Your Voice Matters: How to Uncover What Makes You Unique
A three-step process
“Our passing through this earth is so absurd and fleeting, that it calms me to know that I have been authentic, that I have managed to be more like myself as much as I could.”
—Frida Kahlo.
If you’re anything like Frida, you feel that distinctly human longing to craft a life from your deepest truth and give voice to what makes you unique, in the short time you have to be alive. I get it — I feel it, too. But let's face it, the whole thing is kind of elusive. No one can tell you exactly what it means to be authentic. You’re evolving at such a fast pace it’s hard to keep up, and there are no obvious signs when you are doing it.
The whole thing is abstract and that makes me suspicious—it’s too easy to get stuck in it.
While it’ll be a long time before I can answer these questions with any great authority, I am attempting to make sense of them, because who am I and why am I here — these are my central questions, and originality, creativity, meaning, and purpose — these are the great themes of my life — which means that, to some degree, I’ve already spent my lifetime trying to figure them out.
It’s true, I have made ground on them. For the last ten years, I’ve been working with clients to create a process that allows what’s unique about them to emerge and that’s what I’m going to share with you today.
While this is only a small part of the answer, it is essential because the only way you can express what’s unique is if you’re first creating space to hear your unique voice.
No matter where you are on the journey, you can begin or deepen the ongoing process of giving voice to your unique gifts using the three stages outlined in this process.
Although this process seems simple in theory, it’s difficult in practice. So, don’t be discouraged by the vulnerability, fear, and uncertainty that arises. These each come with their own insights and opportunities for growth, and each of these three stages is vital in your unfolding narrative of self-discovery.
Ready? Let’s go!
Stage 1: Laying Fertile Ground
It’s impossible for what’s unique about you to emerge if you are not creating space for it. This sounds simple, and yet, laying fertile ground is the hardest part and the area you need the most support because it comes with the least reward and the loudest voices telling you to quit.
Your task in this stage is this: Find 30 minutes every day where you sit comfortably and listen to what’s inside you. During this time, mute all external influences, particularly the eternal chatter of social media, to allow the quiet stirrings of your soul's voice to flourish. Dedicate yourself to a daily practice of being present and listening intently to what’s inside you. Whether you speak, create, or sit in silence—the fact you take 30 minutes a day is all that matters.
This initial stage poses the highest risk of your abandonment because it’s messy—it’s a battle against the chaos of negative internal and external influences and the relentless demands of modern existence in service of what’s unique about you being brought to life. Creating extra time and space for yourself does not come easy—the fact it’s in service of something unformed and undervalued makes it almost impossible.
Just this week, I had two clients attempt to abandon the process at this stage. The first felt he wasn’t “ready,” and the second like she wasn’t living up to her “agreements” with me. To be clear: you’re never ready for this work, there is no perfect time to start. Feelings of inadequacy and shame often parade as confusion—they are your critical voices detracting you from the authentic whispers you’re trying to hear. In short: learn to listen to the right voices.
Embrace the vulnerability of this stage, because it is here that the journey begins. Simply making space creates the fertile ground for your voice to take root and flourish, setting the stage for deeper exploration and self-discovery to come.
Stage 2: Your Thoughts & Feelings Roam Free
If you’ve ever tried to work with your dreams consciously, you know how important it is to write them down first thing in the morning. Recalling information from the dream while it’s fresh allows you to explore the themes in more detail, and it primes your brain to remember more dreams in the future. It works a bit like magic—once you start writing down your dreams, you seem to dream more frequently and vividly, and remember more of them. This is because you’re building a vital link between your unconscious and conscious life. The same is true of the voice of your gifts.
To build this link, your task in this stage is this: write everything down, and I mean everything. Thoughts, ideas, dreams, visions, symbols and signs, the things that make you angry, sad, happy. During your 30 minute practice and all throughout the day if possible. You don’t yet know or understand the raw material of what wants to emerge through you, so you must treat everything that arises as if it’s a critical revelation your soul has to offer.
Stay in this stage for a few months, just making space daily and taking note of what comes up. It’s a beautiful part of the process that puts you in deeper touch with everything emerging inside and all around you, and ultimately, with yourself and with life.
If you commit to this process, you’ll emerge from Stage 2 with a wealth of carefully documented insights and revelations. As you reflect on the thoughts and ideas you’ve captured, some will feel stronger than others, and you should feel a stirring—an urge to breathe life into at least some of them. Armed with these musings, we’ll step into Stage 3.
Step 3: Your Gifts Take Shape
Once you've made space for your voice and noted what it’s saying, it's time to breathe life into your ideas. This stage marks the transition from introspection to manifestation—from abstract to material. It’s a pivotal moment in your journey where you translate your innermost truths into tangible form.
Your task in stage three this: flesh out the content of your musings into digestible pieces like blogs, programs, and social posts, whatever makes the most sense for what you have created. For example, big ideas tend to go into longer-form content like blogs, while more fleeting ideas are sent out on social media. Figuring this out is an art in itself.
When you bring your ideas to form, it’s easy to feel that what you created does not meet your expectations. When in abstract form, everything makes sense, but when you try to distill the multitudes that make up your thoughts into a material form, it becomes much more challenging to communicate the idea because you bump up against the limitations of your skills, time, and energy. This is natural; form is limitation. The mantra here is done is better than perfect—just get something down.
There are two more stages here I’m leaving it out intentionally—sculpting and publishing. I’m leaving them out because they are the stages most dependent on skill and that takes time to develop. You should not expect that the first time you bring something to form, it will be the final result. Always remember that perfection is not possible, but you should get comfortable engaging in as many iterations as you can handle, to continue pushing it as close as possible to your idea of perfection.
As you move through stage three, you start to find that the creations born from your depths are beginning to pulse with life and that’s all that matters. As you prepare to release your creations into the universe, you’ll feel a shift—a subtle yet profound awakening within you. This is a recognition of the power inherent in your voice.
In Touch With Life
If there’s anything you take away from this, it should be the knowledge that this process takes a long time and therefore, the best thing you can do is fall in love with it. Learn to embrace the idea that it’s not the volume of your voice that matters, but the authenticity of your expression, and that the process itself is the result: it brings you into deeper connection with what’s emerging inside you, and forces you to pay greater attention to what’s unfolding all around you. In short: it helps you become more in touch with life.