Over the years, from patients and coachees I have accompanied, I came to the conclusion that what is most difficult for us human beings is to let ourselves be.

What happens between childhood and adulthood leaves a mark that is often difficult to repair. As the years go by, we let go of what makes us unique, we mold ourselves to what others expect from us, we pretend to feel what we are told we can feel and not that pain in the belly when there is something we don’t like. We keep quiet instead of shouting and kicking when we get angry, we laugh slowly instead of jumping for joy when something makes us happy. We also hide our fears because we can only be strong and brave. And so we grow, being what we should be, or what others expect us to be, and we silence that little inner voice.

Some of us at some point in life become aware of that discomfort and start to slow down, to look differently, to turn up the volume of that inner voice. We start to register what we really like, where we are happy, what scares us, what makes us angry.

To start to get out of the discomfort we have to dare to do some things:

1. Listen to ourselves, to silence external noises. Start to register what we feel, how and where we feel it.
2. Unlearn our beliefs, those mandates that determine us how to be and what to do since we were children.
3. Identify our biases and test them, maybe some are no longer valid.

Now, there is an important fact to keep in mind. The brain is a machine that works non stop, 7×24. One of its main functions is to save energy, so it needs labels to quickly identify what is happening in the world, in order to act quickly. Most of the time we do not have all the necessary information to interpret what surrounds us, through cognitive economy the brain identifies and interprets to be able to respond. This means that we all have biases, prejudices and beliefs. The proposal is to defy them….

As I am very visual I propose a game, let’s imagine our life as a road we are traveling on, in a backpack we keep all those things we want to keep: people, moments, memories, sensations, smells, tastes, places. As we said before, we go along this road according to what we are marked, so in that backpack we also have these labels, divided into beliefs, biases, the “should be’s”. Now let’s stop and sit down, imagine the landscape that you like the most, mine is by the sea on a deserted beach. Let’s review that backpack, what things we are carrying that are not ours, which ones we already think are meaningless.

The more space we have, the more room we will have to store new things.

When we walk this path lighter, we can choose, we always have that possibility. To choose who we want to be, what we want to do, who we want, who we fall in love with. To choose how we want to live our life. I think this is the closest thing to being free that we can have or be.

Nurture the courage to be able to choose, I know it is often scary because of that deep-rooted should-be and the fear of what others will think.

Dare to raise the volume of your inner voice, feel in your body what happens, breathe, choose what resonates in you!