Diversity and Inclusion: What’s Voice Got To Do With It?

I recently offered a Full Voice presentation for a group of diversity and inclusion managers at a large financial institution.

Expressions like, “we need every voice at the table” or “everyone must have a voice in this organization” inevitably arise in conversations about inclusion.  These comments are usually metaphorical in nature, but I do see the critical role our literal voices play in creating vibrant connections across differences.

Even when there is a sincere desire to create an atmosphere where all people feel free to offer their perspectives, it can be difficult to do.  Here are a few reasons why:

•  Silence is a strong habit.  People who are used to being silent may find it difficult to speak up.  One invitation may not be enough.

•  Oppression, discrimination, and bullying can make being seen and heard feel downright dangerous to those who have experienced it.

•  Many cultures place a high value on conformity and blending in.  What can be an asset in one of those cultures can look like a deficit in dominant Western culture where extroversion and individuality is valued.

•  People from under-represented groups are often reluctant to call attention to their differences in a group.

•  People who speak a second language in their everyday life are sometimes self-conscious about their accents or vocabularies.

•  Those who are used to taking up the airwaves sometimes find it difficult to stop talking and start listening.  They inadvertently fill every available space.

•  Timing and pacing vary widely among cultures.  People who are used to fast-paced conversations may not wait long enough for a slower speaker to jump in.

Four things you can do to connect with people across difference:

1.  Learn about the cultures of others, especially how they speak, listen, move, and connect.

2. Discover and master the diversity of sounds your voice contains.  You’ll have many more choices when you are communicating across differences.

3.  Listen deeply to the sounds, rhythms, and subtleties within the voices of people you meet.  Develop a keen ear for how people speak, not just what they say.

4.  And most importantly, notice how the way you are speaking and listening is affecting your connection with the other person.  Connection is the conduit through which all communication travels.

What have your discovered about how voice affects inclusion and diversity?

Opening Words

Here are the opening words of Full Voice: The Art and Practice of Vocal Presence.  It comes out next week.  Buy it on Amazon on October 4 to support Fifty Lanterns International and their great project in Uganda!

Welcome

This book is not just about voice.
It’s about life.
It poses some big questions:
Are you willing to be alive?
How alive?
And in service to what?

The words “voice,” “vocation,” and “avocation” all share the common Latin root.  Vocare literally means to call, invoke, or name. The people who first made these etymological links recognized the deep connection between voice and calling.

Here’s what they knew. The voice emerges from the mysterious intersection of your body, mind, emotions, and spirit. For anything to get created, it must make the treacherous journey from the world of imagination to the physical world.

Your voice is the primary vehicle for making that journey.

If your “vehicle” breaks down on the way from the inside out, your gifts will remain locked inside you.  If what you are saying is at odds with how you are saying it, your listeners may miss your message altogether.  And without a connection with other human beings, your work can’t come alive in the world.

Your voice says a lot about you. Did you know that just by hearing you speak, a listener is able to determine your physical stature, sex, and age?  That the sound of your voice reveals detailed information about your health, mood, fatigue level, social class, race, and education level?  Long before they process the meaning of your words, your listeners are busy making up their minds about you based on the clues your voice reveals.  And you’re doing the same thing whenever you listen to someone else, whether you realize it or not.

Identical words spoken in different tones can express a diversity of meanings.  The answer to the ubiquitous question, “How are you?” can be answered with the word “fine” in way that indicates joy, boredom, rage, uncertainty, lust, or impatience.  How many exasperated parents have told their rebellious adolescents, “Don’t use that tone with me, young lady!”  Tone is so powerful that it often trumps the meanings of the words themselves.  If there’s a jarring disparity between your words and the sound of your voice, you can be certain that your listeners will give more credence to the sound than the actual content of your speech.

Given its pivotal role in our lives, work, and relationships, it’s astounding that we devote so little time and attention to the voice.  We don’t get training in how to use it well and lack a shared language for talking about it.  We walk around unconscious about the messages our voices are spilling into the world.  At the same time, we hold strong opinions about the voices we like and dislike.

Voice is at the heart of your personal relationships as well.  It is a kind of miracle that your voice has the power to connect your inner world to that of another person.  And it can shut someone out just as easily.  Our voices create a soundtrack for the lives of those closest to us.  The beautiful baritone singing voice of my Grandpa Fred is still vivid in my mind’s ear even though it fell silent in 1996.  I hear my mother’s voice in my mind every day, sometimes imparting words of love and wisdom, sometimes saying things that irritate me no end.  I recall in detail the sound of the blessing I received from a wise therapist in 1985, the scathing sarcasm of my dad at his worst, and the warm resonant tone of the teacher who helped me find my voice.  Whose voices are ringing in your memory right now?  How do you think the people around you will hear your voice in their memories?

The voice you have right now is not your fate.  It’s not fixed and permanent.

Voices change all the time.  You’ve changed yours over and over during your lifetime, sometimes on purpose, sometimes unconsciously.  Some aspects of how you sound are determined by physiology, gender, culture, language, and history.  Those vocal qualities aren’t open to significant change.  Other aspects of your voice, though, were cobbled together by a series of unconscious decisions you made along the way.  (Picture something made of duct tape, pipe cleaners, and Popsicle sticks.)

Some of those decisions served you well; still others suppressed parts of your voice that could be useful to you.  Aspects of your voice that were shut down can be reawakened and integrated back into your full voice.

They aren’t gone.  They’re just rusty.

Here’s another truth that’s woven through these pages: you don’t have one voice; you have many.  You vary the sound of your voice many times a day, whether you realize it or not.

Do you use the same voice at an intimate dinner and a sporting event?
With a prospective client and a smiling baby?
Do you talk to your boss the same way you talk to your pets?

You’ve got all the voice you’ll ever need in there – a veritable wealth of sound just waiting to be set free.
Every color in your voice is worth reclaiming.
Each one carries a piece of your humanness.
Reclaiming your full voice makes for a fuller life.
For what did we trade our raw, messy, human voices?
When did we start to believe that becoming less of ourselves would keep us safe?
What is the long-term cost of suppressing the wisdom of our instincts and emotions?
What is so frightening about the possibility of authentic expression?

This book asks you to consider what might be more interesting and important than your fear.
Invites you to shake off the lies that keep you tight, silent, “nice,” or scared.
To take off that muzzle and speak.
To drop your chains and dance.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Most of us go to our graves with our music still inside us.”  The thought of all those wasted gifts is what calls me to this work.  Your gifts are not yours alone; they are your part of our shared destiny.

I hope you will use your voice in service to your vision.
I hope your loved ones will recognize your love for them by the sound of your voice.
I hope your “music” will find its way out here where it belongs and that your “song” will inspire other songs.
I hope your resonant and wise listening will invite the silenced ones to speak out.

May you experience the pleasure of your voice rising up from your deepest center, opening through your heart, flying unimpeded from your mouth, lighting up your eyes.  I haven’t found a feeling more wonderful than that.

It’s sheer joy even when it’s terrifying.
It’s what kept me going through the swamps of fear and self-doubt.
It’s the sound of a body fully alive.
It’s the shortest distance between your gifts and the world that is so hungry for them.
It’s your part in the great song that all of life is singing.

Full voice.
Full life.

Come, let’s begin.

What Is This New Voice?

Long before I wrote songs or books, I wrote poetry.  Lots of it.

I was that sensitive teenager whose heart poured out into the pages of her journal. Somewhere along the line, I started creating little chapbooks of them.  There are now five collections.

My hard drive now contains a file of 283 of my poems.  And I wrote #284 at the Images and Voices of Hope Conference last weekend at a prompt from our reflection leader, the wise and generous Mark Nepo.

Here is a poem from 1992 that celebrates the brave emergence of my own full voice.  It is the ancestor of the book that is being released next week.

 My Voice #2

I shed my clown mask for good –
the one with entreating eyebrows that leak apology.

Here I come –
striding out into the bright light,
clear-eyed and buck naked.
Once the cloak of feigned incompetence falls,
it never fits quite right again.

“There’s no turning back!”
sings my bounding heart
and my lungs stretch another centimeter
to take inside
more space
and more
and more…
until my chest blooms into flame.

There is a new force moving through me:
I run with my feet underground.
I piss thundershowers and spit lava
My eyes are sky sponges,
exchanging blue for blue in scathing riffs.
My body sprouts feathers.
The sweet cry in my throat burns and soothes like brandy in reverse,
heat rising from belly to mouth.
I shake with the power of sound.

What is this new voice?

It is a company of friends
a spinning galaxy
an angel hootenanny
a viper pit
a slow motion volcano –
Made from pillows of God’s breath and leaps of faith.

© Barbara McAfee  1992

 

Sounds and Silence

Stay close to any sounds that make you glad you are alive.
~Hafiz

What are those sounds in your life?

Wind in the trees outside your window?
The voice of a beloved child?
The song of the sea?
James Brown’s shout on “I Feel Good?”
The call of the first bird at dawn?
The roar of a NASCAR race?
A Mozart piano sonata played by Glenn Gould?

Your life most certainly has a soundtrack.
Sometimes the sounds there are not of your choosing – traffic, airplanes, noisy colleagues, Muzak, or arguing children.
The rest of the menu is up to you.

Many of us fill every waking minute with music, television, or radio.  This inundation with constant sound can dull the sensitivity of our listening.  We tune out after awhile and go numb to what’s happening around us.  The rare gift of silence can offer a much-needed refuge and oasis.

I’ve had two recent encounters with the kind of silence that is much greater than the mere absence of sound.  Allow me to tell you about them.

I just returned from a weekend retreat with a group of 60 authors affiliated with my publisher, Berrett-Koehler.  The conversations were rich and sophisticated.  We explored the diverse ways we were all contributing – or hoping to contribute – to the repair of the world.  There were people in that room whose thinking I have admired for years.  Wise elders.  Young visionaries.  Brilliant world-changers.  Witty, friendly, and engaging human beings were all around me.

And yet I kept finding myself pulled away from the conversations to sit in the resonant silence of the redwoods.  In the presence of those ancient trees, I can almost hear a subsonic hum.  A deep thrum that’s just below my hearing range.  I don’t know what the trees were “saying,” but I drew great sustenance from them nonetheless.

About a month ago, I was greeting the dawn from an island I frequently visit in the waters between Minnesota and Ontario.  As the watermelon sky brightened to peach, there were a few precious minutes of utter silence: no boat motors, train whistles, plane engines, human voices, or even bird calls.  On a large lake like that – especially on a weekend morning – that absence of sound is a rare occurrence.  The lake’s silence had a completely distinct flavor from that of the redwoods.  Each silence has its own distinct music.

Tasting the gift of silence refreshes the ears and heart for deeper listening.
Enjoy seeking out the sounds – and the silences – that make you glad you are alive.

Staying Alive

This whole conversation about voice boils down to one question:
how alive are you willing to be?

Inhabiting your full voice makes you feel more alive.
You breathe deeply.
Your body is engaged.
Your heart is open.
Your face is animated.
You are completely present in the moment.

We do our best work from a place of deep aliveness.
We notice things you wouldn’t otherwise and connect with people at a deeper level.
We’re able to access our own gifts and freely offer them.

What better way to spend the rest of your life….

In the words of the 15^th century poet and mystic, Kabir:
When you were born, you cried,
And the world rejoiced.
Live your life so that when you die,
The world cries and you rejoice.

(These words have been beautifully set to music by Jody Healy.  My version – called “Navajo Chant” – is available on iTunes.)

 

Voice – The Original Information Superhighway

In the days before the printing press, most information in the world was conveyed through the oral tradition.

Imagine how important the voice was in those times.  There were dire consequences if you didn’t adequately:

•  transmit information about hunting and gathering food, enduring seasonal changes, building shelter, and navigating the landscape;

•  communicate the stories that formed your people’s culture;

•  convey the critical rituals of your spiritual tradition; or

•  instruct your children about what was expected of them.

Our species’ more recent dependence on the written word has eroded the value we put on the way we speak.

Here’s the funny thing – your voice is still an information superhighway.

Just by listening to the sound of your voice, people can determine all kinds of things about you:

•  age

•  mood

•  gender

•  energy level

•  educational background

•  region where you grew up

•  state of health

They can often tell if you really mean what you’re saying.  And you can tell when someone on the other end of the phone is distracted while they’re talking to you, right?

The ancient skill of speaking intentionally is still in our DNA.
As is our ability to deeply listen to what’s underneath each other’s words.

Try this: as you listen to people today, notice how much information you are picking up just from the sound of their voices.

The Spirit of Yes

I was taking an afternoon snooze one lovely afternoon in the summer of 2009.  In that delicate place between wakefulness and sleep, a song started unspooling into my mind.

This rarely happens to me as a songwriter.  The inspiration for a song usually comes in an instant.  Then it takes diligent hours at the piano refining melody, organizing chord structures, detangling lyrics, and waiting for that certain “click” that tells me it’s finished.

I brought the new song to The Morning Star Singers, a volunteer hospice choir I founded in 2007.  When we sang it at our rehearsal that evening, they jumped in with breathtaking harmonies and unbridled enthusiasm.  My yoga-teaching friend Margie Weaver suggested that we add a gesture to the singing: making a “Y” of our upraised arms.

The song found a new voice when I was emceeing the International Coach Federation conference.  There I witnessed a sea of 1,200 people from 46 countries singing the one-word chorus – “YES!” – with hands in the air.  It’s a sight and sound that I will never forget.

Since then thousands of people have sung the song at conferences, retreats, community sings, workplaces, and in their cars as they commute with my CD playing (so I’m told).

Just this week my beloved friend Lucy Matthews Heegaard finished the music video version of the song.  Here’s the link…

http://youtu.be/OqexOh9I4Z0

I wonder how singing the word “yes” over and over these past two years has changed me?  And I wonder what effect it has had on the thousands of people who have raised hands and voices in the Spirit of Yes?

And most importantly, what might the Spirit of Yes have to offer the world?