended up coming up with a book called “The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying”, and the number one regret was, “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself. Not the life others expected of me.” That shakes me to my very core, when you really think about that, no one wants to get to the end of their lives, and have those kinds of thoughts and regrets. To look back and to realize that there were so many things that you could have done. All of the what ifs that you didn’t fulfill simply because you were afraid of somebody else’s opinion. I never want to live that way. I never want to get to the end of my life and to think that to think about all the things that I could have said, stood up for, or done. I was living for someone or somebody else. I don’t want to live that way. I don’t think that most of us want to live that way.
What I want to encourage you to do is instead of worrying about what everyone else is thinking of you, why don’t you go ahead and start the podcast or launch the business or speak up with an unpopular opinion. Turn that idea in the back of your head into something bigger than you could ever imagine, have the kind of impacts that you barely even dream to think about. Most importantly, to communicate more clearly in your relationships, and to ask for what you really want. There are a number of episodes I’m going to reference here that I think could be really powerful that will tie in with this. One of them is Episode 152, it’s about harnessing your creativity and switching from consumer to creator. That really goes into how a lot of us can end up sort of following others and getting stuck in comparison traps and it’s really important to start to focus on your own stuff, your own thoughts, your own opinions, first and foremost. Episode 108, about how to set boundaries and the key to healthy relationships and Episode 196 Sex, single life and social distancing and managing trust issues and boundaries with my friend, Steph Connolly. That’s another really great one talking about communication and clarity in how we speak to others and how we communicate our needs to the people closest to us. I want you to do the things that you can feel you were meant to do, because you were never designed to live a small life.
There has never been a better time to speak up because we are all doing things imperfectly right now. That’s the beauty of this. No one knows what we’re doing. All of the guidebooks have been thrown out the window. Nobody knows up from down. There are strong emotions that are being brought out of us. We’re having to communicate differently. This is really stirring something, and the best part about that is because everyone is doing everything imperfectly, you can’t really go wrong in a lot of ways. I don’t want you to allow fear to take over right now, because there’s so much fear in the world right now that it’s very easy to get sucked down that hole. You might start to have more clarity and, you know, start to realize maybe where you’ve been filtering yourself and where you need to have better communication or all of that. It can be very easy and can happen in a split second, where the fear starts to take over. I’ve been there. I’ve had that even just in the past few weeks, you know, I’ll have an idea or a thought and it’s as though if I don’t act on it right away then the fear from within starts to shut it down. It’s like, ‘Oh, no, no, that’s a stupid idea. Don’t do that. What are you thinking?’. I want you to continue to take action and to push through that and do what you need to do to protect yourself and your energy and to protect that spark, that idea that you have within you to keep it burning to keep it alive. That might mean putting up more boundaries with certain people in your life or limiting new consumption or other types of content that you normally consume. Particularly anything that will lead to a comparison trap. That’s a really dangerous road to go down. I’ve also fallen down that hole more times than I can count where I will have you know, this great idea and then I start seeing what other people are up to and I’m like, ‘oh my idea isn’t so great’. That isn’t true. You have a unique voice and a unique set of experiences that no one else in the world has. You are having this idea for a reason because you see a need for it, and you know that you are capable of doing it. You know that deep down, when you push past the fear, when you pull it all away, you know that you are capable of it.
This is a big part of why I launched my second podcast as well, The What the Fuck is Happening podcast, because I didn’t want to be filtered anymore. One of the episodes, Episode 3, my co-host Sarah and I ended up talking about our greatest fears. Mortality came up as a part of what we discussed. It made me think about what I was talking about earlier with the greatest regrets of the dying. We’re being given a reminder about our own mortality right now, that is impossible to ignore, and having to stay away from loved ones and all that is putting a whole lot of things into a very clear perspective. I hope that you take advantage of that. That’s what I’m encouraging you to do, because I want you to use that reminder that we don’t have unlimited time here. There isn’t always going to be an excuse where you can say ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’, because eventually we won’t always have a tomorrow and we don’t know when those tomorrows will end. I don’t want to take this super morbid or anything like that, but I do think that it’s a really powerful reminder that can be the kick in the ass that we need to do the things that we know we’re meant to do, and to change the relationships that we’re in. I’m not even saying break them off, I’m saying that maybe we need to change the rules a little bit, and to have better communication in the relationships we are in. Platonic, romantic, otherwise, whatever that looks like to lead to greater happiness on all sides.
Yes, sometimes you will piss people off, just like I said at the beginning, you are going to piss people off when you change the rules, because people aren’t always prepared for that and might not be thinking about things the same way as you. It does mean that there are going to be times where you have to leave people behind in order to move forward to where you know you’re meant to go. But ultimately, isn’t the pain of that worth it in the long run? And it’s not easy. I’m not saying that it’s easy, but I have been in that space where I was with someone, and this is just one example of many that I could give. This is the most glaringly obvious example in my life, where I was with someone for nine years, and cutting away pieces of myself to continue to make that relationship work, and to continue to try and find happiness within it, even though deep down I knew that that was not the relationship that I needed to be in. But I pushed it down, and I settled, and I kept the peace and I didn’t say the things that I needed to say, in order to maintain a relationship that was doing what? it wasn’t furthering me towards a greater goal. It wasn’t making me nearly as happy as I thought it was, and we can only do what we know with the information that we have in that exact moment. I want you to start thinking about things in a little bit of a different light, and to start thinking about these regrets that we hear about when people are saying. Wishing that they had the courage to live a life that was more true to themselves, instead of what others expected of them.
None of this is easy. I’m not saying that any of this is easy. It takes a huge amount of courage. That’s why people are talking about courage there because it takes a lot of courage to live the life that you know you’re meant to live, particularly when it’s one that doesn’t necessarily meet societal standards, or stereotypical societal standards. ‘Go to high school, go to college, go get the white collar jobs, Married with 2.5 kids in the white picket house’. We all know that that’s what the so-called societal standard is, and anything that deviates from that people don’t really understand. The number of times that I have to explain what I do for a living to people who don’t understand it and think that it’s the most bizarre thing they’ve ever heard, I’m sure that that will continue to happen a lot more in the future as well. You know, it’s changing, people are starting to understand things like that a little bit more, but the fact that I travel a huge amount on my own around the globe, and all these different things. The life that I’ve created for myself at this point is not conventional. It does not meet conventional standards, but I’ve also reached the point of not giving a fuck, and I give far more fucks about being happier in the life that I have created for myself and doing what makes me happy and fulfills me and allows me to have a positive impact on others, not just from business standpoint, but just from, from the standpoint of the people closest to me. I always want to be able to have a positive impact on people close to me. If I can fulfill all of that, then I don’t really care about the societal standards that I’m being held to and asked about, and being told that I’m doing things wrong by not meeting those standards. I already lived that life. I already lived the conventional life, and it didn’t work for me. I’m not saying that it won’t again in the future, but at the moment, I’m living the life that I need to live, and that I can feel myself being pulled to regardless of other people’s opinions.
This is going to look so different for everyone. I’m not saying uproot your entire life and drop everything and burn everything to the ground the way I did, I had some unusual circumstances. I chose to make some unusual choices with those circumstances to get to where I am right now, and they just happen to be the right ones for me. They are not the right ones for everyone. What I really want to underscore here is to stop being so concerned about other people’s opinions. Even though it’s hard, you were the one that has to look yourself in the mirror at the end of the day, you are the one who has to live with the regrets of not living the life that you want to live and, and speaking up when you know that you want to speak up and voicing your opinions and doing something a little bit differently. Shaking it up a little bit in a way that feels true to you. I hope that this encourages you to move forward to progress a little bit in whatever way that’s going to look for you, and to remind you of the courage that I know you already have within you, it’s just a matter of actually using it. I can also promise you that the people that you think are so concerned with what you’re doing in your life, aren’t nearly as concerned about your life as they are with their own. Even though people will make comments, people will have opinions that we don’t necessarily want to hear. People will say things that aren’t even necessarily always very nice when we make choices that make other people uncomfortable. At the end of the day, they still care far more about their own lives than about yours. Keep that in mind that even though it can sting when somebody says something, make some sort of offhand comment, asks you for the 5,000th time if you want to have children, or why don’t you have children or when are you going to settle down or when you’re going to get a real job, whatever that looks like for you. We all get these comments in various forms from various people in our lives, for various types of choices. Just remind yourself that when those people are asking you those questions, it’s far more a reflection of them and their own insecurities than it is on you. You need to do what is best for you and make the choices that feel true to you and feel true to the life that you ultimately want to live and the values that you hold dear.
I hope that this gives you a little bit of push, to become a little bit more unfiltered, and to start making choices that are a true reflection of how you want to show up in the world. There has never been a better time to change that. If you feel like you’ve been living in a way that has been very filtered, that has not been very true to yourself, there has never been a better time to shift them.
Don’t forget Speak Your Truths Academy drops May 19 2020. Go jump on the waitlist! I go live every single week day over on Instagram @emilygoughcoach and on Facebook @emilygoughcoaching, although I’ve been having some tech issues with Facebook in the last few days, so I missed the Facebook ones at the same time as the Instagram ones for a couple days there but I think I’ve sorted it out. So technical issues are ironed out now as far as I know and we’ll be showing up at the same time Facebook and Instagram. If you’re on Facebook more often, I’ll be over there as well. Don’t forget to check out some of the incredible episodes I’ve had the last few weeks and that I have coming up as well. There’s some really great ones. A particular favourite of mine was my friend Dr. Jade Teta, who was on the podcast this past Tuesday, talking all about online business and purpose. Using pain for growth. This is the second time he’s come on the podcast. He’s a really great friend of mine and his episodes always just do so so well. He’s just an incredible teacher and I can’t wait for you to go check out that episode. Please share this episode with somebody who needs to hear it and who maybe needs a little bit of a push as well.
Thanks so much guys, talk to you Tuesday!
Questions? Comments? Want to connect and chat about this episode? You can email me at [email protected], or DM me over on Instagram @emilygoughcoach or Facebook at Emily Gough Coaching. I would absolutely love to connect with you and thank you for listening in real life and here any takeaways you had from this or other episodes!. It makes me day to see you listening to the podcast and fills me up with pure joy. Seriously. See you on the ‘gram!
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