Corage: Hearing Your Quiet Truth

December 22, 2014 | Filed under: Citizen Bloggers | Posted by: Staff Blogger +

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The Truth may be as easy to reach as just letting the quiet drown out the noise around you.

By Sally Eames

The world is full of people who are happy to offer advice. When everyone else has an opinion, how do you make the choice about the right course of action for YOU? When obstacles come up, different choices emerge, or other opportunities that sound just as good, how do you know when to stay the course and when to change direction?

The Quiet Truth We’ve got a number of techniques in the Co-Active coaching world we can use to help our clients figure out which decision will serve them best. It boils down to this: getting quiet and checking in.

If you take the time to quietly be with yourself, in stillness, in artistic creation, or in a walking meditation, you can come back to your center. Once you are able to be present in the moment you can figure out where you are, where you’re going, and how you feel about that. When you get quiet — quiet enough to hear yourself breathe and feel the blood move through your body — you are finally quiet enough to hear that voice inside that knows what you want. That voice always speaks your truth, always knows the right answer.

This isn’t to say it’s always an answer you want to hear. It may tell you things you’d rather not know, like “This job is killing you” and “You need to get out of that relationship.” It may urge you to do things that scare you to death, like sharing what you believe about religion with a love interest, committing to a new exercise regime, starting a business, writing that book you keep putting off.

However, what that voice always has to say is “This is who you are. This is what you need to do to be whole and complete.” Which means that seeking it out and listening to what it has to say is always a good choice when faced with a big decision. Or when something doesn’t feel right about where you are on your journey.

There is another voice that pops up. It tends to be much louder than your truth-telling voice. It’s more demanding. It’s really good at sounding like truth, and sometimes we’ve become so accustomed to hearing it we take it for our true voice. But what it tends to yell about is what you aren’t. You aren’t good enough, strong enough, smart enough, talented enough, experienced enough. That’s your saboteur, and all it wants to do is keep you from changing.

Even though it’s small, quiet, best found in stillness, your truth speaking voice can overpower your saboteur. When your saboteur’s fearful voice starts screaming about how horrible you are, get quiet and check in with your inner truth teller. Ask it what’s real, what’s true. Its quiet answer will drown out all of the fear, and there will be no doubting your best option.

What’s your favorite way to connect with your true voice?

How do you get quiet?

What true things have you told yourself this week?

Sally Eames, CPCC, ACC operates Corage Coaching. She is a Certified Professional Co-Active coach and a graduate of the Coaches Training Institute. She is also an International Coach Federation Associate Certified Coach. For the full text of this column, please visit her blog. For more information on her work as a Co-active coach, please visit her site at havecorage.wordpress.com.