Coffee Chats w/ Dr. D- Do You Trust Your Own Voice?

Hello, Cadre. So I am having a weird day with technology today. For some reason, in my area, the Wi Fi hasn't been the best, and I just, like, hopped on here real quick, and I forgot to plug up my mic. So hopefully the audio is okay. It looks like I'm gonna wait a few seconds just for a couple people to join, but I am enjoying a little bit of what I have left in my cappuccino. It's almost gone. Can you see it? And I need this today because cappuccinos just make me feel fancy, and I felt like being pretty today, so I'm enjoying my cute little mug with my cappuccino.

But today, I wanted to. Hi, Jocelyn. I wanted to talk to you guys about the. The voice we choose to listen to, especially when we're in relationships. So I'm sure you all have experienced times when you're in a pivotal moment of your relationship and you don't know what to do. And I want you to think about who's the first person you think of that you need to reach out to. So, for me, typically, if I have an issue in relationship, I want to reach out to my best friend and be like, girl, let me tell you what's going on.

What do you think? What should I do? Has this happened to you? Right. And sometimes I don't always feel like I have enough information to make a decision. Hi, Jules. And so I will keep reaching out to other people, and so I might ask, you know, another friend, or I might ask my mom, or I might look up YouTube videos, or I might talk to my priest or whatever, like I'm talking to so many people just to get some insight to what to do about this concern I have. Right. And this happens not just in relationships, just with any life circumstance.

I think when we're kind of stuck feeling like we're in transition and we don't know what to do, like, we. We don't choose to trust ourselves. We put our trust in other people to help us navigate this next step in life. So think about that person, and think about the person you choose to go to first. What is their relationship like? You know, are they in healthy relationships, not just romantically, but just in life with their family? There's a nat in here with family, with friends. So if they're not.

And I also want you to think about the problem that you're reaching out for for help. So if your friend or whoever the person is, if you're going to them for support and advice, and they have done you know, dealt with this problem. How did they deal with it? Did it end up in a healthy outcome? And if it didn't, should you be listening to that person? Should you take their advice? If they're. If they've done things that didn't necessarily help and they're still in that same situation? And I don't know if this has been your experience, but sometimes I'll ask a person, you know, this is back in the day, right before I had all the information from psychology, but when I would ask friends, like, girl, what should I do about this?

And they were still stuck in that same situation with their partner, you know, I don't know why I chose to listen to them thinking they knew better than me. They were still in the same situation, so it didn't necessarily help. But over the years, I've been thinking about the power of my own voice. And why is it that when I'm trying to solve a problem, I have so many other voices in my head? I have my friend's voice, my mother's voice, you know, scripture. Like, there's so many things involved, but it drowns out my own voice.

It drowns out my own thoughts. And so sometimes we get into relationships that are kind of hard to navigate, and we are listening to so many other voices where we don't pay attention to our own. And so if that's been you just ask yourself, why are you not listening to yourself? Why do you not believe that your voice matters in situations? Why is it that your voice is silenced by the voices of other people? If we are in this world, right? They say we come into this world alone, we go out alone, right?

And so we have to learn to trust ourselves. The most important relationship we can have is with ourselves. You know, we're told often we need to learn to love ourselves. Well, we don't even know what that looks like. We don't know how to do that because no one can really describe what that really means. But we have to trust ourselves. We have to trust our own voice. Our voice is important. And if you don't trust your voice, why is that? What's getting in the way of you trusting your own voice? And sometimes, you know, I've experienced this where I have made a decision, thinking I gained enough information to make an informed decision, and I made a decision, and it ended up not being what I needed it to be.

And so what I come to realize was that, well, maybe I shouldn't have trusted myself. Maybe I trusted myself at the wrong time, because what happened was not what I wanted. But that's not true. I trusted myself with the information that I had, and I took all that I had at the time, right? Whatever tools I had, that's what I used. That doesn't mean that I can't or should not trust myself. It's that maybe there was another piece of information I didn't get yet, and maybe that situation was just a lesson to be learned.

So then the next time it happens, I know better what to do. So if you've been in situations like that, feel free to comment, because it's hard navigating relationships when we are being fed with information from people that, if you think about this, people who have also been hurt, and so where are they coming from? Where's their voice coming from? Is it coming from a place of hurt, or is it coming from a place of healing? So that's all I got for y'all today. I didn't want to get too deep into this because it can get kind of heavy.

But I want to encourage you to acknowledge your own voice, recognize the power of your voice when you're trying to make a decision in navigating relationships, and also be mindful of how many people you're getting involved into that relationship. So you have to trust yourself. You have to learn to trust your partner. And yes, it is wise to get wise counsel from other people, but be mindful of how much you're spreading that out to kind of limit that if you need to. So I hope you guys have a wonderful day.

Thank you for joining in. And let me know if there's any other topics related to the power of your voice that you want me to acknowledge. Maybe in the next couple weeks. But I do want to give a shout out to voices of women. So I am part of an anthology called Voices of Women that's coming out next month. So if you follow me on LinkedIn, I will have a post when that is officially released. There'll be, I think, the middle of next month, but it's 22 women from across the world that'll be sharing their stories about how they've been able to use their voice.

And I think it's a beautiful testimony of women around the world who can empower other women, but also empower young girls who, who need to be empowered now before they make too many mistakes. So, but thank you for joining in. Make sure you get your coffee. Bye.