Ariana Newcomer

Healing the soul's voice

Do you let your voice out to play?

by

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

You’re not as good as you think

by

goodasyouthinksm

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.

Continue Reading

Are You In Partnership With Yourself?

by

Are You In Partnership With Yourself?I’m passionate about creating true partnership between men and women, so we can all be in partnership with our planet to create a world we can all thrive in.

So, I’m taking a course based on Riane Eisler’s book, “The Power of Partnership.” I’ve been blessed to work with her directly in the past, and she is an amazing woman who has been inspiring me since the 80s.

Our first module is about our partnership with SELF – which is the place we have to start. We can’t create true partnership with others until we become a true partner with ourSELF.

For me, this means accepting ALL of me – even the parts that seem pretty dark or that look like they’re still sabotaging me in spite of all my years of personal growth work.

One issue that’s coming up again is the masculine vs. feminine within myself, and in our culture. I’ve found a more integrated way of looking at them in Riane’s work.

There are a lot of authors and coaches now working with “feminine principles,” “feminine power,” “feminine leadership models,” and “feminine” _______ (fill in the blank with your favorite). They encourage women to tune in to their “feminine” instead of their  “masculine,” which has been causing them to push too hard, to burn out, to operate from a way of being that isn’t natural.

Let me be clear – I’m FOR the resurgence of the feminine. We need to bring the traditionally-considered-as-female qualities — caring, nurturing, collaboration, deep listening, going with the flow, doing without forcing, etc. — into businesses, our lives, and our culture. We also need to raise women up to true equal (partnership) status with men.Continue Reading

Creative people are crazy, right? Umm, not exactly.

by

IMG_0533

It’s a common story about highly creative people – that they’re basically crazy. Creative geniuses end up as loonies, or borderline loonies, or minimally functional. The reclusive writers, the drunks, the suicides, the painter who cut off his ear (Van Gogh), the institutionalized artists…

Turns out, creativity is complex. It’s not dependent on your IQ, and you don’t have to be crazy. There are many characteristics and traits that go into being highly creative, and highly creative people may actually be MORE sane than “normal” folks.

Last week I wrote about boosting creativity through cultivating the Art of Serendipity. (Read that here.) This article builds on that one.

Here are some of the characteristics of highly creative people:

  • cultivating serendipity, or discovering “what they were not in quest of”
  • introspection and openness to their inner life
  • preferring complexity and ambiguity over black & white perspectives
  • a high tolerance for disorder and disarray
  • yet they are able to extract order from chaos
  • being highly independent and unconventional
  • willing to take risks
  • tolerance of uncertainty and contradictions

Highly creative people develop a higher self-awareness – including awareness of the “shadow” or “darker” aspects of the self. They engage with both the dark and the light – the full spectrum of life. The whole enchilada. The whole human being. All of themselves.Continue Reading

What Do YOU Want To Say?

by

whatdoyouwantsay2
Our need to “self express” is deeply human. It is a key to our creativity and having a life that has meaning.

It’s also key to both our spiritual growth and our worldly contribution.

Your voice is your primary instrument of self expression, yet you normally take it for granted.

So much of our culture conspires against your full self expression – cultural expectations of women (and men), the things you were told as a child, traumatic events that caused you to shut down, your own perceptions of how you’re “supposed” to sound.

I call these “voice stories” – unconscious decisions you’ve made about how to sound (or NOT to sound), and about how you can speak, that cause you to hold your voice back.

I’m on a mission to bring back your full self expression, and I’ve discovered that opening up your voice is an overlooked, underutilized way to do it.

When Connie came to work with me, she had a very small, quiet voice. We met in Zumba class, and she would always stand in the back. She never smiled. If she came in late, we never noticed her coming in.

She felt that people didn’t listen to her, and told me that people would often talk over her.

Now, she was not a tiny woman, nor was she any kind of dummy. She was a CFO in between jobs.Continue Reading