Welcome. This is A Glimpse Inside, and I’m Wendy Perrotti.

Over the past few months, we have talked about reinvention, relationships, happiness, and confidence. All of those rely on this simple thing in order for us to live them fully, experience them fully, and that’s showing up as the best version of you. All right? That’s a simple, simple thing. Just being our best every day we’ll deliver re-invention, healthy relationships, happiness, confidence, all of these things.

Only, this simple thing isn’t really so simple, is it? Of course it’s not. If it were simple to show up as that best version of ourself every day, we’d all be doing it. And there are so many things that get in the way, and we’ve talked about them on all these episodes, negative self-talk, getting stuck in your head, that fear of being judged, the expectations that we set for ourselves, the expectations that we set for other people. All of those things get us mired and muddled down and they stop us from living as our true self. They stop us from showing people our vulnerability, our love, our brilliance, our joy, all of those best pieces of us, right?

We’re afraid to show up fully as ourselves because life smacked us down. This is not an easy go around we have, right? It’s not all hearts and ponies and rainbows and all that groovy stuff, we get smacked down a lot. Not everything goes well for us all the time and we learn to protect ourselves, right?

So, I always tell my clients, if you picture this little tiny version of yourself behind your rib cage and covered in armor, right? This armor that we’ve built in our lives, that we know keeps us safe from the scary stuff, and that little critter’s got whole posse of weapons, right? And for each of us, those weapons are different. For some of us, we pull out the sarcasm, others are aggressive or eager to like fight or blame when we’re afraid. Some of us play small, shrink back, get frozen. You know, we were talking to Karen in the Confidence Series about those things that sort of trap us in that way.

We’ve all got them. And when we interact with one another, we’re not interacting with the human that we see in front of us, we’re interacting with that little critter behind their rib cage, all covered with armor, with those varied weapons all ready to roll.

And when we recognize that, when we recognize that we don’t want to come at the world from that space, we can start laying down our armor. We can start laying down our weapons. And as we do that, we create a safer environment for ourselves and others. We can start to create an environment where we show up more fully, where we lean into that best version of ourselves, and where by that model, we’re encouraging the people around us to do that.

So, we all share these things. We all share these tendencies, we all share these things that get in the way. And if you’ve listened to the episodes in the past, you know that I have tons of tools for surmounting these things, these obstacles and these things that get in our way. You can go to the toolbox on wendyperrotti.com to find them. They’re all free. You can download a PDF of how to use them. There’s one in every episode of A Glimpse Inside. You can find those on aglimpseinside.superpowerexperts.com. Tons of tools that we all share.