Good Girls Are Quiet

Most women don't lose their voice all at once. It happens slowly, quietly, and with the best of intentions. They soften their tone here. They hold back an opinion there. They make themselves a little smaller, a little easier, a little less. Until one day they can't quite remember what they actually sound like.

This episode is about that. Where the muting comes from, what it costs, and what it takes to find your voice at midlife.

Listen For

3:30 What Does It Really Mean to Find Your Voice at Midlife?

5:03 Why Do So Many Women Feel Ready to Explode in Midlife?

7:13 Why Are Assertive Women Judged Differently From Assertive Men?

12:19 How Can Women Process the Unspoken Grief of Not Having Children?

16:19 When Should You Speak Up, and When Should You Protect Your Peace? 

Guest: Priya Sudarsanam, Speech Pathologist

LinkedIn |  Website | Instagram | Podcast | Facebook | YouTube

Doug Downs

Substack | Website | LinkedIn 

Watch this episode on YouTube

Subscribe to the Stories and Strategies PR podcast newsletter

Are you a brand with a podcast that needs support? Book a meeting with Doug Downs to talk about it.

Apply to be a guest on the podcast

Connect with us

LinkedIn | X | Instagram | You Tube | Facebook | Threads | Bluesky | Pinterest

Transcript

Lady Emily (00:00):
Imagine you had the most beautiful voice in the world. Now imagine trading it away for the chance to be chosen.

Doug Downs (00:14):
Hans Christian Andersen wrote The Little Mermaid in 1837. Not the Disney version, the real one. Now, in the real one, the mermaid has a voice. It's described as the most beautiful sound in the ocean. Fish stop swimming to listen to her. Sailors lean over the rails of their ships, trying to find where the voice is coming from. She falls in love with a prince she's never met. A sea witch offers her a deal, legs for a voice. She can walk on land. She can meet the prince, win his heart. All she has to give up is the one thing that makes her extraordinary. She takes the deal. She gets the legs. Every step she takes feels like she's walking on knives. She finds the prince. He likes her well enough. She's beautiful. She's quiet. She never complains. He marries someone else, and then the mermaid dies.

Doug Downs (01:14):
Andersen meant it as a story about sacrifice and unrequited love, but read it again. A woman trades the most powerful thing she has for the chance to be chosen. She becomes pleasing. She becomes agreeable. She becomes silent, and it kills her. He wrote that story 187 years ago. Some things haven't changed very much. Today, women are giving up their own voices too often just to fit in, for a chance to be chosen. Today on Stories and Strategies, what if the worst deal you ever made wasn't with a sea witch, but with yourself? My name is Doug Downs. Just a quick note off the top. Met a listener the other week. I was lucky. I was in London, UK, for the big podcast show conference. And as part of that, I got there a couple of days early, and I was giving a presentation on podcasting. I'm downtown at a big, big PR agency, Hunter, which is right downtown overlooking the Thames, and I had to use the washroom.

Doug Downs (02:33):
So I walk out of the main area before the presentation starts. I'm walking down this little hallway, and this nice lady is passing. I said, "Can you tell me where the bathroom is?" And she goes, "Hi, Doug. How are you?" And she says she listens consistently to the podcast. It's such an awkward but awesome meeting. So anyway, hello to Daisy Pack, who's a managing director at Hunter, and I hope to have Daisy on the podcast in the coming weeks. My guest this week is Priya Sudarsanam, joining today from Gallup, way up in the northern part of New Mexico. Hey, Priya.

Priya Sudarsanam (03:06):
Hey, Doug. Nice to talk to you today.

Doug Downs (03:10):
You too. And I'm in Canada, so I get snow. It's a regular thing. You're kind of deep south US, but you get the snow where you're at, right?

Priya Sudarsanam (03:17):
Oh, yeah. We're at a high altitude. I did not know that when I decided to move out to New Mexico. 6,500 feet. Got four seasons my first year here, two feet of snow, minus 23 degree weather. Yeah.

Doug Downs (03:30):
You're acclimated now. Priya, you are a speech language pathologist and communication specialist with more than 20 years of experience helping people better understand how they express themselves in their relationships, their work, and their sense of who they are. And now you've undertaken, and you've taken what you've learned and channeled it into a brand new podcast called Unmute with Priya: Finding Your Voice at Midlife. So that finding your voice thing, when you hear that, what does it mean to you to be unmuted?

Priya Sudarsanam (04:06):
It's not just related to speech. It's not just related to communication and speaking up. So as we enter midlife, there's this shift that's happening, and it's not just all of a sudden I started thumping my chest, saying, "Woman, hear me roar." I was starting to recognize all those places in my life where I was kept silent, whether it was actual verbal expression, whether it was wanting to do something creative that I never did, all the things that kept me stifled. And so unmuting is really about finding those things, your voice, your place in this life that is away from stereotypes, conditioning, any of those things. So I literally see it as pressing the unmute button on yourself and seeing, what does that mean to you?

Doug Downs (04:51):
And is it mostly women, do you find? I mean, the title of the episode is Good Girls Are Quiet. Deliberately provocative, by the way. Is it mainly women? Why do you think it goes that way mostly?

Priya Sudarsanam (05:03):
So I have found, in my experience and just in doing the coaching in the past few years, that it has been women. I do have a couple of men who are resonating with the message as well. But for the most part, it's women. I don't know if it's menopause, this change, this hormonal change. Most people aren't saying, "Oh, well, I'm going through menopause. My estrogen is dropping. So therefore, my ability to function in this world is changing." I found that it wasn't a connection to the physical. It was just this something stirring inside that I can't put my finger on. I can't take it anymore. I've put up with it too long, and I'm ready to explode. I feel like a pressure cooker. And that's essentially the message with all the women that I've spoken to. It's just, I cannot take it anymore.

Doug Downs (05:51):
So it's learned young. I mean, right down to... I think women are judged more harshly almost from day one. What a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl. To quote a song from the Barenaked Ladies, that the hair net that's applied to women at a very young age. And they live under that guise, how to fit in with their friends, how to fit in with a bigger social group, how to not be judged or bullied, even on social media. So it's learned at such a young age.

Priya Sudarsanam (06:23):
Absolutely. I mean, when you talk about it that way, I can remember it back to when I was seven, and I was struggling with wanting to fit in with that group, wanting to just belong and not knowing where I belonged. And then that continued until I was 40 something, until I said enough is enough.

Doug Downs (06:40):
Yeah. And so many women get into public relations. I mean, two thirds of the industry is female. Unfortunately, we haven't matched that, or even fifty fifty, breaking the glass ceiling, so to speak. Do you think that women, especially young women who get into public relations, marketing, communications, they're less likely to speak up, more likely to just do the work and keep quiet? And how do you coach young women to know that they already have earned a voice, that they already should have a voice at the so called table?

Priya Sudarsanam (07:13):
Yeah, those are great questions. I have found that women typically, even if they're going into these really empowering roles, they're in these higher positions, that they are muting themselves. They don't have the confidence, or they feel like they're going to get in trouble. There's this learned behavior. Now, that's a whole conversation with just thinking about women, epigenetics, and what's been carried on generation to generation to generation. Are we carrying the burden of other generations of just shut up, be quiet, do your thing, and do it well? And so I find that even though they're going into those positions, there's just still so much fear and so much work that still needs to be done so women feel confident speaking up, or that they're not... Am I allowed to curse on this show?

Doug Downs (08:01):
Shit, yeah.

Priya Sudarsanam (08:04):
If they speak up, what's the common thing that we're told? We're bitches. Or there's a term for us, but somebody else speaks up, if our male counterparts speak up, they're not called that. They're called assertive and confident. It's a lot to break there. And as far as the women, the young women that I'm coaching, there's this group of women that I know that even are in their teens, they're 18, 19, and I'm seeing that pattern replaying. They're assertive, they're this new generation, but there's still that fear about speaking up. There's that fear of being judged. There's that fear of not being liked. And they're on this trajectory. Even this conversation that I had the other day, she's 18. If I don't do this, I'm not going to meet that man. I'm not going to get married. I'm not going to have children. So then, all of a sudden, this pathway that we think is supposed to be our pathway is already laid out for her, and she's fighting that one while she's trying to navigate being in this world.

Priya Sudarsanam (09:05):
So there's a lot that needs to be done, and just women unmuting themselves and literally figuring out, what is it that I want? Do I even want this?

Priya Sudarsanam (09:17):
Or is this something that my family wants?

Doug Downs (09:20):
You mentioned impact on relationships, work, the sense of self, but this feels like almost an impossible task because it's not from a small group, and it's not just about, "Hey, speak up," because there will be some women who speak up and get called bitches. And that will degrade them to such a level that they won't speak up. They'll speak less. So how do we normalize that everybody has a voice? And that's a huge question, I realize, I'm asking you.

Priya Sudarsanam (09:49):
Yeah. I mean, I was called... I had written a book. I was just playing around with writing an ebook, and it was called Don't Tell Me to Shut Up. I had a silhouette of myself and put my finger on my mouth. And it was just really about this journey that I took where I was silenced my whole life, yet I was helping others to communicate and to find their voice. And there was a guy, it was a group coaching, and there was a guy in the group, and he goes, "Oh, this isn't that women's empowerment bullshit, is it?" And that actually fueled me even more that I was on the right track. If I was to get that reaction from him, and I don't want to go against the grain and make everything a fight, I think women have to fight as it is enough.

Priya Sudarsanam (10:30):
But the fact that I got that reaction meant that, yeah, there's more women out there that really need to start saying, "You know what? This is what I believe." And have their groups of women who believe the same, and just really start to create a ripple effect so that we're taking away that stereotype that speaking up means being a bitch. That speaking up means speaking up.

Doug Downs (10:56):
Exactly. I mentioned off the top, I was traveling in London last week. I was there with my business partner and producer of the show, Emily, who's also 25. And there was a really neat moment. Our good friend Farzana Badwell had invited us downtown for a special dinner at this high rise legal office. We're overlooking the Thames, and the London Eye is through the window. And we went around the table, and we were supposed to talk about what we think of when we think of reputation management. Emily's only 25. She was by far the youngest at the table. And we started the other way, so she had lots of time to think through what she was going to say. And I hate to admit it, but I was nervous for her. But at the same time, what a phenomenal opportunity. When it got to her, I thought she stuck to her lane really well.

Doug Downs (11:50):
She talked about reputations mean a lot of things, and that for Gen Z, your reputation is who you are in your social circle. And it's not about keeping Gen Z off of social media or banning. In her mind, I think she thinks a ban is not a good idea, but helping Gen Z understand social media and how to use it and what bullying is all about. And my God, my heart was just boom, boom, boom. I was so proud

Doug Downs (12:19):
of that

Priya Sudarsanam (12:19):
moment. Yeah. And as you talk about Gen Z and I think about my generation, what we need to work on is getting rid of the shame, guilt, and regret. Because I think so many of us, and the women that I've spoken to, I stood in it for years. The guilt, the shame, the regret of not having children. Being an Indian woman, I'm 50, and I didn't get married nor have children, that was a major thing. And even that's some of the last words that my grandmother left my mom with, that she failed in her duties with me because she didn't get me married and I didn't have children. It was like...

Doug Downs (12:53):
Actually, unpack some of that for me

Priya Sudarsanam (12:55):
because

Doug Downs (12:55):
those are some checkboxes there. So you're of Indian ancestry, you reached a certain age, you hadn't started a family, and you're a woman.

Priya Sudarsanam (13:04):
And

Doug Downs (13:04):
I'm a woman. Be quiet, girl. Exactly. You're supposed to do all this stuff. What was that like?

Priya Sudarsanam (13:11):
Oh, it was brutal. It was brutal because it wasn't as if I didn't want children. I was saying I had the twin genes since I was five. I was going to have the twins. And so it's just wherever life took me. That's right. Not having a voice probably led me into my first toxic relationship. That set me into a 30 year trajectory of dysfunctional ones where I was not going to... I didn't just want to... And people were like, "Oh, go to, what is the place where you..." I'm blanking on words right now, where you get inseminated. What is that called?

Doug Downs (13:42):
Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

Priya Sudarsanam (13:43):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm totally blanking on it. And they're like, "Just go there and have a child." I'm like, "No, it wasn't about that. It was about meeting somebody, having a family, and that wasn't happening." And it was such grief, unacknowledged and never validated, because it was like, "What do you have to grieve for? Nobody died." So it was many years of doing this silently as I started to come out of it. And then I noticed I started to come out of it once Mother's Day came around and I wasn't triggered when I heard, "Happy Mother's Day." And it just was, okay, I'm working my way out of it. This doesn't make me a failure. My college degree, all of these things, don't make me a success. The fact that I am Priya and that I get to exist and I get to be me, that's what makes me successful in this world.

Priya Sudarsanam (14:36):
And I really started to embody that. And that's when things started to lift. But last weekend, there were a whole bunch of graduations for my friends' kids, and my friends are all my age, and that definitely was like, "Oh, wow, this could have been me. I could have been seeing my kid graduate." And it definitely struck a nerve, but I was able to work through it. But it was brutal. It was brutal. And luckily, I've met a couple of other Indian women who have felt the same and said, "Wow, you put a voice to it. The fact that you talked about grief, unspoken grief." So that's part of the unmuting too, is putting a voice to the things that people don't talk about. And there's rarely anything about that.

Doug Downs (15:24):
And I'm thinking about this. When I worked in corporate offices, there were times I wish I'd spoken up, but there were times, to be honest, I'm glad I stayed quiet. It's about finding, I guess, the times when you can contribute meaningfully and affect change. And sometimes in corporate settings, there aren't a lot of those opportunities because the decisions have already been made. And quite frankly, sometimes I call it my give an F meter. Sometimes, as I get older, my give an F meter, it ain't moving a whole lot of the time. Certain things, this is one issue actually where it does, because I actually care about this one. But what's your own experience with discerning, okay, here's where I am going to speak up. Here's how I'm going to do it. And I have to accept that the room may decide I'm wrong, and that's okay because I've contributed.

Doug Downs (16:17):
How do you go through that mental setting?

Priya Sudarsanam (16:19):
Yeah, it's a nice process, actually, because some of the times I am so quiet. I'm just not speaking up. It's like unmuting is also learning how to be quiet. And I feel like that's when you come into a place of surrender, because you're going into midlife, you're going into 40, 50 on, you realize where your time is. And so you don't want to waste time on things like that conversation that you had with a boss or something that would take two weeks of your life away because you were so upset with the way that you were spoken to. You don't want to waste time with that anymore. So you actually go into rooms saying, and I know for myself, I've got this voice going on in my head, is this worth my time right now? Is this something that I want to give my energy to?

Priya Sudarsanam (17:05):
Because my energy, my time, is mine. I'm not giving it away to anybody anymore. So therefore, I am able to say nothing, or I'm able to say something that has such impact that it's just a one liner, and then that's it. So I feel like we come into ourselves, and so we know what we don't need to struggle with anymore. So if you're in a room with me and I feel like this is going to cause a conflict, I don't need to get into conflict with you. I don't need to lose my time. I don't need to lose my energy. You have your conflict. I'm going to go have the peace the rest of my day. So I feel like as you navigate through the process, and the biggest thing is committing to it. I think one thing that you and I were talking about is so many people want to give up because it's so hard.

Priya Sudarsanam (17:52):
And I was there. I wanted to give up. I was like, "I'm just going to not do any of this. Just go back to what I was doing, shut up, and do what I was doing. Use my college degree." And I had to push. I had to commit. I was like, "No, I can't do this for the rest of my life. I want something different." And it was the commitment. So I hope that was a long answer to what you just asked, but I feel like once you commit and you go with the growth and you sit with the discomfort, then when you're in that room, that discernment just comes. And you're smiling internally because you're like, "I'm not going to say anything, and this is great."

Doug Downs (18:31):
I love that. Hey, if you've got time to listen to another episode, Unmute with Priya: Finding Your Voice at Midlife. Priya, thanks so much for your time today.

Priya Sudarsanam (18:40):
Thank you, Doug. This has been awesome.

Doug Downs (18:45):
Here are the top three things I got today from Priya Sudarsanam, my guest. Number one, unmuting is bigger than speaking up. It's about removing all the ways you've kept yourself silenced, not just finding your literal voice. Number two, the good girl conditioning runs deep. Women are trained from childhood to stay quiet, and that fear of being judged or called difficult follows them into adulthood and careers. And number three, discernment comes after the roar. True unmuting eventually leads to knowing when to speak and when silence is actually the power move. If you'd like to send a message to my guest, Priya Sudarsanam, we've got her contact information in the show notes. Check out her podcast. Stories and Strategies is a production of Stories and Strategies Podcasts. If you like this episode, hey, leave us a rating, possibly a review. Thank you to producers Emily Page and Jocelyn Florealde.

Doug Downs (19:40):
And lastly, do us a favor, forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening. I