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
I was in a coaching program for a while with “Fearless” in the title. I learned a lot, but I didn’t become fearless.
Lots of people out there want to teach you how to become Fearless!! – to banish fear, to get rid of it, to stop it – because fear is BAD. Fear is negative, and we can’t have any negativity in our lives if we want to succeed. Or so the story goes.
The truth is, it’s not actually a good thing to get rid of fear.
There are 3 pieces of this.
One: Fear is actually a very valuable thing that tells us something is wrong, or could go badly wrong. Sometimes it is necessary to survival. That fear you feel when you’re thinking about whether to get into an elevator with a shifty-eyed, bad-energy-pouring-off-him guy is a good thing. It says, “Danger! Don’t go in there!”
Two: Making the automatic judgment that fear is negative usually misses the point.Continue Reading
Want a fun, creative process to nourish your soul?
I LOVE SoulCollage®. It’s a wonderful way to access my inner wisdom and higher guidance – another way to connect with the voice of my soul.
Not only that, it’s FUN and CREATIVE – and there’s no way to “do it wrong.”
Sounds fabulous, doesn’t it?
We collage our own cards and consult them. Because we made our own cards from images that called to us, and we give meaning to the cards, we are consulting our own inner wisdom – the voice of our soul – when we consult them.
SoulCollage® was created by Seena Frost in the 80’s, and the community of SoulCollage-ers and SoulCollage® Facilitators has been growing around the world ever since. I was introduced to the process a couple of years ago by my dear friend, Mariabruna Sirabella, and recently became a Facilitator myself.Continue Reading
I’m excited to share my recent Blab interview with Terry Wildemann creator of the Attractionpreneur™ Business Show.
Your usual voice is NOT your whole, authentic voice – the voice of your soul. It’s only part of it.
If your soul has a big purpose, you need your whole voice to express it. Your habits of speech are unconsciously preventing you from truly communicating.
On the blab I demonstrate how your voice is sabotaging you, and I reveal secrets I’ve learned in working with hundreds of women (and a few men) to healing your soul’s voice. Bring your voice into full congruency with all that you are, so you can come into an authentic, congruent, confident and powerful expression of the YOU are meant to be.
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In our journey to create a better world, one of the crucial things we need to do is support powerful women speaking powerfully.
ALL of us.
We have what I call a “cultural voice story” – that women’s voices are less important than men’s. There’s another one I’ve just realized we have – that women have to compete (and compete hard) with each other for the attention of men.
Men can be very dismissive of women’s voices. Another story – we don’t need to pay attention to what women say. I worked with a woman pilot, whose male co-pilots didn’t pay any attention to her voice over their headphones unless she dropped her pitch to sound more like a guy. In her normal speaking voice, they completely tuned her out. It was as if she hadn’t even spoken. When she sounded more like a guy, their brains paid attention.
Voice stories can be insidious, because they are largely UNCONSCIOUS. You don’t even know you have them.
So men, please be aware of these cultural voice stories, and stop buying into them. Notice if you’re tuning women out, and make a choice to tune them back in.
And women, we can be even more critical of other women than the guys are. Men may tune us out, but we often actively tear each other down.
I may have been lucky with women – I’ve been knocked down more often by men than by other women. But I have female friends who have been really savaged by other women.
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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