Ariana Newcomer

Healing the soul's voice

Lose the maybes and mights…

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While working with a client today on her Clear Story (an essential part of your talk about what you do), she bumped up against an issue many women have. Her Clear Story draft was wimpy and unclear, because she used a lot of “maybes” and “mights” in it.

The Clear Story is a format I teach my clients that is designed to take their listener from a place they are stuck, to the possibility that they can have what they want by working with you, by changing a belief they hold that’s in the way.

When I got my Clear Story, it profoundly improved my marketing, and my ability to talk with people about what I do – and it does that for my clients, too.

MY GIFT – You can get the Clear Story Format here

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Do you let your voice out to play?

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do you let your voice out to play

Being creative is essential to our success – in whatever we do. I wrote 2 articles recently about the process of creativity – Are You Crazy?, and The Art of Serendipity.

Here’s another crucial piece of your creativity that no one is telling you about: Your voice.

I’ve seen it over and over again with my clients. When you free up your voice, when you learn to play with your voice, and gain a greater range of self expression through your voice, your creativity sky rockets.

Your voice is an expression of your essence.
So, if you’re holding your voice back (which most of you are doing without realizing it), you’re holding back your essence. And you’re holding back your creativity, which is tied to freely expressing your essence.

Here’s what I recommend:
Read out loud regularly, especially from books or poems that are just silly and fun, so you can actually PLAY with your voice. 10-15 minutes 3x a week is enough. I love Dr. Suess books for this practice.Continue Reading

No, no, no!!

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Do you struggle sometimes to say that little word, “no?”

Yep. Me, too.

I led exercises in how to say NO at the FEM Talks event, “How To Set Nourishing Boundaries and Say No With An Open Heart”.

I asked the women when it was hard for them to say no. Some of the things they said were:Continue Reading

What Do You Do When Things Don’t Go As Planned?

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Oh c**p, I couldn’t load the program I needed… Here I was for my carefully prepared talk to the Association of Women In Science in Palo Alto, CA.

Since this is a science group (and because it’s really fun), I had planned to use my Voiceprint program to demonstrate the acoustics of voice projection towards the end of my presentation.

My regular slideshow was up and running on my Macbook just fine. But the Voiceprint program (a spectrograph representation of the frequencies in the voice) lives on my old PC laptop, which is still running Windows 7, and hadn’t been booted up in about 6 months.

I DID boot it up the day before so it could do that interminable Windows Update thing. Unfortunately, the next day, it had 78 MORE updates to install, which took FOREVER, and it was still slogging through that as I began my talk. Aaarrgghh!Continue Reading

Should I Just STFU?? Part 2

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STFUBlogBannerPart2 Last week, I wrote about why you can’t claim your habits of speech are “feminine speech,” and critics of your voice should just STFU.

My experience in coaching hundreds of women to shift their old voice stories and their disempowering habits of speech, and watching their whole lives open up afterward (businesses taking off, relationships healed, creativity unblocked, money flowing, confidence soaring) shows me how vital it is that you NOT accept this stupid idea.

If you haven’t read last week’s article, read it HERE, otherwise this won’t make as much sense to you.

So what are disempowering and/or injurious habits of speech? Why are they disempowering rather than just “feminine?”

First, some info about our brains. Hearing is the act of collecting sound. Listening is what the brain does with what it hears, and that involves lots of complex functions in the brain called “auditory processing.” If you want to be truly heard and understood, you have to give people’s brains the opportunity to do all this auditory processing in a way that results in actual listening, not just hearing.

Actual listening results in communication, more often than not. Hearing does not guarantee listening. Speaking to create communication is a skill most of us need to get better at.

Disempowering and potentially injurious habits of speech actually IMPEDE communication. Here’s how:
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Should I Just STFU??

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I’ve seen a lot of articles recently on women’s speech. Some of them address ways of speaking that are disempowering, weaken leadership, or are self-sabotaging, and the authors encourage women to speak more directly and powerfully.

Others point out that women’s voices get criticized MUCH more than men’s. You can find gazillions of articles recommending that women change their speech patterns, and almost none that do the same for men. And if you are a woman who is broadcasting or podcasting, you can be criticized for the same kind of speech by different people in opposite ways.

In other words, we can’t win. Fair point.

One woman claimed that ANY criticism of her “uptalk” speech habit was just misogynistic, because uptalk is “feminine speech.” (Uptalk is the habit of raising the pitch at the end of every statement as if it were a question.) Another author agreed, and basically said women should speak however they want and everyone should just STFU.

I hear you. It’s true that women’s voices are criticized when and where men’s would not be, and are often criticized unjustly. So, am I a woman-hater because I work to change self-sabotaging habits of speech and empower women to speak with power and confidence? Should I just STFU?

Not on your life. Dear ones, here’s one thing I know: There is no such thing as “feminine speech.” Continue Reading