Latest / Radiant Voices / Liberate your voice with the Radiant Voices Process
Transcript
- Jeremy de Tolly: When you are ventral vagal dominant, it is not hard to be connected. In fact, it is the most natural thing. You don't have to try hard to create connection with people. It just comes out of your nervous system. And that vagal dominance, ventral vagal dominance, also then results in us and our nervous systems feeling nicer to other people. We make people feel safe when we are ventral vagal dominant. Hello and welcome to the Radiant Voices podcast. I'm Jeremy Dutale and today we're going to talk about the exact process required to move from overthinking, anxious speaking or using of one's voice into being able to do it from a state of confidence, groundedness, presence, just flow where the words or the sounds come out real easy and they represent us. authentically, it feels like the real us coming out and it's pretty effortless. But before I go any further, I'm going to tell you a story. Bear with me. 15 years ago, about to play the biggest show of my life as a singer in my band, The Dirty Skirts. We flew up to Johannesburg, which is on the high felt around 1000 meters, about two and a half, 3000 feet high. Up on the high felt in front of 20, 25,000 people. I know I'm going to get on stage in front of a huge crowd and we're supporting some of the biggest bands in the world at the time like Snow Patrol and Oasis and many other big uns. Big lead up of excitement, nerves, fear. It's a big thing to stand up and sing and perform in front of 20,000 people. And this is the biggest show I've ever played. Big ramp up in the lead up. of tension in my body. But it gets even worse when you arrive at the venue and you go through this sort of backstage area and you're waiting, listening to the band who precedes you and it's your turn. And there's this mounting tension in the body and you're talking to people backstage and warming up and your legs are jiggling and it's scary. And I remember the moments before in the kind of countdown before we go onto stage to do our show. I'm scared. It's scary. I've done big shows before, a lot of festival shows, but this is just this kind of ramp up that is quite frankly a little bit terrifying. Get up onto stage and bam, we start to sing this real high impact song. And of course my throat is pretty closed and it's really hard to sing when your throat is really closed. Wow, that was a little bit sore. ⁓ When it feels like there's just a clamp around your throat and your whole body is a little bit rigid with fear, but I'm kind of busting it out and trying to perform. But the sound doesn't sound too good at all. I don't sound great, but I'm kind of making it through the first song. It's all angular and busy and electric, but scary. Tense. Don't sound good. By the second song-ish and third song, my voice is warming up. It's getting a bit better, but I'm still scared. And then we move on to the fourth song, which is our hit single Daddy Don't Disco, which has got the highest full voice belt note, other words, raw sing it out note of an A4 in the set. And that was not my favorite note to sing. It's a scary note. It was always a big reach at that time for me, technically. Right at the beginning of the verse, slammed into that note and I squawk like a duck. comes out, this ugly, weird. sound as I try and sing the beginnings of each verse and that happened a few times in the song and I could feel this sort of mortified embarrassment but then compensating it just trying to look confident and keep performing you know don't let anyone know but inside I wasn't feeling so good and I got through the set I didn't sing that well I sang pretty well but of course those parts of me were now micro focusing on their 10 not so great notes in the whole set And got off stage and people were like, well done. And I just felt like people were being fake and they were lying and they were just saying that to be nice. But it was obviously a failure and went out into the crowd afterwards and people were high fiving. It was embarrassing. I felt really bad. It had this feeling inside like anyone who was saying it was nice was just being polite to me, but it wasn't great. And if there were fans and they liked it, then they just don't know music. anyone who knew music would know that I was useless and that I was bad. there was a lot of remorse going on. The very next day we flew to Cape Town to play the second show at Lawrence for this beautiful wine estate at sunset, same lineup, magnificent afternoon and that show just came together absolutely perfectly and it was empowering and beautiful it was like being in full flow like soaring with my voice and even so I carried the Johannesburg show because that was you know, highly visible, but I also felt good about the Cape Town show. And that was really like a microcosm representing what it was like to have a voice for me 15 years ago. I learned to do the big stages, but a huge amount of self-criticism, self-shaming, and not really talking about it, not really owning up to it. Quite good at hiding it. But this series of ups and downs. It was uncomfortable. It was powerful sometimes. I had a magnificent ego, but also had this other part of me that was kind of eating itself alive in my belly that was like, it's not good enough. And, you know, all of this existing in one human being. Let's take a breath together. The patterns weren't just there. I had much longer term patterns of kind of freeze, shut down and become awkward, especially in social group situations. I would, in a group, social group, lose my words. I would find myself becoming clumsy, kind of tongue-tied. I wouldn't be able to keep up with the humor. I'd be a bit frozen. People, if they came at me with humor or a kind of a bit of a cutting joke, I was like a lamb to the slaughter. I just wouldn't really... be able to respond, my boundaries were really shocking. I wouldn't be able to say no, or that's, I don't feel okay with that. But ⁓ I really had this sort deep inner sense that I didn't feel okay in group social situations. This was long before becoming more kind of famous-ish. That pattern had very deep roots. And it was one of the first things that I got to grips with as I began a deep healing journey around my voice was this reaction that came up in social situations. I had a sense that I was awkward. And but I was so it was so familiar to me that I never thought, you know, it's my personality. This is how I am. This is how I'm to be for the rest of my life. But I got lucky. I got into dismantling the pattern and I discovered that these patterns are old and they come from our childhood and that superficial fixes generally don't work. We can learn how to be more humorous. We can learn to have boundaries. All of those things are really important. But there were core beliefs and strange nuggets of conditioning, you could say, core wounds. that resulted in me feeling this condition or having this conditioning just come over me in a social situation, which is occupy me, hijack me, and then there it was. Now, it's socially awkward again. Even as I say this, my tongue becomes a bit thick and I start losing my way a bit. To cut a long story short, having done a lot of deep work around this, including schoolyard bullying and changing continents and family dynamics and all kinds of stuff, I found deep underneath this a belief system that I was unlikable. Who knew? I didn't even know that I felt that in a social situation, that people wouldn't like me. There was something inherently wrong with me. And that then was part of a fear system or an anxiety and freeze system that would arise in social situations that then determined how I felt about myself every time I went out, every time I hung with friends. I fortunately had the opportunity of clearing this belief system and went on to feeling really good socially. learning to feel fluent and just confident inside myself and happy to be a messy, ordinary human being when around others and dropping layers of perfectionism and self-doubt and self-criticism to just let myself be. And in the process of all of this, developed the methodologies that I'm going to share with you today. Did a whole bunch of trauma trainings and embodiment trainings and ways of working with early life conditioning and developed what I now call the radiant voices process. So what we're going to do today is a deep dive into how to liberate a voice, how to overcome voice blocks that you can feel in your body, but also express themselves as thoughts and belief systems that express themselves in behavior patterns like avoiding the limelight, avoiding big social situations, avoiding job interviews or standing out and meetings and instead replacing this negative conditioning, these negative patterns, well let's call them limiting patterns, with a kind of an unshakable, joyful, messy confidence. The willingness to show up in the world as you are, the willingness to be seen and let people see you, and the willingness to take the risk of putting your full self into the world. and to share oneself and then hopefully in the process contribute deeply to the well-being of all beings. Okay, great. So I also want to say that I'm shooting this episode from a few notes that are down here, but just trusting my voice. I am using the methods that I teach and share to be able to just speak from a kind of a flow state where I completely trust that the words will just come out right. Right now, there's not really anyone in charge. I'm not pre-thinking what I'm gonna say. It's honestly, there's this miraculous process of blah, Words are coming out of me, stuff's coming out. And it's not like there's some part of my brain going, okay, now we're gonna say this and then we're gonna do that, then we're gonna do that. This is just happening in real time and it's flowing out and I've learned to trust my voice to be able to do this. And it's kind of fun and powerful and real, maybe even a little bit more vital than being scripted. or having ⁓ someone up in HQ saying, hey, it's time to do this. It feels really natural, really easy, and honestly, I'm even actually enjoying myself. Okay, before we go any further, I have one big request of you. I would love to spread this work, and to do that, I need the algorithm to work, the bots and the machines to say, this guy is doing something cool, and you can help me with that, and you've heard this a thousand times on YouTube or on Spotify or wherever you are. but to please subscribe, like the episode and leave a comment. Otherwise, this is all gonna happen in the darkness and I would really, that would make me sad. It wouldn't actually make me sad, but please help with the comment, like and subscribe. I really mean it. Okay, let's get on to the next phases of this. So for the rest of this pod, we're gonna move into the practical methodologies of the radiant voices process of how to approach liberating your voice into full confidence. What I'd like to begin with is who this is for. To look at the types of patterns that this work supports the healing of. So I'll give you one case. So one case is someone who works in corporate or who is an entrepreneur and needs to use their voice a lot. They do okay, but they also have a pattern of freezing or shutting down, especially in high stakes environments. For some people that will involve being in corporate, And when there's a CEO or someone from the C-suite in the meeting, there's some sense of perceived authority in the meeting, they shut down, they become awkward, they start clinging to their bullet points. Some of the people that I work with are of course very brilliant at what they do in their work. And they might be middle management or they've got a kind of a cool position. But the thing that's holding them back, and this is all in the same category, is the fact that when they have to present their ideas, especially in bigger meetings, they tend to freeze and shut down. They can't rely on their knowledge. They can't really trust their voice. All the rehearsing that they're doing, they can't trust their brain to deliver the information in the correct order and sound fluent and confident. And so that's a classic voice block that I will work with. I call it a voice block, but it's a full body experience. There are thoughts, cognitive processes about it. There are fears, there are images and memories, but there are full on nervous system and body reactions. and musculature things and all sorts of things going on, not just in the voice itself and the whole vocal tract, but in the full body. The heart might be going, sweating might happen. It's a full person experience. And that's why I will talk about this as happening within one's communication system. Your communication system is brain and thoughts, body, emotions, everything. It's a whole system that then comes into life. in that meeting. And so this first category is folk who are in corporate or entrepreneurs. They need to communicate better, but they get hijacked by anxiety and or freeze responses. The second category is, I'm going to say more social. It's often a group situation, but sometimes can be a vocal block that appears one on one. But I frequently work with people who struggle in social environments too. So that might reflect as social anxiety or a form of social anxiety, but often it'll be group anxiety. And it's similar patterns to what I've described with the corporate folks, but it's a real disappointment, for example, in struggle with making friends and feeling like you could contribute in a group environment, knowing that you've got funny things to say, but they're all stuck inside, feeling really frustrated that you're unable to be spontaneous. And there'll often be accompanying belief systems like no one wants to hear what I have to say, I'm invisible and so on. The third category of folk that I work with is from time to time I work with youth and kids. I'll work with late teens and early twenties. COVID was really difficult. The ⁓ solitude of kids growing up in COVID for those few years actually did cause some very difficult socialization patterns. and increased social anxiety. So I've worked with a lot of kids unbundling social anxiety patterns that are often accompanied by or caused by bullying, for example, but also there'll be family history and all kinds of things feeding into that. And the amazing thing with kids is that they have much less entrenched conditioning. So they actually can really heal quite quickly given tools. And it's beautiful to get their reports of they went back to school and they used the tools and they became more embodied and they found themselves contributing and it just happened naturally and spontaneously. It's really wonderful working with them. But the largest category of people I work with are folk wanting to put their voice out into the world, in work, as entrepreneurs, in meetings, on the internet, as professionals, and really wanting to learn how to shine in the spotlight. instead of shutting down, freezing and avoiding. And the beautiful thing with all of these categories of folks, whether it's anxious voices or shutting down voices, or even what I would call over speakers too, folk who speak a lot and then feel ashamed afterwards. These are all different categories of what I'd call vocal dysregulation or communication dysregulation, is that all of them can deeply transform. These are just patterns and they hijack the system. in the particular communication situation. So let's just say she walks into her monthly meeting. ⁓ there's someone from the C-suite there. They're a bit intimidated by that person. Then the whole system moves into a kind of freeze, anxiety, hypervigilance, scanning the room. If they're speaking, they are already in anxiety and possibly even freezing a little bit. And when that freeze happens, they start speaking and sounding wooden. They lose all their facial expressions. They can't really think creatively and in the moments and other clinging to the bullet points and they're scanning everyone to see and often perceiving that they're being rejected or people are thinking that they're boring. And there's a whole that's a whole system that then just takes over and we just go, ⁓ there's this whole system. Let's dismantle that. And the beauty of the work is that approach systemically like this as a whole communication system. It can be dismantled and it's a process. of learning to feel safe in one's body, to, I'm going say, really see and meet all of the belief systems and thoughts and traumatic memories that inform or create the pattern. And in the process, there's a slow but deliberate conversion from an anxious overthinking voice into a free, liberated, happy voice. One that is just willing to be itself, to fly its individual flag, my I'm unique, a little bit different, quirky, funny, and just human and letting ourselves be a full human where we trust our voice and let our voice come out. And so that's the joy of the work that I do is that day in, day out, I'm supporting folks to move from these really difficult patterns, patterns that feel like they're stuck forever. patterns for which they judge themselves and feel awful about themselves and so much frustration. You when I first meet folks and they express what it's like to be stuck with this, there's always so much sadness, disappointment that it turned out like this and so much anger to turn towards themselves. Like, why am I like this? Why haven't I solved this? And the reason why it hasn't been solved is that for the folks that I work with, there's a deeper pattern that has roots, usually that go all the way back to the childhood. to childhood and unless one deals with the roots, it's really difficult to move the pattern. So, how do we do this? Let's take another breath together. ⁓ Let's take another breath where we take a breath in and then a second breath like this. Another one of those. ⁓ One more. How does that feel? Feels really good for me. It's really nice for me. So I'm going to use as we move through this, excuse me, as we move through this episode, I'll also demonstrate and talk through the tools that I like to share with my clients. Okay, so now we're going to talk about the radiant voices process, what it is and how you can use it to liberate your voice, find more confidence, speak from a state of self-trusting flow. The radiant voices process, has a few components. The first component is in the moment practices. Practices you use when you're in that meeting, at that family dinner, having that difficult conversation with a lover or a loved one. What do we do in the moment to shift our nervous system state into greater regulation, grounding, presence and flow? The second component is working with that clump of conditioning, that pattern and getting stuck into it and picking it apart. It has lots of components. It has components like what happens to you before a meeting, all the anxiety and the thoughts and the wondering and imagining, and the flood of embarrassment or self-judgment after the meeting, as well as your whole personal history of having failed or frozen before, or things that happened as a kid being told to shut up, or doing a school oral presentation where people laughed at you, or bullying, or whatever other components there are. that then created the pattern. All of this is supported by best-in-class tools for speech writing, communication strategies, body language, and many of other tools that one learns when one wants to be a powerful, persuasive, authentic, heart-centered communicator. Let's get into the in-the-moment tools. Okay, so what does it look like to regulate your nervous system in real time around other human beings? Let me share the practices. The first part of it is that I'm gonna ask you to start bringing your awareness down, your focus of attention down into your body. As I sit here and share this, I'm focusing on the sensations in my lower body, for example, my legs and butt in the seat, all the way down to my feet. I'd ask you whether you're standing or walking or sitting or lying. to bring awareness into the lower body and keep bringing it back. You will have a habit of attention of your awareness popping up into thought every few seconds. Don't make an enemy of thought. It's just your default mode network thinking, it's time I solved some problems. No biggie, come back down to the feeling in the body. It is very hard to do this around other human beings. So what I ask my clients to do is to start training this ability in every meeting that they're in, at the dinner table with their families, to train this habit of awareness of being able to feel the body in real time around other human beings. At first, it will seem almost impossible to hold awareness down here. But even just bringing it down and breathing and regulating your nervous system, will already interrupt your habitual pattern that you normally go into in that meeting situation. In other words, I call this the great pattern interrupt because your usual pattern, go into anxiety, overthinking, starting to spin, stare at everyone's faces, maybe project on them that they're judging us, start to try and think of what you're gonna say next, deep anxiety in the body, feel anxiety about the fact that you're feeling anxiety in your body, because ⁓ no, this is only getting worse. There's a whole pattern. Suddenly we go whoop, bring awareness down. We're pulling attention out of the habitual pattern into a part of your body, your lower body, that generally feels neutral, heavy, and safe. Bizarre fact is you can be feeling anxious and in your head in a meeting, and just by moving your awareness down into your body, you can find a part of yourself that simultaneously feels calm, heavy, and present. how weird that we could have an upper half of our body that's freaking out and a lower half of our body that's just like, I'm here, I'm heavy, I'm just your legs. And so we start leaning on the grounding and presence and heaviness of the lower body to pull us out of the pattern. We now want to start developing conditioning, a pattern or habit of bringing awareness down. I like to say to my clients, I challenge them, I want you to get 70 % of your awareness into your body. I challenge you as you listen to this, to get 70 % of your awareness in your body and only 30 % on the content of what I'm saying or if you're watching this. We habitually give all of our attention away into the rooms that we're in or the people that we're with. I say, bring 70 % inside, 70 % into a nervous system that you're going to be regulating and only have 30 % out there. So let these words just wash over you, trust your brain to process the information. You don't need to eat this podcast like a meal that you're really hungry for with all your attention or you're multitasking and listening to the podcast and doing four things at other things at the same time. I'm saying Bring awareness down into the body. Secondly, start breathing slowly. We could use classic box breathing. I do teach a number of different breathing techniques with this, but let's just work with box breathing in this moment. So box breathing is I count in for four, in, two, three, four, hold, two, three, four, breathing out, two, three, four, hold, two, three, four, breathing in, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Breathing out, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. And so on. I want you to just keep breathing. So now you might be counting in your head and bringing awareness down to feel your body in the seat. And you're listening to me or you're in the meeting, but you've become a nervous system regulation machine. Your focus is on soothing. and grounding and relaxing and integrating yourself in the moment. It's really powerful. A lot of people will say, but how can I listen and be counting in my head? Bizarrely, you can. I'm not suggesting the whole time you should be counting in your head, but especially when you really need to calm yourself down, pulling out of the pattern that you were in of anxiety and overthinking and all of that stuff into this very focused self-regulation, bringing yourself liberating yourself from the fear. It's an incredibly powerful act. Now let's put one more thing on top. We're going to do this, we're going to cross our hands over left and right. So for those of you that are listening on audio only, please check out the show notes. But imagine just putting your hands in front of you and crossing your arms over each other, right? And then gradually dropping your arms, or rather your hands so that they're on your legs, so your left hand is on your right leg and your right hand is on your left leg. So your hands are crossed over, your arms are crossed over and you want a hand on each leg crossed over. And now you're going to slowly start tapping on your leg left, right, left. we're using what's called bilateral stimulation, very gently. So could even just tap on your legs or press on them gently while breathing slowly and bringing awareness down into the lower body. So you could say using the bilateral stimulation, we are processing the moment. We are processing our feelings. And we're using this technique to fundamentally alter the pattern that we were stuck in. We were hijacked before. Now we're replacing it with something that requires a whole lot of attention. I like to sometimes call this positive multitasking. The negative multitasking was being in your head, overthinking, trying to think of what you're saying next, worrying about the fear in your body, feeling anxious, staring at everyone hypervigilantly, looking at and worrying about what they think of me. Instead, we've now moved into positive multitasking, which is I can feel my legs, I feel my lower body, I feel my hands tapping, and I am breathing and calming myself. And yes, there may be some anxious thoughts, but we've replaced most of the anxiety-ridden pattern with a self-calming, safe, happy coming home. So again, I challenge you and challenge all of us throughout this episode to keep bringing awareness down and to consider that we would have a lifelong practice of learning to be in our bodies around each other and to learn to listen and speak while simultaneously feeling our body. As I'm speaking to you right now, I am... completely connected to the sensation of my lower and whole body. But especially this foundation of my lower body. And at first when people do this, they're like, I can't speak and feel my body at the same time. And then they quickly discover if they keep playing with it, especially it's in safe places like at home and the dinner table. But they speak and they practice feeling their bodies and speaking. You could say the voice just comes out. It's like it always gets the the head and overthinking out of the way because you just can't overthink and feel your body and speak at the same time. Then a natural voice and voicing and language and communication comes out of us and it just comes out as this kind of act of flow. A very natural real us comes out. There's just no mediator in the anxious overthinking head or little or no mediator. So challenge. repeat because it bears repeating in our bodies when around each other to train this as a habit of awareness. In polyvagal theory terms we would be training ourselves also to be deeply in our ventral vagal or connected to our ventral vagal nervous system. You could say influenced by our ventral vagal nervous system while around others which would mean that oxytocin would naturally pump through our body. It is a state where we naturally relate and connect with each other. When you are ventral vagal dominant, it is not hard to be connected. In fact, it is the most natural thing. You don't have to try hard to create connection with people. It just comes out of your nervous system. And that vagal dominance, ventral vagal dominance, also then results in us and our nervous systems feeling nicer to other people. We make people feel safe when we are ventral vagal dominant. Their mirror neurons read our mirror neurons and vice versa. And there's this sense of, this person feels safe. So these in the moment practices ask us to come home into a grounded, regulated, at home inside ourselves feeling. And keep coming back there. And then we can watch the effect it has not only on ourselves and our communication, but on the rooms and environments we find ourselves in. We can then affect the rooms that we're in positively by being someone who is at home inside ourselves and grounded and regulated and feeling good, calm, excited, happy, connected. Short infomercial about the Vegas Nerve and Polyvagal Theory. So... The vagus nerve drops out of the brain stem, connects with the ears and the voice and throat, down to the heart, down into the belly, extremely important. Polyvagal theory posits that we have three main branches. You could say the most evolved one being the ventral vagal. That is where we feel happy and connected. Oxytocin pumps in our body. Our bodies are able to digest and the immune system is amazing. It's our kind of unicorn, I feel good in me state. grounded, connected, at home, safe, all of those kind of things. Then we get triggered, life happens, we get excited, and the sympathetic nervous system, the second branch, gets switched on. We need this, we need to feel excited, we need to be to play, we need to be able to fight, we need to be run. But many of us get stuck in sympathetic nervous system activation. So... That's like we're always switched on or when we go into social or work environment, a group speaking environment, bam, that sympathetic nervous system switches on. Adrenals go on, all the energy moves from digestion and immune system into muscles. Now we can run or fight. Very useful from an evolutionary perspective. It also means our throat tends to close, the whole body tenses up, and it is much harder to speak. we lose our ability to relate and connect and communicate in favor of being able to get the hell out of there. Fair enough, but not necessarily so useful when you're trying to talk to your CEO. The third state is called our dorsal vagal. And that's where the freeze state lives. It's a parasympathetic state where what are called endogenous cannabinoids, which are hormones pump into our system. They're pain relieving and numbing. And this is a place where or a it's not really a state per se but when we are in a free state our most of our brain goes offline our frontal lobe goes offline we move more into our threat detection system super hard to speak properly to structure sentences correctly to remember to rely on our knowledge and we feel numbed and dizzy but our tongue becomes thick something I knew really really well and It's really hard to process information and even really perceive the environment around ourselves. We shut down. There are these numbing hormones and we are no longer really in the building. We often quite dissociate it. Those are the three systems and all of them are really important and useful. I will say about the sympathetic nervous system is that when we go into a public speaking environment, it is exciting. It is scary. There is always going to be some sympathetic nervous system activation. We want to twin this with what I would call ventral vagal grounding. And then you have this combination of switched on, I'm ready to speak, but I'm also grounded and calm and present. It's like mobilized, but also grounded and present and calm. And it's this combination that creates what are called performance flow states. That's what creates the killer speech as being engaged and present and able to really deliver A Humdinger. Okie dokie. So we've spoken about in the moment practices, but the next huge component is deconditioning. Working with the pattern itself. How do we do this? Well, we need the right kind of tools. In my case, I like to work with emotional freedom technique, EFT. One could work with EMDR or many other techniques on Planeter. But they need to be directed at the pattern in various specific ways. So the pattern shows up in different environments and different situations. Let's just say you have a public speaking event in a month's time. Already you will have feelings about that public speaking event. You'll feel scared if you're an anxious speaker. So what we want to do, and working with the radiant voices timeline process, is work on the anxiety before, during, and after any speaking event. So in the lead up to the meeting, You already have feelings about it. You have thoughts. There are particular people you're speaking to. You have particular fears. There are things that you imagine. And what will happen is that if you just leave that anxiety and avoid it, which is what most people do, it's going to gradually mount all the way up to the day that you do the speech. Can imagine? we're going to, ordinary practice is, I'm scared. I'm scared of speaking. I'm just going to let my anxiety mount so that when I arrive at that speech, I'm terrified. and then we wonder why it doesn't go well. So the first part of the timeline process is we say we're going to dismantle the mounting anxiety curve as much as we possibly can so that we arrive there having processed the fear in advance repeatedly. In the weeks that proceed speaking, we process every little nuance of it that shows up. If we're scared, we're curious about it, we start to journal and note all of the nuances of how the fear shows up. ⁓ I'm picturing my boss and what he said last time. ⁓ that woman from accounts who always looked at me in a judgy way. She really trips me up. All of the thoughts and feelings about it. ⁓ I remembered the time I failed three years ago or I froze and I'm so scared that's going to happen again. All of the intrusive thoughts that we'd want to like block, hide away, we're now super curious about. And we want to process them. using a leading edge deconditioning tool like EFT. We don't have the time in this episode to go into how to use the tool itself. I do have a PDF called EFT for Speaking Anxiety. There'll be a link in the show notes. You can look at how to use EFT to do this. Another place that we would use the deconditioning tools and again in the Radiant Voices timeline process is to look at what happens after speaking. Most anxious speakers after speaking, will find themselves judging themselves. There'll be a review process that goes on. Particular things we said or things we left out or things we got wrong, we'll start chewing on them. And there'll be this unconscious process that happens time and time again after speaking, where we feel some remorse or embarrassment or shame and we judge ourselves. And for me, this process used to just happen in the dark, in the darkness of my unconscious. I would kind of go home and slink home and feel a bit rotten. And now we want to bring the whole pattern into the light. We want to know everything. We want to know what does it say? Oh, you're useless. You shouldn't do this. You should give up your job. should whatever it says, including all the fine detail. Oh, I remember Anne from accounts. I see she looked at me horribly and it felt so bad about that. All of the things that happened in that meeting or speech, plus all of the thoughts and feelings that arise afterwards is what I like to call the shame hangover that arises after speaking. We want to process the heck out of that. We want to render it neutral, chilled, okay I feel comfortable, okay with myself afterwards. It's the same thing with all of the pre-speaking fear. We want to render that fear down to as close to neutral or even optimistic as possible. The same thing with the shame hangover. What I like to say is that if you leave a shame hangover unattended, it just festers, it repeats the pattern, it always says to ourselves, see, look, we'll never get over this, and we're always stuck like this for life. And instead, we process that so that it doesn't affect the next time we speak. We dismantle the pattern at the beginning and at the end. But that's where the deep work really begins. From here on we then got to go into the history of the pattern. How did this happen that we came to have this freeze or anxiety response? Sometimes it'll be a very angry father or mother. Sometimes it'll be their absence. Often it'll include bullying. Sometimes it'll be a one child household or a four child household and particular relationships between the siblings. Stuff always happens. There's always a history that creates a voice block. And for those that have had a very deep and serious voice block, I would say that it's almost impossible to clear the pattern without doing some work around the origins. Very deep and beautiful things happen when we actually go into the history. We don't spend months examining the family environment and personal history. It's specific memories. and really just calling out the pattern really gently and naming it and helping it soften and transform. There's something that happens that is deeply self compassionate. When someone who has had a pattern like this and judged themselves so much like, am I like this? Why do I let myself down? I'm so frustrated with myself. I feel so much shame and embarrassment. When they finally really meet the origins of their pattern. Something really profound happens, or like a softening inside, it's like, ⁓ okay, I see and feel why this happened. I think I can forgive myself. There's a reason why I shut down and I'm anxious. There's a part of me that's almost trapped, five or six years old. And that little girl or that little boy needs my compassion. That part of me needs support and compassion to heal, to evolve, to... have the courage to then go out into the world and really share his or her voice with courage. You know, so it's incredibly profound to do the work in the roots of the pattern. That's often where the origin of the anxious energy is, the afraid or the freeze. For example, if you have a child that is in a very turbulent family environment, let's just say dad is highly volatile, that kid will have learned to freeze to stay safe. to avoid being in the crosshairs of their father's anger. And it's quite difficult to liberate that freeze energy, that thing that got trapped when they were five or six or seven or 12 years old without going back there. It doesn't require infinite numbers of sessions. It just requires focused, gentle, loving work. And it's beautiful work. It leads to liberation and a softness inside. and helps move out of, need to perform for everybody else to make everyone else approve of me in those meetings, in those environments where we get anxious into, y'all can deal with you, all you people, I'm here to look after me. I've actually, I've got my own back. I'm looking after a part of me that is a terrified five-year-old or six-year-old. I'm gonna nourish this nervous system. I'm gonna really look after myself as I sit with everyone else. I'm gonna be at home in me first. I'm gonna make me feel safe, then I'm gonna deliver a fantastic speech. So it helps move that, remember that 70-30 deeply into the self where we're operating kind of in alignment with our whole self. We are self-supporting, self-soothing, and we've got our own back. And from this place, it's so much easier to be in ourselves, speak and deliver our truth. So in that process, one will also discover the belief systems that underpin this. For example, I'm invisible. No one wants to hear what I have to say. I'm unlovable or unlikable. I'll be punished for speaking my truth. I'll be punished for having emotions or taking up space. So there's a process also simultaneously where as we work, often memories will come up. And those memories, if they have charge in them, feelings, can feel strong emotions of shame or anger or regret. That will tell you that that memory is still somewhat active and needs to be worked with in order to liberate the communication system. Amazingly, this work doesn't take years. It does require consistent showing up. It does require the willingness to courageously go into kind of sticky parts of ourselves that got stuck and scared a long time ago. But I often refer to this as a silo of conditioning. that gets stuck. Often I work with people who have done a ton of therapy, for example, and strangely, the therapy just couldn't get into this weird silo of conditioning around communication. And so what we're doing is we're going into the specifics of how your voice got stuck across your personal history, and those specifics show themselves quickly when you start to really ask the question and process the pattern. And thus, with some in the moment work, with some deconditioning work, a voice gets liberated. One learns to sit inside oneself and speak like I am and the words come out imperfectly, humanly, courageously. And it's fun. It's honestly like really fun taking your hands off the wheel. not knowing what's going to come out next. being willing to trust a giant pause. I often suggest in public speaking or meeting environments, just slowing it down, having a big pause, everyone's attention starts to concentrate again. But we get to slow down, it's kind of juicy. And so that's what I would call a radiant voice. A radiant voice is able to be in itself, a human being in themselves. In other words, I can feel my feelings, I can feel my body, I'm inside myself, I'm out of my hyper-vigilant, scared head, I'm in all of myself. We're in a wiser, more present part of ourselves while communicating. And from that, there's a kind of a radiance to that. Just a sweet, human, simple radiance of I'm here and I'm willing to be seen. I'm not shielding or hiding. I'm willing to be wrong. I'm willing to get it wrong, maybe even to make a bit of a fool of myself. But I'm willing to put my voice into the world and maybe be a little bit of service and try and help clean up on this sweet but pretty crazy planet. So we've spoken about the primary elements of in the moment practices and deconditioning. From there one learns tools. public speaking tools, speech writing tools, how to concentrate information so that you speak coherently in the moment, and practice, putting oneself into situations where we have to use the voice. And it's this gradual process of just learning to feel safer and safer and safer and safer, more more more present as the months go by. And honestly, the responses I get from folks are, for the most part, miraculous. I cannot believe I did that. For the first time in my life, I was a little bit nervous beforehand, but it wasn't too much. I opened my mouth and it all just melted away and I just spoke. I can barely remember what I said, but everyone just said it was amazing. That's the performance flow state. You're not monitoring yourself. It just comes out. And I think something happens when we are more inside ourselves and less in fear is that it's easier to come from a place of kindness, to feel kind, to feel good. feel softer and more connected. And so in summary, my wish for all of us is to be able to be in our bodies, be present, be able to communicate from within the fullness of ourselves, to be our full radiant present selves. And so what I would really recommend is if you're interested in these techniques, start with practicing being in the body. Start with that in every meeting, every family environment or dinner or whatever else it is, drop into the body. practice that level of presence. And then from there, you can start working at deconstructing the patterns. If you're interested in knowing more about the whole Radiant Voices process, there lots of links in the show notes to learn all about how to work with these techniques. Please like, comment, subscribe, and even share the podcast to help me get this workout into the world. Thank you so much.