Why strategy won't help you with the emotional wounds you have with using your voice

and what to do when you want to be more visible

Using your voice - your AUTHENTIC voice (not the one that’s masked with fear) and growing your visibility whether it’s for business, career or just to share your creative endeavours is an EMOTIONALLY CHARGED pursuit.

We want it to be strategic, we want an easy fix. We want to just ‘post more’ and use a different cadence or rhythm or increase our productivity and ‘do more’ to solve the lack of results and likes and views and shares.

We want to be able to just use someone else’s voice and see the growth and success that they have.

But then comes the familiar feeling in the pit of your stomach. The daily dread around how your social media is performing, hovering over an email not knowing what to say and defaulting to chatGPT to solve your problems.

The way you hesitate, procrastinate and use other people’s voices and words or AI to try and welcome the connection you seek is deeply rooted in your patterns and wounds. It’s the way you learned that having an opinion was unsafe, the way you were told to be quiet in class or that your ‘stupid’ or ‘ugly’ or my personal unfavourite ‘fat’.

The way you were taught how to use your voice (or how to suppress it) has been a lifelong journey of you learning where value is placed in our society and in your lineage.

Most women who struggle with visibility also struggle to stand up for themselves and set boundaries in relationships. It’s no coincidence.

You have placed no value on your voice.

If you don’t have any value for your own voice - how can you expect anyone else to?

It’s a hard pill to swallow.

Many of us never even explore our voice. Until you go on a journey into entrepreneurship or start a social media account - or try to progress your career - you have likely just been following a well trodden path set by others before you, and you didn’t need to worry about what to say or how to say it or how to ‘sell’.

And then your trying to push push push for results. You need to prove yourself. You need to be able to tell your partner that ‘the business is doing well’ or the pressure of finances is crushing you. The external world is telling you that your lack of results is your fault and ‘you’re not good enough’.

It’s no wonder that your exhausted.

Pushing through your visibility wounds and fears will only get you so far. Strategy will get you a little further.

But it won’t heal the part of you that never felt good enough, or popular. The part of you that’s still trying to gather evidence that your enough.

Visibility (done well) is you conveying what’s on the inside of you to the external world through your voice and expression. Whether that’s talking, writing or any other form of creation. It’s the way you build programmes, speak on stage, write an email, write a post on social media or talk about yourself and your business at a networking meeting.

But if what’s on the inside is confused, fearful and full of pain - your outer expression will be mirroring that.

Your words won’t be authentic. They won’t match what’s truly calling to be heard from your soul.

You won’t say what you mean - you will say what’s been said 10000 times because you know what to expect from other people and can gauge how they will react.

The patterns we have held with our voice can change, they can be broken and replaced with new ways of doing, saying and being.

But not with another strategy.

Only when you take a hard look at what you’ve been taught is acceptable, palatable and safe can you uncover the story of your voice.

For most women - especially my neurospicy ladies - we have masked our true feelings, opinions and thoughts for most of our life.

It has never felt safe to fully express.

Not at home, not at work, not with friends.

You were always too much, or too quiet, or introverted, or your view was wrong. It made you feel like you weren’t to be trusted, like your voice didn’t matter.

But the thing with ‘value’ is that it’s subjective.

Just because you have experienced a world where your voice didn’t matter doesn’t mean that’s true. And just because you have the emotional charge from those wounds and experiences doesn’t mean you can’t change your relationship with visibility.

We are now in the position to connect with people (for free) from across the world who value your voice and what you have to say.

They will love your opinion, your voice and your authentic way of doing things and creating.

But it was never about them. It’s not actually about sales or money or likes or followers.

The journey is healing the parts of you that tell you that your only worth is what other people think of you.

Voice + visibility work is about finally discovering what YOU think of you, letting go of the performance in your life and allowing yourself to free your expression in full trust.

Trust that what you have to say is valuable. That when you are authentic - you will resonate with the people you need to grow your business and bring you the opportunities you desire.

I talk about this as the Wallflower Identity. You are stuck at the edge of the room in your life, never fully stepping into the limelight. Looking to others to lead you and tell you what to say, how to be and who to be.

On the other side of deciphering your relationship with your voice, being fully seen and felt for your true self - the greatest gift of true connection and community is found.

You don’t need another strategy - you need to step away from the edge of the room and into the light.