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Episode 79: Learn to Powerfully Use Your Voice with Casey Erin Clark & Julie Fogh

Welcome to The Career Clarity Show, where we help you find a lucrative, soulful, and joyful career path for you!

No matter who you are, no matter where you are, it is possible to stand in your power to be able to share your opinions and be able to feel like you are claiming a seat at the table. Today’s conversation is a fabulous, fun, empowering conversation for anybody who needs a little extra boost of confidence, self assuredness, or a little bit of extra fire to go after what they want in their lives. 

Our guests Casey Erin Clark and Julie Fogh, of Vital Voice Training, bring us some of the strategies and ideas for things that are going to work best for you and who you are to be communicating in an authentic and powerful way.

Want to learn more about our strategic framework for successful career change? Download The Roadmap to Career Fulfillment ebook right here!

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Transcript:

Lisa Lewis Miller  0:04   

Welcome to the Career Clarity Show. If you want to create a career path you’ll love, you’re in the right place. I’m Lisa Lewis Miller, career change coach, published author and your host, and each week we’ll bring you personal transformation stories, advice and insights from experts about how you can find a more fulfilling, soulful and joyful career. Hello, and welcome, clarity seekers. I’m your host, career change expert author and the creator of the Career Clarity Show method, Lisa Lewis Miller. And today on the podcast, we are talking about how to powerfully use your voice. No matter who you are, no matter where you are, we are talking about what it looks like to stand in your power to be able to share your opinions, be able to feel like you are claiming a seat at the table. 

Lisa Lewis Miller  0:58  

Today’s conversation is going to be a fabulous, fun, empowering thing for anybody who needs a little extra boost of confidence, self assuredness, or a little bit of extra fire to go after what they want in their lives. This episode of the podcast is for you. If you have been feeling nervous about using your voice, speaking up, standing up, bringing attention to yourself. This episode is for you. If you’ve been trying to speak up, stand up and bring attention to yourself, and you haven’t been received the way that you’re wanting to be received and you’re not getting the results that you want to get. This episode is for you. If you have been wanting to go to the next level, and escalate into a higher level of leadership, a higher level of authority, a higher level of thought leadership in your market, and you’re trying to figure out the right ways to position yourself. And spoiler alert, there’s no such thing as a right way or a wrong way per se. But we’re going to talk about some of the strategies and ideas for things that are going to work best for you, and who you are to be communicating in authentic and powerful way. I’m excited if you can’t tell. Today, our guests on the podcast are Casey Erin Clark, and Julie Fogh, of Vital Voices, a training company that helps people particularly women have their most empowered, incredible foot forward in all types of communication. And as a fun fact, I have known these Wonder Women for years and years. And I actually hired them. Five years ago, before I went on to my very first podcast interview, as a career coach, because I wanted to make sure I had my message on lock, I wanted to make sure I was preparing well. And so the existence of this podcast today, and the existence of the whole business was something that they were there for at the very beginning. So it feels like a really unique, sweet pleasure to get to bring the two of them on on to share their brilliance with you. So with that, Casey and Julie, welcome to the Career Clarity Show.

Casey Erin Clark  3:00  

Lisa, we’re gonna have to hire you to introduce vital voice training, like every time we show up anywhere, because that was fantastic.

Julie Fogh  3:08  

I feel so fancy. It’s so good to talk to you, though, as well, after all of this time of our back and forth, and career growth and all of that. So really happy to be here. 

Lisa Lewis Miller  3:19  

I’m so glad to have you too. And I want to start our conversation today with giving each of you an opportunity to share why this mission matters to you and why this company was worth creating. Because it can be really intimidating to be an entrepreneur, it can be really intimidating, to think about going out on your own, creating something to help people. And this is a space that I know is a deep passion like a deep soul resonance for both of you. So maybe Julie will start with you. And then Casey, tell me about why you feel like the voice is so vital.

Julie Fogh  3:59  

For me. It’s all connected to a longer story of how I became interested in voice starting with I was a pretty shy child and definitely an introvert who really wanted to become an actor. It was very hard for me to figure out overcoming shyness with things like but if I stand in front of all of these people, that’s great. I’ve knocked it, you know, gotten it out of the way, but I’m still shaking, I still feel awful. I’m not showing up the way I want to show up. So I took that to graduate school to get my MFA in acting. And as I did the acting training, really starting to connect the dots of how we communicate with the world through the discipline of voice training. It gave me a vocabulary to really understand how stimulus hits us and then how we gather our responses. I also just feel in general that in the time we’re in the access to our voice and the Access to saying what we really think the access to getting to be in the world as we want to be not as we have been told we should be appeals to my little rebel side. And I love vehicle of voice to be able to explore and really break that down. It’s a language that makes sense to me. So I think that’s actually the the core of it, I can give you lots of reasons, but it’s the language that makes sense to me.

Lisa Lewis Miller  5:25  

I love that. And as a fellow sort of like a shy person myself, I also appreciate the kind of cerebral way that you approach that. I mean, the fact that you were willing to go get your MFA in acting, despite knowing the shyness, so shows such a cool resilience and such a cool dedication towards growth and expansion and being able to share your gifts more powerfully. So I love that. But Casey, I want to hear your story.

Casey Erin Clark  5:52  

Well, Julie and I, at this point, share a brain in so many different ways. But but one of the ways that we’re, I think fundamentally different, which is a great thing for how we build our philosophies and also for how we connect with our customers and our clients. Julie comes from this rebellious, introverted shy side I come from this type a perfectionist extrovert. Former Good girl side I have certainly ignited my rebel side, especially in the last four years. But I grew up as a as a very outgoing kid who always used my voice. Not to get attention. That’s the wrong way to put it. But I got a lot of attention for my voice. I started singing in church with my family when I was four years old. And I say I’ve sung my whole life and I pursued musical theater, I got a BFA in singing and acting and dancing, and went on to a professional career in musical theater. And I was I was just, I was always the kid with the voice or the girl with the voice or the woman with the voice. And I was defined by what my voice could do in so many ways, which for a perfectionist, I think, can be as stymieing as, as criticism, his praise is something you then always have to meet, you always have to be there and, and so the journey of my acting career was about losing my inner director turning off the voice of like, I have to keep impressing them and start to stand in my power with with more simplicity and the more you know, f the haters and more, more of all of that. So so the the birth of vital voice training Have I got off the national tour of llamas, which was a wonderful job that I had held for 18 months, and frankly, I needed money. So that was part of it. And and I wanted, I was sick of the survival job game that that professional actors have to do between gigs. And I wanted something that was more meaningful. And at the same time I read this book called Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl woo done. It was about the the issues facing women worldwide and sort of several things combined this this burgeoning sense of women are being held back a dissatisfaction with the the narrow focus of only pursuing professional acting and all of these random side gigs. 

Casey Erin Clark  8:18  

And, and then at that same time, I got a random interview for what I thought was a singing coach position, which is something that I’ve been doing for a long time. And it turned out this firm wanted a speech coach, and I thought, yeah, I can do that, I could do that, I could definitely do that. And I, I fell in love with the process of speech coaching. And I fell very much out of love with the place I was working, because they were they were working under what I observed to be a very old fashioned method of speech coaching. And you kind of introduced it beautifully in the way that you introduced us. They were working from the place, a lot of professional speech coaches and public speaking coaches come from, which is, I’m going to teach you how to put on your serious voice. So people will take you seriously. And it all comes down. When you really dig under the surface to we’re going to teach you how to put on the facade of a middle aged white man, no matter who you are. And that and that adherence to the norms of who we perceive as powerful, who we perceive as worthy of listening to will help you be heard. And I was so uninterested in teaching people how to do that. And so at the same time that this frustration began to rise, Julie and I met and, you know, for long story, medium length, not short, Julie and I found kindred spirits and each other and this twin frustration of we know as actors that there’s so much more out there to this. There’s so much more to the voice, and there’s So much more to why we make the communication choices that we make. It’s not it. This also happens to be the time when vocal fry was this huge media phenomenon. Everybody wanted to talk about why women, nobody takes women seriously, because of vocal fry, and up speak. And so all of this kind of all of these conditions kind of met in this cauldron of what if we start something to address this, and so we did. And it it’s taken us places that I never, ever could have predicted and, and allowed us to work with. I mean, we we love all of our clients, we’re so lucky to work with the people that we work with, I mean, including you very much. So and and it’s just, it’s been such a gift.

Lisa Lewis Miller  10:47  

Well share a little bit for people who don’t know about your company and your story about some of the types of things that you help support people with speaking on, because you’ve got a pretty badass resume. Ladies.

Casey Erin Clark  11:00  

Do you want to jump in on that?

Julie Fogh  11:02  

Sure. So the short answer is everything. But really, as we’ve evolved through a, you know, our six years in business, it started with a lot of women and English as second language clients approaching us sort of looking for that, how do I sound like a middle aged white dude. And it became clear as we worked with them that this this mission, we have to give vocal power without having to sound any particular way, was something we wanted to build on. So we have built on creating programming around things like executive presence, how do you find executive presence in your authentic way? How do you look the way you bring to the table what you want to bring to the table. So that combines also a little bit of our acting training. We also work with people that are getting their ideas out into the world, they’re getting their signature talk together, they’re getting their frickin TEDx talks together, they’re they have mad passionate ideas and amazing brains. So you know, that’s just a true pleasure to walk somebody through getting it from an idea to a fully formed talk. And then the third area of what we do we do a lot of corporate training around, how can teams communicate with each other better function better? How do we talk about inclusion? How do we work with power structures? How do we find what authority is to us in a way that we feel strongly about that authority does not have to equal dominance. So So like I said, everything, but that’s, that’s three pretty specific veins that we’ve spent quite a bit of time in.

Casey Erin Clark  12:36  

We’re finding especially right now, of course, that that what a lot of people want to talk about is presence on camera, and digital presence. But they also want to talk about creating a communication culture where every voice can be heard, because of course, we’re having these very necessary and important conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion. And I want to make it very clear that we are not diversity, equity inclusion experts, we very, very much believe that you should be hiring people of color to to fulfill that function for your office. We see ourselves as part of like an Avengers team of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion people were the ones who want to help you take the things that you’re learning from those dei experts, and put them into behavior, put them into communication behavior. So how can we create the environment that allows people to access their authentic voice as opposed to putting the onus always on the individual to fix themselves or to adjust themselves to the circumstances, because what our acting training teaches us, and what I think we bring to our clients in a way that’s very unique, is what we all function at this intersection of who I am, and what my circumstances are. And so much of I think personal development training, the onus is always on the individual. What can the individual do? And and, and that’s good. And it’s, it’s, I think, empowering to some people, but it also tends to ignore power existing power structures. And it also ignores that like, you can be doing everything, quote, unquote, right, and still haven’t land like a lead balloon because of the environment that you’re in. So we always want to work at this intersection of individual and given circumstances slash environment.

Julie Fogh  14:23  

And can I add one more thing to that as well. So the idea that the environment contributes is huge and how we approach this because when Casey said, getting it, right, we’re also really looking at who determines what right is. Yes. And the advice for women, really, particularly for women tends to have double binds that no matter what right you pursue, there’s an equal and opposite wrong. It’s like some sort of law of physics. So we do feel it’s more empowering to let individuals off the hook for totally having to fix themselves and in fact, you don’t need to be fixed because you’re not broken. It skill building is not about being broken, it’s about increasing your palette.

Lisa Lewis Miller  15:05  

Gosh, I feel like there were six Mic drop moments in minutes alone, I, I love all that. And, you know, as somebody who works in this sort of personal development space, it’s really challenging to figure out how to support people in both, like, let’s have you take responsibility for all the things that are in your power to influence to control to prepare, etc, so that you can show up with your best foot forward and as strategically as you can. And also recognizing that if you’re walking into an organization or a situation or a dynamic that has factors in it, that are going to create bias that are going to create limitations that are going to create whatever, that sometimes trying to get those two situations to play beautifully together, the way that we want does not always happen, the way that that we would ideally like.

Casey Erin Clark  15:58  

Absolutely well, and I think this, this feels to me, and I think particularly in the last year, as we’ve explored the idea of authenticity, really deeply. This feels like a particularly American phenomenon. It’s part of I think, our like, love for like the rugged individual, you know, and, and, and where, where I think it’s been really interesting is in the age of Instagram, where personal development has been sort of CO opted into this, like shiny, pretty brand of get your mindset in order. And it’s all about like, blah, blah, blah. And again, it’s not that there’s not some truth to that. But this is a both and not an either or, and we we very, very much love to play in the messy middle, but between these things, but I just a specific example of that I saw an Instagram post several weeks ago, I think now was something like you are the sole author of your story, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, that is not true. No one is the sole author of their story. Because no, unless you listen, unless you live on a deserted island, and even then you’re still your story is still being written by the people who you want to rescue you as well. Because we all we live in a story with other people and other people affect us. And especially when we’re talking about our voice and our communication habits, other people affect that all the time.

Lisa Lewis Miller  17:24  

Okay, say more about this, you’re on a roll.

Casey Erin Clark  17:29  

So so one of the I’m trying to think if we want to go down the path of our explorations into authenticity, or explorations of distress, so maybe let’s talk about stress first, because I think I think probably, this is one of those things that I think could be very useful to your listeners. So so one of the things that we talk about with our clients all the time, lots of people come to us and they say, I’m terrified of public speaking, or I get so nervous when I have to speak up at work, or when someone interrupts me or any of those situations, right? I feel stressed helped me not to feel afraid anymore. And the short answer is, sorry, we can’t do that. Because there is no such thing as fearless public speaking. And anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you a program. Fear is a necessary and beneficial condition of being a human being with a working nervous system. fear is fear is our our brain doing our brains job, which is trying to protect us. Now, of course, it’s also true again, this both and concept that we don’t want to let fear control us and we don’t want to fear can very much send us off the rails in terms of our communication. So the way that we break down fear for our clients is we talk about the stress response in the body. And we talk about these four different paths that your body can take you down when you’re starting to feel rising fear, and I’m talking a lot. So Julie, do you want to explain the four different pads of the stress response?

Julie Fogh  19:01  

I do it No, you were not talking a lot. That was beautiful. One of the so we started reading a while ago when we started our company there, there was a book called Come As You Are by Emily Nagurski that was about the sex response and in women, and it had this chapter on stress, which we were absolutely smitten by. And then she wrote another book called Burnout, which goes even further into this very recognizable way the nervous system works. So this got us thinking about it in this very different way of this cascade of chemicals come in and your body goes into fight or flight. Fight or flight is more nuanced than we thought. It can come out in different ways. So everyone has their their preferred place they go. When we talk about fight or flight it’s kind of interesting because the most popular one is actually freeze, which usually happens if you can’t fight and you can’t flee and freeze within that is where we start to lose our words where we’re up there and we will freeze in front of people, which is, again, a very natural nervous response to facilitate a painless death. There’s also an really interesting one called faan, that is a part of freeze, that basically is being nice to the predator, so it won’t eat you. And that is when we see a lot with our clients. This this is a trauma response, it is a stress response. But it’s it’s so culturally welcomed that it often doesn’t get identified for what it is, which is fear or stress.

Lisa Lewis Miller  20:36  

So let me jump in to ask for people who who can’t visualize what fun would look like in a communication setting? Hmm, what would fun be in an interpersonal dynamic?

Casey Erin Clark  20:49  

 Okay, so let’s say that I have a boss who is a bit toxic and intimidating to me. And I know that there’s egos on the line and stress starts to rise in a meeting, I might make myself very small, and very accommodating. And the pitch of my voice might rise. And I might start doing this, this very feminine coded, soothing, nurturing mothering thing where I’m, I’m, I’m very purposefully trying to defuse the situation by being very sweet and very accommodating. And I and I do that voice. And I want to make this very clear, I am not denigrating a feminine sounding voice. We are huge fans of feminine sounding voices. It’s when it’s a an an affectation brought upon by this trauma response, that it does not serve us. The so fun is basically, yeah, it’s basically compliment the predator on his fur until he decides that you’re not, you know, edible anymore, or it’s it’s defuse the situation by soothing someone else, which, frankly, culturally, women are very much taught and trained to do. From the time were little girls. And it’s it’s, it’s cloaked, I think, as nurturing. But what it is in the middle of the stress response is, again, it’s it’s a, it’s a stress response, it’s not something that is we think, as efficacious as making, making a choice. That’s not from your stress response. So So basically, they’ve got fight, flight, freeze, and fun. So a fight response in the middle of a trauma situation is going to look like I want to destroy your argument, or I want to destroy you, or I’m going to dominate this conversation, I’m going to I’m going to dominate…

Julie Fogh  22:38  

Own the room…

Casey Erin Clark  22:40  

I’m going to own the room, I’m a God’s another phrase that we hate, fearless public speaking and owning the room Nope. A fight or flight response might be speeding up. Or, you know, I’m not gonna take up too much of your time, I’m just going to rush through my presentation. And I’m not going to take any breaths or, or, or put any pauses at the end of sentences, because I want to make sure that I’m not taking up too much of your time, or that feeling of like, Just get me the hell out of here. That’s a, that’s a flight response. Freeze. And I want to make one more note about the freeze response. Because I think this is really important. Freeze is both the first stress response, it’s that moment where you sent a stressor in the environment. So like, imagine you’re laying in your bed at the middle in the middle of the night, and you hear a noise, right? Your body is going to go What? And you’re going to think, and you’re going to examine and what your body is doing is it’s looking it’s to make a decision, am I going to fight or am I going to flee. So it’s the first stress response, which is why often our brain goes blank immediately. And then sometimes we can get our thoughts back. Once our body decides that that the that the response doesn’t need a huge stress response. It’s also the final stress response. And this is where I think it’s super apropos, especially right now. Flight is also or sorry, freeze is also a burnout response. It’s when your body has decided that everything, nothing else is going to work and it just needs to shut down. And that’s when you can’t summon the energy for a communication interaction. Or you just kind of retreat into yourself and you stop trying to speak up in a meeting because you know, you’re going to get interrupted, you know that no one’s going to listen to you. So you just shut down and and what we want to do is we want to teach people a that those are natural responses and they’re nothing to be ashamed of. And be that that your your stress response doesn’t have to be the whole story. There are other elements to the story that you can steer toward and focus on that will keep you present and engaging.

Julie Fogh  24:42  

So fear is not a stop sign when we’re dealing with situations that make us nervous and we tend to think of it like it is and this creates this whole other level of stress response because you can have your initial stress response and if you can focus your attention on something else or you can breathe You can tell you keep your body knowing that it’s safe, you can actually unwind the stress response. But what we see happen more often is that, oh, it’s a stop sign, oh, I don’t deserve to be up here. Oh, they think everything I’m saying is stupid, this inner monologue that in of itself keeps re stimulating that nervous system response. So while you can’t initially stop the fear, you can work with it in a different way than I think we’ve been trained to where it’s a self preservation function to monitor ourselves from the outside. And that just doesn’t work with communication, when we need to be fully present and pivoting in the moment.

Lisa Lewis Miller  25:40  

Yeah, I’ll I’ll say that when, when folks go through our Career Clarity Show, program and process and they’re in the stage when they’re doing job applications and interviews. What comes up time and time again, is this idea that emotional management is, is the key to being able to perform the way that you want to perform and show up the way that you want to show up? Because if you have that initial response, right, that is natural, normal, biologically hardwired, of Oh, there’s a stressor or a stimulus in my environment, I need to find a way to react and respond to that. But then you turn it into a story. Yeah, why or what your value is, whatever is happening, your prefrontal cortex goes on like a one way ticket to spiral town, us. Yep, you start going into this catastrophizing state, you lose the narrative, you become so lost in your own brain and your own thoughts on the overthinking process, that it’s hard to find the anchor to come back to, hey, I’m having this response from my body, because I’m in a situation that has a little bit more engagement or environmental stimulation, then the norm. And that’s fine. And that’s what I signed up for. and cool. Let me Breathe it out. Let me use whatever coping tools I need in this moment to come back to me. So I can still show up as me and not as the person who is sort of lost inside of their own head and inside their own narrative, when they’re trying to have a conversation with another human.

Casey Erin Clark  27:13  

Beautifully put.

Julie Fogh  27:14  

We had a revelation, when we were doing a workshop a couple of weeks ago. of apologies, we noticed when somebody stood up and started to apologize, well, maybe some of you have heard this before, or you I’m sorry, I’ll try and keep this short, I finally realized that was coming from their own inner monologue. So in essence, they were apologizing to themselves, and we really broke it down. That’s a step you can skip. We don’t need to apologize to yourself.

Casey Erin Clark  27:41  

Oh, the thing that I’ve started to say in general is fear is the cost of admission to an interesting life. Like if you if you want to show up in the world, not just in a big way, frankly, in any way, you’re going to feel fear. It’s, it’s, it’s just part of being human. And if we can learn to work with our fear and embrace it as a sign that we’re alive, not that we’re failing, that that’s where I think the magic happens.

Lisa Lewis Miller  28:14  

I love that. And I want to have us explore that a little bit further. Because I as a sis hat, white woman, the situations that prompt fear for me, are going to be 100% different than my sisters and brothers of color. If you have different situations, different backgrounds, you come from a different country, all of these different pieces to your story may make the threshold for where fear kicks in for you a little bit different based on your life experiences based on biases in certain situations. So I’m wondering, because I love this concept you’re talking about both, you know, taking responsibility for the stuff that’s yours to control. And also finding a way to meet the situation knowing that there’s an X factors here. I want to talk about that intersection point and kind of the risk management game in here. of let’s say that you have experienced microaggressions you’re a person of color, you feel like it’s really difficult to use your voice and be taken seriously because people write it off as your your the token hire you or the diversity hire you or whatever. Yeah. And you’re finding it really difficult to to not be fearful in professional situations or in potential situations where you need to be advocating for something. What kind of advice do you have for folks where the fear response kicks in pretty quick, pretty early, pretty understandably, because there are different risks at play in a potential interaction.

Casey Erin Clark  29:56  

Well, first of all, thank you for pointing that out. Because that is supremely important to acknowledge that the the stressors, the environment is different for different people. And particularly when you’re talking about repeated microaggressions, I think it’s so important to to understand that, that just that all those drops in that bucket one by one by one, you’re going to have a different response to that. So thanks for pointing that out. Julie, do you want to do to take this one?

Julie Fogh  30:25  

Yeah, I, because it’s, it’s that place where, at some point, I don’t know what to say to somebody who has a correct fear response in a toxic environment other than change the environment. And that’s really what it comes down to, there’s only so far you can go your fears are absolutely reasonable. They are when our body feels like its survival is at stake, which it tends to do when achievement is on the line or when belonging is on the line, which is really what the essence of what we’re talking about here. It is such a normal response that it would be gaslighting to say, manage your fear around this. And that is partly why we have such a passion to change communication, corporate communication culture at the ground level, absolutely.

Julie Fogh  31:11  

I can jump in. So I you know, I think knowing how your nervous system works, so you can at least recognize that’s my nervous system acting up as a tool that’s useful for any situation. But the fact that you have that fear to begin with, I don’t think is any sort of indication of a malfunction or something you need to change to feel safer in your environment.

Casey Erin Clark  31:33  

Well, this is Yeah, this is why I think our our corporate work, our group training work is so deeply, deeply important to us. It’s also the reason why we wanted to dig into authenticity. So I mentioned a little earlier that we we really dug into the subject of authenticity this summer. That’s another I think, very popular concept right now. A very shiny, perhaps nebulous concept of like, just be authentic, right? Have you know, and we really started with that, like our first tagline as vital voice training was authentic voice, authentic presence, authentic power, and we believe in it so wholeheartedly. What we wanted to do with this project was dig into why that is so hard. And what we can do about that? Why is it so hard to find your authentic voice and you already identified, I think one of the main reasons which is bias and power structures, you cannot be authentic in a situation in which your authentic voice and authentic presence is considered inappropriate or considered wrong or considered not leadership material or considered any of these things. Because our fundamental imperative from our brain is to survive, and to belong. So we make these strategic adjustments all along the way to do that. So we we dove, we go so far into the idea of authenticity. That sort of TLDR of the authenticity project is that we have to reframe the idea of authenticity, from an individual pursuit to a community practice. What is the community doing to create the conditions for authenticity. So if you are a person of color, who is dealing with in an environment where you’re having microaggressions thrown at you all the time, where you know that you cannot be as authentic as you want to be, you know, obviously, ideally, you could move to a scenario where that was less true. But that’s not always possible. And we acknowledge that. So what we want to do is create a framework where we’re calling it functional authenticity. And it’s basically where, you know, how can I show up as the most of myself and the best version of myself as much as is possible within the given circumstances that I have? And how can I make choices that support that, so that I don’t basically become exhausted because it’s exhausting to pretend to be somebody else. And we know that that’s true.

Lisa Lewis Miller  34:16  

Wow, I love the concept of functional authenticity. And I love the concept of authenticity being the community’s responsibility to create preconditions for the psychological safety, you enable that to happen. And knowing that there are certainly people who are going to be listening to this podcast who may not be underrepresented in their current situation or may have never been underrepresented in workforce. For those people who haven’t ever had to think about authenticity, and perhaps have never intentionally thought about how to create a safer space to encourage that from teammates from direct reports. from clients, what are some of the things that that people can use to start thinking about that more, more intentionally. And then, like you were talking about adjusting behavior. To facilitate that.

Casey Erin Clark  35:14  

I want to tell one quick story about this because it served me really well in speaking with a client about this exact thing the other day, so I’m part of a Broadway choir called the Broadway inspirational voices. And it’s a non denominational, non religious gospel choir, we sing, we sing r&b stuff, we sing Broadway regiments, it’s amazing. It’s also the first environment that I’ve ever been in, where I, as a white woman, am in the numerical minority in the room, I’m still not in the minority, because I have inherent power, no matter where I walk in, I have an inherent power as a white person walking into a room. I have, you know, conditional power as a woman, you know, we could go, we could talk about that all day long. But I am in the numerical minority in this room. And I noticed immediately that it was causing me to adjust my behavior. I was I am quieter in that room than I am in a lot of places in my life, I am slower to speak, I am more thoughtful about what comes out of my mouth, I have more filters on. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all, I think I’m so grateful for the opportunity to experience the tiniest piece of what other people experience when they walk in rooms, where they are the minority all the time. So first of all, I would include I would encourage every white cisgendered human on this planet, to try to experience at some point in your life, being the minority in a room and and and observe how that causes you to act and react just so you can get some tiny empathy, some some small level of empathy for for what people go through all the time.

Julie Fogh  37:04  

I think it’s also about recognizing what one of the challenges that we see is people’s struggle with, but I’m a good person. Oh, yes. And I don’t think that in any way, shape or form. That’s the right question. You can be a good person and still have caused unintentional harm. So if you can take that out of the equation and actually listen to what makes this person feel safe, not what do I think they should feel safe under or what condition do I think makes them feel safe, but to really listen and engage with an as is and recognize you’re gonna get it wrong. But that’s the freaking point that is learning that your wrongness inability to course correct causes less harm than your unwillingness to engage.

Lisa Lewis Miller  37:56  

Well, take me a little bit deeper on this, I’m a good person piece like let’s let’s see an example of something that somebody might be thinking, I’m a good person, I do this that might have some unintended consequences, in compromising the psychological safety of the space they’re creating.

Julie Fogh  38:13  

I think the good person thing has come out a lot in varying degrees from the conversations around racism and anti racism. I see it playing out. As somebody looks at the situation, I can’t possibly be racist, I am a good person. And I don’t see anything in this situation, whether it was really going to go there the death of George Floyd or any of the protests that were happening, I’m still looking for the evidence that would make this racist to me. Mm hmm. Which I saw over and over and over and over again, in conversations, whether in person or on Facebook. And it occurred to me, oh, it’s because you are still picturing that there must you must need to have like a hood in your glove compartment or like a card carrying I’m a racist? No, it’s expanding it to being part of this system of discussion. So that good person thing gets in the way because it puts you to almost a deliberate blind spot of what systemic racism is. And instead, you’re responding to an argument where you feel like you’re being personally called out for being something that we know collectively as a society is horrible in name.

Casey Erin Clark  39:26  

But this this sort of takes us back to some of the larger themes of this conversation, which is like the individual versus the group or individual responsibility versus group responsibility. I think that that in these discussions, it’s so easy to personalize feedback and to personalize to personalize everything, basically, to make it about yourself. And I think again, that goes back to our brains fundamental response to a threat to our safety or a threat to our sense of belonging. And, you know, nobody wants to be considered to be a bad person, I mean, that’s that talks about a threat to, to our sense of belonging, you know, we ostracize bad people, or at least we used to. And, and so so that that instinctive reaction to, to deny, and to be like, well, I need like before I can have a conversation about this, I need you to acknowledge that I’m a good person. Like, if we can just get past that if we can start to interrogate our own responses, then we can start to look at things like, so when we, when we talk about how our voices are formed, and how our communication habits are formed. We talked about four arenas, we talked about the physical, the mental, the emotional, and the social. So your voice and your communication habits have been built over your entire lifetime, both within interactions that you’ve been a part of, like, all the way, you know, from the time you were a tiny infant, learning to make noise that would cause someone to either feed you or comfort you, all the way up until the conversation that you had with your boss this morning. But it also goes to the conversations and the communication interactions that we’ve observed in our environment. We make as human beings continual calculations and observations about what is charismatic, what is attractive, what is boring, what is good, what is bad, who is sexy, who is who is dumb, you know, all of these things, and we adjust our behavior accordingly, both consciously and subconsciously. So again, to to ignore, the effect that the world has on us, is hubris, it’s silly, it’s just silly to imagine that you could exist in the world and not be affected by the world. So if we could just get past the sense of like, well, I am an individual who makes individual choices, and I as a person cannot be part of this like, then we can actually have an effective conversation.

Lisa Lewis Miller  42:02  

Well, so say that somebody is listening to this as an individual who knows that they are part of a group part of a community, they belong to a majority identity, whatever that looks like in their workplace, and they’re wanting to be a responsible member of that community in creating those preconditions for authenticity to be possible. Even if there are no exact steps of do this, do this, do this. What are some of the questions that someone should be perhaps thinking about to raise their awareness of ways they might be accidentally or subconsciously contributing to a space not being as inclusive or as safe as it could be?

Julie Fogh  42:43  

I would say the first thing is to listen. There’s a lot of information if you listen. So instead of saying, What can I do? What question Can I ask? Take that beat to look at what is the situation? I think that the interrogation comes in with acknowledging that we all have biases, being really honest with those. And also kind of questioning when we look at corporate cultures. And people say just bring your authentic self to work in lieu of human resource policy that that basically means Intuit what we like and do. We can’t have structureless environments, they find a structure, they find a hierarchy no matter what. So it’s really about going more into examining the differences, then, you know, the the idea, I think the idea of just be authentic is sort of akin to just be colorblind as well. So as far as I think there’s plenty of resources out there the book by you know, so you want to talk about racism, how to be an anti racist, we’ll all give you really, really good solid Rachel cargo has a program, the great unlearn. There are resources out there to figure out what questions do I need for inquiry, and to just be open and hear first before speaking.

Casey Erin Clark  44:07  

Definitely listening before speaking, I think is a huge one. And especially I think for for those of us extroverts out there, and those of us well meaning people who just want to help, I think that staying in the place of listening and learning and being humble enough to stay in the discomfort of that, again, it kind of goes back to that thing of like, you’re going to have us you’re going to have a stress response in your body, it doesn’t mean that you failed, it doesn’t mean that that things have necessarily gone off the rails, learning how to live in a bit of discomfort as we’re talking about these really complex issues. I think for organizations defining, we can culture happens, whether you build an intentional culture or whether you whether you’re like, Ah, you know, we’re just we’re all friends here. It’s like we’re a family like that’s a very popular thing. I think that you hear, especially in modern workplaces, culture happens. So we have to be intentional about culture. And we have to be so intentional about continuing to audit culture, and understand where things are working and where things aren’t working. Particularly, I think, in digital meetings to take this down to something that’s really, really practical. We are a huge fan of structure within digital meetings, if you want every voice to be heard, you have to be intentional about that. Otherwise, no matter what, somebody is going to dominate, and somebody is going to recede. So the more the more that you can learn the beautiful art of facilitation, and of creating a structure where everyone’s voice can be heard, the greater your chances of success, the greater that you can make it an experiment and continue to iterate on what’s working and what’s not working, and listen to your people. Listen to your people.

Lisa Lewis Miller  45:57  

I love that structure point. You know, it’s such an important one that we forget about so often that the person who is the agenda setter, right? The person who creates the structure, the person who puts things in order of priority has a huge amount of power. And it’s up to you, how you use that power, how you wield it. Are you using it to lift every voice? Or are you using it to continue to advance your own ideas? Are you wanting to sort of steamroll and get something through perhaps at the expense of being able to solicit some really helpful feedback on some potential issues? So I think the thinking about the structures, and listening, taking a beat and observing what’s already happening in your ecosystem to see what might need some extra TLC are fabulous, fabulous tips.

Casey Erin Clark  46:44  

You also just identified one of our favorite tools, which is objective, what is my objective, so used a couple of objectives steamroll, or like get my point across those our objectives, and steamroll and get my point across at all, at all costs? I would call a fight response. Often. That’s like the fight the fight stress response. So the after tool of objective basically is what what am I trying to do in this scene? What am I trying to accomplish? I’ve got my words. And then I’ve got what’s underneath my words. And, Julie, you have this new way of putting this that I want you to say because I think it’s so perfect.

Julie Fogh  47:22  

Objective is basically our way of answering your Why do I say what I say in the way that I say it? Because we’re always trying to make our communication to have an effect on somebody for some reason, whether we acknowledge that or not.

Lisa Lewis Miller  47:42  

I’m listening to this, and I’m feeling a little bit of shame come up for me of like, Oh, no, I know this game with my husband. I will say something. And legalistically the words there’s nothing, there’s nothing about the words that has a little bit of like fire behind it. But the way that I said it, there’s implication, there’s innuendo, there is a subtext to it. That absolutely can is not always as kind and loving and honest. As I perhaps

Julie Fogh  48:19  

There’s no shame in that. That is how we communicate. Sometimes I do need those those polite words with the No, but really, I mean, I’m speaking Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking. That was every single objective of like I want to destroy, but said through the most customer service friendly words, you could ever imagine that we as humans need that we aren’t meant to always have our internal and our external communication ally. And that is an unsafe way to go through the world. So yeah,

Casey Erin Clark  48:54  

No shame on that. Well, and this is, I think one of the things, one of the objections that we often get when we talk about the idea of objective in workshop is that somebody’s like, Well, wait a second, I’m thinking about what effect I want to have on people or I’m like trying to pursue something. Isn’t that manipulative? Isn’t that manipulation? And the answer is, yeah, it might be manipulation. It might be. But it’s, we are always pursuing something we are always trying again, just like Julie said, trying to have an effect or you wouldn’t be talking in the first place. Or you know, and the objective can range from something as simple as my boss told me, I have to do this presentation. So I’m getting the presentation done to I want to impress them, that’s a dangerous objective. Because it’s again, that’s sort of falls into that fun category. Or I want to prove myself that falls into that fun category as well. But But an objective that you can really hook into On both an intellectual and a gut level will light you up in the room, it will give you that sense of energy, I want to galvanize them, I want to inspire them, I want to set them a flame I want whatever it is, and you can, this is where the magic of language and poetry I think comes into it for us. And where the fun comes in the art of choosing the right objective for the moment to connect with the audience in front of you, so that you remain fully present.

Julie Fogh  50:30  

Even words like, you know, I want to calm them down, get really specific, I want to soothe them, I want to reassure them, you can, it allows us to wrap our heads around doing something deliberately that, like I said, we’re always doing subconsciously, anyway, it’s just creating a vocabulary for these systems and processes.

Lisa Lewis Miller  50:51  

And it’s also tied to identifying that outcome feeling state you want for your audience to be different than just what you want the the sort of like tangible outcome of a conversation. You’re thinking about it, you know, with this whole extra layer of not just this is what I want to accomplish, not the bolts wise, but this is how I want to have people left feeling Yes, totally ups, your your presentation process, and your ability to get what you want, over the long term, definitely.

Casey Erin Clark  51:24  

And it’s something that you then create in collaboration with the people in the room. Because the other thing about objective is that we can’t get rigid about it, we have to stay in that state of fluidity and flow, you have to have a goal. Because if you don’t have a goal, then then there’s no way you can hit your target. But we also have to notice what’s happening in front of us. And that’s that given circumstances piece, the who, what, when where we have my scene, how is this information landing on these people? Do I need to make adjustments Do I need to to change my tactics in the moment? So so one of the examples that we like to use is the idea. So for anyone, any one of the listeners who’s a parent, right? If you’ve ever had the experience of trying to get a kid dressed and out the door to do something, right, that’s a very clear objective, get the kid out the door so we can go go to the thing? Well, we have all kinds of tactics, where we can accomplish that, right? We can, we can cajole, we can compliment, we can threaten, we, we can we get shut it down, like they’re like we all we have this, this whole beautiful spectrum of tactics in order to achieve the goal. And we can stay fluid within those tactics.

Julie Fogh  52:34  

Sometimes we talk about those moments where you need to change tactics as obstacles. And much like fear, the perception of obstacles seems to be I did something wrong. But if you consider you know how complex you are as a human, that it’s not just your identity, and your core values and all of that it’s the spinning ball of every moment of every day, you’re where you’re at. And you realize, wow, something landed on me today differently than it was yesterday, or tomorrow, you can start to see how impossible it is to imagine even with the best preparation, you can psychically predict how your information is going to land. So if you can look at that, now we’re in the dance, I’m pivoting, I’m in it, versus, oh, they gave me a reaction I wasn’t expecting, I guess I did it wrong. You really open up your communication possibilities.

Lisa Lewis Miller  53:23  

And love that. And it feels like that potentially gives something a little more tangible to people who are noticing their fear response and want to be prepared for a future upcoming conversation. identifying your objective will help you to feel grounded and clear in your message. But potentially just thinking through like, if I’ve been in situations like this before, are there any obstacles that hit me, and that created an emotional response that I want to be more cognizant of, or just more emotionally agile and emotionally resilient to weave through. So I love that as a beautiful landing point for our conversation today. And Casey and Julie, this has been such a rich, interesting, modern conversation about communication that I’ve just been eating up. And if there are listeners who have also been eating out of the palms of your hands over there, where can they find out more information about what you do, how they can work with you how they can bring you into their companies?

Casey Erin Clark  54:19  

Yeah, so our website is www.Vitalvoicetraining.com. We also currently have a free mini course that we’re super excited to debut on on finding your communication core values. So this brings us back to that idea of authenticity and standing in your power right. So knowing where you come from knowing what your strengths are, knowing what your habits are, in order to understand them better and then and then work within that framework. All you got to do to get it is sign up for our mailing list. You can also find us on social media. We’re at @vitalvoicetraining on Instagram and @vital_voice on Twitter. We love to post little little tips and big day discussions we’ve been, we’ve been really taking the filters off ourselves recently, I think on social media and putting some very, very intentional stakes in the ground around things like how panels suck, and how we want to change them, or the feedback matrix of like how to receive feedback or how to reject it. It’s been very exciting for us as we as we continue to refine our voice as a company. So we hope you’ll join the conversation.

Lisa Lewis Miller  55:30  

Wonderful! Casey and Julie, thank you so much for coming on the Career Clarity Show.

Julie Fogh  55:34  

Thanks. My pleasure. 

Casey Erin Clark  55:36  

Thanks, Lisa.

Lisa Lewis Miller  55:36  

And if you listening have loved this conversation just as much as I have. I’d love to hear your feedback. You can send it to me as a direct email at Lisa@GetCareerClarity.com. Or leave it as a review on Apple podcasts. Because we here at Career Clarity Show are dedicated to trying to give you as many empowering, juicy helpful resources to redefine your relationship to work as we possibly can. So any ideas you have about what would help serve you even better are incredibly appreciated. And don’t forget to go get your tools, goodies and links from today’s episode, we’ll try to link to Emily. And I think she wrote it with her sister Amelia and Amelia, his book on burnout. Yes, that link to some of the other things that we have been talking about through the course of today’s conversations and those great anti racist books that Julie brought up so that you’ve got tons of tools in your toolbox to figure out how you want to implement and take action on everything that we covered today. So you can get to that at GetCareerClarity.com/podcast, or at the direct link to today’s episode that you’ll see in the show notes and around member. If you are tuned into this and listening to the Career Clarity Show because you don’t love your work. We should talk because life is too short to be doing work that doesn’t light you up. Talk to you next time.

About the Author Lisa Lewis

Lisa is a career change coach helping individuals feeling stuck to find work that fits. She helps people clarify who they are, what they want most, and what a great job for them looks like so they can make their transition as easily as possible. Lisa completed coaching training in Jenny Blake’s Pivot Method, Danielle LaPorte’s Fire Starter Sessions, Kate Swoboda's Courageous Living Coaching Certification, and the World Coaches Institute. In addition to that, she apprenticed with the top career coaches in the country so she can do the best possible work with — and for — you. She's helped more than 500 individuals move into more fulfilling, yummy careers and would be honored to get to serve you next!

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