Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #7: Authentic Voice
The Authentic Voice exercise is a simple exercise on the surface: instead of writing your inner monologue like I did in exercise #3, this time you have to verbalize it, first alone, but then with friends, family, or anyone else.
The first couple of times doing this exercise on my own made it seem easy enough – it was just like when I sometimes talk to myself about what I have to do for the day, or if I’m checking to see if I’m remembering everything before I leave the house. I thought, “this exercise is going to be super easy, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get out of this.” It wasn’t until I tried it with others that I really started to feel something new.
The first time I tried it with someone else, I asked them to give me a topic and I just opened the floodgates from my brain to my mouth. I immediately noticed some things that are very different from my usual conversations with others. First, I became really self-conscious of how much I was talking without giving the other person a chance to talk. I felt voices in my head saying things like “I wonder what he thinks about what I’m saying? Does he have anything to say about this? I should ask him something related so he can talk”. Because of how fast these thoughts came to me, some I was able to voice, but others passed too quickly for me to verbalize.
Talking “without a filter” also brought some other feelings associated with speaking freely. In one way, I did feel like it was my “authentic voice” – I wasn’t trying to tailor what I say to the person I’m talking to, meaning I wasn’t saying anything simply to appease the person I’m talking with or to placate them. But other times, it also felt like having a filter is not a bad thing – I found myself asking “Is it a bad thing to be aware of who I’m talking to and tailoring my conversation for the person I’m speaking with? Does speaking in my “authentic voice” truly make the conversation better? For me? Or for the person I’m talking with?”
Another feeling that I really enjoyed during this exercise was a feeling of importance, or being special, if only because the format of the exercise made that artificially so. Speaking freely for a couple minutes without being interrupted or disturbed felt like I had a spotlight on me – like I was on a stage giving a speech, rather than having a conversation. It meant all of my attention was devoted to trying to speak in a way that was impactful, engaging, and “worth” the listener’s time. It felt exciting and almost like an improv performance.
I definitely felt the value in the exercise: I’m simply not used to giving speeches or speaking freely and the more I did it, I felt more confident and like a more powerful voice was slowly shaping up, for when the need arises. The exercise really made me feel like this is a new area I can work on and felt like a skill that, when developed, can become a really potent tool for leading and influencing others. For the first time, I felt why organizations like Toastmasters are so popular – learning to speak powerfully, from your heart, and without inhibition can be thrilling, fun, and in a way, addictive.
There was one area that I didn’t feel like I got to try enough: using the “authentic voice” unannounced in normal conversation. I tried to do it a few times, but during regular conversations, it was really hard to not just have my typical, ordinary conversations. I found it difficult to just trigger the same mental state as when I would “prep” my listener for the exercise, and found myself trying to figure out whether I was doing something wrong, or was there some kind of belief or self-consciousness that was preventing me from doing it. Sometimes it felt like maybe this “authentic voice” exercise just doesn’t quite suit regular conversation, though from the description in the book, it didn’t seem like that is the case.
Like the past few exercises, this exercise continues the pattern of being one that doesn’t feel like one week is enough. It feels like a skill that you could spend years developing and improving at, and I certainly would like to continue to do so. I hope that the coming exercises will continue to build on this and allow me to keep practicing it, but even if it doesn’t, I think I will probably continue to try to practice my “authentic voice” during regular conversations.
