You’re not as good as you think

February 4, 2016 by admin

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Yes, I acknowledge it. This is the opposite of what I usually tell you.

Most of the time, I’m all about getting women (especially) to understand that you are better than you think you are, so you can stop hiding out and feeling like a fraud. So you can own your value and the value of everything you have to offer, and we can hear that in your voice.

But there’s a time when you’re NOT as good as you think you are.

It’s when you’ve finally gotten yourself to get out there and speak. You’ve got some experience. You feel like you’ve got your story down. You’ve given your talk or presentation many times, and you’re getting some good feedback.

You think you sound pretty good, and you think you don’t need a speaking coach anymore.

Or, WHEW, you’re glad you never spent the money on that speaker coach you talked to. I knew I could do it myself, you say.

Ooops.

You’ve forgotten a crucial thing about your brain. Or, maybe, you never knew this – your brain is messing with you.

You don’t hear yourself accurately. Or more correctly, you don’t LISTEN to yourself accurately.

Will You Support Women Speaking Powerfully?

September 24, 2015 by admin

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.

Should I Just STFU?? Part 2

September 16, 2015 by admin

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:
Continue Reading

Should I Just STFU??

September 10, 2015 by admin

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

Beat Stress and Overwhelm By Taking In The Good

July 1, 2015 by admin

by Ariana Newcomer

The news is almost uniformly bad. We feel like there’s never enough time. Traffic is terrible. We worry about money and our health. We worry about work and family. We worry about the planet.

We feel stressed. It feels like the world is stressful.

In truth, the world is just happening. The stress we feel comes from the inside. In an earlier article, Perspective Is Everything, I wrote about how we can shift the stories we tell ourselves (our perspective) about what happened so we can get out of the negative loop and move forward.

Perspective is key. But there is also a neurological reason for our tendency to focus on the negative.

Our brains are wired to pay more attention to things that are threatening, or MIGHT be threatening. It’s a survival mechanism that was very important to early humans.

These days, this brain function can be less than helpful, since many of the things we perceive as threats are not really life-threatening at all. Yet our brains and bodies react as though they were.

The good news is, we can change our brains! Neuroscience has realized that our brains are capable of learning and growing all throughout life. We can create new habits and pathways in our brains with the right input, delivered consistently over time.Continue Reading

Gender Bias In Business: Speaking out can backfire!

December 30, 2014 by admin

I usually talk about how important it is for us to speak up and speak out for ourselves (especially women) and for change. We usually don’t speak up enough in many areas of our lives. Of course, speaking up at the appropriate time is critical, and HOW we say things is even more essential.

I just learned something new about how to speak about gender bias. It’s an issue I address with my clients – always – because it is so often operating unconsciously for all of us, men and women alike. It affects how we listen to each other, how we speak, how we behave toward each other, and how successful we are.

I talk about creating a paradigm shift in our culture into true partnership between men and women, about speaking up and speaking out for ourselves and for partnership, about claiming our place beside men (no longer slightly below them). I support my clients in creating highly successful, deeply fulfilling businesses as women entrepreneurs and change agents – as part of this new paradigm. Being able to speak with power and confidence is crucial to your success. Shifting the gender bias is a central part of creating the new economy.