If you don’t speak your truth when you know you need to share your opinion, well, you swallow the words, you swallow the emotions. And here’s what it does. It not only then damages the work relationship or the personal relationship, here’s the powerful insight. It damages your relationship with yourself.
And I think in many ways, all lack of success and creativity and productivity in someone’s life comes down to a lack of self-worth. One of the best things you can learn how to do is learn how to honor yourself, learn how to build self-worth, learn how to build self-respect, learn how to build self-love. And one of the best ways to do that is to speak your truth, even when the fire is on.
And so how do you do it? It’s like any other skill. You practice it. So you look for opportunities every day at work or at home where you want to say something, and then you start paying some attention. Because as you know, with better awareness, you’ll make better choices. And with better choices, you’ll make better results.
It’s my Three-Step Success Formula. Write about it in your journal so you can really build awareness around it. With better awareness, step one, you’ll start making better choices. And with better choices, of course you’re going to see better results.
So the greatest women and men of the world all built high awareness of what they wanted to improve and where they were weak. And so start thinking about, where am I swallowing my truth? Where am I not sharing my opinions? What context or what situations do I do this?
And that’s going to build some awareness. As you become more aware, you’re going to start catching yourself in the moment. Then you can say, you know what? I have power. I have choice, and I’m not going to do this anymore. And you start to speak up.
And there’s a brain tattoo that has been so helpful to me in my own life and with the work I do with the members of the fortune 500. And when I work with these heroes of business and these leaders of humanity, here’s one of the things I remind them. You can say whatever you want so long as you say it with respect.