First let’s talk about what Truthful Tina isn't… she isn’t about speaking your truth in an arrogant, self-righteous way where you're walking around saying to people, “you look terrible” or being obnoxious about sharing your truth with people. She is about being true to who you are and understanding your own truth.
Now, I'm all up for a good lie and I think that sometimes lying is really important. All of us lie in our lives. We do it to protect others. My kids often say to me, “when we were little you used to lie to us” (and they bring up one particular lie I told them). My response to them is “I lied to you because you were eight, and you didn't understand the concepts of the adult world” so I lied to protect you.
Just have a think about things like Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny – all lies we as adults tell kids. It’s just a part of society. So Truthful Tina isn’t about saying “you can never lie again”, she is about is about being really truthful to yourself and to others.
When we are truthful to ourselves, it's about really looking into what's working, what's not working, what's serving me, what's not serving me, because when you can be clear on that, that's when you can start your Change Journey.
We've been so conditioned not to be truthful with ourselves because we want to protect ourselves and we want to stop ourselves from hurting. So we tell ourselves little lies to keep ourselves safe, however what it is actually doing is hindering us from moving forward in life.
So when you're doing your Change Journey and you really want to move forward, being truthful with yourself is the most important thing that you can do. The best way that you can do that is to start doing the following journaling exercise.
Start by writing a particular situation at the top of a page and then ask yourself, how do I truly feel about this? Then just start to write what flows for you so that you can really understand what it is that you feel about that situation and be really honest with yourself. The best thing about discovering your truth via journaling is that you don't have to share it with anybody.
Many times in life, the hard thing about being honest, is that people may judge you or you're worried about what they will think. So when you're honest with you, and it's just you, you're not going to judge yourself. You may be shocked by what you discover but you then have time to process it and bring in your Accepting Alice to accept you as a whole.
This is why Truthful Tina is so important in your Change Journey, and also why she's part of the self-confidence stage, because you can't have that confidence to step out of your comfort zone if you're telling yourself little white lies inside your mind.
However when you're going through your Change Journey and some of your changes involve other people, that's when you need to speak your truth to them. The example I use in the book is of me leaving my marriage. Obviously this decision involved my husband, so I couldn't just go and leave a marriage without telling him how I truly felt. One of the hardest things I've ever done is to speak my truth at that time. It would have been much easier for me to stay in my comfort zone where every time he said “I love you”, I would just say “I love you too” whether I felt it or not. It was just the answer that came out of my mouth. It's the answer that wives are meant to give their husbands, so I would just say it. Yet to leave the marriage, I had to speak my truth and say to him out loud “I don’t love you” and that was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.
So when you're having a Change Journey that affects somebody else you have to speak your truth and you can bring in the power of Truthful Tina to help you with that. You may even get some professional help about how you can have a truthful conversation because they are definitely not something you are going to have on the spur of the moment. It's something that you plan for and have confidence and trust in yourself that it’s the right thing that you're going to say, for who you are going to say it to.
Yet having a truthful conversation doesn’t mean it has to be something massive like leaving a marriage, your truth might just mean that you’re going to start exercising in the mornings, so that affects your husband because you're alarm is going to go off at 5:30am every day and you may wake him up.
If you're still finding it really hard to speak your truth, practice in little situations where it doesn't really matter, because that will get your subconscious used to speaking your truth. For instance, because I never used to speak my truth, when people would ask me things like, what do you want to do, or what do you want to watch on TV, my response was always “it doesn't matter, you choose”. Especially if I was in a big group and people would say “we're going to do xyz today” and I would go along with it, even if it was something I didn’t want to do.
Saying no to people is another great way to practice speaking your truth. If you get invited somewhere you don't want to go, say “no thanks”. You don’t even have to make an excuse. If you stand in your confidence and your truth, it becomes easier and easier to say “no” to things you don’t want.
The last part of Truthful Tina is understanding what your values are. Knowing this is incredibly important as it will open up a whole new awareness for you around what makes you tick. You’ll discover that the people you resonate with, that you get on with, that you are friends with, will all have similar values to what you do.
Your values are your essence, the truth of who you are. They are woven into the people you like, the goals you set and the choices you make.
If you have the Change Journey book, within the Truthful Tina section, there is a link where you can discover your values. Enjoy!!!