The Right Moment To Get Vulnerable And Share Your Story

“So, when is the right time to share my story? And on what occasion?”

One of my students recently asked me this, as she wanted to share more of herself with her audience, but feared the vulnerability of exposing parts of herself that she wasn’t totally comfortable with.

I’m not going to beat around the bush – it can be really scary to come into our Truth. To move beyond what other people expect of you, or what you think you have to say for your audience to “get” you, and instead move into a space where you completely own your story and can confidently express yourself in your authenticity (and of course, have that be a really smart business decision!).

It’s a process of venturing into the unknown, and once your message is out there, you can’t control how people react.

So faced with this fear of uncertainty and what people might think, what do you do?

Too often, this happens:

• Instead of just sharing what’s on your heart, you self-censor. You hold back what you really want to say.

• You don’t say what you really think and feel out of fear of being judged.

• Or you share something and then have a vulnerability hangover, terrified of how people might react.

I get it. Even though this is my line of work, I still go through my own ebbs and flows of being unsure of how much is “too much.”

At your core, you want to speak up and show up as 100% you because you know that what you have to share will help someone. But, then the terror of being misunderstood creeps riiiighttt back in.

I could give you a cookie-cutter answer, like: “you need to wait X months to share these parts of your story, and only speak about them in X, Y, Z occasions.”

That’s what my student was hoping from me, as well as the many people that ask me a variation of this question.

But, that wouldn’t be genuine.

The truth is…

• The right occasion is when you’re ready to share your Truth.

• The best way to tell your story is by healing the parts you’re holding back, and sharing your message from a heart-centered and vulnerable space.

• The right amount of vulnerability is the depth at which you’re willing to meet yourself and be seen by others.

Yes, there are frameworks and processes to facilitate this, which I teach.

But too often, these doubts come from your head and not your heart, which is your inner compass.

So the real work is regulating your inner compass and understanding WHY it keeps flicking away from your Truth in the first place.

That’s what most people struggle with:

They look for strategies for how to package their story in the “best” way so that their audience will accept them.

But at its core, sharing your most authentic story is quite simple:

Tell the truth, from your heart space.

Everything else stems from there.