4 Ways to Stay True to Yourself

This post is so timely, IMO. And it’s a journey I am personally on and I want to take you along for the ride. The world is so loud and that can get very overwhelming. I can tell you from experience that you can find peace when you stay true to yourself. This is a practice I have been working on for many months and I feel like a new person. I look back at myself in March and ask, “who was she?!”

So, let’s chat about how you can practice staying true to yourself in very easy steps. 

Hold up. First…what the eff does it mean to stay true to yourself?

Staying true to yourself means honoring what your needs are, surrounding yourself with people that support you, not defining yourself by what outside influences think or say, and doing what feels right to you.

I don’t know about you, but I have certainly abandoned myself before. That means repressing feelings which can lead to anxiety and disease and betraying myself to please others ← this was a BIG ONE for me. Denying or betraying yourself just diminishes your energy…it’s so depleting. Do you ever feel exhausted when this happens? Yeah, me too. You are here to experience happiness and grow, not to get smaller. 

Living your life for others doesn’t work long term. It works until the emotions you’re ignoring start to affect your health, and when you start to feel overwhelmed because you’re trying to please other people. Are you going to just exist, or live fully?

Before I give you five tips on how to stay in alignment with yourself,  ask yourself: “Am I staying true to myself daily?” If not, read on & then GET ON WITH YOUR BAD SELF.

1. Spend time alone every single day

This is my favorite tip ever. When I don’t spend time alone, I feel emotionally drained and overwhelmed. 

I LOVE BEING ALONE.

Some of my favorite things to do alone are to work out and run errands. And sometimes eat alone. I love going to grab lunch and maybe a glass of champagne or coffee + bring my laptop. tIt brings me so much JOY. 

When we spend time alone, the mind can relax and drown out the noise of the outside world and connect with your intuition and what you know to be true for you.

2. Let go of emotions

Reading the Untethered Soul coupled with therapy taught me this tool. 

Here’s what I learned: You are not your emotions. You simply experience them. 

When you hold on to your emotions, they can make you sick. Instead, feel them, and release them. 

I’ll give you an example. When I feel anxiety, instead of just trying to ignore it or distract myself, I will let it in. I notice where I feel it in my body, let it do its thing and then I focus on separating the anxiety from myself. How? My therapist taught me this amazing tip: Close your eyes and imagine you are looking at yourself through a window with this anxiety. Can you move a foot back? 10 feet back? 100 feet back? Simply closing your eyes and focusing on it getting smaller and smaller works serious wonders. You can do this with sadness, anger, literally any kind of emotion you are seeking to release.

3. Question everything.

I had and have beliefs that I accepted as true without questioning them. We pick up these beliefs along the way as we get older and they’re hugely influenced by adults around us when we were kids…because those beliefs were true for them. 

Ask yourself if these beliefs serve you. If you’re not buying a certain “truth”, buh-bye. You know that saying “you can build your own reality”…it’s true! 

Check in with yourself before you buy in to outside perspectives and beliefs.

4. Stay in the present

Have you heard this truth? “Anxiety is a feature of the future and depression is a feature of the past”? It’s so true. Your true self does not live in the past or in the future.

Your true self is right here, right now. At peace.

I’ve been spending time meditating, which keeps my mind in the present moment. I resisted trying to meditate for so long because I am one of those who always said “I can’t sit still or keep my mind still”…but what’s worked for me is focusing on the things around me as well as my body. Doing guided meditations on YouTube has been a gamechanger.

Meditating has helped me to see through eyes of compassion, joy, and love.

I hope that you guys found this helpful. I feel so calm just having written this all out.

xx, Lynn