How To Find Your Voice: Own It And Hone It
About a month ago, I published a series of blogs with many tips on How To Confidently Own Your Voice, and you can view the blogs here blog 2 and blog 3. While I have received a lot of feedback on how helpful these tips were, one recurring challenge that many women have in the first place is to know what their perspective is. When we have spent our lives trying not to rock the boat or avoid the backlash that we feel may come when we speak up, we realize that we never even took the time to form a perspective independent of what everyone thinks. No wonder it is so common when many are asked what do you think, they struggle to find an answer because they have not taken the time to find out what they think or even what they truly want. In today’s blog we will begin to fix this by discovering how to find your voice and hone it.
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1. Quiet The Voice Of Self-Doubt In Order To Develop Your Own Perspective
The first and most important thing that we can do to develop our own perspective and bring a unique viewpoint is to turn down distracting noise. This is why solitude and silence are such powerful practices because we allow ourselves to be quiet long enough to access our internal wisdom. The issue isn’t that we don’t have a perspective, the issue is that we have not silenced all the distractions of self-doubt, fear of other people’s opinion etc., long enough to form a perspective independent of distracting influence. The practice of meditation and deep breathing can help us retrain our brain to remain calm and focused which will allow us to tap into our internal GPS system, aka our internal wisdom and inner genius. We all have untapped wisdom and creativity that if we learn how to be still and access it, we will unleash a power that we have never before discovered inside of us. Read this blog for more information on how to incorporate the practice of meditation into your daily life so that you will be the most calm, relaxed and therefore, the most powerful person you can possibly be.
2. Read, Listen & Learn
One of the most amazing things that we have in the modern world is an endless amount of data available to us right at our finger tips. Wherever we find ourselves lacking knowledge and information there is a book, blog post, Youtube video, or podcast addressing this exact need. People have spent time investing 10, 20 or more years of expertise and experience captured into one book that we can read in just a few hours. When we take the time to deep dive into various sources of data, we can form an informed perspective to move forward with. The thing we need to be careful of however, is to ensure that the perspective informs us but we remain unattached to it. We remain unattached by being open to look at how our own life experiences have confirmed or negated the perspectives of the “experts” out there. This requires thorough self-reflection and analysis. Remember that your own experiences are just as valid as anyone else’s and you should have confidence to know that you too have deep wisdom from your experiences. No matter what, be open to learning and mentorship from those who have gone ahead of you but no one is your guru, YOU are your own guru!
3. Write Down Your Life Experiences And Think About How This Informs Who You Are
Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living and I believe that part of this examination allows us to extract wisdom from our experiences. It is fascinating to me that many of us look to others to tell us how to live our lives when there are so many themes, trends and lessons that we can learn from our own experience if we just took the time to reflect on it. We can certainly learn valuable lessons from previous successes and mistakes that we have had. We can learn from classes we have taken and projects that we have worked on at work or in our business. We can learn a lot from how we were raised, our family history, our culture and the experience we have lived through until this very day. The fact that we have survived what has taken so many people out could be the beginning of a great and impactful story. Yet, most of us never acknowledged the miracle of our own lives, yet we go watch a fictional movie being in awe of it, while missing the spectacular drama unfolding in our every day lives. There is beauty in diverse experiences and we should never neglect our own life story while elevating that of others. Our journey is equally as important and relevant to give a voice to and a face to. This is the beginning of the path to discovering our own personal power and why the thing that makes us different can truly be our differentiator and tool for success. Take sometime to reflect on your experiences in the upcoming days and weeks and reflect upon how this informs who you are today. These experiences will encompass every aspect of your life, personal and business related. Your unique story can be the very thing that impacts and transforms the lives of the people that you come into contact with. Someone else’s story may not resonate with them even if that person is as powerful and famous as Oprah or Bill Gates but your seemingly insignificant story will mean so much more to them because of the similarity of their experience to yours. As you walk out your own freedom, you will allow others to experience an encounter with their own freedom.
4. Write Out A List Of Things That You Care About
In order to figure out what we are meant to speak about powerfully and use our voice to influence our community, we must start with what we care about. Our calling is already within us, we just have to take the time to discover it. We must pay attention to themes and trends throughout our lives. So grab a pen and paper and write down all the things you care about without taking the time to edit your writing. Maybe as a child you cared about play, art, being creative, having fun, then in high school you noticed how people were being bullied, left out of conversations, how oppression of civil rights exist, or as an adult you became aware of gender inequality, people struggling with anxiety or depression, the silencing of victims of assault, or those struggling to lose weight, the lack of healthy affordable food options, women in sports, meditation and mindfulness, knitting, cooking, politics, etc. The list is endless and there is no wrong or right answer, noble or unimportant topic. If it is something you are passionate about, it is important so capture it. Once you have this list capture the top 3 that have been recurring interests in different stages of your life and then choose the one that speaks the strongest to you now to focus on. Research about, it study it, build your expertise in the area and begin speaking about it or taking the appropriate action that you are led to take. It doesn’t matter what that thing is, what matters is that you begin taking action in alignment to what you value and care about.
5. How to Hone Your Message
In order to develop and hone your message so that it is impactful and carries the influence that you greatly desire you must spend time with the message. You need to think about it, write it down frequently and communicate it in a variety of settings to test how it lands with others. However, note that the others here are not family and friends - your message isn’t designed to land with everyone the message is for a specific predetermined audience that will benefit from it, and this would be your target audience and/or decision makers aka stakeholders. A perfectly honed message will take weeks, months or even years to develop and refine. Most people don’t want to spend this much time upfront on their message and messaging skills. They just want to work on it once and be done. Yet the message and messaging must be given time to develop in the incubator of life. It must first be birthed out of your own life journey and then it must be presented to the audience you want it to reach, then as a scientist you must observe to see if it is having the desired impact and if not you keep tweaking and experimenting until you have the perfect formula. The best communicators like Steve Jobs are not just born, they work tirelessly at it until magic happens. The secret is that the magic doesn’t happen suddenly, it is a result of hard work over a long period of time. You just must be willing to put in the work.
A word about criticism. When you start building up the courage to get your message out there, expect opposition and negativity. Don’t be alarmed by it, this is the way the universe tries to hold everything in status quo and stop change from happening. You are breaking out of the mold and upsetting the status quo so expect the forces to try to pull you back down into your place, but don’t stop. Know that criticism automatically comes with the territory when you are stepping up to play big and make an impact in the world. Read more about how to deal with criticism here. This is just part of the deal. Although the words of the critics maybe harsh, they are not the ones that matter, meaning it’s not about them. Your message is for a tribe of people you are meant to touch, inspire, and liberate. Let the vision of how your message will bring healing and life to those who need it propel you be unhindered by the temporary distractions that will present themselves.
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