Strong Words: Soft Tone

Covid has humanised the Leadership model, redefining what an authoritative voice should sound like in 2021. If you need to have hard conversations, tap into your feminine voice and get the results you want.

If you had googled the word “Leadership” between September 2019 – 2020 you would have seen this very, ‘on trend’ verb transit through a heavy detox program, eliminating the autocratic leadership styles that we, our parents and grandparents grew up with.

As academic, speaker and author, Dr Brene Brown, Author of Dare to Lead, says, “The world needs leaders who are self-aware enough to lead from their hearts, rather than unevolved leaders who lead from hurt and fear.”  We are certainly heading in this direction, here’s some ideas to fast track your progress.

The human voice, the primary leadership tool, has always been heart-centered and has evolved to be full of colours, light and shade, joy and pain, emotion and expression, but as we over-organised our lives, many of these expressions have been lost.

Everyone has their own set of beliefs, desires, and values. We are full of emotions, thoughts and ideas that we want to share with the outside world – and just like every human, your face, body soul and physical voice is totally unique. It is true, no one else in the world sounds exactly like you. You recognise hundreds of people, just by the tone of their voice! 

Vocal recognition makes perfect sense because when you combine your physical structure, breath, upbringing, accent, life experience and mind set you create your very own VIBE. 

It’s about your VIBE.

When you speak, people are going to remember the way that you made them feel more than what you said, or how fanciful your structured sentences were! I want you to imagine you are going into a meeting, to have a difficult conversation, where you feel undervalued. Your defences are already up, you want to run, and you are fearful of what might happen if you are challenged.

Do you spend time setting your intention on how you want him to feel when you leave the room? A feeling of receiving the truth, even if it is bad news, because you want him to feel confident and empowered in your decisions? Or do you get stuck in your head, worried about what you are about to say, reviewing your notes, feeling overwhelmed, concerned you will forget something? This will leave you feeling vulnerable, unworthy and as if you don’t even have a voice, all before you enter the room.

Take a moment here. If you feel like this, what is the listener going to feel like in this scenario? 

If you are like the majority, you are probably resonating with the second option. Let’s use this as an example and deconstruct the most likely outcome of this behaviour. 

Your voice will go wherever you want it to go. It will support your profile and ensure you are heard in every conversation; However, you must point it in the right direction. When you step into that meeting, what you say is not just about you! It is about how you make the listener feel. 

It starts with a thought. You have something to say, which has prompted the brain to tell your body to act, but because you are already in a fight or flight mode, your muscles have tightened up. Your voice must function under extreme pressure. As best it can, your diaphragm assists the lungs to take in a breath (the fuel to your sound). This is where I refer to the “MAGIC MOMENT’ happening. 

Your thought, desire, message, or idea attaches itself to the breath ready to be transported to the outside world. You then begin the onset of sound, releasing a steady air pressure through your vocal cords, setting them vibrating, up to thousands of times per second. The air then travels up through the back of the throat, into the resonating cavities and down into the articulators, (tongue, teeth, soft palate, hard palate and lips) which are waiting to encode your original thought into our complex language system. You then release the sound and it’s gone; You can no longer control your vibe. 

Once the sound has left your body it takes on a new form called a sound wave. Your thought is now travelling through the air and landing in the ears of your listeners, but your listener is also feeling your voice. Sound waves travel through mass and because your thought has been converted into a sound wave, so does your thought. Your voice has now entered your listener’s body and is being translated, by the listener, as a sympathetic vibration. This is the moment that your listener is literally feeling your “vibe” for the first time and will have one of two responses. They either like it or they don’t! 

Be true to your voice.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the process, when you first had the thought. If you had set your intention on how you wanted your listener to feel, whether that is safe, understood, or valued, you will have increased your chances of being heard and understood. If you are stuck worrying about how you feel (nervous, embarrassed, apologetic, or inferior), you run the risk of being misunderstood. The listener will not necessarily intellectualise what they are feeling. They will interpret it as…there is something I do not “vibe” with here. The nervousness in your vibration may even trigger the listener to go into a fight or flight response, repelling them as they sense danger. This response is also the moment you could get misinterpreted as being a bitch, all because your intention was not in the right place. 

The interesting piece to this process is tied into the fear of telling your truth. When you tell the truth with the right intention and it comes from a heart-centred place, your voice is more likely to vibe with your listener. Your listener is a highly intelligent human being, who can decode your vibe in a millisecond, even if they do not like the information. They will hear your projected truth whether they like it or not, and that is always a better vibe.  No one likes feeling you are not being authentic.  

Take ownership

There are many elements to consider when we are talking about inequality, feminism, racism and every other “ISM” but here’s the thing. In almost all the conversations I have had with male CEOs and leaders, they are desperate for women to own their truth. They want you to be authentic, to show up and deliver your genius. You do not need to go into meetings with your high-pitched, fight or flight, bitey, (bitchy) defensive tone to be heard. 

You need to quit playing the victim and own the conversation with your vast expertise and experience. Set your intention, stay focused on your goals and own your behaviours. The choice is always yours. 

No matter what you do, sometimes people just will not get your vibe and that’s ok, but if you start every conversation with strong words and a beautiful, divine, feminine tone, even if you are not heard, you will know you were true to yourself.

For more support in developing a confident strong competitive edge with your voice, why not check out my creative programs that are guaranteed to diagnose, train, develop and transform: www.thewomansvoice.com.au/programs/