It’s a magical and powerful thing to share your truth. In the following poem, poet, David Whyte, speaks to us about our voice in business. Please read it and consider how you use your voice in the workplace. Every day we encourage both leaders and employees to say what they need to say. Not from a place of needing to be right, but from the right place; the place, as David puts it, “the slightly broken voice that we must first call our own.”
“The initial steps on the path of courageous speech are the first tentative steps into the parts of us that cannot speak. Entering their shadowy, previously hidden abodes, we discover an interior soul energy that has not seen the light of day in a long time.
It has not seen the light of day because we find it hard to like what we hear when we first go in there. The singer beginning to work on her voice wants Maria Callas but doesn’t find it. She finds her abdomen and chest will not open to carry the sound. The actor wants Richard Burton, but his round golden tones have no undercurrent of grief and regret to match that of Burton. The person low on the office totem pole wants the voice of authority but has not yet found the place in his body where it resides. We want only one side of the equation, the same side of the equation that the overarching hierarchy of the corporation wants from us – control, consistency and predictability. Like the corporation, we want every voice but the cracked and slightly broken voice we must first call our own.”
By David Whyte from “The Heart Aroused: Poetry & the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America”
