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Have you ever been stuck in a rut with someone long after the argument’s used by date?

This year, we’ve been working a lot on being truly authentic and fully self-expressed and we have to say, it’s made a huge difference to our lives. To us, being authentic means looking deeper into ourselves in order to discover what’s actually going on at any given point in time. We’ve found that often we are triggered to have an emotional experience which we assume is associated to our given situation when in fact there is an underlying emotional cause to blame. So we end up getting caught up in these surface level issues which aren’t actually the real problem at all. For example, I (Nikki) remember early on in our relationship getting annoyed at Kevin for not wishing me good luck for a uni exam. I was stewing for days and eventually took it out on him. It wasn’t until I looked beneath the surface when I came to realise that the issue wasn’t Kevin not wishing me luck at all, but rather it was about my fear of failure in my studies, and I was merely taking these deep seated emotions out on the circumstance at hand instead. Being willing to look beneath the surface and acknowledge to ourselves what we find there is what we think being authentic is all about. Now what does it mean to be fully self-expressed? To us, it’s about having the freedom to share our authenticity with the rest of the world which might include divulging uncomfortable parts of ourselves to others, and speaking from our heart in spite of that little voice in our mind telling us not to.

We’ve come to understand that it’s not easy to be authentic and fully self-expressed all the time. Naturally, our preference is to always be happy and for our life to be perfect. So when things aren’t going to plan, our instinct may be to stand proud on the outside whilst beating ourselves up on the inside. The truth is, it’s okay not to be happy all of the time, and actually life’s just as ‘perfect’ when we’re not. It takes courage to be authentic and real guts to express it. Yet often it’s the very act of expressing it that restores the happiness we were searching for all along. Try it out and see 🙂