744. Feeling Silenced? This Is How You Find Your Voice Again
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Welcome to the Almost 30 Podcast. I'm Lindsay. And I'm Krista. And we're your hosts, guides, and friends on this path. Almost 30 is not about your age. It's about the feeling. All of us are almost something, seeking community and resources to support the rumblings of transformation within us. Our conversations are deep dives, shepherded by our insatiable curiosity and desire for connection, enduring inspiration, and a sense of levity that we can all benefit from.

We're looking to find the magic in the human experience. Buckle up, baby. Your evolution is waiting. Hello and welcome to Almost 30 Podcast. My name is Krista Williams and I'm your host. I'm your guide. I'm your friend and I'm so grateful you are here. I promise to make it a valuable one for you and for me and I'm really excited to talk to you guys about The Voice.

So Almost 30 is a podcast I do with my best friend. She sometimes is taking episodes. I'm sometimes taking episodes. We're sometimes doing them together. We actually live on different coasts. So I live in Los Angeles, originally from Ohio. She lives in New York, originally from Pennsylvania. And we created Almost 30 eight years ago when we were approaching our 30s. And we realized that we felt really alone, that we felt really lost and that

life wasn't turning out how we thought it should. We felt like we were completely on the wrong path and we wanted Almost 30 to be a space where we could learn, where we could grow, where we could connect and where we could find community. And that's really what we did. So if you've been an OG with us over the years, I love you very much. I'm so grateful for you. And I can't wait to see you this year on the book tour. It's going to be pretty exciting and incredible. It's going to be good.

So at almost 30, we do solo episodes. So this is going to be a solo episode with me where I'm going to be teaching and talking about the voice. We are going to be talking about the voice, a very, very hot and important topic right now and something that is so near and dear to my heart. So to get personal, I can start out by being personal. Is that okay if I get a little vulnerable with y'all before we start this to tell you a story? I, um,

got divorced two years ago. So I've been shingle and in my little, my little single portal. But I remember at the end of that relationship and just feeling like I had completely lost myself. I felt like I didn't know who I was. I felt like I had no connection or relationship to myself. And I felt like I really didn't, didn't know who I was.

And what I realized is that when I had lost my self, it was really I had lost my voice. I had been someone that in relationship over time, I became silent. I became self-critical. I became confused. I became hyper perfectionist about what I would say, how I would say it. And I was in this situation where I really felt like it wasn't safe for me to speak.

It wasn't safe for me to share my truth. It wasn't safe for me to be who I was. And it was really, really hard to not have a voice. And it's funny because for my profession, I speak on stages and I have a podcast. I use my voice as my currency.

And to go home and be in my personal life and feel like I was a mute and that I couldn't share or be who I was felt so inauthentic and felt so wrong. For me in this work that I do, it's so beautiful. I have such a beautiful, expansive life being a public figure and teaching on spirituality and personal growth. But

That also means that I have to live in integrity. So everything that I'm teaching or doing, I have to have at least some level of mastery in my own life. So what was so painful for me in the ending of that relationship was that I was using my voice as my currency, but I wasn't using my voice behind the scenes. So I was essentially like a version of Krista that you guys saw was not the version that was existing in this relationship. I was a shell of myself.

And I remember a moment thinking, I was sitting on my couch post-fight and just thinking to myself, wow, if the audience of almost 30 or the people that followed me saw me,

they wouldn't know that that was me. You know, they wouldn't think that I was the person that couldn't speak her truth, that couldn't connect with how she felt, that couldn't share how she felt, that didn't really have access to the confidence to speak her truth in this relationship. And that was one of the things that really propelled me to end up, you know, leaving that relationship because I felt so disconnected to my voice.

I think for so many women that when we think about our lives and we think about this beautiful, expansive life and the new timeline life, the new you version, we can think about all of these things that we can write down on a to-do list. We can say she is getting up at 5.30 and she's doing the five-minute journal and she's walking 10,000 steps a day and she's drinking a green juice and she's habit stacking, blah, blah, blah.

That's great. I love discipline. I love, you know, setting ourselves up for success. But what's really going to move the needle for you and really change your life is being able to use your voice, being in your fullest expression of your voice. The voice is what changes the frequency and energy of a room. The voice is where you are heard. So if you are someone that feels like in life you've been invisible, you've been invisible,

that people look over you or people don't notice you or that you're not in the fullest expression of who you are. The voice is how you become visible. The voice is what brings you into visibility in a room. Say we're in a room with 50 people. Who is the most visible?

the person that is speaking because they're using their voice. So you being able to use your voice in this year and the next year and really learning to heal and be in the fullest expression of you is an essential part of you stepping into your power and your purpose here on earth. So when I left that relationship and I really decided that I wanted to prioritize myself and my expression and I really wanted to reclaim my voice,

I knew that I was going to go on a journey of self-discovery and soul healing that I really didn't know was possible. And I really didn't realize until that point that so much of my life had been about my voice. When we think about the voice, sometimes we can just think about the external voice, my voice that you're hearing now on this podcast or the voice that you use to express at a board meeting or in a job or in a relationship. But there's also our internal voices, right?

I do a lot of voice work with the external and I do a lot of voice work with the internal. As a self-development transformation coach, I'm working a lot of times with all the inner voices that people have, that my clients have, their inner critic, their inner judge, their inner child, their inner teen. So there's also these inner voices that we also need to tend to.

that we also need to make peace with. And when we can find that perfect amalgamation of inner peace between the inner voices and peace with ourselves, that's when we're able to be in this really beautiful full expression of who we are in the world. Okay, this is a new supplement in my routine that I've been telling everybody about. It's the Grass-Fed Organ Complex from Paleo Valley. Maybe you've heard the buzz around organs.

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I think the voice is so important because the voice is our identity and sound. When we meet someone, we look at their appearance. You know, half of what we're taking in is their appearance, what they're wearing, how tall they are, you know, what color their hair is, what color their eyes are, what their clothes look like. And then the rest of how we perceive people is taken through their voice.

If they sound interesting, if they sound warm, if they sound inviting, what is the energy of their voice exude? So your perception of you in the world or how people perceive you is not just what you look like. And we know what it's like to meet someone that over indexes on the physical appearance and over indexes on what it looks like.

the outside but doesn't prioritize the voice or what's on the inside for you to be that person that you really want to be Focusing on the voice and how that's expressed in the world is going to be the absolute game changer It's gonna be the thing that takes you to the next level what I've noticed the most when I'm speaking to people about the voice and when I'm talking to people about the voice and being fully expressed is that it's not just about you

speaking the loudest. It's not just about you saying whatever comes to mind. It is such a spiritual experience to be fully expressed. When you are able to have the competence and self-love to prioritize yourself and your opinions over other people's, to prioritize your own experience over others and say how you feel, that is such a huge part of your healing and a proof of your healing.

So an example is I had a situation recently where there's a relationship or friendship that kind of fizzled out, you know, a year or so ago. And I felt really clear. I felt good that the relationship had kind of transitioned from one place to another. I was completely fine with it. I kind of understand how things go. And this person reached out to me asking about why that happened and asking about my perception. And, um,

You know, in previous times, my voice would have tried to match their energy and kind of give them an answer that they wanted and been like, oh, I know. I'm really bummed or I'm sad or, you know...

I'm so sorry and apologize and just people please. But the voice of me today and now is one that's like, no, I actually with love feel completely clear. I feel really good about where I'm at and I feel really great about where our relationship ended. And I actually don't feel bad about the transition and using the voice to prioritize myself and my experience to actually declare that

on the outside, in the world, how I feel and my worth. And it doesn't mean anything bad about the other person, but the voice can really be this proof of our growth and proof of our healing and proof of all the concepts that we're talking about in the healing space. For so many of us, we do a lot of self-help

personal development work, whether it's in relationships or outside of it. And how do we know that it's working? Because we're able to be regulated. We're able to have a hard conversation. We're able to navigate conflict. We're able to say our truth with love. We're able to have boundaries. All of this is exercised through the voice.

When we think about relationships, everyone says the number one thing for relationships is communication. What is the one thing that will make your relationship communicative?

communication? How does that happen through the voice? And when we can really regulate ourselves and be at peace with our truth and really be honest with our partner and honest with ourselves, that's when we're able to have a really deep and intimate relationship. Just like I was saying in my previous relationship, it was so hard for me to be truthful. It was so hard for me to express. It was so hard for me to be honest. I'm never going to have a relationship that I want to be in if I can't use my voice to do all of those things.

So when you prioritize the voice and your voice healing and your communication healing, you're prioritizing every area of your life.

your communication of your worth, your communication of your value, your communication of your creative ideas and your expression. It is huge. And I think I'm really looking forward to seeing so many more women prioritize their voice over other things that we've been prioritizing over time. I think for women, we've been so pressured to look a certain way or to be perfect or be all these things. But actually with the voice, it's like,

the most powerful thing that I think a lot of us were overlooking. And I think for so many of us, we've overlooked it because throughout time and throughout history, women have been not valued for their voice. We have been valued for how we look, for...

things that we do for other people. But for so many of us, we've been in a situation where we prioritize everyone else's expression or voice over our own. So reclaiming your voice is reclaiming or stepping into your true identity. It's stepping into the truest version of you, the most expressed version of you. And when you can really claim that and be in that, your whole entire life shifts and changes. So how did I get from completely losing my voice to being fully expressed in my voice?

Well, I'm not fully expressed in my voice. I will say I feel really good. I feel so far. I feel like my communication skills are completely on point and I'm doing my best, but I also don't feel like I'm fully expressed if I'm completely honest. I don't know if I'll ever get to the point where I'm like, I am in my fullest expression of me. I feel in my most joyful. I feel in my most

you know, aligned version of me, but I still don't feel fully expressed. I think there's a next level version of my expression that's going to come online at some point that I'm looking forward to, but I've come really far.

So how do we get from a place of feeling like we're disconnected from our voice and our power to a place of more expression, not perfection, but more expression? I think one of the first things that we can do is practice a few exercises. So I'm going to walk us through a few different exercises that are going to be supportive of you in really connecting with your voice and really connecting with that part of you that is the most powerful aspect of you, I truly believe.

So one of the first exercises that I like for people to do is pretty simple. It just requires you to have your iPhone or your phone, whatever it is that you can use to record, just pull out your voice recorder app. So it's like that little app that says voice recording. It's got the red button and it can record you just talking to your phone. I like to have people practice speaking for like two minutes to this voice recorder, talking about their pets and

their family, their friends, what they had for dinner, their favorite TV show, you know, recapping Love is Blind or Yellowstone, whatever it is, but just talking for two minutes. What you're going to do after this point is listen back to yourself being recorded and take some notes. Try to do this when you're regulated, when your inner critic is offline, when she's kind of relaxing and you can have peace with yourself and you can really listen to this unbiased and take notes about what you heard. Do I use a lot of filler words?

Did I pause? Do I sound confident? How's my energy levels? Do I sound excited? Do I sound kind? What are the things that are coming up when you are hearing yourself talk? Am I judgmental of myself? Am I critical of myself? What are the things that are coming up for you? These are often the things that you are telling yourself when other people are listening or you are telling yourself subconsciously throughout the day.

And in this moment, you can also find ways to improve your speech or improve how you're speaking. One of the most important things that I like to say to people or I like to offer to people is bringing in pauses. The pause in our life, pausing in general, just taking a second, breathing, stopping time, being present is one of the most powerful things. But also when we're speaking, the pause can be one of the most powerful things.

When I paused there, you probably were able to process what I was saying. You were able to take a second. You were able to lean in again. You were able to engage again. So the pauses can be something so powerful to add to your speech. So if you find yourself recording yourself and you don't really like what you're hearing, try pauses. Give yourself a second to process. Give your audience a second to process and let yourself bring in a pause.

Another exercise that I love to give people to find their voice, to cultivate their voice, to have vocal mastery is to record themselves on video talking, but don't listen to yourself speaking. Just watch the video back and notice your body language. So say you give yourself two minutes, you're going to talk about your dog and how they love to go to the park and they have so many dog friends in the park. And you're going to record this on video on your phone and you're going to play it back, but without any sound.

And by doing this, you're able to see your body language. Are you stiff? Are you slouching? Do you look excited? Do you use your hands? Do you not use your hands? Your body is a part of your instrument. It's a part of your expression. It's a part of what gets your story and your point across. Yeah, using your body and using hand motions and gestures is such an important part of storytelling and what really captures and keeps people around.

So recording yourself on video and then watching it back is a really great way to improve how you move in your body, how confident you are, and how much you can notice that other people are potentially noticing about how you carry yourself. Again, both of these we're going to want to do when we're regulated, when we are not judgmental, when we are having a good hair day, whatever the things are, trying to not have that inner critic be online during this time so you can give yourself really honest feedback.

The third thing that I think is huge that anyone can do at any time, and this one's like a little bit harder, it's not an easier activity, is to speak your truth to someone in your life. So who is the one person? What is that one conversation that feels a little icky? It feels a little off, feels like there's something you need to say, but you haven't had time to say it. What if you took 30 minutes today to say that thing?

What if you called that friend that you have a little bit of friction with, you have a little bit of icky and ooeyness with, and you just cleared the air? What if you told your partner, hey, I love you very much and I love where our relationship is going, but I'm feeling like I want to have a night off. Maybe one night a week I go on a date by myself.

Maybe one night a week, I have a night off just with me and without the kids. Maybe you'd tell your boss, hey, I'm really loving this job. I'm loving how much I'm getting done. But Thursdays, I'm going to need to leave at five. It's not feeling good for me anymore to stay at seven every single night of the week. And I need one night to myself.

What if you told one of your friends, hey, I love you so much, but it's felt like you haven't shown up for me in the past. And I'm curious of what your experience is. Just saying the thing that's kind of been looping on your mind and liberating yourself from the experience of just keeping it to yourself. So often we hold intimacy back from ourselves and our relationships because we just keep everything to ourselves.

Some of my clients who I am obsessed with and I love so deeply, they'll tell me things more than they'll tell their partners.

Totally fine. No judgment. But if we want to have these deep intimate relationships with friends, family, or partner, we need to be able to say and speak our truth. So have one conversation and this courage and confidence could get the ball rolling for you to speak and say your truth way more often in life. This isn't easy, but it's a part of being the person you came here to be.

I say this all the time. You guys can do all the plant medicine. You can do all the courses, all the programs. Take me to the person that's having hard conversations every single day, that's telling people how they feel. That is, to me, the most evolved and mature version of me. If you can say how you feel with love to people that you love, that is the most baller thing of all time. So the fourth thing that you can do to improve your communication to find your voice is going to require you to journal. And this is getting in touch with the inner voice.

Like I said, we have our outer voice. We have the voice that you're listening to right now on the podcast. That is me. And then we also have that inner voice. Our inner voices are talking way more than our outer voices. Our inner voices are dictating our days. Go do this. Go do that. They looked at you weird. They don't like you. What if she said this? I can't believe he's doing that. What about this situation? The inner voice is running a lot of our show.

So when we can kind of tune in to what our inner voice is saying and what they are guiding us to do and what they are influencing us to do, then we can really get clear on where we're going in our life and why. So journaling is going to be a huge thing for connecting with your inner voice because when our inner voice is the one that is guiding our outer world and it's the wrong inner voice, we're not going to want to go where that inner voice is going.

And what I mean is that if my inner child, my dysfunctional little inner child that was traumatized from a young age, her voice is running the program that is creating the life, that is not a life I want to live. The inner voice that I want to be leading my life is the voice of my soul. The inner voice that I want to be creating my life is the voice of my soul.

And so when we can really get in touch and in tune with all the other voices, my perfectionist, my inner critic, my inner rebel, my inner queen, and get clear on the voice of my soul versus the other voices, that's when we can really live a soul-led life and a life of expression and a life of love and a life of bigness. So getting clarity on all the inner voices that are going on is going to be so helpful for you and being fully expressed.

This is where I love internal family systems, parts work. It's my favorite thing because it really allows you and helps you to identify and be with all of these voices that have been running your show up until this point. So for me, that was my inner critic. That was my inner perfectionist. These various parts that were running the show dysfunctionally can now relax, take a load off. It's actually my soul that's leading the way. It's my soul that's leading me to be fully expressed in the version of me that I knew I came here to be.

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So the fifth thing that I like to offer for you to step into your voice and be fully expressed is your connection to your body. This is huge. I think about when I work with and coach people on the voice and their expression. And so often we focus so much on what we have to say.

We focus on perfecting the presentation, perfecting the speech, making sure we get the content right. But it's actually not it. You being comfortable in your body and in your voice and being fully grounded and being fully regulated is actually the thing that will make you an amazing speaker, an amazing communicator, an amazing partner.

So your ability to regulate in your body is going to help you through hard conversations. It's going to help you do a presentation at work. It's going to help you step on stage. It's going to help you create that reel or that TikTok that you're creating. Whatever it is that you're wanting to do in your expression, you have to be able to be connected and at peace with your body.

What can often happen is with people that are nervous to speak, say on stage, they will get so activated. They will have so much adrenaline. They will have so much nerves. And so it's not even about their voice in that case. It's fully about their body and their fear of speaking and their fear of taking on that much energy and their fear of judgment and their fear of being seen. So you can even think about right now, if you're driving, maybe not, but you know, if you're not driving, you can close your eyes and even think about

What would the feeling be if I walked on stage right now? There was a stage, a room of 500 people, and I knew I had to give a speech and I knew I had to walk on stage. What would that feel like? Where do I notice in my body any energy coming up? I can feel it right now. My throat chakra getting activated. I can feel a little warmth in my body. I can feel like a little lightness. We can often feel that nervousness or that anxiety pulsing through our body. And we're just having the visual of being on stage.

So for many of us, if we have a nervousness, if we have an insecurity, if we're lacking confidence in our speaking, our body is going to react. So the way that we can be much better at speaking or much better at communication or being in our fullest expression is by regulating our body when we're not on stage or we're not in a hard conversation. So if I'm thinking about a hard conversation with someone that I love or a team member or business partner, whoever,

I will often walk myself through what I want to say to that person on my own, and I will regulate my body as I'm doing it. I will practice deep breathing. I will tap. I will, you know, put my hand on my heart. I will put my hand on my throat. I will just kind of walk myself through and soothe myself as I'm expressing with my mouth what I want to say. So I'll be like holding my, you know, hands over my heart, just kind of breathing. And

you know, there's a part of me that feels like you don't care about my opinion and that you don't want me to succeed. And I will kind of walk through the voice and what I'm saying, but also regulate my body during it. I will also do this for speaking on stage. I will visualize myself speaking on stage and I will regulate my body as I'm walking myself through the visual to make sure that I'm fully embodied and fully empowered when I'm actually doing the thing.

This is what so many sports psychologists do. This is what, you know, neuroscientists do. This is you visualizing you being in the experience and visualizing that best version of you. It's not just you seeing in your mind the image of you on stage, but it's feeling in your body how calm you're going to feel when you speak, how grounded you're going to be when you speak, how powerful you're going to be when you speak, and how easy it is for you to be speaking on stages or in front of people because you've communicated and gotten in touch with the body.

The body also holds a lot of memories and emotions that can keep us from being fully expressed. So for so many people and so many women that want to tune into their voice and want to use their voice, it is their body that is stopping them because their body is storing an emotion or an experience that's keeping them from their fullest expression.

So say you had a situation in a relationship with narcissistic abuse. You were dating or with a narcissist. Your body is going to have a cellular memory of your voice being neglected, you being judged or critiqued, or you having things that you shared in vulnerability used against you.

you are going to have the experience of feeling like you don't matter. And that feeling is a cellular memory in your body that your brain is picking up on and that your brain is using to stop you from speaking. It is not safe to speak. It is not safe for me to express. I know this from history and my body is remembering that no one cares what I have to say and no one really wants to hear me out.

So when the brain says, hey, we're around a guy, we want to speak, or we're around, you know, this group of people, we want to speak, the body is saying, no, last time we did that, no one cared. Last time we did that, my partner emotionally abused me. Last time we did that, my parents didn't listen. So I'm going to clamp down on the throat and the voice and make sure that it is not comfortable for me to speak.

So when we do healing work, whether we're healing the inner child or the inner teen, or we're just healing ourselves, so much of this work is going to support us in reconnecting with the body and also reconnecting with our voice.

For many of us as children, we weren't really valued for what we had to say. We weren't really valued for our creativity, our expression, our opinion. I remember feeling so much like kids were to be seen and not heard and not really feeling like my opinion was respected or that my unique expression was appreciated.

was wanted or desired. And so I lost so much of that from a young age. So we have to kind of go back in time and recultivate that relationship with ourselves to bring us back to a point in life where we can use all of our expression and we can use all of our creativity and we can use ourself as the guide.

So how to heal blocks to self-expression involves things like inner child healing, inner teen healing, which I've talked about before. You have to also release the fear of rejection. You have to let go of the fear that everyone is going to make fun of you or everyone is judging you or everyone is thinking negatively about you. And you also have to practice forgiveness. You have to really let go of the people that have invalidated your sense of self-worth or your sense of self-expression in the past.

and really be able to be at peace with the way that you express here and now and just seek opportunities for improving your voice and improving the person that you came here to be. To engage in this self-expression and finding your voice, you have to release perfectionism. So letting go of perfectionism and the idea that it has to be perfect or the idea that you have to say the most powerful thing

This is something that I've really had to work on. I am someone that believes that unless I'm saying something philosophical or deep or like something that's going to make people piss laughing, that it doesn't even matter. And I've had to really give myself permission to just say things in between, to say things

and just share my stream of consciousness. So letting go of perfectionism is going to be a huge aspect to you being fully expressed and using your voice. You have to also affirm your worth. You really have to affirm that you are worthy of a life that you love and you are worthy of being heard.

If you do not think that you are worthy of being heard, we have to stop there and work on that because you being fully expressed and in your voice is you being worthy of being heard in a really deep and powerful way. You also have to celebrate vulnerability. Vulnerability is a huge aspect of this. It's not about being perfect. It's not about being profound. It's about you also being vulnerable because recognizing that sharing your authentic self, even if it's scary, is an act of courage and the energy that really connects so many of us.

When we think about speeches or talks on stages, the ones that really draw us in the most are the ones that are vulnerable. You know, Brene Brown was so instrumental and so iconic in talking about shame and vulnerability because it was something that people hadn't really acknowledged before. We had kind of talked about it, but not really, and her bringing that to the forefront in sharing her own story, vulnerable.

vulnerably was like groundbreaking and really connected us as humans and really broke that fourth wall that speakers or teachers or gurus know more than us and that they are perfect.

And I think as we move into the next year, something that's going to be changing as far as culture is that people are going to be recognizing and understanding that and able to read voices and energy so much more easily than before. People are not going to be falling for the same types of sales tactics, the same types of marketing, the same types of branding. People are not going to be buying in the way that they were before. And people are going to be even more able to read and see bullshit.

And so your authenticity and your voice and the depth to which you can communicate is going to be the thing that allows you to step into this world and be who you came here to be. It's not going to be the people that are selling fake shit or the people that don't have a true connection to their true authentic voice because that stuff is going to be falling away. In the new paradigm, it is truly going to be authenticity-led, soul-led, and really true voice communication.

So my hope for you this year is that you are able to start to use this beautiful frequency of your soul, the linchpin of them all, this aspect of you that is just the manifestation of consciousness on earth and in this lifetime to spread more love, to be more of who you are, and to really explore and experience this human life.

I love you guys very much. I'm so grateful that I get to deep dive with you every single week on solo episodes that we get to have fun in our interviews with Lindsay and our amazing guests. This year is going to be incredible. We have our book coming out in June.

I am so excited about this book. It is my little offering to the world. It is my culmination of everything I've learned on this Almost 30 journey, this awakening to my consciousness and power and just getting to know you guys over the years. Like I know all of you so deeply and intimately, and I just have loved you all so much. So the book is just going to be so good. It's called Almost 30. You can pre-order it now at almost30.com.

I love you. My name is Krista Williams, K-R-I-S-T-A Williams. You can find me on Instagram. It's Krista and I'll see you on the next one. Bye-bye.