Ariana Newcomer

Healing the soul's voice

This made me cry…

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12779274_1073492029359804_4494323776771849535_oThis photo shows my favorite moment from Bill Baren’s Big Shift Experience in San Jose. Even though I brought home a serious cold/flu from the event, which I’m still recovering from, I’ll always remember this moment with tears and gratitude.

A woman stepped up to the mic to share an Ah Ha she got from a partner exercise. Bill invited her onstage. She acknowledged her male exercise partner for the respectful, loving and compassionate energy he brought to her that made her feel safe enough to work with him.

She brought him up onstage with her to hug and thank him, and she shared that she had been abused by many men for much of her young life, including her father.

Then, this happened.Continue Reading

Hold Your Tongue!

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How many times have you been told to “hold your tongue” or “bite your tongue”?

How many times have you “swallowed your tongue” or “held your tongue” when there was something you really wanted to say, but couldn’t (or didn’t think you should)?

These are common phrases we use to stop ourselves or someone else from talking, or from saying something in particular. They’re ways we hold our voices back.

You need to know 2 things:

1. Holding, biting or swallowing your tongue are not just metaphors for not speaking. They actually cause physical tension in your tongue, which can really mess with your voice.

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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

Becoming Fearless (Or Not)

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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

Will You Support Women Speaking Powerfully?

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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.

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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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