Speak Freely, Safely, Confidently

To speak freely you need to feel safe and confident. If you are a bit afraid, feeling vulnerable, here is a intangible way to protect yourself. It is a visualization that I use when I feel insecure or vulnerable, and most important: it works!.

First you should practice the following, in your mind:

See yourself outside in the garden or in a park. You look for a place in the lawn where you feel fine.

There is a gardener who gives you a shovel and you start to dig a rounded place around you. You work from the place where you are, in the middle, to the border to make a flowerbed.

Imagine it is just as big that other people just cannot reach you if they and you extend your arms.

When you are finished you see that the gardener has a trailer full of all kinds of beautiful roses.

You are invited to choose the kind of roses you like the most and you take enough of them to cover your bed.

You start to plant them, beginning at the border always around to the middle of your rose bed.

You can speak with other people but they cannot touch you.
Now you let grow your roses to the height that you feel comfortable with. In your mind you can do this fast. 

How tall are they now? Can you look over them? Or are the roses taller then you? In that case you don't show yourself! So make them smaller.

When you are satisfied, feel how it feels. There you are! In the middle of a (your!) rose bed.

Roses are very beautiful, so all people you meet will see how beautiful they are and will be interested in you. At the same time you are protected by their thorns. So they will not treat you in a negative way. You can speak freely, without fear.

How does this work? I don't know, but when I use this visualization, I notice that people are more interested in me and have more respect.

What if I meet people whom I want to approach closer to me? I let the roses disappear.

Practice now a few times the roses disappear, the roses grow, they disappear, grow, and so on.

Now you can use your rose bed the way you need it in any particular situation.

Make sure you take your rose bed always with you, so you can use it when needed. The magic of this exercise is that if you practice it in situations where you find it difficult to speak freely, it seems to work as if the rose bed is tangible.