My daughter Cora took longer than her sisters did to really start speaking. She had some articulation issues that made her difficult to understand for a while, as well as talkative older and younger sisters that maybe just made it easier for her to hold back. However, since starting kindergarten a few weeks ago, it’s as if her voice has blossomed.
All of a sudden, Cora is singing at the top of her lungs, boldly advocating for her younger sister and articulating her feelings in a new way. Over the past week, she got worked up and shouted to her older sister, “Please stop interrupting me. It makes me really angry when you do that!”
For the first time, she’s carving out a space for her own voice, and we’re all so excited to hear what she really has to say.
Some of us take much longer than Cora has to find our voices. Along the way, maybe it’s difficult for us to speak up. Maybe saying something is out of our comfort zone, or we muddle our words when we’re in the moment. Maybe our voice isn’t the loudest in the room, so ours is hard to hear. Perhaps we begin to believe our voices don’t matter. Or perhaps we disqualify ourselves from speaking up because we think someone else must certainly have something more valuable to say.
Colleen Cook works full-time as the Director of Operations at Vinyl Marketing in Ashland, where she resides with her husband Mike and three young daughters. She’s an insatiable extrovert who enjoys finding reasons to gather people.
However, there is only one of you. Your unique voice and perspective matter to the world. If you don’t speak up when you need to, you can’t assume someone else will do it for you. If you see something you disagree with, it’s good to call it out in the right settings. When you need something, it’s good to ask.
Then there are those of us, myself included, for whom using our voices is much easier. Maybe, in some cases, we use our voices more than is necessary because we are uninhibited in doing so. Words come easily to us, we’re not bashful about speaking up, and we are happy to seize the opportunity to speak. For us, we must remember that speaking up isn’t as simple for everyone else.
We need to look for the quiet voices and give them space and encouragement to speak. We need to listen. We need to cultivate our spoken thoughts, rather than sharing each and every one of them. And we need to consider the setting and determine whether what we have to say will bring value to the conversation. We all have something to learn from each other.
