Speaking Your Truth: Why It’s Essential and 3 Ways to Do It

Have you ever felt pressure to go with the flow – to avoid speaking out about something that didn’t feel right to you? You knew what you wanted to say, but were afraid to say it because of how it might be received.

And in the end, you didn’t say anything, or you said something that simply didn’t align with your core values.

How did that make you feel? 

Probably not so great. This is because when you say things that aren’t aligned with what you believe – when you don’t speak your truth – you’re doing a fundamental disservice to what you know to be true and good.

If you find yourself not speaking your truth regularly, you might need to recalibrate one or more areas of your life.

Speaking your truth often means speaking up when it’s uncomfortable. But it’s an incredibly powerful and transformative experience, one that aligns you with your inner compass and the universe around you.

Let’s explore how to do it.

What Does It Mean to Speak Your Truth?

To speak your truth, you need to reconnect with the essence of who you are. This is your most authentic self – the person you were meant to be.

Once you’ve rediscovered your authentic self, the next part of speaking your truth is sharing who you are. 

You have to be unabashed with the world by pursuing your dreams, setting meaningful, thrilling goals, and making decisions that align with the core of who you are and who you’re meant to be. 

Unfortunately, a lot of us aren’t particularly fluent in the language of our truth – which means we’re living out of alignment with who we truly are.

We can’t articulate why a successful career is making us feel hollow. We’re afraid to rock the boat in an unfulfilling relationship. We don’t want to be ungrateful and we secretly desire more out of life, but we’re scared of the alternative if we do voice our dissatisfaction. 

Societal influences, other people’s opinions, and our own limiting self-beliefs can all drown out the sound of our truest selves.

Over time and if left unchecked, you may not even be able to hear your truth at all anymore – it can be reduced to a meek whisper. 

Now, you need to figure out how to turn the volume up again. 

Why Telling Your Truth Is Important

If you feel like something is missing, like life isn’t all you hoped it would be, then you are misaligned from your truth. When you betray yourself, you wind up feeling isolated and disenchanted with life. 

You may experience low self-esteem, feelings of guilt and shame, or chronic tiredness and low mood. All of these emotions indicate that you’ve lost touch with your true self. 

Thankfully, it’s never too late to start telling your truth and, the sooner you do it, the more joyful, fulfilling, and meaningful life will feel.

How to Speak Your Truth

Although speaking your truth is the key to living a badass, awesome life, most people never quite get there. In fact, according to Dr. Robert Kegan, a Harvard psychologist, about 65% of people never fully step into authenticity, or what he terms self-authorship. 

This is because learning to speak your truth can be, well, hard.

• It takes raw honesty to conduct a life audit.
• It takes courage to go against other people’s expectations and live unapologetically.
• It takes mental toughness to achieve daunting goals and chase the life of your dreams.

But, as the saying goes, nothing worth having comes easy – and this is the case for speaking your truth. It’s one of the most worthy, rewarding capabilities you could ever cultivate, and a surefire way to reach fulfillment, find your purpose, and unleash contentment. 

So, with that in mind, here are three steps to get started: 

1. Discover and Honor Your Unique Personal Needs

Just like we all have fundamental needs for things like sleep, water, food, and shelter, we also have more nuanced, soul-level needs that nourish us spiritually, emotionally, and cognitively. 

I call these needs our unique personal needs.

Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t know what your UPNs are. It’s very common to become out of touch with them as we get older because external influences like work, financial concerns, and other people’s needs often overshadow our own. 

Many of us don’t know how to speak up and take up space for our own needs. Often, because we don’t know what these needs are, we don’t take them seriously, or we think of them as “nice-to-haves” rather than essential needs that allow us to feel like ourselves.

To reconnect to your UPNs, try looking at the “why” behind your core values – it’s often there that you’ll discover your underlying UPNs.

For example, say freedom is one of your core values. This could mean that one of your UPNs centers around having room to be nimble so you can move quickly and try new things. In a rigid schedule or environment, you might struggle.

Alternatively, if you greatly value growth, this could indicate you need to overcome challenges to feel fulfilled. When things are too easy, you might feel out of alignment. 

2. Shed Limiting Self-Beliefs

One of the major challenges I help my clients overcome on the journey to speaking their truth is learning to separate themselves from the self-limiting beliefs that are holding them back. They don’t believe what they want is possible, so they keep quiet about it.

You probably have a few self-limiting beliefs you need to work on – we all do.

All of these self-critical thoughts can stop you from following your dreams and speaking your truth, which is why it’s so important to take intentional charge of your belief system and clear out any faulty limiting beliefs.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Over the next week, keep a regular journal and note down self-limiting beliefs as they arise.
2. Pick one or two of your beliefs for conscious rewiring. Notice every time negative self-talk creeps in and become aware of specific situations or people that trigger the limiting belief. 
3. Commit to recalibrating your self-limiting belief with an expansive one. For example, if your self-limiting belief is “I don’t have time,” counteract that limiting statement with an empowering one like “I will carve out time by prioritizing tasks with daily planning.”

3. Define What Success Means to YOU

Armed with the knowledge of your UPNs and a commitment to recalibrating your self-limiting beliefs, it’s time to define what success really means to the truest version of you, and then create meaningful goals that catapult you in that direction. 

Here’s an exercise from the SoulSalt book to help. Once you complete the “start small” exercise, you can progress to the follow-up exercise in Chapter 8, which is all about defining success for a lifetime:

1. Stop where you are and contemplate how you’ll define success for tomorrow. Simply consider the following questions about your next day:
   1. What would your values say if they could define success for tomorrow?
   2. What strengths would you use if they could rule your day and leave you feeling successful?
   3. What UPNs might get met so you can sense these elements of winning your day?
   4. What would one of your beliefs or personal philosophies ask you to do to feel like you’ve won the day?
2. Look over your answers. Pick one, two, or more and transform that into a metric of success for tomorrow. For example, your goal could be to win the day feeling satisfied, shut off the computer at 6:30 pm, and have two big items ticked off your task list. Now, go live that day and see how it feels.

Ready to Discover Your True Self?

Speaking your truth requires you to be radically honest and channel your core values whenever you speak or act – and this isn’t always easy.

But I’m here to help.

My new book will help you uncover what motivates you, find your why, define and achieve your long-term goals, and ultimately plot a roadmap to reaching your full potential – as the truest, most badass version of you.

Get your copy here!