The First Time You Heard Your Own Voice

THE FIRST TIME YOU HEARD YOUR OWN VOICE

There is a voice you have been using for years. In meetings. In presentations. In every room that ever asked you to prove you belong. It is articulate, strategic, effective. And it was assembled, carefully, over time, from every mentor you admired, every institution you wanted to impress, every expectation you were trying to meet.

Then one day, something slips out that you did not rehearse. Something unscripted, unpolished, entirely yours. And the room gets quiet. Not because you said something wrong. Because you said something real.

In this episode, Lisa names what most leaders carry but never talk about: the gap between the voice that gets rewarded and the voice that is actually yours. She traces how professional fluency can quietly replace personal truth, what it costs to sound right to everyone except yourself, and what becomes possible when you stop assembling your sentences from borrowed parts.

This is not about finding your voice. It is about recognizing you never lost it. You just buried it under years of performing someone else's version of competence.

If the most honest thing you have said recently was in a side conversation and not a meeting, this one is for you.

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Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

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Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to Soul to Soul with Lisa Carter Boba, where science meets soul. I want to tell you about a moment I have never talked about publicly. It was not dramatic, nobody clapped, nobody noticed. There was no stage, no spotlight, no invitation to speak. It happened in the middle of a meeting, one of those meetings where you already know the answer before anyone asks the question because the answer was decided before you walked in. Someone asked for input, and I opened my mouth and said something I had not rehearsed. Something I had not borrowed from a book or a mentor or a framework. Something that came from a place in me I did not even know it had a voice yet. And the room got quiet. Not the kind of quiet that means people are impressed, the kind of quiet that means you have said something that does not match the script everyone else was reading from. The kind of quiet that tells you very clearly that what just came out of your mouth was yours and only yours. That was the first time I heard my own voice. Not my speaking voice. I'd been using that for years, decades. I had used it to present research, to defend a dissertation, to advocate for patience, to lead teams. I'd used my speaking voice in rooms that were not built for me, at tables I was not originally invited to, in conversations where my presence alone was already a statement. But that voice, the one I had been using, was assembled carefully over years. It was built from parts I had collected from people I admired, institutions I wanted to belong to, and expectations I was trying to meet. It was articulate, it was strategic, it was effective, and it was not entirely mine. Here's what nobody tells you about becoming a leader, a professional, a person who operates in institutional spaces. You learn to speak before you learn to think. I do not mean that literally. Obviously you think. You think constantly. You think strategically, analytically, creatively. But the language you use to express that thinking, the vocabulary, the cadence, the tone, the posture of your sentences, that language is almost never yours. Not at first. It is inherited. You pick it up the way you pick up an accent when you move to a new place. Slowly, then all at once. You start to sound like the people around you, the mentors, the leaders, the voices that got rewarded in the rooms you were trying to survive in. You learn which phrases open doors, which tone gets taken seriously, which version of yourself gets invited back. And you get good at it. Really good. So good that after a while you cannot tell the difference between the voice you built and the voice you were born with. That is the trick of it. The borrowed voice does not feel borrowed. It feels like fluency. It feels like competence. It feels like belonging. Until the day it doesn't. Until the day you're sitting in a room saying the right things in the right way, and something inside you, something quiet, something you have been ignoring for longer than you want to admit, says, that's not what you actually think. I spent years being articulate about other people's ideas. I could cite the research, I could frame the argument, I could translate complex behavioral science into language that moved people. I was good at that. I am still good at that. But for a long time, the voice doing the translating was not fully mine. It was a composite, a collage of every person whose approval I had ever wanted, every institution whose stamp I had ever sought. And here's the cost of that. And I want to be honest about this because I think a lot of people are paying this cost right now and do not have a name for it. The cost is not that you sound wrong, the cost is that you sound right to everyone except yourself. You deliver the keynote and people applaud. You write the proposal and it gets funded. You lead the meeting and people follow. And afterward, in the car, in the quiet, in the space where nobody is watching, there is this strange hollowness, this feeling of I just performed something perfectly and I am not sure any of it was me. That hollowness is not imposter syndrome. I want to be very clear about that. Imposter syndrome says you are not qualified. This is different. This says you are qualified, but you have been expressing your qualifications in someone else's language for so long that you have lost the thread of your own. And the hardest part? Nobody around you notices. Because the performance is flawless. Because the borrowed voice sounds exactly like what the room expects. Because you have gotten so good at speaking in a language that is not yours that people mistake it for fluency. It is fluency, just not in your mother tongue. The moment you hear your own voice for the first time is not a triumph. I want to be honest about that too. It is terrifying. Because your own voice, the one that has been underneath all the performance, all the borrowed language, all the institutional fluency, that voice is rougher, less polished. It does not come with citations, it does not have a framework attached to it. It does not sound like anyone you've been taught to admire. It sounds like you. Just you. And after years of building a voice that sounds like everyone else's best version, just you can feel like not enough. I remember the aftermath of that meeting, the one where I said the unscripted thing. I sat in my car afterward, and my hands were shaking, not because what I said was wrong. It was not wrong. It was probably the most honest thing I had said in a professional setting in years. My hands were shaking because I had broken the contract, the unspoken agreement that says in this room we speak this way. We use these words, we frame things in this tone, we stay inside the lines. And I had colored outside of them, not with someone else's crayon, with mine. That is the fracture, the moment when the voice you built and the voice you actually have cannot coexist in the same sentence anymore. When the gap between how you have been speaking and what you actually think becomes too wide to bridge with performance. Some people experience this as a crisis. Some experience it as relief. Most experience it as both at the same time and the same breath. So what happens after the fracture? I wish I could tell you that you find your voice once and then you have it forever. That it is like learning to ride a bicycle, awkward at first and then automatic. It's not like that. Finding your own voice is more like learning a language you used to speak as a child but forgot. It comes back in fragments. A word here, a phrase there, a way of saying something that surprises you because it is so simple, so direct, so stripped of performance, and it still lands. Maybe it lands harder because of that. I started paying attention to the moments when my voice showed up uninvited. Not in keynotes, not in grand applications, in the margins, in the side conversations, in the things I said to a colleague when nobody else was listening, in the way I talked to my team when the cameras were off and the titles were irrelevant. That is where my voice lived, in the spaces where I was not performing, in the cracks between the professional language and the human truth. And I started pulling it forward, slowly, carefully, not replacing the skills I had built. Those matter, those are real, and those serve a purpose, but making room next to them for something raw, something that did not need a citation to be valid, something that did not need institutional approval to be true. It sounded like I do not agree with this, and here is why. It sounded like this does not sit right with me. It sounded like I lead from a place that does not separate the person from the position. That sentence, the one my team member wrote back to me, the one that has become a kind of compass for this podcast, that sentence did not come from a framework. It was not strategic, it was not assembled from parts, it came from me, from the place in me that had been practicing its own language quietly for years before I let it speak out loud. So here's what I want to leave you with today. If you're in a season where the words coming out of your mouth feel right, but not yours, I see you. I have been you. I am sometimes still you. If you have a voice living underneath your professional voice that you're afraid to let into the room, it is ready. It has been ready. The question is not whether it is good enough. The question is whether you will trust it before you have proof that it will be received. Because here's what I've learned. Your own voice will never sound like what that room expects. That's the whole point. The room has been shaped by borrowed voices for generations. Your voice, the real one, the unpolished one, the one that does not come with a framework, that voice is the thing that changes the room. Not by being louder, not by being more strategic, by being honest in a space that has forgotten what honesty sounds like. You do not need permission to speak in your own voice. You do not need a title, a credential, or an invitation. You just need the willingness to let the room get quiet, to let the silence land, to trust that what comes out of you, unscripted, unrehearsed, unassembled, is enough, more than enough. It is the thing the room has been waiting for, even if the room does not know it yet. That is soul to soul, not roll to roll, soul to soul. Thank you for joining me. I'll see you next Monday.