You're in a gap between who you were and who you're becoming. Your communication confidence can feel borrowed. Your sense of self can feel like it needs a new address. Each edition delivers one small step to help you communicate with more confidence, and move through change without losing yourself. Read one below, if you find yourself in it, you're in the right place. Written by Susan, Director of Blossoming Speaker and creator of the Speak Afraid Method.
Our voice when speaking through fear is more about music than I realised
Insight:Spent the weekend studying different perspectives of hundreds of historic speeches that shaped our modern world. Many of these speeches created a major shift with a large group of people that goes beyond their current circumstances and generation they originally delivered their speech in. With this depth of study, you notice commonalities amongst the different points of views that to me, highlight the power of voice, especially when speaking through fear. One that I will share here is the one key moment or sentence of a speech that many remember. For example, Martin Luther King, Jr’s immortal “I have a dream.” Winston Churchill’s “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” And Nelson Mandela’s “It is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” Like a musical score written to move its audience through the journey of its story, that is what our voice does when we speak, especially in prepared speeches. You take whoever is listening to you on a journey, using musical rhythm, pace, tone, pitch with your voice. This builds up to a moment that touches your listener in a way that their recall of your message is high, and they are motivated to repeat that moment in their mind or with others. It is how these people who delivered lasting impact in their speech, gave that key sentence that is repeatedly shared and used for motivation beyond its time. Using their voice to create an atmosphere, connection, community, and relatability that when that line is delivered, it is difficult to be forgotten. So What?If these memorable lines from these speeches were delivered in a monotone voice, I strongly doubt these lines would be remembered. If these lines did not use musicality of voice to build adventure while weaving in tension and emotions, I believe they would not have achieved such wide and scaled impact. Fear likes to keep us speaking in rushed, hushed, or monotone voice so the value of our message is not delivered. It miss-informs you by saying using such vocal variety which comes naturally to you will be deemed as over the top and dramatic, when the truth is, using our voice like the musical instrument that it is, is how we secure connection when we speak. Are you using your voice like a musical instrument or is fear holding you back here? Interesting to note.I am a confident public speaker and well studied in this area. It is what allows me to select from a wide array of methods etc, to deliver bespoke training and coaching. But fear continues to try and stop me in this way, and this is a battle I need to continue to seek peace in. Fear uses my strengths in voice projection, vocal variety, and rhythm, to say that it is noise that creates no meaning. Interestingly, whenever I am about to deliver an important speech, workshop, or coaching that my guts says will be especially impactful, I usually have someone randomly come to me to mention any of these voice strengths to me as a negative, for example, “Your voice is too loud.” Yet it doesn’t stop me, I continue to move through, thanks to the Speak Afraid Method. I share this with you to let you know, each time you are about to grow into your next level or version of you, about to deliver something with positive meaning, or about to rip through fear’s final thread of hold over you, your voice and how you use your voice will be challenged by fear itself. I encourage you to choose to speak through that fear just like Martin Luther Jr. Sir Winston Churchill, and Nelson Mandela did. If they could do it, so can you. All the best, Susan.
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Minute Insight by Blossoming Speaker
You're in a gap between who you were and who you're becoming. Your communication confidence can feel borrowed. Your sense of self can feel like it needs a new address. Each edition delivers one small step to help you communicate with more confidence, and move through change without losing yourself. Read one below, if you find yourself in it, you're in the right place. Written by Susan, Director of Blossoming Speaker and creator of the Speak Afraid Method.
Insight I sometimes think that being under pressure is like being a boiling potato. Yes, thanks to me practicing the Speak Afraid Method, I am becoming more courageous and confident in sharing different perspectives to help you communicate through the uncertainty gap of change. Now back to boiling potatoes. Pressure is required for the potato to boil and for it to change its state from raw to cooked. Pressure here is not a problem but something required to help the potato transform. It’s when...
Insight I’ve said “you are enough” to other people more times than I can count, I even included it as my first affirmation in my book Confidence Booster, Affirmations to Reframe Your Mindset and Boost Confidence. I meant it every time I said it and wrote it. I can see it in others clearly, and know it is a truth. But believing it about myself, in a way that sticks, well, that is a different conversation. So I spent time learning why and so far, I came across two reasons. I will discuss one...
Insight For years I believed courage was something I needed to dig for. The deeper I went, the more I’d find. So, when change arrived and shook something loose inside me, I kept digging, head down, inward, searching. I didn’t realise that all that digging was actually my most convincing excuse to stay still. I was in the uncertainty gap. No longer who I was, not yet who I am becoming, and in that in between space, I couldn’t articulate much. The words sat at the tip of my tongue and wouldn’t...