Last week Thursday, two friends and I attended a presentation in Madison, WI about beauty called Dream Big: You Are Beautiful and It's Time for You to Believe It. First of all, the woman who did the presentation, Kyira Hauer, totally fucking rocked it. She is the founder of #ReclaimBeauty and an advocate of embracing ones authenticity. After telling her amazing story, she dug into the five ways that we hide our true selves. And they took me back because some of these five things were unexpected.

5 Ways of Hiding

• Over-perfecting: trying to maintain a specific order; rigidity; not starting things until everything is perfect.

• Over-spending: trying to keep up with the "extras" you need to keep up appearances.

• Over-analyzing: worrying too much about outcomes you have no control over the what-ifs

• Over-caring: caring too much about what others think or how you fit in

• Over-comparing: building yourself up or tearing yourself down based on subjective experience of others

I've definitely found myself hiding behind a number of these, but the biggest one is over-perfecting. Sometimes, I won't start things until conditions are right or I won't finish things until everything is up to my expectations. Sometimes, I'll adjust a piece of furniture in my house because it's askew! I can drive myself crazy with my rigidities and have even found myself blocking intimacy in times of deep rigidity and not wanting to break from my order of things. 

So, how can we see/show ourselves and see each other more?

Maybe it starts with acknowledging how we hide, and then we dig our way out of hiding by being vulnerable. That's what I did in today's video.

Okay. Talk to me.

Did one of those ways of hiding hit you? How do you hide? And how do you (or do you want to) dig your way out of hiding? Share with me in the comments. I'd love to hear from you.