Discover

It can take a life time to discover our true voice. It can remain locked away deep inside us. Simple things, life frustrations, obstacles, blockages and physical impediments can keep our voices trapped. The tragedy is that so many of us go through life without ever finding our true voices. A voice that is never heard is like a boat that never sets sail – it never achieves its full potential.

Not so long ago someone said to me everyone has a song in them. I thought I’m not so sure you know some people are tone deaf. But that set me thinking. Well perhaps it’s not their song that you’d want to hear as much as their book or their account of their revolutionary bicycle or something else. If you want to call that their song then yes everyone does have a song in them. Your song is really your inner voice. It’s that thing that makes you sing when you think about it.

Express

In my experience most people have some block in finding expression and using their voice. There can be lots of reasons. The obvious ones are the more structural vocal issues like laryngitis, vocal nodules and glottal fry. These and other vocal defects can curtail the use of the voice altogether if not severely limit it.

Stuttering and stammering, lisps, dyspraxia can often have their roots in trauma or developmental problems. Some research suggests that we lose the ability to access some language features if they are not developed in the first few critical years of life. Whether or not these things are physiological, psychological or developmental is academic: the point is this, they are serious issues which need hard work and dedication to overcome.

Whilst these physical, psychological and developmental issues are not rare neither are they common-place: we’re talking only a few percentage points of the entire population. Yet 80 – 90% of us (depending on which statistic you read) will say that they have some difficulty expressing themselves and feel that they haven’t reached their true potential. Why is this? Can you honestly say that you have made the most of every opportunity that has been presented to you? Most of us live in various states of regret.

In my work I find that most people aren’t properly aligned: they are not congruent with themselves. The consequence of this is that their self-esteem has taken a battering and they don’t feel that they have anything worth saying. You have to ask yourself if you don’t believe that what you’re saying is worth listening to a/ why would you bother saying it and b/ why would anyone bother to listen?

When we are working with the physical voice what we always look for is good alignment and supporting posture. We need to make sure that the vocal apparatus is lined up properly with the lungs and that the lungs can do their job properly. But this is only part of the battle. I can get someone to project perfectly to sing beautifully but if they still don’t believe that they’ve got anything worth saying it’s a waste of time.

Lead

An amazing thing happens when you discover your voice and start to express yourself: you become a leader. You can’t help yourself! Once we start to believe that we have something worth saying, there is no stopping us.

The trick is to get someone to the point of personal congruence: that is that their heart and intellect are in harmony with each other and working to the same ends. Someone once said “if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” This can mean dealing with all sorts of baggage and self-limiting beliefs. It means being far more intentional about the way we communicate. Then we get to the point of personal authenticity and that’s when you can start transforming your life with your own voice.

The mark of a true leader is always congruence with their highest values.