Watch the full training HERE.

We all want to be loved and accepted for who we are. And it can be hard to reveal ourselves to let our guard down and show up as fully ourselves.

We want to be seen, but we’re often hiding. 

Or we’re out there slaying dragons all day in the world and then we come home and it’s hard to shift gears. It’s hard to get vulnerable and reveal what’s going on below the surface. 

Because out in the world, maybe vulnerability wasn’t the best thing to lead with all day. Or maybe it was, depending on the life you lead. But for a lot of us, there’s a real disconnect between the person we have to be at work and the person we want to be at home. And transitioning between the two can get sticky.

Here are five ways to show up authentically and REAL in your relationships. 

Number One: Notice what stops you

Notice what’s in the way of authenticity for you. These can be things like:

  • Ideas you may have about realness
  • Fears you may have about revealing your true self
  • Cultural inheritances you might have around what realness looks and feels like and whether it’s appropriate or not for you to show up that way. 

So notice and get aware about what’s in the way for you now around being authentic and what you want to change about that. Awareness is the first step to change.

Number Two: Create deliberate transitions

Understand that you want to bring different flavors of yourself to different places because it feels good TO YOU, not because you have to twist yourself in knots to be appropriate. 

Because it’s enjoyable to not be stuck in one slice of you all the time and there are many sides of you that would love to come out to play.

To transition better out of work mode, or mom mode, create a deliberate transition, whether that’s a bath, a walk, a three minute dance to a song, a guided meditation, a hypnosis tape, jumping up and down, masturbation, exercising, slinging some weights. 

Whatever helps you transition, even if it’s simply to picture yourself taking off the work hat, and/or the mom hat, and putting on the luscious juicy woman hat. 

Whatever transition it is, make it deliberate, so that you can put work and mom down and be present and open at home as a lover. 

Number Three:  Make it a practice to have people feel you 

Whether that’s with your partner, or a friend if you’re single. 

You can do this by sharing 3 things: 

  • Something that went great that day that you’re grateful for
  • Something that was hard and how you overcome it. Or maybe you haven’t overcome it yet, and you share what’s hard, saying, “I don’t want you to fix this, I’m just letting you know what’s here for me right now.”
  • Something that you like about the person or something they did right that feels good to you, simply for the practice of being more expressed and honest. We’re quick to criticize, but we’re not always quick to share what’s working and what they’re doing well. So part of authenticity practice is to deliberately share the good.

Number Four: Ask for help

Ask for help, ask for support, ask for people to do things for you because it feels good and it stretches you. You don’t have to wait till you’re overwhelmed and on your last leg. You can ask for support because it would feel great to hand that thing off. 

Doing so gives you practice and facility with handing things off, which is a good thing to know how to do if you want to be more successful in life.

Number Five: If you feel full, let the person know

I call it my “stuffed sausage” mood. If you feel stuffed like a sausage and you don’t feel like being touched, tell them that before they touch you. Don’t wait till you bristle or smack their hand away, because that feels terrible.

This is also true for listening and conversations. We get full on a particular topic and then it’s hard to listen anymore.

Let them know that you either can’t listen anymore, or you don’t want to be touched and you need to either shift the conversation to something else or you need to go empty out a bit and you’ll be back when you have more space to be receptive again.

Be responsible with your energetic state and be real about it, like, “I feel really full right now. I don’t want to be touched, I’m going to go empty out and I’ll be back.”

Or, “I feel full on this topic right now, could we talk about something else and come back to this later?”

The activities I listed under number two work well for emptying out, too. And the most important thing is to come up with your own that work.

For more on being authentic in your relationships, listen to this short podcast episode.

Watch the full training HERE.

Discover what’s holding you and your partner back from having the relationship you’ve always wanted. Click here to take the Relationship Alchemy Assessment.