How NOT being true to yourself crushes your life

Hello, everybody. Wow, this is crazy. Well, welcome. I'm Kathy Caprino. Welcome to my Facebook live, Brave Up Tuesday. So this is the craziest thing. I was here at noon, pressed record, live. And what's crazy is I talked for a half hour, ready to go, pressed, finish, and it hadn't been recording. And I feel like, really? I just spent a half hour talking about this. Oh, sorry. Dropped my glasses. And let's just make sure we're on here. Yep, there it is. 39 seconds. So I'm sorry I'm late. Yay, somebody's here. So I know that. That it's live. So. Wow. Let's see if I can do this all over again in a half hour. I should be able to because I kind of rehearsed it. All right, so I'm thrilled you're here. We are talking today, and again, forgive me, technology. We are talking about how not being true to yourself crushes your life. So what I'm really wanting to do here, I'm wanting to make this personal. I'm not wanting to be just a talking head. I'm gonna really reveal here and be transparent. And I would love it if I'm sharing something that resonates that you give me a little thumbs up. I would love that. Because then I know I'm not speaking to dead air. I'm speaking to you. Oh, I see wonderful friends have joined. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. All right. How not being true to yourself crushes your life. Let me talk about this. I'm going to talk about what happens and how we get crushed down. And then what can you do today? Five little steps you can take to start moving past that paralysis of not living the life you're meant to live. So how do I know about this? Well, first of all, I've lived it. I've lived years of not being true to myself. And I want to talk about this for a minute. It's a spectrum thing. Kind of like a spectrum disorder on the low end. You could be having a very functional, healthy, happy life. Good relationships, you like your work. But there are a few things that happen that you realize, wow, I didn't really say what I meant to that person. I didn't really tell them that's not acceptable. So it might. Might be. Excuse me. Something's in my little hair, on my lip. It might be just an incidental thing that doesn't happen a lot. On the other hand. On the other side of the spectrum, you are not living the life you're meant to live. You're not in the relationships you're meant to have. You're not doing the work you're meant to do. You're not having the joy and the love that you came here to have. It's wrong. You're not feeling physically the way you want to feel. It's wrong on every dimension. Oh, people are here. I'm so excited. Thank you. So the very first thing I want you to think about is if it's a scale, scale of 1 to 10, one is low. Number one. My life is pretty much rocking it. But there's some things I'm really not true to myself on. Or a 10. No, my whole life means I am not true to myself. I. I'm just so not on the right path. So do me a favor. Type in the number you think you are and let me see what you say. A1 is no, I'm rocking it. And it just every once in a while, I may not be true. A 10 is no, I am so not true to myself that everything's going wrong. Just type in the number that you think you're at. So I understand. Okay. All right. So I want to tell you why I think that we stop being true to ourselves. And there was a funny little analogy that came to my mind. I work with a wonderful team that supports my website and supports my online efforts. And, you know, I am going to talk to you a little bit about. Oh, thank you. Thank you for sharing. Hi, Barb. Can't wait to hear about your trip, which sounded amazing, but you're a three. Okay, who else, please? I want you to be really open and honest and let this work for you. Right. Share with me. What number do you think you are on the spectrum of I'm not really true to myself. So as I was saying, I have a wonderful team that supports me and we were talking about creating and they called it an indoctrination series. I'm like an indoctrination series. What do you mean? No, I don't like the name of that. Well, we've called it a welcome series, but let me just tell you what I mean. So I have a big list and 60,000 people, and when people join me, what we want to do is create a welcome series where they get a series of emails that. That tells them what I do and what they can learn from me and, you know, introduces them to some concepts that'll be helpful. A welcome series. But if you think of indoctrination, you know, what's happened from the minute we're born we are indoctrinated. And that sounds. I don't mean it to sound like a cultish, scary thing. What I mean is we are taught by our family, by our parents, by our tribe what we're supposed to do, what we're supposed to say, what we're supposed to look like, how we're supposed to act, who we're supposed to say yes to, who we're supposed to say no to. We are indoctrinated. Let's face it. And if you watch my TED, TEDx talk, time to brave up. What I talk about is research. Study after research study has shown us that girls, when they hit puberty, start to go underground. And this does not happen to boys. They start not being as confident, not speaking up as much, not believing they can do what they want, not believing they can be leaders and presidents, not believing that they can. Can do math and science like boys can do. And research has even showed that teachers actually have that bias, and they're supporting that bias that girls are not as good in STEM or science and math and engineering. Ooh, we're indoctrinated. And girls go underground, and they start being really preoccupied with their bodies and their body image. What happens when you start not being able to speak up for yourself, not being able to be forceful? The research shows that in our society, people don't like forceful women. They're called the bitch. Bitch. This happened to me, you know, I'm being called the B word when he's doing the same thing I'm doing and he's getting promoted for it. So I'm not gonna go on a rant here. But there's indoctrination that happens in society and in culture and in our families and our tribes, right? So there's also stuff like boundaries. My gosh. This was the single most important thing I learned in therapeutic training. Boundaries are the invisible barrier between you and your outside systems that regulate the flow of information and input. So if you have overly diffuse boundaries, you're catching every ball that's thrown at you. Somebody says they don't like you, that's it. You're obsessed about it for days. Somebody disagrees with you, you ruminate about it. And you know what? This was me. This was me. I used to be so sensitive. I'm so kind and sensitive. Why are people nice to me back? No, you're overly sensitive. You take everything to heart. You catch every ball. You don't have to catch every ball. You can throw it back and say, I don't really agree with that, but that takes boundaries. You have to know where you end and another person begins in order for you to start being true to yourself. So what are the signs of a life that's crushed down? Truthfully, at this point, I can see it in about five minutes. Depression, chronic fatigue, chronic self hatred, pain. You know, a lot of times the medical community will give the name to something when they don't know what the hell it is. I think in many cases fibromyalgia is chronic self hatred. I do, I really believe, and I'm not saying you shouldn't go to the doctor, but I have lived. You know, I had four years of an infection of my trachea. Every three months I would get a violently painful infection of my trachea. What do you think that means? It means I'm not speaking up. I'm not. And I didn't buy that back then. Somebody said, you know what, the doctors aren't helping you. You've been to five doctors. Why don't you go to an energy healer? And at that point I thought, what, what am I doing that for? I walk in, I say nothing, I lay down on the table, and the woman spends two minutes with me and says, wow, what are you doing for a living? It's a lie. And this is where it's hurting you. And I didn't like that answer because I made a lot of money and I didn't want to have to reinvent. And I went to another energy healer, same thing. I didn't say a thing, laid down, she spent a few minutes with me and said, wow, what do you do for a living? I said, oh my gosh. And she said, the pain here was a crying within because I wasn't being true to myself. I wasn't saying I hate this work. And I wasn't saying it for a lot of reasons because it in some ways gave me self esteem because I was a vice president, made a lot of money, I wanted to please, please people and impress people. What a mess. So I want to tell you, I've lived all of this. How do you know you're, you're not being true to yourself? You're in the wrong relationships, you're doing the wrong work, you're doing the wrong projects, you have the wrong kind of friends who hurt you. You know it, you know it. But the first thing you have to do is this is a key to a happier, healthier life. And it's so simple. Five minutes a day, stop what you're doing, go in a room where you're distraction Free. Turn off your devices, turn off your computer, turn off your phone and sit with yourself for five minutes. That's it. You don't have to be Buddha on the mountain. Just take three deep breaths if you want to meditate. All it is is watching your breath and watching the thoughts. The thoughts are going to come, the thoughts are going to go. They're going to be crazy weird what you're talking about. You know, you're thinking about your neighbor, then you're thinking about what you had for dinner last night. That's how it works. And you just lovingly let those go just so that you can be present with yourself. And then you can ask a question. Where am I not being true to myself? And I promise you, you're going to start hearing things. So I want to give you an example and I'm going to be really transparent. I have been not true to myself for so many years. So first it was in the work that I was doing. Then it's been friendships that I've had that really don't suit me, that have been really wrong for me. Hard people, mean people, people who don't have love in their heart for themselves. And then I want to give this funny little example because it's so obvious to me today how I learned the wrong lessons. Oh, yes. We were still talking about how you get crushed down. And I want to give this piece of information. It's not just how we're indoctrinated or how we're raised. We can have a beautiful childhood, but then something happens in life that hurts us desperately and then we just withdraw. We don't have sufficient boundaries to be resilient and we just retract our love for ourselves and our confidence. It just goes right. And I had one of those. So about 11 years ago when I started doing this work, started being a therapist and a coach, I was giving some workshops, being asked to talk and speak. And I got hired to give a series of workshops on kind of live your true life for this very big organization, a very big YWCA in my area. And we had. We said the curriculum was going to be pretty loose. We were going to talk about what people needed to talk about. And in that one and a half hour talk, I mentioned, thought it was kind of a light mention that I write to angels. I'm not religious at all. I actually, I find for me personally religious doctrine and dogma don't work for me. But I'm a spiritual person and I do. Anyone who knows me, I talk about it in my book. I talk about it in my courses. I write to what I believe are the angels. And they have a name, Eleazar. And I get amazing help. I don't feel it comes from me. It's unbelievable. But I mentioned that in this workshop. And after the workshop, the person who hired me came out like shaking. And she looked so bewildered and confused, as if, I don't know what's happening, but I'm gonna have to ask you not to come back. And I was so hurt. I said, what happened? She said, just your mentioning of the angels. God, everybody's so freaked out. They don't even know what to do. So basically I was fired. So I know now what that lesson should have been. But then I was just devastated. I lost my confidence. It was just like I had been laid off in my corporate job. Same feeling that what I was so excited to do, you know, wasn't received well or. And I. It was devastating to me. So you can even have a situation where your confidence is okay, but it gets rocked irrevocably and you don't know how to handle the situation and you get crushed. So what happened was I thought, okay, I can never talk about spirituality again. Can't do it. So I went underground. I didn't talk about it. I wasn't true to myself. That makes me sad. So what's really interesting to me is I've come completely full circle. And as you might know, I'm offering webinar with the renowned best selling author and mystic Lorna Byrne, who has seen angels from the minute she opened her eyes. And her books and her talks and her videos have been so transformative for me and clearly for millions of people because she's an international best selling author that I reached out to her and we are doing a webinar one hour live webinar January 31st. And you can find information about that on this page. But here I went from I'll never speak about spirituality again because I'm going to get hurt to here we go, let's talk angels. Let's get the messages from the angels. And my gosh, it feels so good now. You know, part of me is a little scared. What are people gonna think? You know, they love it in Lorna, but what are they gonna think with me delivering it? You know what? It's time. It's time for me to be true to myself and not hide what I believe. So I'm gonna ask you to think about yourself. Are you being true to yourself? So here's the first steps I'D love to offer for you to think about this and move forward. Okay. The very first thing is, what is the one conversation you need to have today that will allow you to be true to yourself? Who is violating your boundaries? Who is making you crazy? Who is disrespecting you? Who is taking advantage of you? Or it doesn't even have to be that negative. Who are you in a partnership with that you don't want to be in a partnership with anymore? What conversation do you need to have today that will say, thank you for that? I love it when I get those because I know these points are getting through. What conversation do you need to have today? And I want to tell you, conversations are healing. In my podcast, Best Work, Best Life with Mo fall, we interviewed Dr. Neha Sangwon, who's a physician who wrote an amazing book, TalkRx. And it came out of her being in emergency room situations where people were coming in with chronic, near fatal illness and disease and through treatment and as she was discharging them, she'd say, why do you think you're really here? They would know, and it would be a conversation that they hadn't had. When you don't say what needs to be said, when you don't defend yourself, support. Not defend, support yourself. Honor yourself. When you don't speak up for yourself, you go underground and that crushes your life. So what's the one conversation that you need to say today that you need to have now? What I do want to say, My beloved sister's on this call. I think she said to me, you know, this brave up stuff can be hard because once you brave up, then it doesn't just go away. Then you got to really continue to brave up. Yeah. You know, I learned in therapy, training, your family, the world around you, your relationships, it's like a system. Like a mobile. It's not like a system. It is a system. But think of a mobile hanging. When you move one piece, all the others move. You can't just do this on your own. It's going to change everything. And, yeah, that could be a little bumpy in the beginning, speaking up for yourself and saying, you know, I need to say this, this is not acceptable to me any, any longer. And I need to let you know that, or I love you from the bottom of my heart. I want to talk about having love. We're going to talk about that in a minute. It's not easy. And you're going to get things back that you're afraid of. And that's what Braving up is, but it changes your life. Okay, secondly, boundaries. Where are you enmeshed? Where are you doing more than is appropriate, more than is healthy, more than is necessary? And you're being a perfectionist in trying to get an A in all of it. Right. Where are your boundaries being violated? What are you going to do about it? Right. So many women are people pleasers. I can't remember if I talked about this in the last, last recording that wasn't recording or not, so forgive me if I'm repeating, but women are taught and trained culturally that to be forceful is not acceptable. So we are scared to do it. But what happens is we get mad, our life gets crushed down, we get resentful. So I was giving an example before, I'll repeat it because I'm a therapist and a coach. A lot of people will say they want to get together as friends and then they really want a therapy session. And I want to tell you from my heart, I want to be helpful to people. And I do, I really do. But sometimes it's not what I'm in the mood for. Sometimes I thought we were going to go have fun. So my husband was saying, it's kind of like if your friend were a massage therapist. And you said, hey, let's meet up for lunch. And then you said, by the way, can you go give me a massage in the car afterwards? It's work for them and it's work for me to be a therapist now if someone really needs it, I want to be there and I want to help. But what I sometimes find is after an hour and we've moved out of the realm of friendship and fun and it's all work for me, I leave and I'm mad, I'm hurt, I'm upset, because that wasn't a give and take. Well, guess what? That's being a martyr. I've had martyrs in my life. You know, they'll bend over backwards, but then they'll let you know about it. I don't want to be a martyr. Do you? Give me a thumbs up if you know what I'm talking about. If you feel like you've given to people but then you feel a little angry about it, that's martyrdom. It's up to you to set the expectation. So if someone really needs you, if someone really needs you and says, you know, do you think we could talk about this? Set the boundary? Sure. Listen, I know that would be helpful. I think it would be helpful. How about we do that for a half hour and then we Stop. And then we have fun. Set the boundary. Don't be the martyr. Okay, what else? How to know when you're not being true to yourself. Are you exhausted? Are you chronically fatigued? Are you chronically down? Are you chronically depressed? Do you know that there's more joy out there and more love to be had than you're having? Well, then you got to figure out, what can I let go of? And that's really hard for women in particular, but you're gonna have to let go of something. What is it that you're chasing? What is it that you are constantly pursuing like a hamster on a wheel that you need to let go of so you can love yourself more, so you can have more time for yourself? You know, I had a client who said, I've made a decision that I'm not gonna go for the big promotion and I'm not gonna keep pushing for better jobs and more money. I'm exhausted. Exhausted. And all I want to do is be with my three children, my three young children. I want to do this job and not hate it, but I want to be more present for my children. So I'm going to stop pushing. But I'd love your help to love this job a little more. That is how not to crush yourself down. That's being true to yourself. That's not living to. That's not trying to live up to other people's expectations. That's understanding what you need to be happy. Right. Whether that's staying home with your children, whether that's going for a different career, what will make you happy, what is true for you. Right? Okay. And then I want to talk about, finally, love and self worth. What I see in almost everybody who I work with and almost everybody I connect with, including me. We don't love ourselves to the full measure of. Barb, I'm going to check what you said in a minute. Oh, I love it. Yay. Thank you for sharing. And please, everyone write a question. Hi, Mo. So nice to see you. Oh, I love this. Hi, Laura. Thank you for being here. Everybody, I would love you to post questions because I want to spend a few more minutes just answering your specific question. Okay, Barb, what you saying? Oh, got a rash on my hip. First thing the doctor asked, do you like what you're studying? Holy cow. I love it. I love how the doctor knew to ask that because so many don't love that. Yeah. And I. Interestingly, you talk about a rash on your body. I've had issues with skin. To me, the metaphor of skin is your boundary. Do you get hives? Do you get welts? Do you get stuff on your skin? I feel that that's the body's boundary. And when we have troubles there, we have troubles asserting our boundaries. Interesting. Love it. Where were we? Love. Oh. So Lorna Byrne, the mystic, who I'm going to work with on January 31st, join that live. It's going to be unbelievable. She's written a book that's just about to come out and I have the advanced proof and I think it's called Love from Heaven and it's all about love. And. And she says that she literally can see love, an energy, it's like a mist that she can palpably physically see. And she can see when we have it and when it's coming forward. And she can see when it's been retracted. And she says so many people, I think she said, on average people are experiencing and letting out only a quarter of the love that they have. I really see that. I see that, that. First of all, oh, Lena, so nice to see you. And Jan, this is amazing. All my dear friends, love it. Love, let's talk about it in all its ways. It makes me tear up because it's so powerful and so many of us are withholding love from ourselves and from others. So let's talk about it in ourselves. And when Lorna's book comes out, Love from Heaven, snap it up. It's simple and straightforward, but mind boggling. So do you love yourself or do you constantly hate yourself? Constantly recriminate, constantly beat yourself up for what you've done wrong. This is going to crush your life. You're not really being true to your actual soul essence. Every one of us, according to Lorna, is a part of God. I don't use that word, God. I use the universe or one source, whatever word you want to use. If you believe there's something a little bigger than what's going on here in the ego place. We didn't come here to hate ourselves. What a waste. We came here to love ourselves. And a lot of people think, well, that's selfish, that's narcissistic. You know, I personally was trained with half Greek. My mother would say, tutu, Tunis, may the evil eye not see. I never knew what that meant, but I was scared to death. I was scared to death, Barb, tell me what you think of that damn evil eye. And I somehow got the feeling that the evil eye would come down and swoop me if I were being egotistical or thought too much. Of myself. I was scared for years. I even felt that when good things would happen, the other shoe would drop. My poor mom didn't mean these things the way I took them. But I remember I got, what was it? I got onto the volleyball team and two weeks later I broke my leg. I'm like, see the evil eye? That's not self love, that's fear. That's anxiety. That's craziness. That's not love. So do you love yourself? What do you say to yourself? What goes on in your head? Do you beat yourself up? Do you talk to yourself like you would your worst enemy? Then you're not loving yourself, right? Secondly, what Lorna talks about is she sees if someone's being put down or someone's being made fun of or there's cruelty towards a person, she sees this mist of love go right back in. And I know what this feels like. I mean, how many of us, give me a thumbs up in life, have been devastated by someone, by a friend, by a lover, by a boss, by a family member who hasn't and who doesn't know what it feels like to feel so hurt that you retract into yourself and say, that hurts so badly. I don't ever want to feel this again. I mean, Brene Brown, who you shouldn't miss her work, talks about vulnerability. And her research shows that if you choose to blunt vulnerability, you blunt everything else. So if you blunt love and you blunt appreciation and joy, you blunt it all because it hurts so badly. Well, let's get tougher. We didn't come here to go underground. We came here to speak who we really are, to say who we really are. To deal with the consequences of that. To purge our relationships that are no longer serving us right to not stand for when people treat you like shit, excuse my language. I can't tell you how many people in my courses, in my life say how they let people treat them terribly. It's going to stop. Okay, so what I mentioned in the, in the previous non recorded video was my spiritual psychotherapist gave me an exercise. He said, you're a very judging person and you judge yourself incredibly harshly and I want to help you shift that. So he said, I want you to look in the mirror every day and I want you to say, I thoroughly love and accept myself. And I laugh because I did it. And as I did it, I like coughed up a hairball. I don't thoroughly love and accept myself. This is absurd. So I read later and I believe that affirmations like that Will not work if there's no truth in them for you. They're just a waste of breath. So what I realized was I could say, please help me thoroughly love and accept myself. Please let me get on the path to thoroughly loving and accepting myself. And then I did. So I would ask you, do you thoroughly love and accept yourself? Can you get on the path to that? And I promise you, here's another thing for any of us who are parents, if your children don't love and accept themselves, you're probably not role modeling that because children do what we do. They don't do what we say, they do what we do. They watch how we operate. So for any woman out there who has a daughter who talks about how much she doesn't like her body or her hair or her skin or I'm getting old and I look like a hag, you are role modeling for your beautiful child. How not to love yourself. Watch it. Watch it. And I. I'm guilty of this, too. Especially when your kids get older and you feel they're more like friends than children, but you're still a role model for them. So let us start being true to ourselves, true to that highest beautiful soul quality, that we're gifted and we're talented and we mean something in this world. And start saying more loving things to yourself and to everyone who you love. Do you say it enough? Do you say, I really love you? Now a lot of people say, I don't need to say that. They know that. No, they don't know it. Say it. Say it. Say it. Bring out that love. Let's see if that mist of love that Lorna can see if by the time we join her on January 31st for this free session, if we can expand that and feel it and be true to yourself. And I really believe that if you take these steps, your life will transform and you'll feel more joy, more health. And I want to leave you with this. There was a woman in my amazing career project last week, and we were talking about goal setting and coming forth with what we really want to do in this world. And she started to cry. And I said, what is making you cry? And she couldn't really articulate that. But what I sensed was she's completely blocked about bringing herself forward in the world. If you feel like that, reach out to me. Let me know. You know, let's have a session. Let's have a talk. Let's have an email exchange. Some people are completely and utterly blocked. The idea of coming forth and honoring who they really are is too scary and too foreign a territory. And if that's you, there's help. There's energy, healing. I have an amazing friend, Lynn Carroll, who's. Who's helped so many people, including me. Sometimes it's really in your energy system and no amount of talking can release it. Sometimes you need a transformative energy shift and that you can get with incredible helpers or a little therapy. There's so much that you have to offer and to give, and it starts with loving yourself and being true to yourself. And I hope that was helpful. Please comment below. Let me know if you have more questions, if you'd like any more help. If you want more resources, I'm here for you. I love you and I'm so appreciative of you being in my life and me having the chance to share these things that are helping me all along the way as well. Thank you, everybody. And next week, let's hope that my thing goes live at noon. I'll do my best. See you for Brave Up Tuesday next week. Love you. Thank you.