What do you think of when you hear: in order to live your best, fullest, most purposeful life, you need to show up in the world as unapologetically yourself? 

This is what I’ve learned, and I believe this so deeply. In this article, I’m going to share with you what it means to be unapologetically yourself. I’ll also touch on the subject of selfishness and why claiming yourself unapologetically is worth it, even when it’s hard.

So, what does it mean to be unapologetically yourself?

It can mean different things to different people, but overall, it means to fiercely choose yourself–the good, bad, and the ugly–over the person you think you “should” be.

It means choosing your unique expression of life and making decisions that are based on that truth.

It means choosing you even when you’re scared to speak what’s true for you. 

It means choosing you when you’re feeling difficult emotions – choosing to feel them fully and honor them as an expression of who you are.

It’s choosing what’s true for you when you decide what to wear each morning, even if what feels good to you isn’t the latest fashion; or deciding to go to the grocery store without makeup because you simply don’t feel like it.

Being unapologetically yourself means choosing yourself by changing course in your life when something calls to you and you know in your heart it’s the right thing to do, even if it goes against all logic.

It means choosing you, even when fear is inviting you to stay with what’s familiar–the relationship that’s making you miserable, the toxic boss, a job you hate.

Being unapologetic in claiming your true self means choosing YOU by taking courageous steps toward creating the life YOU want–not the life someone else told you you should have.

Who are you when you’re claiming yourself?

This is, for most, the trickiest part. This question begs another question–who am I, actually? Who am I, really?

For most of us, we attach to expectations, limiting beliefs, and other wounds as we grow up. So, the person we really are gets a bit muddled as we try on other identities in an effort to fit in or belong.  We’re told to be different and stand out by achieving or doing, but we’re also told to fit in. It’s a conflicting story, and most of us get sucked into fitting in.

In Debbie Ford’s book, Dark Side of the Light Chasers, she references a work by John Welwood in which he describes the world within us as a castle. Inside the castle are many rooms, all different, each with its own special gift. They are all perfect in their own right. When we are children, we see the specialness of each room regardless of whether it is a broom closet, grand ballroom, luxurious bedroom, or dark cellar. They are all perfect to us.

But then one day, someone comes to your castle and tells you one of the rooms isn’t perfect. They tell you that if you want to have a perfect castle, you should lock the room and never show it to anyone. Since you wanted love and acceptance, you quickly closed off that room. 

Over time, more and more people came to visit your castle and shared their opinions about the rooms with you. Slowly over time, you shut one door after another for different reasons. You closed rooms because you were afraid. You closed rooms because you were too much, or not enough. You closed rooms that were too conservative. You closed rooms because other castles didn’t have rooms like yours.

You closed all the doors to the rooms that didn’t fit society’s standards of the way your castle “should” be.

So imagine that you wanted to get rid of these rooms, but they’re part of your castle so you can’t just remove them. So after a while of putting them in the dark shadows of your mind, you just forget about them. They’re gone, never to be seen again.

Most of us lock away so many rooms that we forget we ever had a castle. We think we have a 1 bedroom apartment. And isn’t it crazy to think that there are all of these perfect, precious rooms we’ve just forgotten about?

Now, think of your castle as the place where all of you lives unapologetically. The good, the bad, the ugly… all of it.  One of your rooms is courage. One is love. There are an infinite number of rooms filled with things like honesty, integrity, grace, fear, hatred, greed – all of it. They can all exist together, and while some rooms feel a little different than others, they all exist together and together create the perfect castle. Each room is a necessary part of the structure of the castle and each room has an opposite. 

We need to unlock the rooms to find our uniqueness – who we really are.

So who are you without your limiting beliefs, stories about yourself and the way the world works, wounds, and expectations about how life “should” be?

This is the question most people spend their lives trying to figure out.

Only it doesn’t take figuring out.

There isn’t anything outside of you that will help figure it out. There is only love inside of you that can bring you home to your castle. It’s just coming home to love. Love for others, love for the world, love for you. Unapologetic love.

Why being unapologetically yourself isn’t selfish

I asked around, and it seems the word unapologetic carries some baggage for a lot of people. Being unapologetically yourself seems to mean that when someone shows up in their truth and isn’t willing to compromise on that, that it’s selfish.

I understand why it seems that way, but it’s different, and here’s why:

When I choose me unapologetically, I am honoring my sovereignty as a human being. I am giving myself permission to unlock all of the rooms in my castle. I’m giving myself permission to stand in all of my flawed humanness and honor all of it.

Sometimes that means having to say no to things that aren’t in my best interests. Sometimes it means disappointing someone else. 

Why isn’t this selfish? 

It’s not selfish because choosing you is self-care. It’s taking care of yourself, and in doing so, you are also honoring others in their sovereign human being-ness. What that means is that in choosing me, I am not making myself wrong for being me, and in doing so, I am also honoring your ability to navigate the expectations and emotions you have about me disappointing you. I am not making you wrong for having expectations and emotions about it, and I am not making me wrong for choosing me. 

It’s when expectations get in the way that the word selfish comes up when we talk about being unapologetically yourself. 

See, humans have expectations. It’s just fact. It happens to all of us. We have expectations about how things should be, or in most cases, the way we want things to be. 

But what that does is set us up for disappointment because we can’t control the actions of others. Sure, we can feel disappointed, but what if we were to drop the expectations? How would life be different if we fully chose ourselves, unapologetically, and were able to give ourselves what we thought we needed from another?

Is it wrong to ask for things? Absolutely not! But when the answer is no, we have to remember that the person we are asking has full sovereignty over their being-ness. We might not like their choice, but we have to honor their choosing of themselves because everyone has that right. It doesn’t mean you have to like it, but you do have to honor it because there is no way you can control it.

The Merriam-Webster definition of selfish is, concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself : seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others

When you are being unapologetically yourself, you’re operating from your heart and soul. You are choosing the fullest expression of the sourced being that you are, and when you operate from this place, there is no way you can have zero regard for others. I promise.

Being unapologetically yourself is not selfish!

Being unapologetically yourself is hard sometimes

Yes, it’s true. Choosing yourself fiercely is hard.

My current relationship is in turmoil because I decided to choose to be me. I fiercely claimed that part of me and it caused a lot of chaos because I was showing up as a person who was not me in the relationship. I was not being true to myself when I was living in my survival patterns of fear.

Another example of claiming yourself is with money – specifically scarcity versus abundance. Scarcity is a default energy pattern. The Universe is abundant, and that is our true nature – to believe in that. When we live from this place of scarcity and insufficiency, we’re not claiming ourselves. We’re living in fear, not love, and in order to be unapologetically yourself, you must always choose the path of love. 

I quit my day job last August to be a full-time coach, and it’s hard. It’s difficult to build a business, and being an entrepreneur without a “guaranteed paycheck” is not for the faint of heart! I found myself in a cycle of fear around money and it affected how I showed up everywhere else – my relationships, my work, my finances, everything.

When I chose to claim abundance and trust, which is who I am, everything changed. Do I worry about money sometimes? Of course. But I’m not afraid of it. I’m not living in survival anymore. I am choosing to be me. I’m claiming abundance and the life that’s waiting for me and I am trusting in the Universe’s ability to provide what I need.

The reason it’s hard to choose yourself over and over again really comes down to fear. Fear of the unfamiliar and the uncertain. And the truth is, we can’t even really do anything about the unfamiliar but to get familiar with it, and we can’t really do anything about the uncertain but stay in the present (because that’s all we really have).

When fear kicks in, our survival patterns, which are basically habit loops, kick into gear. It’s like a computer program that gets to a place in the code where a routine is called to run. It’s all neurobiologically hard-wired into our brains to let fear drive the show. Our brain is trying to protect us! 

But the survival patterns aren’t what help us grow. We have to make the hard choices that invite us to fiercely choose who we are. That means rising above the conditioning, limiting beliefs and stories we have that say our castle isn’t perfect.

Conclusion

Being unapologetically yourself is really the key to living your fullest, best life and that’s due in large part because when we don’t choose ourselves, we stay small by avoiding the feelings that come up with the discomfort of stepping outside of our comfort zone. 

It’s important to know that all of us bump up against conditioning, limiting beliefs, expectations, and past wounds in our lives. We’re neurobiologically hardwired to avoid pain and stay safe. Sometimes anxiety, fear, anger, shame, grief and other emotions get in the way of us noticing the edges we’re bumping up against and we make them wrong. But they’re entirely normal and are messages inviting us to look deeper and take a closer look.

The key is to cultivate a relationship with these parts of our castle. These emotions are the doorway to the locked rooms and when we can meet these experiences with kindness, love, compassion, and curiosity, this is how we get unstuck. This is how we thrive. 

So ask yourself what’s holding you back from being unapologetically yourself in your life. What’s it costing you to stay connected to your limiting beliefs, conditioning, expectations, and wounds? What would be possible for you in your life to show up unapologetically yourself.

It’s a great question to consider!

Prefer to listen to this topic?

Visit https://realbraveunstoppable.com to listen to this episode on the Real, Brave, & Unstoppable podcast.