Your Voice: What Do You Believe, What Do You Know – and Are You Saying It?

Over recent months, I’ve realised that my voice has changed.

Not my actual voice, of course, but the depth, clarity and conviction with which I’m prepared to say what I think, what I believe and what I know.

The interesting thing is that many of those beliefs aren’t new. They’ve been there in the background for a long time. What has changed is my confidence to embrace them, stand behind them and say them out loud.

And that has made me think about our voice in business in a much wider way.

For me, it comes down to three things: what we believe, what we know, and how we communicate it.

What Do You Believe?

One of the clearest examples for me is how we define success.

For a long time, I felt surrounded by messages that seemed to link business success with money – particularly the pressure to become a six or seven-figure business owner.

That has never really been my definition of success. I’ve always wanted my business to give me a good life as well as an income. Time with the people I love matters enormously to me. So do freedom, enjoyment and being able to build work around my life rather than allowing work to consume it.

My own perception of the six or seven-figure world was often long hours, pressure, stress, hustle and missed moments. I know that isn’t necessarily the reality for everyone. There will be people earning at that level who have created exactly the balance they want, and for whom that financial goal is genuinely part of their version of success.

But it wasn’t mine.

And yet, for quite a long time, I didn’t feel confident enough to say that widely.

I worried that people who did earn six or seven figures might laugh, look down on me or see me as less successful. I didn’t want that. So I kept quiet.

I’ve also not always had a very good relationship with money, and I can see now that this added another layer. When financial success was being held up as the measure of business success, it touched an insecurity that was already there.

I knew the difference I was making to clients and members. I knew the experience I had. I knew I had created a business that allowed me to be there for the people I loved. But I could still allow the fact that I wasn’t running a six or seven-figure business to devalue how I saw myself.

Perhaps the most interesting part is that people often assumed I was operating at that level.

Looking back, I have to ask myself whether part of me was happy to hide behind that perception. Was I afraid to correct it because I liked fitting in? Not because I believed I needed to be a six or seven-figure business owner, but because I worried that other people might value me differently if they knew I wasn’t.

That’s uncomfortable to admit, but it has helped me understand something about finding my voice.

Sometimes we don’t stay quiet because we don’t know what we believe. We stay quiet because we aren’t yet confident enough to risk somebody else disagreeing with it.

What Do You Know?

The same thing can happen with our knowledge and expertise.

I think we all take for granted just how much we know and what we can do. When something has become second nature to us, we can stop recognising the fullness of our own expertise.

Then someone new can come into our space with huge outward confidence. They talk confidently about what they know, put themselves out there and own their expertise without hesitation.

Sometimes they have enormous expertise to back that confidence up. Sometimes, as you get to know someone, you realise the confidence and the depth of experience aren’t necessarily the same thing.

The point isn’t to judge them. It’s to notice what their confidence can trigger in us.

I have always had an inner confidence in my own ability, but I haven’t always found it easy to show that confidence outwardly. So when someone else appears incredibly self-assured, it can highlight our own insecurities and make us question ourselves.

We can make ourselves smaller. We can soften the way we describe what we do. We can almost apologise for our expertise before anyone else has even questioned it.

But confidence and expertise are not the same thing. Someone else sounding more confident doesn’t automatically mean they know more than you. And feeling less comfortable talking about your own expertise doesn’t erase everything you have learnt and experienced.

Years ago at WBN, I ran an exercise where I paired members who knew each other and asked them to tell one another what they saw in that person – how they perceived them and how they came across.

It was a real eye-opener and a huge boost for the women taking part.

There is something quite telling in that. Other people can sometimes see our strengths, qualities and expertise much more clearly than we can see them ourselves.

We can give enormous weight to what we imagine someone might think about us, while giving far less weight to the positive things people actually tell us they see.

How do you communicate it?

For me, this is where the change has happened.

If I compare my voice now with the way I communicated years ago, I think there is more depth, more clarity and more conviction.

The depth comes from lived experience. The clarity has come from stripping away some of the noise and becoming clearer about what I actually want. And the conviction comes from being more willing to stand behind that, even when somebody else may see things differently.

That doesn’t mean I believe I’m right and everyone else is wrong. Far from it. I still value other perspectives, and I think hearing different experiences is one of the most valuable things we can do.

But somebody else’s certainty doesn’t have to become my truth.

My own lived experience has made a huge difference to my ability to speak with conviction. That may not be true for everyone, but it is true for me.

I also know that some women will hear me say that success doesn’t have to mean six or seven figures, or that you can choose to work fewer hours, prioritise yourself and build a business around the life you actually want, and feel a sense of relief.

They are the people I’m speaking to. They are my people.

I’m not trying to persuade everybody to want what I want. I’m becoming more comfortable saying what I believe without needing everybody to agree with me.

Was the voice already there?

I think, for me, it probably was.

Much of what I’m saying now was quietly there in the background years ago. I just didn’t have the confidence to embrace it fully.

Time of life has played a part too. Age, experience and menopause have all contributed to the way I see myself, my time, my priorities and what I’m prepared to accept.

And that leaves me with a question I don’t think I can answer.

If I had understood all of this years ago, would I actually have been able to act on it?

Or do we sometimes need to travel the road first? To live through the experiences, make the decisions, get things wrong, change our minds and learn enough about ourselves before we can truly hear and embrace something that perhaps was there all along?

Maybe it’s the older, wiser version of me who can hear it now.

I can only share what I feel, what I believe and what I’ve learnt. My perspective is just one perspective, and I know it won’t resonate with everyone.

But I’m also confident I’m not the only woman who has spent years knowing more than she gives herself credit for, softening what she really thinks or allowing somebody else’s confidence to make her question her own.

And I’m curious:

Do we simply need to hear these things sooner, or does some of the confidence to truly embrace our own voice come with the maturity, wisdom and lived experience we gather along the way?

And then theres where we choose to use that voice

Finding our voice isn’t only about what we say. It can also mean questioning the assumptions around where we’re supposed to say it.

Social media is a good example. It’s very easy to absorb the message that if you run a business, you need to be posting, creating content and keeping up with whichever platform or algorithm is demanding your attention.

But do you?

That’s one of the reasons I’m particularly looking forward to welcoming Lisa York to WBN in October.

Lisa is a lifelong solopreneur who helps one-woman business owners turn emails into income without relying on social media. She has built three solo enterprises over the last 30 years, creating simple, automated sales systems designed to work around real life.

And Lisa runs her own business without social media.

She isn’t saying social media is wrong. In fact, she acknowledges that it can be a brilliant marketing tool. Her point is that we don’t have to use it simply because that’s what businesses are expected to do.

Through her business, Sell More Stuff™, Lisa advocates using captivating emails to draw people in, build trusting relationships and sell, allowing business owners to reduce the amount of marketing they need to do. Lisa says she has sold to 33% of her email subscribers without using social media.

At our open WBN meeting on Thursday 22 October at 1pm, Lisa will be delivering her session:

Turn emails into income and DITCH social media

She’ll share how to use email to sell without feeling pushy or relying on sales calls – a practical next step from our October conversation about what we believe, what we know and how we communicate it.

Lisa is the founder of Sell More Stuff™, has been featured in Business Insider and lives in Lancaster. She is also a mum of four teenagers, so her approach to creating a sustainable, manageable business around real life feels particularly relevant to the conversations we have at WBN.

Join the conversation

Our October WBN theme is Your Voice.

Throughout the month we’ll be exploring three things:

What you believe.
What you know.
How you communicate it.

Our open meeting takes place on Thursday 22 October at 1pm and includes Lisa York’s guest session. You can join us as a pay-as-you-go visitor for £15.

You don’t need to have all the answers. Come and join the conversation.

Sharon x