Is Your Empathy Editing Your Voice?

In this episode of The Energy Xchange, we're breaking down how your empathy might be quietly editing your voice. 

Whether you're a business owner trying to sharpen your marketing message, a professional who holds back in meetings, or someone who finds it hard to say the true thing in personal relationships, this episode will give you both the insight and the practical steps to start showing up more fully.

We're diving into:

• Why high empathy leads to over-filtering (and unclear messaging)
• The difference between expression and translation and why it matters 
• How over-awareness of other people’s reactions weakens your communication 
• The hidden ways you might be softening, over explaining, or diluting your voice 
• Why trying to be understood by everyone is actually costing you the right people 
• A simple, practical way to access your real voice (without overthinking it) 
• How to use AI without losing your tone, perspective, and edge

The Energy Xchange is a podcast for highly sensitive people (HSPs), empaths, INFJs, and deep feelers navigating relationships, business, and personal growth.

Work With Me:

• If this episode resonated and you want more clarity in your marketing, book a 1:1 Storyboarding Session / Messaging Audit! I’ll help you say what you actually mean in your voice so the right people can finally hear you!

Links & Resources For This Episode:

• Subscribe to my Weekly Newsletter
• Visit My Website
• Get the Book: The Empath Detox
• The Empath Detox Oracle Deck
• Book a Storyboarding Session / Messaging Audit
• Book a Full-Scale Marketing Audit (Website/Messaging/Digital Presence)

Transcript

Speaker 0:03

Welcome to the Energy Exchange, a podcast for deep feelers and quiet leaders. Here, we explore what happens when we start working with our natural energy in both our business and personal lives. I'm Colleen Wolak. I'm a highly sensitive professional who spent years untangling patterns of overthinking, people-pleasing, and playing small just to feel safe. Now, I help others like me step more fully into their power without losing the superpower of their softness. We don't have to be allowed to be seen, and we don't have to push to be powerful. Everything is energy. Let's start this exchange. Welcome into this week's episode of the Energy Exchange. I just got back from a long weekend in Charleston, South Carolina for a banana ball game. If you have not experienced this, add it to your bucket list immediately. The whole thing was pure joy. Highly recommend it. Diving into today's episode, this one has more of a business slant to it, though it certainly applies to life in general. If you don't feel like people fully get you or that you have to overexplain yourself, it's because your empathy is editing your voice. And once you see this, you are not going to be able to unsee it. I promise you. If you were someone who is deeply attuned to other people, you consider yourself an empath, an intuitive, a deep feeler, you have a lot of strengths. You can read a room, you can feel what's not being said, you can hold nuance, multiple perspectives. But that same awareness is the exact reason your communication gets muddy. Because instead of speaking from clarity, you start speaking from anticipated reaction. Before your words even leave your mouth, they are going through a filter and maybe multiple filters. So you start asking yourself, how will this land? Is this confusing? Do I need to explain it more? So what comes out tends to be softer. Maybe it's longer than it needs to be, more palatable, a lot less clear, and ultimately a lot less you, which is a really big threat in this age of AI, where people are looking for unique perspectives and differentiation. And this can show up everywhere. Today I want to talk about where this comes up in business. And this is the number one issue I have to address with my marketing and messaging clients. And it is one of the most frustrating parts of my job. Because I can hear exactly what they're trying to say. I can pull that out of them. It's right there. But then they'll turn around and say it in a way that's so careful and so polished that it completely loses its power. And I find myself saying, Can you just say it the way you said it to me casually over the phone when we talked about this a month ago? Not the cleaned up version, not the audience-friendly version, but that real version because that's the one that people actually feel. So why does this happen? Number one, you're highly aware of how things land. So you're not just hearing words, you're feeling reactions. Before anything even happens, you start adjusting. You're thinking, how will this be received? Will this be misunderstood? Is it too much? So you soften it, you add context, or you translate it into something more digestible. Next up, again, this is part of your superpower. This isn't a bad thing, but you can see multiple perspectives. You understand nuance, you get both sides, three sides, four sides, whatever of any topic, which sounds like a strength until it keeps you from saying anything clearly. You're so busy accounting for how it might be received for multiple groups of people that you overexplain it. You add a disclaimer, you never fully commit to your specific unique point of view. And third, this is the biggest one, your system learned that clarity isn't always safe. At some point, being easy, agreeable, or low maintenance worked in your favor. So now your brain goes, let's smooth this out. Let's not say too much. And then we start shape shifting, questioning if what we're about to say is too much, and then waiting until it's perfectly articulated before we say anything at all. And sometimes outside of over-filtering our voice, we don't share our voice at all because we're so afraid of the backlash. So in a meeting, in a conversation with your partner, you just shut down and don't say anything because you're so afraid of saying the wrong thing. I was that kid in class or, you know, in my early workplace days where I wouldn't say anything unless I had the perfect thing to say or what I thought was the perfect thing to say. And then I was just waiting, like begging for someone to call on me so I could say this most perfect thing, because usually I was terrified to say anything at all. So if you have experiences like that in the back of your brain, that comes into play here. We're still doing it, even though we have a little more confidence now. We're in a different place, maybe our nervous system is a little stronger. That can still show up in this more nuanced way now, when we don't even know that we're doing that. And here's why that is so costly, especially when it comes to promoting yourself or your work. And I'm speaking to business owners here as well as people in traditional workplaces. There is a really big difference between expression and translation. When you are expressing something, really expressing it, there's a settledness in your body. You're not scanning the room while you talk, you're not monitoring for reactions, you say the thing and you let it land. And there's some authority in that. Translation is very different. Translation is when you're speaking and you're simultaneously watching yourself speak. You are managing what's coming out of your mouth. Maybe you're adjusting yourself mid-sentence, or you finish speaking and you're not sure if you actually said what you meant because you were so focused on how it was landing that you lost the thread of what you were actually trying to say. Expression is coming from the inside out, where translation, that's coming from the outside in. And people feel that difference even if they can't name it. Real expression, I was gonna say authentic expression, and I just feel that word is so overused, but real authentic expression draws people in. Translation keeps them at arm's length. Not because it's wrong or bad, but because the energy behind it is a little wavering. It's uncertain. An uncertain energy does not build trust. When you translate your message, you dilute it. And what gets lost isn't just clarity in the message. What gets lost is you. What makes you different and unique? All of your specialness is now lost. We might as well be talking to ChatGPT. And it totally makes sense why we do this, why we got there. Being direct will mean some people don't resonate with you. Some will misread you, some won't be your people. And for someone who feels everything, that risk feels gigantic. But filtering isn't protecting you. If you've smoothed away all of the potential edges, the right people can't recognize you. And I say that with full humility because I've had to learn this the hard way. I've always been drawn to working with empaths, with highly sensitive people. It's my lame. I know that. And when I wrote my book, The Empath Detox, I took a full stand on that. I said, this is who I am, this is who I'm for, this is my work. And then something happened that I was not prepared for. People were like, What's an empath? What do you mean, highly sensitive people? I was coming off of a corporate career in marketing and branding. I worked with all kinds of people. I worked with banks, hospitals. What do you mean you work with empaths? Make this make sense. And suddenly I was explaining a lot. And the more I explained, the more muddled my message got. And honestly, the more confused I started to feel with even what I was doing. Because I do work with a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily call themselves empaths, introverts, highly sensitive people. Whether they are or not, that's not always the language that they use. So what I had to do was get really clear about what struggles these people were having and what I actually bring to the table to address those. I had to bridge that gap without diluting or generalizing my message. And that clarity changed everything about how I show up in my marketing. So how do we create that clarity and stop filtering our message? I'm gonna tell you. First, we get clear on not just our message, but who we're speaking to. Your message is not for everyone. And when you try to make it for everyone, the right people stop seeing themselves in it. So we start there. If we're not clear on this ourselves, that filtering gets worse because we're filtering junk information to start with, right? Our output is only going to be as good as our input. Second, we catch the filter in real time. So start noticing, and you can notice this in your regular conversations with people too. Where am I softening this? Where am I over-explaining? Where am I trying to make this work for everyone or make them comfortable? That awareness alone will shift how you communicate over time. Next up, we say it clean first. And when I say clean, I just mean the unfiltered version. It might not be the tidiest message yet, but we want to start unfiltered. Before you explain it, before you qualify it, just say the thing out loud. Say it the way you'd say it to your best friend, someone who already gets you that maybe you don't have to filter for. That version is your real voice. Start there and then decide what, if anything, needs to be added or shifted. And if you're using AI to help with your writing, which I think a lot of us are, this is where this becomes even more important. We need to do a gut check on whether it's capturing what we're actually trying to say. A great way to use AI in this way is to voice memo your thoughts on something. Just do a brain dump and load that into AI so that it's using your actual words and how you would express something as the basis for what it's gonna spit out for you. And lastly, we let misunderstanding be part of the process. And this is the uncomfortable one. If no one could possibly misunderstand you or ask a follow-up question, you're definitely overfiltering. When you feel the urge to overexplain up front, just try telling yourself, hey, they're either gonna get it here or they're not my person for this message. But we create space for someone to ask a question. We don't answer all the questions for them before they've even registered what we're saying. We want to stand firmly and respectfully in our message for our audience to let it land as it is. If this is resonating with you, definitely check out the one-to-one messaging audit on my website. I'm gonna help you say what you actually mean in your voice so the right people will resonate. And this will clear up the majority of your marketing frustrations, I promise you. If you're interested in doing that work, visit me at just onewoo.com or find me on Instagram at the.energy.exchange. That's exchange with an X. So to close this out, I just want to say that the version of you that you've been editing out is the one people are actually waiting for. I did create this episode specifically for people that are struggling with promoting themselves, talking about themselves, whether that's in their marketing or in the workplace. But this applies to every area of our life. When we are having tough conversations with people, when we're meeting people for the first time, it's really easy to let all of those superpower things that come from your sense of empathy and your awareness of other people. It's easy to let that lead what we say and how we show up. So don't let your empathy be a filter. You will attract better friendships, better relationships, better clients, people that resonate fully with you when you are not editing yourself in advance. Okay, I'm gonna leave it there. Thanks for listening, and I will chat with you next week.