Why finding your voice starts long before you speak
I'm sitting in my favorite local coffee shop, the one I come to when I need to create. Not to work. To create. There's a difference.
I watch the barista ask the same customer for their order three times—too many tabs open in his brain. A woman in a blazer leans forward on a couch across from two men in sweatpants who are slouching, checking their phones, looking everywhere but at her. At the next table, two friends catch up with wild hand gestures and bursts of laughter, fully in it.
And I notice myself noticing.
I notice how often I've sat in rooms like this seeing none of it. How often my phone has pulled me somewhere else while my body stayed behind. How often I've filled the space with "productive" distractions so I wouldn't have to be present for whatever wanted to come through.
We talk about being unmuted like it's about speaking up. Finding your voice. Saying the thing.
But it begins before we speak up. We mute ourselves long before we ever open our mouths.
We mute ourselves by half-showing-up. By being in the room but not in the room. By scrolling while someone talks to us. By letting our attention fracture into a thousand tiny fragments until there's nothing left that's solid enough to speak from.
For years, I trained keynote speakers, workshop facilitators, and everyday humans to say what they needed to say from their full self-expression. But it was never about the words of the talk. It was about how they showed up for the work. Not what they said, but who they were as they said it.
Recently, I supported a friend in her TED talk after she had worked with a speaker coach who helped her write all the beautiful words. They were perfect—a well-crafted talk that would get her lots of views. The only problem? When she gave the ten-minute speech to me, there was a glaring part missing: her.
She was saying the words, but she had muted herself to fit the TED mold. Her usual boisterously hilarious self was MIA. When she finished, I said, "Beautiful talk. Love all the words. But where's my friend Kirsty?"
Over the next few weeks, we picked apart the script and added her essence back in. She made voices, added highs and lows, gave us a reason to feel something, and practiced her movements so the talk didn't feel flat anymore.
At the end of the event, her husband commented: "Yours was the best talk, by far."
I share all of this to say that we've been taught muting ourselves is socially acceptable—on stage and off. Being on our phones during meetings is acceptable. Not being present is normal.
What if we stopped believing this and got really present to what's in front of us?
What if we started to speak up and ask others to be present with us?
What if we stopped doing what's acceptable and started being fully self-expressed, no matter what stage we find ourselves on?
As we finish the last few days of our UNMUTED challenge, I'm inviting you to look at where you're staying muted, where you're not present, and where you're not fully expressing yourself.
Send me a note and tell me what you find. I'd love to hear. (I read every message.)
And if you're ready to start getting in front of more people as your full self, let's chat to see if I can support you—or connect you with someone who can—in taking that next step.
Stepping into more of myself on the daily, alongside you.
xoxo
Melanie