How to get comfortable showing up, being visible & speaking up

Do you struggle with showing up, being visible, sharing what you offer and speaking up in your life or direct sales business?

Sweet friend, I want you to know that I understand. Sometimes I go days or weeks without posting on FB and I seldom post videos or selfies. Speaking up, being visible, saying what I feel, standing up for myself is HARD for me. I have multiple traumas from being bullied as a kid & teenager, abusive relationships, toxic work environments, some serious online bullying a couple years ago and the list goes on…

All those experiences have enforced the feeling and belief that I can’t say or do anything right, that speaking up, showing up or expressing myself will only cause pain, rejection, anger, punishment & loss and that I must always protect and be ready to defend myself. (Being an introvert, empath and someone who internalizes everything doesn’t help with being visible either.) 

You might be thinking, but you’re a coach, you’ve been an entrepreneur for years, you led a big direct sales team, you’ve spoke on big stages, you have thousands in your groups and social media, you train on confidence and mindset, and you struggle with that?…

I promise you it’s all true & I guess that’s why I like to train on it so much because I know how hard it is to become confident and be visible….

I know that I’m not alone in my experiences or being afraid to be visible and outspoken. About 80% of my clients and customers tell me they struggle with confidence & being visible too.

As a coach and having spent a lot of time in therapy myself, I understand how trauma affects us and how fear works. Most of our issues with confidence & visibility come from negative experiences in our past (usually when we were small kids) and stories we’ve been told or come to believe about ourselves, our worth and our abilities.

You see, our brains & nervous systems are meant to protect us & warn us so when we have something happen that causes a negative, painful or harmful reaction, our brains & nervous system will pick up on all the clues (triggers) and will try to protect us from any similar situation or reaction.

It may try to warn us with us with increased heart rate, breathing, upset stomach, headache, panic attack, etc… or it just kicks the fear into gear so we start remembering all the bad things that have happened before or that could happen. This happens subconsciously and unconsciously most of the time before we even process what’s going on consciously.

The fear, that natural safety mechanism response then takes over and stops us from putting ourselves out there, being visible, speaking up… It causes us to become perfectionists, overly self-critical, people pleasers who retreat into the safety of ourselves & continually sabotage our own success.

I understand it, I’ve worked to heal it in my own life, but it’s still a work in progress for me to overcome it. (And yes it’s possible for you to rewire how your brain processes things and change those pattern loops and autonomic responses too.)

After some serious online bullying in 2017, I went silent online for a long time, I took a big step back from my business, shut down some programs and stopped doing speaking engagements. I was also dealing with severe adrenal fatigue so I wasn’t physically or mentally capable of handling much for about 20 months. I’ve just started rebuilding my business and being a little more visible again in the past 6-7 months.

It’s still hard, it’s still scary, on days when my anxiety is really bad I know my limits and I honor my boundaries. I still feel the need to protect myself most of the time. I’ll always be an introvert & empath who prefers expressing myself through writing or 1:1 conversations. I’ll never be one who likes to take selfies and share every detail of my life. I’m 100% okay with all of that. 

But I realize now more than ever that I have a voice, privilege, opportunities and a platform that many do not have. I know that all the people who tried to take my voice and make me feel unworthy, ashamed and afraid all those years don’t deserve to still have that power over me. (And your hurts & stories don’t deserve to have that power over you anymore either.) 

There are SO many things I am passionate about, knowledgeable about, interested in, capable of and I want to make an impact and difference in. The current situation with racial injustice has sparked a fire in me and made realize that I can’t be silent and waste my opportunities, privilege or platform anymore.

I’ve spent most of the first 39 years of my life afraid to speak up, to show up, to be myself, to be different, to cause any reactions from others and I’m not going to spend the next 39 years like that.

I hope you know that you have a voice too. That your voice matters. That you matter. That what you offer in your business, how you can help people matters.

That what you say, your experiences, personality, perspective, passion – they matter. There are people who need to hear what you have to say and see who you are and need what you have to offer. Someone else is waiting for you to have the courage to speak up and show up because it will give them courage too.

I hope you’ll start sharing your voice, your passion, knowledge, interests, capabilities and making an impact and difference more too.

❤️ Misty

P.S. for more help with being visible and authentically showing up and sharing your direct sales business, check out my Branding Y.O.U. as a Direct Seller Course & Templates