How To Speak Your Truth >> 3 Key Strategies

Speaking your truth isn’t always easy—but it’s necessary. In this episode, I share my personal journey of finding my voice and how I went from being a constant talker to a more conscious & connected communicator. 

We dive into the fears that hold us back from authentic self-expression, the power of speaking with confidence, and how to shift from reactive to intentional communication. If you’ve ever struggled to be heard, set boundaries, or express yourself fully, this episode will help you reclaim your voice and use it with clarity, confidence, and purpose.

Books mentioned in today's episode:
- Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg
- It didn't start with You by Mark Wolynn

Episodes mentioned:
Ep #88 Nonviolent Communication with Aubrie Pohl

Timestamps to help you navigate this episode
0:00 Intro
0:24 FREE Self Love & Sweat MONTHLY Calendar
6:21 From Talker to True Communicator
11:02 Recognizing Unhealthy Communication Patterns
18:41 3 Key Strategies for Strong Communication
24:05 Upcoming Communication Masterclass

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:24 FREE Self Love & Sweat MONTHLY Calendar
• 6:21 From Talker to True Communicator
• 11:02 Recognizing Unhealthy Communication Patterns
• 18:41 Three Key Strategies for Strong Communication
• 24:05 Upcoming Communication Masterclass

Transcript

Lunden Souza: 0:00

Welcome to Self Love and Sweat the podcast, the place where you'll get inspired to live your life unapologetically, embrace your perfect imperfections and do what sets your soul on fire. I'm your host, Lunden Souza. Hey, before we jump into this episode, I just want to make sure that you get all the free things possible, if you haven't already. You need to get your self-love and sweat free monthly life coaching calendar. Honestly, the way to experience deep change in your life is by doing small little things over time, and so that's what you'll find in this free calendar. You can get it by going to lifelikelunden calendar. Get yours for free and let's get into today's episode. Welcome back to the podcast. Happy .

Lunden Souza: 1:04

I was just thinking about the last episodes we've had recently and there's been so many amazing conversations and amazing guests I've had recently and I just feel so filled and nourished and impacted by all those conversations. When I first started the podcast, it was mainly episodes of just me talking, which, of course, this is what this episode is today, and I still enjoy doing those, but it's just been such a gift to have so many incredible guests and, yeah, people share their stories, share their pain, share their struggles, share things that have helped them share messages that they once felt ashamed of. And, yeah, I was just reflecting a little bit on that. When I pressed record here, I was like this is kind of, yeah, the first time in a while that I've sat down to record something by myself and it's been, yeah, so great to have so many amazing guests. So I also, yeah, love hearing from you guys. So if there's any guests we've had recently that you've loved or topics that we've covered that, yeah, really spoke to your heart, I always want to hear from you. So you can always send me a message on Instagram, @lifelikelunden, or you could. If you're part of my email list and you get my emails, you can always hit reply to any of those emails and just let me know how you're doing, what you think about what we've been sharing on the podcast.

Lunden Souza: 2:30

I always love to keep that conversation, keep that dialogue, but today I want to talk about communication and talk about really, yeah, owning your authentic voice and how to speak your truth with confidence. And, specifically, I wanted to dive in today about three really important key strategies that help us develop strong communication and when I chose to make that shift from working out to working in and coaching more on what's happening within and the stories we're telling ourselves and the way that we are loving and nurturing ourselves. I just really found profound change in my life and profound change in my personal healing journey through communication, through understanding my internal dialogue, my self-talk where it came from? What that self-talk? In which ways might it be holding me back? Communication when it comes to my friends and my family and relationships all of that, all of the work-ins really promoted more powerful conversations with myself, with others, with my team, with friends just across the board. How we express our authentic truth is just so captivating to me. Truth is just so captivating to me, and so I just think that, yeah, speaking your authentic truth and speaking your voice and unleashing that is very powerful, but it's also really challenging. I know, because I've been there and I've worked with a lot of people all over the world on this as well. It's not always easy to just. You don't just one day decide you want to speak your authentic truth and then do it right. There's so many layers and so many components, and my friend Deanna uses the word rich a lot when she describes things, so I'm going to say there's a lot of rich elements to communication that we just keep. We get to keep uncovering and keep peeling back those layers. So definitely challenging, definitely not easy, definitely not overnight, but definitely a game changer because as you keep growing and evolving and changing and up-leveling and healing right, the way you express, the way that you talk to yourself and you express that truth to others, changes and evolves. And I just think, yeah, the power of conscious, confident communication is is, yeah, what I love.

Lunden Souza: 5:16

And growing up, I was always called the talker, right, and I was the kid in class who was finishing all of my work and then wanting to talk to every kid in the class and share my opinion and talk nonstop. I remember, yeah, my teachers in elementary school would literally put my desk outside because I would talk so much, or in the hallway or in that pod, which was like that main room that connected all the other classrooms, right, it was like Lunden done with her work, she doesn't, yeah, she won't stop talking. So we got to figure it out, I guess. And I remember a teacher telling me that I was going to talk at my own funeral. And as a kid too, I remember being told that I talk really fast. And I definitely did and do sometimes. I think living in Austria, living abroad, talking to a lot of non-native English speakers, helped me slow down a little bit in my speech. But I remember my grandma would tell me back in the day when we had voicemails, you would call someone on their house phone and leave a voicemail and my grandma would tell me I have to go back and listen to your voicemail multiple times because I don't know what you're saying and you're talking so fast and I just couldn't understand you. And so all my life I was this, yeah, labeled as this kid who never stopped talking.

Lunden Souza: 6:40

And then I got the opportunity to work for a company that was called Runtastic in 2012. I got an opportunity to work with them and build their YouTube channel and be the face of that brand and the face of that startup. And I got to speak on stage and speak on camera and speak to others and coach on things and talk a lot and got really good at that. And then I realized, through kind of those repeat reminders of the same circumstance over and over and over again right, this is how the universe lets us know. There's something that we get to choose to change if we want to, because we'll see those repeat patterns, we'll see those same scenarios.

Lunden Souza: 7:24

And so I found myself not connecting through conversation with people that I loved, like family and people I dated and friends. I found myself in those moments where you really have to look in the mirror a little bit. I was like, yeah, I'm kind of telling everybody what I think they should do and giving unsolicited advice and being loud and angry and expressive and dominating conversation and giving advice where it's not asked and getting angry at guys I'm dating and getting mad and throwing things and being like just not connecting, just really trying to convince. And so all the while I was doing these workouts right, doing fitness, working out on stage, traveling the world over 13 different countries, talking on stage, hosting events, talking to people about fitness and health and all of that and yeah, that was great. But I really realized that the real flex was not just what I could say on stage and how I could articulate a great speech or a great talk or whatever, but was really being able to take those deeply connecting communication skills on stage and take them off stage to my family, to my friends, to the people that I love.

Lunden Souza: 8:42

And yeah, it's been a beautiful journey ever since I had to let go of some things. I walked away from fitness. I walked away from all my online fitness coaching yeah, all the different coaching programs and different things I was doing. I just really wanted to step away from just being a talker and really tap into true communication and dive deep into the shadows of myself and help others do that too, and all the family dynamics and just all of it. It just all made sense, right?

Lunden Souza: 9:12

And what's beautiful is that I've had clients that I've worked with. Some started working with me after I started NLP coaching and communication coaching and life coaching and all of that, but some have been with me for a long time. Some have been with me ever since I was like 19 years old, started personal training and fitness coaching, and now this natural evolution of the way that I bring my coaching and voice to the world makes sense to a lot of people that have worked with me in the past, and I'm super grateful for that, because, yes, we need that element of fitness and physical wellbeing and taking care of our bodies and sweating and all of that, but then we also need the work-in parts, and I believe that, yes, you need both and, but one is just not going to work without the other. And now my main focus is on those work-ins. But yeah, really, like I said, it's not easy. It can be a little bit of a challenge to really reclaim your voice and really choose to look in the mirror and say, hey, what am I saying? Am I connecting? Where are these repeat patterns that I'm noticing and why am I being so overbearing in conversations? Where is this anger and this? Let me give you advice and all the things. Where's that coming from? And I love coaching on ancestral speech patterns because it's such an eye opener when you start to find compassion and love for where these certain communication patterns might have originated from.

Lunden Souza: 10:43

And a side note, a book I'm reading right now is so good. It's called it Didn't Start With you. I'm pretty sure that's what it's called. I'm going to check my Audible really quick, but what's been really empowering is yes, there are some things we have to clean up in our own space, right, Of course, but then there are also things. It's called it Didn't Start With you, by Mark Wallen. There are also things that maybe didn't start with you, like maybe there's things ancestrally that have been passed on patterns, ways that we behave, think, believe, feel, interact, all of that. And so that's been empowering too to understand, because I'm very hard on myself. That's something I work on regularly. I'm very much like what's the root cause of this? And if there's a problem, how can I understand the root cause of it and how can I heal that. And just like I very much go hard in the paint with the work ends and I'm working on easing myself through that a bit more because it's going to be a lifelong process, but hey, we're all human, right, but just really, yeah, taking the time to think, hey, a little self-love and compassion. It might not have anything to do with me, it's just something passed on that I get to choose to metabolize and digest for myself and for those moving forward. So that's been a really good book. I love that book, highly recommend it. I'm not done with it yet. I think I have like another couple hours of the audio book left, but it's really good, really good.

Lunden Souza: 12:14

One of the things I wrote down some different bullet points I wanna share three key strategies to develop strong communication skills. But I was taking some notes and just wrote down some things that I thought were just really helpful in that reclamation process of my voice. So one of the things I wrote down was I feel like I really used to talk to just take up space without thinking about impact, and so maybe that's something you can resonate with is like are you comfortable in that silence? Are you comfortable with a little bit of a pause and not needing to say anything to fill the space or fill the silence or fill the nothingness? Right, the nothingness is so incredible and so amazing, and so I just really started to see moments that I could just take a step back and listen more and not need to fill that space.

Lunden Souza: 13:08

The fear of speaking up authentically and worrying about judgment that was interesting. I don't know if you guys listening have worked through some healing things where you have this aha moment or this piece of the puzzle that pops up and you're like, oh, that's weird, I would have never thought that that was something I was subconsciously worrying about, but turns out I was Right. That fear of speaking up authentically and worrying about judgment Right, you would have thought, and I would have thought too, if I didn't have this opportunity to get a better viewpoint of it, like from the outside, it would have looked like, oh, Lunden doesn't give a shit about what anybody thinks and she's just sharing her opinion and her voice and she speaks up and all of that. But I really got to come face to face with the part of me that was worried about what people were thinking about me and maybe was trying to do the most and do all the things in order to drown out that voice a little bit. So that was very interesting to connect with.

Lunden Souza: 14:06

And then also, people pleasing is huge and avoiding conflict and just trying to please others that can keep us really, really stuck, and this is not something that I really resonate with a ton the being the people pleaser. But I've worked with enough people to know that this is a huge part of what keeps them stuck from sharing their voice. And so maybe people pleasing and avoiding that conflict and feeling like when you express and speak up, that's a problem, something to really dive deep into as well. And then some big lessons I've learned that I want to share. And then we'll talk about the three key strategies. I think all of what I'm sharing now really will bring, yeah, the meat and potatoes of those three key strategies to life. And so in that shift of going from talker to communicator.

Lunden Souza: 15:05

There were some lessons and some aha moments, and one of them was learning to pause and listen and speak with intention. I did a Instagram reel about this the other day of you know, you want to get better at communicating, try not talking, just don't say anything and really, the power of meditation in that right, our ability to be in the present moment, listen, pause, take it in. Meditation is so helpful for that, because it keeps us in the present moment, not in the familiar past and not in this predictable future based on our past experiences. Right, it's not about listening so you can think about what you're going to say next in the future. Or it's not about listening and then you know thinking about all the past stories of communication and ways that things didn't work out and why this is going to not work out in terms of conversation. Right, there's so many important parts to communication and one of them is really listening. And so if you're not meditating and you think meditation is just to like calm your mind and reduce stress, it's to teach you how to come back to the present moment, which is huge when it comes to communication and conversation.

Lunden Souza: 16:20

And then a couple other really big yeah, big pillars in what I coach and teach and what's changed my life are neuro-linguistic programming, nlp, the modality of coaching that I use, and also nonviolent communication and I think what's most important about those two because those could totally be episodes on themselves. In fact, aubrey and I did an episode just on nonviolent communication. I'll link that in the show notes. But those two can be two powerful episodes on their own. But NLP just really helps with us understanding the program, understanding that there is a program that is running right. Based on everything in your childhood, all the things passed on to you, the way that you're showing up, communicating, the way that conversations are going or not going all of that is a program that we have an opportunity to change that program with NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, the brain, neuro-linguistic, the words that we're saying to ourselves and to others, and programming right Change your words, change your world. That is NLP and a huge component of the way that I coach and the way that I live. And nonviolent communication as well Another really really good book, nonviolent Communication, that you'll just love to dive into.

Lunden Souza: 17:49

Those four components of nonviolent communication have shifted my ability to be present and when we are present and we're deciding okay, how do I want to hear and then how do I want to speak. It's nice to have these filters that we can go through, and nonviolent communication really provides that. And then the other thing I wrote down was you know, I often will say it's about connection over convincing. It's about clarity over explaining. Less is more right. It's about that deep connection from the words, not what we're saying, not about getting our point across. It's about having the clarity in who we want to be and what we want to bring to each and every conversation, because we're present in the moment to do that right. So yeah, with that being said, let's tap into those three strategies, three key strategies to develop strong communication skills.

Lunden Souza: 18:46

The first one is know your core values In order to speak from a space of what truly matters to you. You need to know what truly matters to you and you need to know who you want to be, how you know when you're being it, how you know when you're not being it and when it's time to set a boundary. You need to know who you want to be right. Things happen to us, things come into our sphere, right, and we have to choose and decide how we're going to happen back how we're going to respond over react. Well, it's easy to react when you don't know your values and you're not sure about who you want to be. It's much easier to respond when you have that framework that you created that says this is who I want to be, these are my core values, this is how I'm going to show up, right? So speak from that place of value. Speak from that place of what truly matters to you. That's the first one. Number two is practice assertiveness, not aggressive communication, and understanding the nuances between being assertive and advocating for yourself and being aggressive and trying to get your way and speaking from a place of trauma and reaction. Right, and finding that balance.

Lunden Souza: 20:00

Recently I was chatting with a team member and we were talking about what we might say in a particular situation and I had a way of saying it and she responded of like oh well, that's assertive. And I remember thinking like okay, well then you know what's something more from your voice that you might say things differently. Or you know, tweak what I said into something that's more your voice. But then I was thinking too of like what's wrong with assertive, right? What's that? What's the story that you tell yourself about assertiveness, right, can we be assertive and also kind, right, like, just thought about that a little bit, right. Can we be assertive and also kind, right, like, just thought about that a little bit? Right? An assertive is going to look different on everyone, right? I love working with people and hearing their voice and the way they communicate and some of the different nuances of that, because assertive can, yeah, look different.

Lunden Souza: 20:55

The tonality of assertiveness, the verbiage, the word choice of assertiveness gets to look different depending on everybody, right, because your voice may be the way you use it and your voice is an instrument, and so sometimes assertive sounds different. And assertive can sound confident and sexy and knowledgeable and wise. It doesn't have to be demanding and overbearing, and we all have these stories of what we think that might mean. So number two is really practicing that assertiveness, that speaking your truth, advocating but then not being aggressive, still being open to other people's points of view Huge. And then the last point of the three key strategies so we have know your core values practice assertiveness and not aggression.

Lunden Souza: 21:47

And then the third one is use the power of silence and presence. Like I said before, listening is just as important as speaking, and being present in the conversation helps people feel heard. Right. If you were in a situation where you were having a conversation with somebody and opening up your heart and sharing and you just felt like they were just hearing you but not listening and just saying whatever afterwards, it's nice to know that someone's there in the present moment with you. They're not on their phone, they're not thinking about something else, their body language is positioned in a way that's like hey, I'm listening, I'm present with you and, yeah, listening is super powerful and I think a lot of even yeah, a lot of the courses I've taught and a lot of what I coach on communication-wise has to do with what words you are saying and what words you might be saying on stage or giving a presentation to your team, or what words you might be saying when approaching somebody you want to have a tough conversation with, and the not words are huge too. And what you're not saying and the way that you are listening and taking that in is so powerful to think about. But yeah, those are the three strategies Know your core values assertiveness over aggression and using that power of silence and presence. Highly recommend meditation when it comes to that.

Lunden Souza: 23:13

But yeah, I hope you took some value from this episode? Right, maybe you're prompted to ask yourself or kind of investigate a little bit, like where am I stuck? Where am I holding back a little bit? What are those repeat patterns of things that I'm starting to notice around communication that I want to get to the root cause of and I want to change and I want to just evolve past? I'm trying to think of if there was anything else I wanted to share, but that was pretty much it. I just wanted to share a bit more of where I come from in that space and what's helped me a lot and help you have some key strategies and points that will help you in this journey that we call life, because we're around other people, we're talking to ourselves, we're talking to others.

Lunden Souza: 24:04

And then on April 12th there is a free two-hour masterclass on Zoom that I'm hosting with Aubrey Pohl. She's a close friend of mine, we coach together a lot and she's a master NLP practitioner. She coaches, yeah, and teaches for so many next level communicators and she's an amazing speaker and communicator. And we're hosting a Communicate with Confidence master class on April 12th, from 11 to one mountain standard time, on zoom. It's absolutely free. We're going to be covering the five pillars to help you unleash your voice, and, yeah, it'll be really awesome. So I'll link that in the in the show notes as well. We would love to see you there on zoom and I don't know if you can hear that noise, but there's a little jingle that's playing because my sheets are in the dryer and they're done drying, which coincides perfectly with the end of this episode. So I'm just going to finish tidying things up around my house and doing my laundry and changing my sheets.

Lunden Souza: 25:08

I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Give me your reflections, join our Communicate with Confidence Masterclass and we'll see you at the next one Later. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Self Love and Sweat, the Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode or were inspired by it or something resonated with you, do me a favor and share this episode with a friend, someone that you think might enjoy this episode as well. That's the ultimate compliment and the best way to make this podcast ripple out into the world of others. And also you can leave us a review up to five stars wherever you're listening to the podcast. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you at the next episode. I appreciate you.