Some Days, It's Harder
Six years ago, my co-founder Julie and I sat across from each other in my living room talked about the company we wanted to build. In 2014, there was a spate of articles about the newest “it” way to criticize women’s voices: vocal fry. Article after article posited vocal fry as unprofessional, girly, dumb, infantilizing, and SO ANNOYING. Men and women both begged women to stop using it – for their own good, of course, but also because how would they possibly listen to a woman who talked like that?
That day, we bought a domain name – www.vitalvoicetraining.com – and we made our first submission to a feminist business conference with our very first workshop idea. The title we came up with that day was What Does AUTHORITY Sound Like?. We wanted to explore the feedback women were receiving about their voices and communication styles, how we see leadership in the world, and put a stake in the ground about how we believed our audience could access their authentic voices and authentically powerful communication. We talked about the definitions – cultural and personal – of authority and leadership. We talked about how voices actually work and how complex and unique they are. We spoke with great optimism about building a world in which we all expanded the definition of what leadership looks and sounds like, a few brave voices at a time, together.
In the time since, we’ve done a lot of deep thinking about words like authenticity, power, authority, and leadership. We’ve seen the world change in ways that exposed so much of what was always evident to people who didn’t have our privilege, and we’ve seen the world confirm what we always knew to be true – that if you fall outside of Audre Lorde’s mythic norm, you are perceived and listened to very differently. We all develop our voices in concert with other humans, with an eye to both survival and success, and with an almost endless capacity for adaptation, but there are simply different rules for women and minorities.
Today, I saw a brilliant, prepared, compassionate, energetic, imperfect but always willing to learn, beloved woman drop out of the 2020 presidential race. It is once again clear to me that the answer to what “authority” sounds like, particularly in these weird, stressful times we live in, is still older white men. They are allowed a breadth of expression and room for error that the women in this race (not to mention the people of color) never were. She was already and is still target of some people’s ire for “stealing” votes from their chosen candidate, as if the people who voted for her are ignorant children, blithely uncaring, willfully blind, or actually evil. As if her votes belonged to a man. She occupied space and airtime that was not rightfully hers.
The mission that we have built for our company is to reject the “get it right” model of public speaking and executive presence, to help people access more of their own brilliance and express it in their own unique way, to work towards a world in which diverse voices are heard and honored for what they bring to the table when they are fully themselves. We’ve seen it work for six years now. We’ve seen so many people - our clients and friends, and other models of powerful authenticity – refuse to shave off their edges and acquiesce to the “shoulds”.
But we’ve also seen the backlash. Some days, hope and optimism win. Some days feel like our insides are being stabbed with hot pokers.
No matter what, we continue the work. We believe in it too much. We know, on a cellular level, that it WILL make the world a better place. We will dream big and fight hard.
Public speaking, failure, public speaking coaches, public speaking coaching, authenticity, Vital Voice Training, Casey Erin Clark, Julie Fogh, communication specialists