The Secret to Being Heard
Marie came to me desperate for speaking voice help - her career was at stake. She was a forensic accountant in an otherwise all-male firm and said that, in the daily company meetings, the men didn’t usually seem to hear her.
My first thought was, there was a real chance her colleagues are to blame. It’s true that this is a problem that women often bring up. Being human means having biases that sneak up on us, like undervaluing women’s voices. But it isn’t just women in all-male environments who complain about this. Some others that I’ve heard similar complaints from are:
Men in otherwise all-female groups
People in a racial minority in groups
Introverts in groups of extroverts
Short people in groups of tall people
Younger people in groups of older people
Older people in groups of younger people
The bias to prefer people like us is called a Similarity Bias.
Similarity bias is the preference or tendency to appreciate people like us. We are more likely to get along with others who are the same as us. We all gravitate toward people like ourselves in terms of appearance, beliefs and background because they make us feel comfortable and safe. - Ebin John Poovathany
Similarity bias is something we can’t escape as humans - it’s built into our evolution. It’s only those people who are aware of their bias who are able to make different choices. However, in Marie’s case, she had no way to address this potential issue with her co-workers.
The next thought was, is there something about her voice that makes her hard to hear? The answer to that depends somewhat on the audience - specifically on hearing issues in the group. As hearing begins to decline with age, people experience a much more aggressive hearing loss in the typical range of female voices than male voices. A group of middle-aged and older men might legitimately have a hard time hearing a woman’s voice.
Approximately one in three people in the United States between the ages of 65 and 74 has hearing loss, and nearly half of those older than 75 have difficulty hearing. - National Inst. for Deafness and Other Hearing Disorders
However, aside from talking louder for the hearing impaired, is there something Marie do could on her own to be heard. That’s where the secret lies. When a person isn’t heard, what are the underlying issues they can tackle on their own?
Some of the solutions that come to mind are:
lowering the speaking range to help with others’ hearing loss
changing speech patterns to be more male-like in order to overcome some of the men’s similarity bias. Changes could include:
lowering the speaking pitch
speaking in shorter sentences
using stronger and clipped consonant sounds
speaking louder
turning all sentence endings down in pitch, as statements, rather than up like a question
choosing different words
(Women) can experiment with using more assertive language. “When you use tentative language, then you are more prone to be interrupted,” Hancock says. She cites as an example the difference between the statements, “We’re going to dinner here,” and, “I was thinking of going to dinner here.” The latter phrase conveys a sense of uncertainty. - Stephanie Watson, ASHAWire
The problem with all of these potential solutions is that they were inauthentic to Marie. They all required her to be “more like a man” or “more like one of the boys.” They all assumed that her male colleagues were coming up short in the respect department, and that she needed to accommodate for their problems. Thankfully, after Marie understood all of these scenarios, we agreed that accommodating was not a long term solution. In fact it might not fix it at all.
Results came for Marie when she examined her connection with herself. Through our conversations about when in her life Marie learned her speech style, she came to the realization that over her entire youth, she had learned to put her own thoughts and opinions at lower importance than other peoples. It was an unconscious training that she received from her parents. It was reinforced in her relationships with her brothers, as well as in school, sports, and church. Marie was an introvert who suddenly discovered that if her ideas had value, she had to deliberately give them voice.
Giving voice to ones ideas is a short-hand way of saying that if something is worth saying, it is worth saying well and with confidence. Over the years, Marie had become less and less confident in herself, but she knew that her deep knowledge of forensic accounting was important and it needed to be heard.
As Marie worked on placing the confidence she had for her ideas into her voice, she achieved success quickly. She learned that the subtle ways she might have devalued herself had snuck into her speech patterns and had given the listeners a sub-conscious impression that her content was of less value. She enjoyed now being heard in the meetings.
Marie made the essential mental shift of believing that her knowledge was so valuable that she needed to work up courage to support her voice with confidence. It was challenging for Marie, but this is often times the solution for people who feel they aren’t being heard. Not only does confident speech enhance things like enunciation and loudness, it also impacts our body language which causes peoples eyes and ears to be drawn to us. Of course it can be over-done. A relentlessly confident speaker can also be called a blow-hard or worse. But being a windbag is rarely a concern for most of us.
