In this week, you'll learn the protocol to have difficult conversations with ease and grace, offering you a Heart Centered approach to communicating your disappointments, fears and unmet needs.

Watch the video above to learn more.

What is a Dare to Share Conversation?

What are you carrying that you believe makes you unlovable? Can you imagine how gloriously liberating it would feel to test that theory and discover that you are indeed lovable after all? Can you imagine how close you would feel to another who can love you right there—right in the middle of your most deplorable unlovability? Can you imagine how much love and compassion you’d feel for your beloved when they met you in that place of ultimate vulnerability by exposing their most staunchly guarded demons as well?

Maybe the thought of it brings up fear for you. Maybe you’re not sure enough about the safety of the container to trust that you would still be cherished and admired if your shadows were exposed. Maybe you’re afraid to know what shadows might be locked away in your beloved, and you’d just assume they remain locked away. That’s fine. It’s a choice. But you’re taking this course because you want to deepen your intimacy, your fire, and your capacity to connect. This is the way to do it. It’s also one of the most powerful means of clearing up your shadows and dissolving your core unworthiness.

Daring to share all of you will require some risk-taking. For example, in a relationship, you might want to share an attraction you feel for a third party. You might think there’s no way that kind of sharing could be beneficial to the relationship, but if it’s there and you don’t share it, you’re holding it, and that can be far more damaging in the long run. This issue came up at one of the Insights to Intimacy retreats, so I asked the room, “If your partner felt an attraction for someone else, how many of you would not want to know?” Not a single person raised a hand. I continued by asking, “If your partner has been withholding something from you regarding your sex life because they didn’t want to hurt your feelings, would you want to know that?” Again, everyone said yes. “What about if there’s something about your personal hygiene that your partner doesn’t like but never brought up?” Again and again I asked the room if there was anything any of them would rather not hear, and again and again the answer was unanimous. We want to know these things if we are devoted to being real and telling the truth.

The health of your connection is entirely dependent upon your ability to be real with another. If you’re not committed to being as radically authentic as you can possibly be, then there’s no point in having a relationship. Even if you feel that you and your partner habitually share what’s going on for you, this is an invitation to stretch into something even more profound together. It will skyrocket the safety each of you feels in your container. It will skyrocket your polarity, magnetism, and juice.

Before you embark on any dare-to-share conversations, you’ll want to make some more agreements. Agree in advance that you’re both willing to follow up afterward on any points that would benefit from a good tracking conversation. Agree that whatever is shared will remain confidential and won’t be used at a later time as a leverage or evidence. You’re doing this as an ultimate expression of your love for each other; it would be an egregious betrayal to use it as a way to gather ammunition. If you have any concern that you or your partner might approach this exchange from that position, do not do it. Sharing at this level is for those who have built enough safety and trust so that they are genuinely interested in amplifying their love and strengthening their bond with the glue of unconditional acceptance.

Ultimately, this is a test of your relationship container. So, yes, the possibility does exist that you’ll discover it’s not as strong as you’d hoped. But if that’s the case, wouldn’t you like to know that now, so that you can work toward repairing any leaks before they get any bigger? Relationship is risky. The only way to take your relationship to new heights is to put it on the line occasionally. 

What is the Dare to Share Protocol?

In the Heart iQ 90-Day Challenge we learn to share our truth in a way that lands by developing the skill of tracking. When we study the Dare to Share protocol, we take this further by training the partner who is receiving the share, to really listen, reflect and offer impact in order to encourage the sharer to go deeper so that he / she can feel truly felt, heard and understood.

Through the Eyes of a Student

By Shalini Tewari

It’s halfway through the 90-Day Challenge and I am feeling courageous enough to trial the skills developed thus far with my partner. He is not on the challenge and therefore hasn’t learned the Heart iQ language beyond the snippets I’ve shared here and there, so I’m curious how it will unfold.

I’m nervous that I’ll mess up or come across as trying to push these methods onto him, and risk creating closure or trigger us both into our pain bodies. While he’s been open to hearing about the practices, I don’t want to direct the experience by holding steadfast to the suggested stems or structure. At the same time though, I know how easily these types of conversations can go awry without these protocols in place. I take a leap of faith.

I decide to incorporate some structure to begin with since the creation of a safe container feels like a natural and important part of any vulnerable exploration. This involves creating context, sharing my heart’s intentions and checking if he is open and available to be fully present to my share. 

‘I’d like to share something that came up for me last week when you didn’t reply to my messages and stopped communicating with me for several days.

The reason I’d like to share this is because in addition to wanting to communicate and explore the impact this had on me, I’d also like to open up my heart to your journey and deepen our understanding of one another.

I don't need anything other than your heartfelt presence. I would simply like to share what moved for me and be heard and seen in that place. Are you open to receiving this right now?’

The invitation allows him the opportunity to actually drop in and check. He closes his eyes, takes a few breaths and says yes, he’s open to being fully present to my share.

I suggest that if either one of us feels like we are closing or moving into a triggered reaction, we can call a time-out and take a pause. He agrees.

For the sake of my own safety in the exploration, I choose to follow the tracking layers I’ve learned over the last 5 weeks. 

I start by sharing the physical sensations arising in my body as I take space to share the content with him, and then I move on to the actual content.

I know it is important to layer in my relationship to this content from the perspective of my own stories, beliefs, judgments and shadows, and I add how it feels to share all of this in his presence right now.

I mention that there might be parts that I am missing or muddling up.

Finally, I track the trigger that set me off and find myself remembering a time when I felt similar emotions in relationship to my father. 

I could feel him dropping into his heart as he listened earnestly, and after 5 weeks of learning how to speak the Heart iQ language, this experience gave me a visceral understanding of how important it is to share these layers when communicating our grievances with loved ones. 

What happened next was amazing. This method of communicating naturally led him to reflect back to me what he heard and the impact he could imagine it had on me. 

This was in fact the next part in the series of steps outlined for this practice. I realise that these steps are there for reference and to create a foundational structure that can assist if conversations go astray. But like any language, once you have the basic structure down, communication flows effortlessly. 

When speaking from the heart, defense mechanisms drop because there is no longer a war of blame and attack. Instead, there is ownership and responsibility for each side of one another’s journeys, and the space for real intimacy opens up and deepens.

I share how his reflections make me feel heard and felt in my pain, and that this has created a feeling of expansion in my chest.

He shares how his body feels relaxed and at ease. Without asking for anything from him, he adds on his own accord that this conversation encourages him to check in the next time he feels himself withdrawing, knowing the impact it might have on me.

What emerged felt similar to how two people might communicate when they don’t speak the same language. While initially a bit bumpy and fragmented, much like the universal language of a smile, speaking from the heart can be understood beyond words and sentences. 

This process brought us closer not only in how we relate and communicate with one another, but we both gained a deeper understanding of how we individually operate in the world, and the impacts this might have on others with whom we come into connection.