PresentVoices

Today, I led a workshop on Conflict Communication and how to have more confidence in challenging communication moments.

Moments like giving feedback, advocating for ourselves, promoting our work, defending ideas or decisions, speaking up when someone takes credit for your idea.

Moments that shouldn’t feel confrontational but do if you’re in a workplace or social space where you don’t feel seen, safe, and supported.

So much of avoiding confrontation, challenging conversations or conflict comes down to fearing how we’ll be perceived.

Fear of saying the wrong thing, seaming inflexible, being unliked, judged, or excluded.

This is even more intense if your identities don’t align with the dominant default (white cis straight male “strong”).

Together, we built formulas and frameworks to create structure in spontaneous speaking moments so participants could relax and focus on what they want to say instead of how we’ll be perceived.

There’s no one right way to give feedback but I find having a structure - any structure - helps.

That’s why I use systems thinking to create structure in spontaneous speaking moments. The strength of the structure allows me to bring warmth to a moment that might otherwise feel contentious and I can begin to feel more comfortable.

I also use structure in this way when facilitating meetings or presenting. Staying high-level helps me focus on my intention instead of over-prioritizing how I’m being perceived.

What helps you focus when giving feedback, articulating roadblocks, or setting boundaries at work?

How would your communication change if you didn’t have to overwork and overthink to speak up?

Communication is dynamic and yet most of us believe we aren’t good at it.

We’ve received feedback that it doesn’t come naturally so now we’re watching ourselves.

We’re over-prioritizing our perception over our perspective (and we’re losing ourselves in the process).

That mental energy that’s going towards finding the right words and sounding “professional” - what would change if you channeled that energy towards focusing on your unique point of view?

Can you consolidate your focus into the present moment and align brain, body, and breath instead of splintering your attention?

You communicate perfectly well when you feel comfortable and at ease. That changes when you don’t feel seen, safe, and supported.

Instead of over-working to “be a better communicator”, cultivate conversational comfort by focusing your attention in the present moment.

Are you breathing? Are you present or you leaning in to show you’re “engaged”?

Your confidence lives in the present moment.

Trust it.

Are you trying to get a word in on Zoom meetings but end up just staying quiet?

I call it the virtual validation void. Many of us are leaning in, over-indexing on how we’re being perceived, and over-thinking and over-exerting to feel connected and validated, especially with senior leaders.

For those of us who struggle with unspoken anxiety (likely most of us!), trying to get a word in on Zoom only increases behaviors like leaning in, speaking fast, overthinking or thinking ahead, and filling the space because we are afraid to pause and let ourselves think.

Instead of trying to get a word in, focus on the following instead:

🌠 Prioritize presence and power

Try to incorporate micro-pauses, tiny beats that enable you to align your rate of speech with your rate of thinking. Instead of leaning in which can feed speaking fast, lean back to prioritize physical comfort and expansiveness.

🏙️ Take the conversation by using conscious filler and micro-pauses.

When you do decide to speak, “take the conversation” by using filler consciously—this creates a micro pause where you can re-ground, take a breath, or organize your thoughts to move forward with more intention and presence. As long as you take the conversation with confidence and micro-pause with clarity, it will help you regulate your pacing and maintain more power and control in the virtual world.

🌄 Make the unconscious conscious by talking about talking.

You may think you know why people are not speaking up but it is important to remember that we can't contribute in a comfortable and confident way unless we feel seen, safe, and supported. Help your team develop shared language and a framework to use when working remotely.

The most important thing is to talk about talking instead of allowing communication to continue to be unconscious. What behaviors do you observe in team meetings that disrupt collaboration and contributions from your whole team? Let me know in the comments!

I always struggled speaking up.

I was always overthinking, thinking about thinking and anxious about anxiety.

I thought there was something wrong with me. But when I started doing this work, I realized that too many of us don’t feel seen, safe, and supported speaking up.

I believe we all communicate perfectly well when we feel comfortable. That’s why I help people prioritize presence, not perfection.

Believing there’s something wrong with the way you communicate creates unconscious patterns like overworking, over-thinking, and over-preparing, leading to miscommunication, misunderstanding, and burnout.

I want to help you communicate from a place of comfort because that’s where your confidence lives.

I’ve spent ten years helping thousands of brilliant people replace anxiety with attention and reclaim their confidence when speaking off-the-cuff.

In my free micro-course, I’ll give you practical tools to turn panic into presence and speak with more ease in your upcoming conversations, meetings, and presentations.

Get the free course today at the link in bio or www.presentvoices.com/free-micro-course

Present Communication is not about changing who you are to sound “professional” or “eloquent”. Present Communication is about trusting your voice and your innate ability to express yourself.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Present Communication is about cultivating comfort, clarity, cohesion, consciousness and compassion. Confidence is just a byproduct.

It’s learning how to bring your best self into your most challenging moments.

Because this is what I’ve seen be effective for thousands of people.

I created the Present Communication course to give you a practical and adaptable framework so you can speak with more ease and less effort in your upcoming conversations, meetings, and presentations to help you:

Activate your presence and preserve your energy:

Move from in-person to virtual communication, from professional to personal, and from off-the-cuff to more presentational, public speaking moments.

Manage speaking anxiety so that you can transform panic into presence and anxiety into attention.

Organize your ideas off-the-cuff in meetings, interviews, presentations, and conversations.

Prepare for spontaneous speaking without overworking.

Express your expertise, your experience, your authority so that you can articulate your life‘s work and not just your résumé.

Have challenging conversations and give feedback with more compassion and clarity.

Learn more at the link in bio!

If you lose your train of thought or go blank while speaking, this is for you. It’s possible you’re over-working, over-thinking, or over-preparing. Over-working isn’t working.

Believing there’s something wrong with the way you communicate creates unconscious patterns like overworking, over-thinking, and over-preparing. This can lead to missed opportunities for career growth, miscommunication and misunderstanding, and burnout.

I’ve spent ten years helping thousands of brilliant people replace anxiety with attention and reclaim their confidence when speaking off-the-cuff.

I created the present communication course to help you trust your voice so you and stop over-working and speak with ease.

In this self-guided course, I share my framework of practical tools to help you cultivate conversational comfort in your upcoming conversations, meetings, and presentations.

Whether you lose your train of thought (or your personality) under pressure or over-think until you’re overwhelmed, this course will give you a practical and adaptable framework so you can communicate with more presence in your upcoming conversations, meetings, and presentations.

Swipe for some takeaways from this course.

The course launches today and you can get the pre-sale discount for just a few more days. Pre-register with coupon code EARLYBIRDCOURSE for 10% off.

Want to know the fastest way to improve speaking skills? Practice in a safe and supported space!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​I’ve spent the past ten years helping thousands of brilliant people feel more comfortable communicating and this is what I know to be true—we don’t learn and grow when we feel unsafe and unsupported.

If you’re in an environment where people are talking over each other, fighting to get a word in or interrupting, or if you’ve received intangible feedback, it can be really hard to “get better” at speaking off-the-cuff.

That’s why I created the PresentVoices Collective, my weekly group coaching class designed to help you practice speaking out loud and get more comfortable communicating.

I built the Collective based off of my years doing corporate workshops with organizations of all shapes and sizes. I realized quickly that most people learned best from watching others incorporate feedback and by learning these new tools in a safe and supported space.

I created a space where people can practice speaking out loud in a safe and supported way. Each week in my group coaching classes, people get to answer a question off-the-cuff and get live coaching from me in front of the group.

The Collective is only open to people who are taking the PresentVoices course or who have worked with me privately.

Visit the link in bio for more information about Collective, including the pre-sale discount on monthly membership.

Every day I talk to people who’ve struggled their whole lives with speaking (or so many others who’ve only started struggling since the pandemic).

Most people don’t believe that these speaking struggles can be “fixed” in a short time working together.

That’s because, we’re not here to “fix” how you communicate. You communicate perfectly well when you’re comfortable and at ease. We’re just giving you access to that comfort in your less comfortable moments.

When you’re put on the spot in a meeting.

When you’re trying to get a word in without losing your power.

When you’re giving feedback but want to be compassionate AND clear.

When you’re rushing from meeting to meeting and want more time to feel prepared.

This work is simple. I’m not the expert of your voice—you are. You don’t need someone to tell you what to say or how to say it, you just need to access the ideas you already know.

I can help.

Join me for a free live workshop on Zoom on April 26th. In a half hour, I’ll share practical tools to help you turn panic into presence so you can stop overworking and speak with ease.

As with everything I do, there’s never any forced participation but space is limited so sign up today.

Register for the Zoom link at the link in bio or at www.presentvoices.com/live

You’re put on the spot in a meeting. Are you 1) able to access your ideas with calm confidence? or do you start 2) over-thinking, shaking, and prioritizing how you’re perceived instead of what you want to say?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​We all have unconscious patterns that sneak up when we don’t feel safe and comfortable. When we feel watched or judged. When we don’t feel free to express ourselves.

What are yours?

Getting familiar with your unconscious patterns is the first step to becoming a more present communicator.

What if your confidence lives in the present moment? What if your confidence lives in your ability to prioritize your own physical comfort?

I created Trust Your Voice, my present communication course, to take you through the tools and techniques I teach to my private clients designed to help you cultivate conversational comfort.

Every single day I hear from people who think there’s something wrong with the way they communicate. They think they have to change how they speak in order to prove themselves, get promoted, or be heard with less effort in meetings, presentations and other important moments.

Read about why I created the present communication course at the Blog in the link in bio.

The course is launching April 26th but you can pre-register with coupon code EARLYBIRDCOURSE for 10% off.

Do you want to know the fastest way to improve confidence in important conversational moments? It’s to prioritize your physical comfort.

Believing there’s something wrong with the way you communicate creates unconscious patterns like overworking and over-preparing which leads to miscommunication and burnout.

I’ve spent ten years helping thousands of brilliant people replace anxiety with attention and reclaim their confidence when speaking off-the-cuff.

Join me for a free live workshop on Zoom on April 26th at 1 pm ET. In a half-hour, I’ll share some practical tools to help you turn panic into presence so you can speak with ease in your upcoming meetings, conversations, and presentations.

Whether you lose your train of thought (or your personality) under pressure or over-think until you’re overwhelmed, this workshop will give you tools to help you communicate with more presence in all of your spontaneous speaking moments.

Learn more and register for Zoom link at link in bio or www.presentvoices.com/live

We communicate really well when we feel present and at ease. So what is getting in the way of us feeling more present and at ease when communicating?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Too many of us are communicating unconsciously most of the time. We believe or have been told that speaking is not a strength and so we don’t trust ourselves.

This causes us to over-work, and over-working isn’t working. This is the Cycle of Unspoken Anxiety. It is the entry point for present communication.

My cycle starts with Perception: Those of us with anxiety can become hyper-perceptive. This can cause us to over-index facial expressions on zoom calls or get lost in thought as we overthink or think ahead.

Next comes the unconscious Patterns that surface with our hyper-perception. I fidget, shrink physically, speak fast, and my eyes would move really fast as I was plotting out what to say and think.

This increases the Pressure we feel and makes us deferential - we defer our own authority. We find ourselves searching for the right words to use instead of listening to ourselves.

This lead leads to Pathologizing: We believe that there is something wrong with us because we feel incapable of communicating. But it’s not our fault. It’s societal.

And finally, this leads to Paralysis. We believe that there’s an imaginary plateau where we will be better communicators and it feels like we will never get there.

We have to prioritize presence. I created the present communication course to help you start a new cycle so you can trust your voice so you and stop over-working.

The course is launching April 26th but you can pre-register with coupon code EARLYBIRDCOURSE for 10% off.

Want to know the fastest way to improve speaking off-the-cuff if you struggle speaking up in meetings and other important moments? Practice in a supported space. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​I’ve spent the past ten years helping thousands of brilliant people feel more comfortable communicating and this is what I know to be true—we don’t learn and grow when we feel unsafe and unsupported.

If you’re in an environment where people are talking over each other, fighting to get a word in or interrupting, or if you’ve received intangible feedback, it can be really hard to “get better” at speaking off-the-cuff.

That’s why I created the PresentVoices Collective, my weekly group coaching class designed to help you practice speaking out loud and get more comfortable communicating.

I built the Collective based off of my years doing corporate workshops with organizations of all shapes and sizes. I realized quickly that most people learned best from watching others incorporate feedback and by learning these new tools in a safe and supported space.

I created a space where people can practice speaking out loud in a safe and supported way. Each week in my group coaching classes, people get to answer a question off-the-cuff and get live coaching from me in front of the group.

The Collective is only open to people who are taking the PresentVoices course or who have worked with me privately (learn more about both offerings at the link in bio).

I’m offering 10% off the monthly membership to the first 20 people who join with code EARLYBIRDCOLLECTIVE. Explore the Collective at the link in bio.