“Go inside yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows” Rainer Maria Rilke

My previous blog “Do you know your true voice?” was about finding and speaking with your authentic, true voice. I invited you to notice when you are speaking with your true voice and when you are not, and how that feels. I was keen to know your thoughts and experiences around this. Thank you to all the people who so generously shared with me.

I had felt it was important for me to understand this more fully, and the synchronicities I found along the way confirmed it! Bringing authenticity to relationships is not only a way of growing and improving them but also makes them stronger. And just as important for me, is the way I feel when I speak from a place that I know is true and authentic. I feel deeply congruent with myself, and I feel whole and complete. There is no internal stress or discomfort.

So, paradoxically, speaking up, expressing myself to the outside world, is in essence, an inside job. However, finding a way to articulate what is truly inside me, to speak from the heart – not just from the head or from emotions, to voice what is important can be a challenge – even for the most articulate amongst us.When I first started researching, I was surprised to realise that I actually wasn’t certain what my true, authentic voice sounded like. It was, in fact, easier to recognise what it was not. So it was with great interest that I considered your responses.

Some of you spoke about the fear of speaking up and had identified different reasons for this. There was the fear of how it would be received, the reactions it would trigger in the other person. There was the belief that others didn’t care about what you had to say, so you didn’t speak with your own true and authentic voice but with a voice that said the words you thought others wanted to hear. There was also the fear that it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. Someone pointed to the fear that they would get it all wrong and felt unable to properly articulate what they wanted to say.

One person spoke very frankly about struggling with her relationship with her partner who wouldn’t/couldn’t speak about how he felt. Deeply frustrated, she continued to share what she thought were her true and authentic thoughts and feelings, and eventually he responded. What she heard was mostly criticism and she felt deeply hurt. It was only in stepping away and reflecting on it that she began to see that she had not been speaking from a place that was true and authentic, she had spoken from frustration and fear (and so had he) and also she had, in her own way, been critical of him. She realised that what she was saying felt true at the time but it was not what really mattered to her.

Others spoke about finding courage to finally speak up about situations that had been bothering them. I learnt about how, for one person, the build up of emotions and thoughts created a distorted energy to the words that came out. It left them feeling uncomfortable and as if it had somehow exploded or rushed from them. This made them even more reluctant to speak up in the future.

Someone shared with me how, being true to herself and cultivating the courage to speak up in a situation, allowed her to communicate what was real and right for her. None of her fears about the reaction she would experience were found to be true.

Finally, another person pointed to some laziness on her part. Often, she simply didn’t take the time to go deeper and find out what really mattered to her. So she just spoke “from the top of my head” because she felt an expectation and pressure to give an immediate response. On reflection, she had recognised she often felt uncomfortable after doing this.

Everything I read and heard was pointing me in a particular direction. It seems there are two aspects to speaking with a true and authentic voice. First, we have to be able to hear for ourselves that voice inside us that speaks with wisdom and understanding.

It is not the dialogue in our heads that will guide us to speak with our true and authentic voice.

It seems that speaking what really matters to me can only happen if I understand myself, centre myself and quiet my mind (thinking and emotions). Cultivating courage sits within this. I have developed practices that help me and I am learning how to be a wise and loving friend to myself. I have found that when it is important, it is useful to take my time to get clear. Whenever I forget or fail to do this, I feel the stress and discomfort of not being authentic and true, but if I listen, wisdom tells me that I am still, and always, learning (and learning is the opportunity found in discomfort).

Second, when we reconcile this voice with our particular personality and style, we can develop the habit of speaking with our own true, authentic and very unique voice but how we speak, and what we say also depends on the situation.

So, communicating what matters to you includes both the content and the energy/feeling behind what you say. Coherence between these two things is essential for authenticity in any relationship. When there is congruence between the words and the feelings and what we do, people are able to understand who we really are and what matters to us.

Life then adds an interesting twist! How others read or see us also depends on their own personal, often unconscious, biases (how they filter the world). We have no control over how someone will receive our communication.

So, when I speak with my true, authentic and unique voice, the greatest value lies in my own inner experience – the sense of self and of being whole as well as the opportunity of genuine connection with the world around me.