Your Quiet, Yet Powerful Voice
Problem Definition:
You have a big opportunity. You have to convince a room full of individuals who have authority over your future, about your contribution, your history, your credibility, your relevance and your value. You barely know any one in the room. You have always preferred your work to speak for you, but these individuals don’t know your work, personally. You have been suspicious of individuals who “blow their own trumpet.”
An hour before the situation, your nervousness peaks, and you wish the ground would swallow you up, and someone else would stand in your place and represent you.
How do you orchestrate a turn around for yourself and face the room with the courage of your conviction – with a voice that represents you truly; that resonates with those who need to connect with you?
You call up your EI coach, and ask her to take you through the next couple of hours and transform your mind-state, if she can. By nature you cringe from having to overtly promote yourself. You want to be yourself. You don’t want to hype yourself in your speech, yet you wish to be fair to the work you’ve done. The problem is not just public speaking, but a lack of inner conviction of the role your voice has to play in representing you and your work.
The Takeaway:
Your voice might not have been a priority, because you didn’t know how to genuinely activate it. Yet, the momentum of your work has got you to a place where you need this dimension of your personality to open the next door. Once you access the emotions that have powered your best work and relationships, discovering the voice that will represent those emotions is typically not far behind. You intuitively understand the decisions you need to accentuate that will lend your voice weight and substance as well as those choices that will make your presence and personality memorable.
The Diagnosis:
Mapping your internal processes from the perspective of Emotional Intelligence – What is the history of your best decisions, your most moving moments, projects that celebrated your best strengths, relationships that changed your life? Reliving this with your coach wakes up the emotions that will awaken the strength and power of your voice.
•How can you picture the individuals as people whose life history and experiences have elements in them that you can naturally trust?
•How will they recognize and connect with your particular journey, the projects, relationships and organizations that distinguish your story?
•Armed with the better range of emotions
powering your inner-self, practice with your
coach to allow these emotions to strengthen
your voice and give it the authority it needs.
Historical Reflection:
Rosa Parks
With quiet
courage and
non-negotiable
dignity, Rosa
Parks was an
activist and a
freedom fighter
who transformed
a nation and
confirmed a notion that ordinary people can have an extraordinary effect on the world.
What inspired Rosa Parks to do it? She said the inspiration for her Dignity Day in 1955 occurred three months prior, when African-American Emmett Till’s murdered and disfigured body was publicly displayed for the world to see. “When I thought about Emmett Till,” she felt, “I could not go to the back of the bus.”
Her feet never ached in her long journey of saying “no” to the injustice her people have had to suffer. She found the event that would fuel her own “voice,” and she got the world to listen.
Cinematic/Literary/Historical Reflection:
Beatrix Potter
Beatrix Potter had
chosen social
censure from her
unwillingness to
marry and live a
conventional life,
of being suppor-
ted by the tastes and income of an individual, alien to her sensibilities.
Instead, she nurtured her unique abilities to illustrate the little creatures of her world and gradually gave them a literary voice. A publishing house, convinced by the merit of her work, entrusts a young partner to publish her creations. The printed works begin to sell in large numbers and are shipped to English colonies as the favored gifts to children world over.
Her creativity and perseverance gave voice and narratives for the beloved farm animals of the lake district as well as to her life story. Once successful, it became impossible for those forces that normally bullied her about choices, to prevail. She broke free and won her independence completely.
With her earnings she purchased about 4000 farms, and created a trust to literally protect what her writing had so cherished. Her work and legacy lives on.
Copyright: Frederick Warne & Co.
EI Authors A Transformation:
You are amazed, your perception of the power of your voice has changed as well as the alien-ness of the room. The audience is no longer foreign. They applaud and lighten up, listening to your engaging narrative that presents the seriousness of the work you have done. The honesty of your voice and the self-deprecating jokes that relax you, also persuasively warm the individuals towards your character and personality. You know you have crossed a personal milestone and discovered a way to stand up for yourself in a way that is true rather than self-promoting.
The Impact:
Your work gains strength and value in the world, backed by a voice that, though “quiet,” is authentically your own and does carry weight. Your resourcefulness and sense of stewardship in the world increase considerably.
