What does the unapologetic version of you look like? The version of yourself where you have unconditional love for yourself? Maybe the first question should be to answer “What is unconditional love?”
This is another one of those terms that gets tossed around in today’s society without any understanding or context behind it. For me unconditional love means expressing love, gratitude or appreciation expecting nothing in return!
You see, not only do we tend to do this with other people but we do the same thing to ourselves. We have been hardwired to believe that everything we do must have an immediate return on investment. Think about it, it’s actually gotten to a point where we overthink and work our ass off to get the perfect picture or video to get a minimum number of likes or views.
Then we beat ourselves up wondering why that picture did not make a bigger splash on social media. Crazy times we are living in!
The Greater You
Now the greater issue is why are we living our lives just going where the wind blows us? Why do so many people fail to take the time to consider the person or life they actually want to live. Nearly everyone’s answers involve the most politically correct responses or what they think their parents, coaches, teachers or society wants to hear. It gets everyone off their back.
I recently was working with an athlete and asked over 2 months ago to text me a Power Phrase that actually excites them. One that if they look in the mirror and say it outloud it gives them chills or a rush of adrenaline.
Really encouraging to stay away from generic responses like “I am Confident” or “I am powerful”…
Now if that truly excites you by all means ROLL WITH IT!! But what I have found over the years is that everyone has a piece of their personality they never tend to express…
The responses blew my mind what certain people were holding back! A fear to unleash a piece of their personality because they do not wanna be judged…
Some of their responses included (most of these people I have never heard use a cuss word) “I am a motha fuckin badass”, “I am the shit”, “I am badass” “I am somebody”…
Now I am not saying that everyone needs to sit down and write as many cuss words as they can, although I am a firm believer that there is power in language!
And then taking the time to consider something more meaningful and empowering for themselves is extremely powerful! It shows that we all have layers to our personality that we probably never express to the world, your spouse or company because feel you must wear the same “outfit” or personality every single day!
Growing You
Growth means growing as a person. It means growing and upgrading your personality. The experiences to want to have in life. The people you want to meet. The things you want to acquire that all comes with growth as a person!
The problem for athletes is that they have trained to believe if you want more WORK HARDER. And working harder for them is more physical training. So here they go getting back into the loop of only focusing on their physical bodies and forgetting the mind, heart or soul.
As many of you know I work a lot with the sport of gymnastics and they have kicked off the season and immediately you can see it through small conversations that they quickly have fallen in the wake up, school, practice, recovery, homework and bed routine.
They leave practice more often than not stressed about hurrying home so they can get schoolwork done in hopes to get in bed at a decent hour so they can wake up and do it all over again.
Quickly forgetting about who they are and growing small parts of their personalities. Even when I reach out to them just to catch up and see how life is going you can see how the initial response is that 20-30 minute conversation is wildly inconvenient with their day.
Yet we know in our hearts it’s wildly powerful and important! So I challenged all of them with a list of 9 categories and 5-8 questions within each category to answer and not forget about growing themselves! Those categories included:
- Quality of Life
- Life Vision
- Friendships
- Love and Relationships
- Emotional Life
- Health and Well-Being
- Athletics
- Personal Growth
- Personality
Taking Inventory
Where are you within these categories of your own life? Are your relationships and quality of life where YOU want them to be or is it based on society’s rules…
These are fun and interesting to talk about. I think most people are looking for 1 answer that gets them to a specific point in their life. The reality is that these questions and parts of your life/personality are always evolving if you choose them to be!
I challenge you. I challenge you to notice with your team or company are most people living in a loop? Can you witness pieces of their personality constantly growing.
What is your Power Phrase! What are things you can say out loud that excite you every morning? When you know you, it rubs off on everyone else around you!
Be unapologetically you!!