Learn to align your voice with your values.
As a leadership coach, one of the challenges I see my clients struggling with is how to articulate themselves clearly. We all want our thoughts and ideas to be understood and to have our voices listened to.
I help my clients work on aligning their values and their voice, a key factor to making sure that we are expressing our authentic selves, while seeking to be heard and have greater impact in the world.
One way to align your values and your voice is to take some time to pause and reflect on the voice and tone you want to bring to your topic. Once you have identified this voice, then you will have a north star that will support you as you write and speak.
These are some of the questions I explore with my clients as we’re identifying their voice. I invite you to take time to write your responses to these questions to aid you in strengthening the alignment between what you express and how you express it.
What is the voice that you want to come through in your speaking or writing about this topic?
Formal, informal? Warm, distant? A voice that questions, that answers, or that opens a new conversation? A voice that is curious? A voice that is intimate? Or something else entirely?
What values do you want to come across in your voice?
For example: do you want to convey your respect for community, or beauty, or creativity? When thinking about values, think also about your needs. What need are you expressing in your writing? Needs connect directly to values.
This is a word cloud of universal needs and values to help you think about and identify what values resonate with you. You can also do this exercise for values identification and clarification.
When you articulate your values in your writing, you can articulate your point of view.
Voice, values and point of view engage the reader more than so called objective stances.
Voice is composed on the page through the language and expressions that we use, whether or not we use first person, second person or third person, whether or not we sound like we’re talking to a friend over a cup of tea or standing at a podium delivering a talk to hundreds of people.
What emotions do you want to evoke in your listener?
Curiosity, surprise, wonderment, a sense of connection, a desire to learn more, a sense of awakening? Something else?
Rhetoric teaches that it is important to think about ethos (who you are as the speaker), logos (the intellectual concepts you are putting forth), pathos (the emotion you are seeking to elicit) and kairos (the timing, the now – why are you writing this in this moment – what has set your ideas flowing at this time?).
Think about what you like to read or listen to. What kind of voice do you most enjoy?
What qualities does that voice have? In what context is that voice most effective?
As you explore these questions, allow yourself to be curious. It may be that as you think about your audiences, you will feel a pull to use different qualities of voice. Write that down as well. The shift in voice may or may not serve, that is something to explore as you identify it.
