Making Amends With My Voice
My voice and I have not always been friends.
There are times when it’s escaped me. This time last year, I had constant sore throats, and was unable to verbally articulate my thoughts, even though I had so much to say and would normally talk without hesitating. At first I thought it was just that I was run down after a long teaching term, but it proved to be more than that.
I had turned 40 and should have been celebrating this milestone. I was at a yoga teacher training course in Bali, which was something which I had always wanted to do. Instead I was feeling completely lost and dejected.
Reaching this age had happened insanely quickly. I thought I would be able to accept it and celebrate my achievements. But I felt so lost: it’s the only way to describe it. I knew that there was a strong likelihood that I might feel self-pity about getting older for a little while, but I wasn’t prepared for the deep sense of existential despair that completely consumed me.
I ruminated about being in an unsatisfying career, because I didn’t feel truly fulfilled with my work. There was also my younger self’s assumption that I would be married with kids by that age, yet I had reached 40 without experiencing what you could even squint at and call a romantic relationship. And this intense disappointment affected my demeanour, especially in how I spoke.
On one of the first days of the course, our yoga teacher got us to work on creating a sense of gentle authority in how we taught our classes by working on our voice. Even though I was feeling really down, I thought this task wouldn’t be an issue for me, as I’d been working for a decade as a classroom teacher, which involves managing large groups of teenagers. You definitely need to have presence in order to succeed in teaching, and that includes having a strong and commanding voice.
I did struggle with speaking to my fellow teachers in at staff meetings, but while working in a large international school, I improved my enunciation to make my Scottish accent more clear and neutral so that everyone could understand me.
But there were times when my words would disappear: I would mumble. Half-speak to myself. I’d get ignored. This was all based on my lack of self-confidence and lack of certainty that what I had to say had any merit.
Yes, I’m an introvert and yes, I see myself as a ‘highly sensitive person’, but I’d always been pretty stubborn and determined. Job interviews are one example: I nearly always excelled in them. So how come I would lose my nerve and not speak properly in other situations? It would be particularly infuriating when I would dare to make a point in staff meetings and get ignored, and then a colleague would make the same point (albeit much more assertively) and they would be get everyone’s acknowledgement and praise.
When I started journalling about the prompt the yoga teacher had set us, I couldn’t stop writing. I was aware of how I’d been told I laugh too loudly when I was younger. I was thinking of the strict, gendered Bangladeshi culture I was brought up in which demanded that women and girls should not speak up too much. I thought about the racism my family encountered and how even though that made me resilient in many ways, it also made me anxious and unsure of myself at times.
And here I was now, many years later, trying to articulate what I was saying and I was struggling. It impacted how my fellow students on the yoga course saw me. A couple of the more blunt and direct types on the course would say I was too quiet, some of them spoke to me as if I was a bit simple, and the others simply ignored me.
My morose attitude quickly gave way to annoyance and frustration: how could people make decisions about me like that, and especially on a yoga teacher training course where we were meant to be more open-minded and less prone to making snap judgements? So I tried to figure out how to start making my voice heard again. I started to contribute more in the discussions during the yoga teaching practice and openly disagree with people, even if I felt energetically like I simply didn’t want to deal with the confrontation. Each little step out of my comfort zone made me feel relieved that I had taken on the risk and nothing terrible happened. That was incredibly empowering.
I decided that I needed to really own what I had to say. I needed to overcome that deep sense of despair, which meant knowing that what I had to say was as valuable as anyone else’s contribution.
One of the main reasons why I was so unhappy with my lack of progress in so many aspects of my life was because I was so fearful of rejection that I didn’t put my out there. That included avoiding high-risk situations like public speaking.
I would go back to my home stay in the evenings and research how I should improve my confidence in what I had to say. Here are the strategies which I started working on during that course and ever since:
- Give yourself thinking time — you shouldn’t feel the need to respond straight away. Think in your mind about exactly what it is that you want to express. Doing so means that you’ll be giving a more confident response than simply reacting.
- See yourself as a complex person with different personas and change into your alter ego, as Todd Herman says. We do this every day without thinking. We can also do it much more intentionally when fear is holding us back from being heard.
- Journal when it is that you feel particularly inarticulate and think about how you could anticipate those difficult times in the future.
- Challenge yourself to speak in a public setting — and notice how no one seems to be bothered, and some might be very pleasantly surprised by the change in your demeanour.
- Stop worrying so much about what other people think of you (I am always working on this goal!)
- Don’t feel the need to speak unless you have to. Are you sure that you actually want to say something, or it simply a case of reacting to pressure?
At the end of our teacher training, we had to deliver our final mini-class to the other students on the course. I was teaching on the last slot before lunch, with a big teaching group, so my students were feeling quite tired after delivering their own mini-classes and following others’.
One of the students before me, the daughter of a former president, had the crowd in awe with her story about the moon salutations. She spoke in great and elaborate detail about how doing the moon salutations triggered fond childhood memories of her Texan grandmother who lived in a desert town, and how they would stare up at the stars together at night. How was I going to compete with that? I don’t think the expectations were too high for me.
But once I took my place at the front of the class, I switched to teacher mode in that big, echo-y room. They could hear me at the back. I had nothing to worry about. While my teaching of yoga poses still needed work, I was able to command the audience and get them to follow my instructions.
The other students seemed surprised yet pleased by the delivery of my lesson as they gave me a massive round of applause at the end of it. It did feel somewhat patronising (I’m already a teacher!) but they meant well, and it did actually feel like a solid personal achievement.
The teacher commented that everyone was able to hear me. It made me inordinately happy. It also made me realise that I needed to cherish and value my voice. My voice is a big part of my identity; I will honour it and I will continue to use it with more confidence.
