Finding Your Own Voice

Judith Sugg

Are you clear, centered and confident about speaking your truth? Or is there a chorus in your head and it's hard to figure out which voice is yours?

I worked in corporate America for many years, and during that time I felt like I was on a tightrope. I had chosen to be there and I wanted to succeed, but that was just one voice in my head. There were company messages I was duty-bound to express, and yet felt alien to my being. And then there were times I would open my mouth and an unknown emotion - fear or anger usually - would burst forth, unbidden and unwelcome. I felt pulled between family, friends, ambition, competition - and my own voice was lost.

The discovery process of claiming my own voice was an important gift to myself. One of the first steps of this reclamation was recognizing the "blame frame" and taking responsibility for what I wanted. How does this blame frame work?

First, think about a picture frame. A picture frame holds the space and focuses the attention on what is inside. A blame frame surrounds the ideas, faces, vague feelings and limited thinking around what isn't working in your life.

In my blame frame, I would ask myself self-defeating questions: Why isn't it working? How long will this go on? Why does he, she, my mother, my boss, my husband, my family do what they do?

You can see how this gets dramatic very quickly. Yet asking these questions is precisely what many of us do over and over again. My first step out of the blame frame came from a musician with training in neural-linguistic programming (NLP). She asked just a few simple, if unusual questions. Next she helped me sort the chorus in my head and locate my own sense of self.

Frankly, I had rarely thought about what I really wanted, and I had never turned my intelligence, my heart and my energy toward revealing what I desired. Even more importantly, what did it do for me to have my heart's desire? I came to understand that this way of thinking is the opposite of the blame frame.

Here are important questions to help find your own voice. What is it that I really want, and how would I know if I got it? What's my next step in getting to what I want?

You can discover your true voice.

Judith Sugg, Ph.D. is a licensed counselor, researcher and trainer in Spokane. She earned her doctorate, focusing on comparisons of psychology in eastern and western traditions. She's taught yoga and yoga teacher trainings for over 15 years. Email JudySugg@aol.com.