Expressing Your Whole Self

A key purpose to each life is to fully express who you are. What you do, how you live, your relationships and your legacy will all flow naturally from a commitment to allow all parts of yourself to be seen and expressed in the world. Yet authenticity is difficult. It is a radical act to choose to be your whole self. Fiona talks to how researching spirituality led her on own journey towards expressing her whole self. She believes choosing our whole self is a form of leadership in the world today.

Transcript

Hi everyone,

My name is Fiona English and this is a shortened TEDx style audio of a speech I gave called Expressing Your Whole Self.

Recently I wrote a blog which began When I first started writing about exploring spirituality in my life and my decision to conduct a research study on the topic I got some well-meaning feedback that perhaps I should focus on a more commercially palatable subject That it might pigeonhole how people perceived me and what I offered and impact my broader business.

I understood completely what they were suggesting and I was not naive to that risk.

However,

I also understood to follow that advice would be to suppress part of who I am and this was a bigger risk I was not willing to take.

I believe a key purpose to each life is to fully express who you are.

What you do,

How you live,

Your relationships and your legacy will all flow naturally from a commitment to allow all parts of yourself to be seen and expressed in the world.

It does of course come with a set of challenges.

We all have parts we're shy to show.

More practically when you do or are interested in multiple things it can be difficult to succinctly explain all of who you are.

To compound matters we live in the era of the elevator pitch,

A form of human reductionism.

We are actively encouraged to keep it short and one-dimensional.

Researching spirituality was not about making money.

It was recognizing there were parts of me I didn't understand.

Parts of me that were not fully expressed in the world.

Somewhere inside me I knew I needed to nurture these parts of me more if I was to become the person I felt destined to be.

This decision to explore an unanswered question in my soul helped me express myself more fully.

It has led me to believe that the key purpose to every life is to find our own unique way to be fully expressed in the world.

Three themes arose in my research that have impacted my life so profoundly.

They were connection,

Meaning and purpose and authenticity.

I want to talk to you today about how I believe they might impact yours.

The most common theme in my research was connection.

It manifested in two ways,

Belief in a higher power and the idea of oneness,

That we are all connected.

Of great significance this connection to a higher presence or life source was an embodied one.

It was not something people simply thought about in their mind.

Their spiritual practice was about being in communion with the higher power or life source which was residing within them.

Spirituality in their experience was not solely a cognitive process,

It is a felt experience in the body.

To be more connected we must be in our bodies,

Not in our heads.

The realisation that connection is a feeling was transformative for me.

The classic over intellectualiser,

I have spent my life in my head.

But we cannot rely on cognition alone for connection.

This has helped me to live a much more embodied life.

One in which I am living more from my heart,

The seat of connection,

Rather than my head.

I have access to so much more of who I am,

My whole self.

I am not just my mind,

I am also my heart,

My soul,

My spirit,

My body,

My feelings,

My creativity.

Now I actively settle aside time for solitude so I can hear myself.

I have learned to trust my intuition.

That I am not just the knowledge in my head but the wisdom in my body.

This has allowed me to trust myself much more than I ever would have done before.

I really believe that this is foundational to change making in the world.

Change is not made by going out into the world and looking at what others are doing,

The answers that already exist.

Change is made by going inside,

Going deeper and trusting the answers waiting to be discovered.

This deeper connection has also helped my sense of belonging.

Feeling more connected to myself has helped me make sense of my relationship with the universe.

I understand my place more fully,

Can see more clearly how I am part of a bigger plan.

This too has transformed my life because it enables me to let go more.

I don't feel the need to be in control to the same extent because I understand there is a greater plan,

A greater force at play than I can imagine.

I trust that even though I can't always see it,

There is a divine plan in place for me and my life.

Researching spirituality led me to have a greater appreciation of what meaning and purpose really are.

Traditionally many meaning making modalities were spiritual.

We learned to make meaning out of our lives from what we learned in the religious or spiritual traditions.

It is no surprise that we have a widespread search for meaning as we have become a more secular society.

A lot of ideas around meaning and purpose have become quite surface level these days.

They are now mis-sold as what you do or what you produce.

What I have come to realise is that purpose is about who you are,

How you express your whole self in the world.

I believe purpose and self-actualisation are the same thing.

Instead of looking for greater purpose you should set a different goal,

A goal to express your whole self fully.

When people ask me why I knew speaking and writing would form part of what I do,

I always say the same thing.

I have something to say.

The truth is we all have something to say.

Each of us have questions inside us that need to be answered.

To live a fully expressed life we must follow the questions inside and where they are trying to lead us.

In those questions are answers that others are also seeking.

To live a life of purpose is to seek to find answers to those questions,

Knowing that the purpose of doing so will become clear only after we do it.

To invest in ourselves appreciating there will be a collective outcome to that investment.

The famous mythologist Joseph Campbell said,

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.

Where you stumble there lies your treasure.

In my experience part of what we're supposed to do in life,

Our purpose if you prefer,

Always lies in our struggles.

It is the gift life has given us to figure out so that we can help others do the same.

It is the unique perception of the present that we have.

It is the unique perspective your lived experience can bring to something which allows you to influence and impact others.

That place in you which you are afraid to investigate,

Reluctant to expand,

That place is the part of you that the world is searching for.

It is the birthplace of the greater sense of purpose you are longing for.

Having the courage to go there is the beginning of transformation and expressing all of who you can be.

To amplify all of yourself so that you can meet some need in the world,

Can be of service in some way.

Each person I spoke to told me how connecting more deeply helped them to understand what the most authentic version of who they could be looked like.

They strived to become this person.

There is something so quietly powerful about choosing to be your whole self in a world which does not encourage it.

Expressing your whole self is the action of authenticity.

It is having your voice heard in the world.

It is our actions,

Not just our words in life that really express who we are.

Every single decision,

Every interaction we have is an expression of the person we are and the world that we want to live in.

Expression is a full body experience.

It is what we think,

How we feel,

What we wear,

How we love.

Expression is embodying who you really are.

Self-expression is how you communicate who you are to others but more importantly it is how you communicate who you are to yourself.

Authentic expression exists in the small decisions we make daily,

The contribution we make in tiny ways,

The way we show up in life.

None of it is insignificant.

Everything creates a ripple and impacts the world around us.

People often say to me,

You can't change the system.

I fundamentally disagree with this.

We are the system.

The system is not outside of us.

We as the people are the system.

Therefore for each individual who decides to transform,

To express who they are more completely,

The system cannot but change.

There is a space where you meet the world,

A space where your impact is felt.

How you cultivate the authentic expression of your whole self defines this space.

In a world in which leadership is increasingly absent,

Making a commitment to express your whole self is an act of personal leadership.

It is showing up for yourself every day.

Do not underestimate the power of this.

It is a radical act to choose to be your whole self.

We all arrive at a point of change in our lives,

A call to do something different,

A yearning to express more of who we are.

Very few welcome this yearning with open arms.

It is disruptive,

Frightening,

Exposing.

Make no mistake,

Authenticity is difficult.

Each of us has our own unique reasons for wanting to protect parts of who we are.

An absolute given about transformation is that parts of us must die.

Your ego will fight you every step of the way.

Your old identity must dissolve to make way for who you are becoming.

All participants of my study were insistent that spirituality should not be framed as a Pollyanna-like experience of life.

Rather,

Having a spiritual framework helped cultivate spiritual connection,

Which provided the inner resilience needed to accept and grow from the challenging moments of living a full life.

I share their view.

Today I am braver,

More authentic because I feel more aligned with all of who I am.

Yet I promise this has not been a smooth journey for me.

When you embark on the journey back to yourself,

You are committing to holding a mirror up to yourself and your life.

To do the often painful inner work and embrace an ongoing path of change.

I still suffer crises of confidence.

I worry that what I say or write may not be well received.

But I also know to make change in the world we must be willing to be different.

To show exactly who we are,

Knowing that even when we can't see it,

We are impacting somehow or somewhere.

So today when I am afraid,

I remind myself that my future is in the right place.

I remind myself that my fear is my arrow telling me I am moving in the right direction.

My North Star remains that I choose the truth.

I choose the most authentic version of myself and my work.

Let me leave you with one final thought.

Your greatest spiritual practice is your life.

There is little point being enlightened in your head and not expressing all of who you are in your life.

Your thoughts and ideas,

Who you truly are,

Must be grounded in the experience of life.

To be fully expressed is the experience of being alive.

To do this means being willing to take risks.

To express myself fully I have learned to embrace the uncertainty of life,

To like it because it is the sister of possibility.

And I prefer my life to be full of possibility rather than full of certainty.

I believe if you trust that,

Trust life and invest in yourself,

All of what you are destined to express will find you.

Reviews

I found you at the precise moment I needed to. Thank you for this.

Just like madam!...that was positively upliftingly a beautiful enchanting session! Saved in my favourites....Namaste 🙏🏼😊

Happy Easter to you & your loved ones 🍀💚🇮🇪💪🏼🙏🏼😊⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Great talk Fiona - very thought provoking & inspiring! We are the system indeed!! 🌸💗🌸