The Importance of Speaking Up: Finding Your Voice and Protecting Your Boundaries

There are days when someone does something that's not correct and you have to speak up. For an example, someone did spit while talking to on the phone and the water went into the food and they do not apologise, you would have to speak up and say go somewhere else and talk. But if we do not speak up, the consequences are even bad. So today's point is about speaking up. We'll discuss why we need to speak, how to speak up and what are the best ways to speak up in any given circumstance. By speaking up, it only means that you are standing up for yourself. In a world that's brutal, that is dominating at times, it's very important to stand up for yourself and speak up. Once you do that, you will really have true freedom. But at the same time, it's also important to remember to choose your battles carefully. 

Firstly let's think about why should we stand up for ourselves? Let's start by thinking what will happen if you don't standup for yourself. Let's start with the pain first and then go to pleasure. Everything humans do is either to avoid pain or to gain pleasure. So let's think about the consequences. 

1. Loss of self respect: Imagine you had a situation where there was an injustice done towards you, if you don't stand up for yourself in the moment, you will lose a part of your own self respect because you knew what was the right thing to do but you still didn't do it. 

2. Loss of control : Let's say you were super busy and someone asked you to do some work during the time. Instead of saying no, you said yes because you couldn't advocate for yourself and say that you are busy. So firstly you will be overwhelmed with the amount of work that's needed to be done and secondly you would feel a loss of control in your life and would always be rushing to do more things. 

3. People will respect you less: Believe it or not, people do not respect pushovers, people respect those individuals who standup and speak up for themselves when needed. So even if standing up for yourself offends people in the moment, they will respect you more with time. 

4. You would feel less happier: Now as we go through life and if people keep pushing us over, keep suppressing our needs and our feelings, we will go through a very resentful phase. Instead it's better to standup for yourself, whatever courage you need in the moment, let it come out and stand up. 

5. Increased stress and anxiety: Like the previous few points, if people keep throwing work at you and if you can't say no to it, you will just increase your own stress and anxiety. It will go through the roof. 

6. Identity Loss: Allowing others to cross our boundaries every time, might make us lose sights of our goals and vision that we have for ourselves. That will make you forget your identity as well. 

Another thing is when we stand up for something or someone or even for ourselves, we got to stand up for it all the way. There should not be it's fine, it's okay and things like that. People who do that, might lose the respect of others. 

The truth is when you start standing up for yourself, you might offend some people, there would be some people who would make you feel guilty about it, but please please don't get into this trap of pleasing those handful number of people. These are the same people who can't standup for themselves and are not letting you do the same. Understand that sharing your feelings doesn't make you oversensitive, and saying no doesn't make you uncaring or selfish. If someone won't respect your feelings, needs and boundaries, the problem isn't you, it's them. Just remember these statements and don't let anyone make you feel guilty for setting these boundaries. If needed offend people at times. It's not going to make you a bad human if you offend people. 

Have a look at this wonderful statement by Suzy Kassem, "Being able to admit you're wrong is important, but so is standing up for yourself when you're right". You might offend people in doing so but so be it.

This is beautiful, when you stand up for yourself, you are standing up for everyone who will follow your positive example. Imagine you stood up for yourself in a meeting where there are 10 people involved, when you stand up for yourself, you also show others how to really standup for yourself. We'll discuss this further about how do we really standup for ourselves.

Now that we know why we should stand up for yourself, let's discuss the how. I am going to talk about my personal way of standing up for myself. Incase you have one, you can add how you do it in the comments but here's what I do. I grab a pen and a piece of paper. I write 3 things there: 

1. What happened? 

2. How it made me feel? 

3. Ask the person not to do it again. 

And what's more important is how you say it rather than the what you say it. The how should still be a calm voice, take pauses in the middle and speak with good knowledge of what exactly happened. Make sure it's authentic otherwise there are too many things to remember. At the end of the day, I strongly believe in the how you say it is more important than anything else. You might have a  really good message, but if it comes across as passive aggressive no one's going to listen to it. So just keep that in mind.