COMFORTABLY YOU
Being comfortable with you who are means you are comfortable with others too.
To be comfortable with who you are, first you have to understand and accept who you are, and that only comes from being honest with yourself about who you are, being your true authentic self.
Do you know who you really are? Are you comfortable with yourself, and with others? Do you let people be who they are, or want to be, without judging (perhaps silently, without even being aware that you are!) or trying to change them? And more - encourage and support people to be their authentic selves? Including you!
Be honest…
LEARNING MORE ABOUT YOURSELF
Knowing who you really are takes some soul searching and also a willingness to accept all of you, your darker moods and your lighter side, your ups and your downs. They are all part of you, all part of the same thing. To be true to yourself means to love all of you. And only by understanding who we really are, can we start to make some changes if that’s what we feel we need to do, so that we can be who we are meant to be, doing what we are meant to be doing.
One of the things about being honest with yourself, is that you are comfortable inviting honesty from other people. It’s all useful feedback, to be comfortable with ourselves and others we have to accept that there is always something new to learn, a different way of looking at things. What we see as real is just a reflection of our inner world - different for everyone, although with some universal concepts underpinning our reality, which in turn we interpret and can understand only from the level of our own experience. So the more we experience, the more we learn, the more we expand our inner world, the more we can understand the universe around us, and that includes ourselves.
TRUSTING
I value honesty, integrity, authenticity immensely. I am honest with people. And I like people being honest with me. But not everyone is ready to meet you at the same level. It’s a balance between appreciating where others are coming from, and not compromising our own needs or values. Part of my role as a coach is to help shine the torch on where people aren’t being honest with themselves, to help them work out how to be their whole, integral self. But as a coach I also know to be mindful that everyone is working things out at their own pace, and there are things that may not be ready to be put in the spotlight just yet. (Just as as a coach I also know when people need a little nudge to move out of their comfort zone and stare right into that spotlight!).
It’s also about learning to listen to your intuition, trusting that you can tell when people are being honest with you and when they’re not. Part of understanding yourself is about developing that awareness, so that you can move away from situations that don’t feel right for you, that don’t allow you to be your authentic self. Once you have learnt to trust yourself, it becomes easier to interact honestly with others as well. Essentially, being honest with each other is a way of showing that we respect and trust one another: showing that we respect each other enough to understand that each of our opinions are valid, and also to trust that we can share our different views honestly. In other words, that we can be ourselves, authentic.
We should all be encouraging each other to be the best, simplest, most truthful version of ourselves we can be, in my view. Starting with ourselves.