I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello hello. How are you doing?

When you are in a position where you need to speak up or step up,

whether it's to communicate who you are,

or what you need, or what is or isn't okay with you and your default

concern is about hurting feelings or coming across as rude, demanding, dramatic, difficult, too sensitive,

burdensome, and anything else you associate with what essentially amounts to representing yourself, you end up

acting as if your needs don't matter. You end up acting as if you don't matter. To represent yourself means to show up, speak up and step up. It means

recognizing, acknowledging and expressing your needs, desires, expectations, feelings and opinions with respect for yourself and others.

I add respect because representing yourself is essentially being assertive instead of passive, passive aggressive or aggressive.

Something I stressed to people over the years is that honesty is the truth with respect.

This means that when we honestly and authentically represent ourselves we come from a place of loving, caring, trusting and respecting ourselves as well as others.

I think something that a lot of us as humans misunderstand about showing up, speaking up and stepping up is thinking that we're only doing it,

quote-on unquote right if people like and approve of whatever it is that we do and that if there's the possibility of disapproval of criticism or conflict

that it must be wrong and this idea that actually being honest about who we are and taking care of ourselves is a bad thing that hurts other people's feelings.

And at the same time I also think that we misunderstand the

representing of ourselves when we think, oh yeah, well I'm being honest when

actually what we're doing is displacing our feelings and thoughts about something,

where we're displacing whatever we're grappling with on the inside and we're projecting it onto others and then

we're calling it honesty when actually what we're doing is being passive aggressive or

aggressive of course because of how so many of us have been

socialized and conditioned, we are often unaware of the large and small ways in which we hide our needs, desires, expectations, feelings and opinions.

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